More House Rules Options

[MaxMahem]

Well I've started up SR4 again after a hiatus, and as is probably typical I've been coming up with some house rules to adjust the system to better suit my groups taste, so I thought I would run them by you guys to see what you think.

Table rules:
If it falls off the table re-roll it.
If you accidentally rolled to many dice for a test you must reroll the test. (Seems the only fair way to handle it)
If I roll it behind the screen its results are probably not for you to know. Otherwise I'll have one of the you roll my dice for me. Unless I need to keep the stats secret for some reason.

Character Creation
Use the extended rules in Augmentation for cyberlimbs. Otherwise they make no sense
Specializations are done SR3 style. Specializing in something improves your skill with that specialty by one but decrease your skill with everything else by one. Cost remains the same. (Part of an effort to decrease die pools, and also to give specialization a drawback otherwise why NOT take it?)
Availability limits apply, but I'm flexible. Ask me and I might allow some higher availability equipment.

Weapons
**Under Consideration** Bows deal (STR/2)+3 damage. (Still a powerful weapon in the hands of a Troll, but not as absurdly powerful
Obvious cyberlimbs deal damage like Titanium bonelacing.
Synthetic cyberlimbs deal physical damage as well.
The Errata stuff on ammo is applied.
Unconventional ammo (like sticky shock) may not be available for all calibers of weapons, specifically light pistols.

Healing
Physical damage is recovered by a Bodyx2 test once every week not day, IF you have received some sort of medical care (beyond first aid or heal). Otherwise the test takes place one every month. (Makes recovering from getting shot a much more realistic process)
Stun damage is recovered by a Body+Willpower test one every day not hour. Likewise makes recovering from getting a beating more realistic)
The optional rules for serious wounds in Augmentation are also used.
Going price for black market care is 100Y per box treated, serious wounds will cost more and may have more serious treatment needs (cloned parts and what not).

Advancment
Switch the costs for improving an attribute and a skill group. So improving an attribute now costs 5xnew while a skill group costs 3x new rating.
---

Thats it for now, mostly minor things. But I'm thinking possibly about making some
changes to the way AP modifiers and Armor is handled, movement, and initiative passes, which all seem to be slowing down and confusing my game. We'll see. Thoughts and comments are appreciated.

[Narse]

Looks like a good list. Several things I like, for example your advancement rule.

Now, a suggestion: If your players are Munchy enough for you to need to gimp the Bow I would suggest not letting obvious cyberlimbs do damage as titanium bone lacing. Several reasons: Firstly a cyberlimb costs less essence and nuyen than Titanium bonelacing. Titanium bonelacing is an awesome piece of cyber that is kept balanced by its essence cost, nuyen cost, draconian legality, and high availability(16). Cyberarms (and legs) cost less essence and are perfectly legal (well so is bone density enhancement, but it is bioware and expensive). Furthermore this essentially replaces spurs, as they do exactly the same damage. Combining such a potent meele ability with a piece of cyber that lets your players increase the strength with which they hit... could lead to game balance issues. For example, If I were making a munchkin type character for your game I would play a meele combat adept, who in an unfortunate accident lost his leg and got it replaced by one with 6 (or more) strength and high agility. This 1 point of essence loss drops the adepts magic to 4 leaving him with only 4 levels of critical strike and a kick that deals 10P damage, and is only restricted in legality. Sure its obvious, but it is also a fairly common piece of gear.

My suggestion is that you lower the damage code a bit. Say have obvious limbs do damage as plastic bone lacing (heck, they probably are plastic anyway, who wants to carry around a 40lb weight attached to their shoulder at all times?) and have synthetic do normal damage, but physical instead of stun.

Of course this is your game, and you might want your players to have metal limbs that they crush their opponents faces with. Thats fine. This is just a suggestion of a potential issue that might occur, and how to solve it (maybe...). I hope that this post was helpful.

[Moon-Hawk]

[Kyoto Kid]

...the table rules are pretty much standard in our group. Of course there are times I use a dice roller programme (which calculates hits and adjusts for application of Edge), when I don't want to tip off the PCs that something is going on.

We tend to stick to the rules on availability during Chargen. I considered doing a Cha + Etiquette test but then you get that Face Adept will be walking around with a Panther Cannon or Barret Sniper rifle.

I kind of like rationale behind using the 3rd ed approach to specialisations.

I agree with extending time for healing.

[Moon-Hawk]

Speaking of availability, I have a rule that if the fixer/contact/whoever who is trying to get the gear for the PCs can make the availability test in one roll, then screw the task time he pulls it out of his back pocket (not literally, but I assume it's something he happens to have on-hand and I ignore the normal task time)

[Lagomorph]

[FriendoftheDork]

[Kyoto Kid]

...having a variable healing time for wounds worked better within the old wound classification framework from previous editions. Basically a light wound had one interval, a moderate another interval etc. Everyone had the same damage track (ten boxes) be they a frail 5'1" human girl or a 8'6" troll. Body attribute only affected how much overflow damage you could take after going down.

With a variable damage track as 4e has, establishing the break points becomes tricker when one character may have 9 boxes and another 14. Basically ir penalises the higher body character for he would have yet another time threshold to overcome. Using wound modifier as a basis is also subject to the Increased & Decreased Pain Tolerance qualities.

[Glyph]

I don't see how making wounds take forever to heal adds anything to the campaign. As far as realism, I don't think it's implausible for a high-tech setting like SR4 to allow much quicker recovery times for wounds. It seems like this new rule would only result in player frustration.

I don't have a problem with Attributes costing more to increase, but you have made skill groups too cheap compared to the cost of raising single skills - a skill group should at least cost double the cost of raising a single skill.

Other than that, good set of house rules.

[Abbandon]

I would not want to play in any of your games. I dont like your spec or healing changes.

[Fortune]

[DTFarstar]

Ditto, I don't mind harsher healing rules, but these seem a bit much. The spec thing.... I can say that I would never ever spec in your games unless it was really really important to the character, and I mean REALLY important. In other words.... I wouldn't create a character that would want to spec.

Chris

[MaxMahem]

Thanks for all the replies.

[DTFarstar]

Just make all movement rates a multiple of 4, and movement is no problem, keep in mind they aren't completely left out on passes where they have no actions. They can still be shot at and such, as well as move which is incredibly important. Hell, someone with 2 passes is generally less likely to be shot than a 4 passer in my games because a 2 passer will shoot 3 or 4 times, and take full freaking cover only moving back into the open on the beginning of the next Combat Phase. 4 passers are generally out and about doing stuff the whole time which means they get shot to hell more. Has advantages and disadvantages. AP and armor just takes a little while. I made little sheets for my characters that have attack dice pools, their main weapons, Ballistic and Impact armor in certain situations(differing equipment), and a penalty chart(from 1 to 9) We put them in plastic sleeves and put paper clips on the edges of them marking what your character is using at that particular time. As you get injured or visibility modifiers change and whatnot I let them know and they move the penalty marker. For AP and Armor we have me calculate net hits(they tell me how many they got) and I say "Soak X damage with a negative X (Ballistic or Impact)." or I just soak and describe what they did to me. I keep track of what their weapons stats are so I just need net hits to know what I need to soak for me.

With the sheet they just look at the armor in the upper left side and see where their paper clip is, subtract or add the number I told them, and roll that many dice + body(also written there so they don't have to worry about remembering). It sped things up alot and made my players happy. I would post a copy, but I tailored each sheet to each player so I didn't bother to save them to the HD.

Chris

[Ryu]

- Watch out for attribute distribution. Higher attribute costs ingame create a stronger incentive to min/max. Intuition/agility will still be as high as possible, and high groups added on that will increase used dice pools. Speaking of the groups: A group 4 costs 40 BP or 33 karma, one skill at 4 costs 16 BP or 22 karma. Expect some weird skill distributions that avoid high groups and single skils that are part of an interesting group.

- See specs as a way of giving flesh to a character. There does not have to be a penalty, you can only have one per skill. Using situative specs instead of the pretty all-time applicable ones (semi automatic pistols is a favourite) is a more sensible approach IMO.

[FriendoftheDork]

[FrankTrollman]

Frankly, any differences of Karma costs and BP lead to min/maxing and stupidity if analyzed carefully. The basic rules charge people 40 BP for a Skillgroup of 4, and 55 Karma to buy it later. They also charge 40 BP to have the lik attribute jacked up to 5 (which is better), and charge only 42 Karma to buy it up later. So Attribute investments are a no-brainer in a short campaign (where they are just like Skill Groups but add to even more dice pools), and should be avoided like plague for the starting character who intends to be played for a long time and accumulate a lot of karma.

The only way to actually fix that sort of thing is to go to a Karma system for character creation like Serbitar made; or to a BP for character advancement system like I made. No amount of tweaking the karma or BP costs can eliminate min/maxing because min/maxing is about making profits off of differences in relative costs. As long as BP and Karma have a different scale in any way, Comparative Advantage will exist and min/maxing will prosper.

Serbitar's House Rule Package can be found Right Here. Don't worry, only the first part of the post is actually in German, the rules are in English.

Here, for another example, are my own rules:


Character Creation and Advancement

Karma Does Not Exist
When your character succeeds and gets bling, it will come in the form of extra Build Points. These are spent at exactly the same rate as when you begin play. Exceptions:

• You cannot purchase Â¥ with post-character generation BP, nor can you sell Â¥ for BP later on.
• Contacts are acquired in-game and not with BP once the game has begun.

Skills are Half Price

• Skills cost 2 BP
• Skill Groups cost 5 BP
• Specializations cost 1 BP
• Knowledge Skills cost 1 BP
  Merry Christmas.

Starting maximums are still one 6 or two 5s. You can commute raising a Skill Group, meaning that if you purchase up one skill out of a Skill group you can raise the rest of them up one for 3 BP. If you raise two Skills out of the group, you can raise the remaining skills for just 1 BP – exactly as if you had just purchased the whole group at once.

Eventually characters can raise their skills to 7 for double cost. The augmented maximum of your skill is always skill +3 rather than Skill x 1.5.

Attributes are Not
Attributes still cost 10 BP per point and you can still throw down up to 200 BP into your Mental and Physical Attributes. Edge and Magic are, of course, Special Attributes and don't apply to that limit.

We are using a less painful methodology for raising attributes. Your natural maximum in Resonance/Magic only ever costs 10 BP. Raising any other attributes to the natural maximum costs 20 BP. Characters can raise their attributes past the normal maximum for 20 points each. This also raises their personal natural maximum and augmented maximum accordingly.

Varying Costs of Other Things
Contacts: A contact costs a number of “contact points� equal to its Loyalty times its Connections. You get 3 Contact points for a BP at character generation. This means that a 6/6 Contact still costs 12 actual BP, but a 3/3 Contact only costs 3 BP. This is to encourage people to know more less impressive people.

¥ Nuyen ¥: If we're playing at 400 BP starting, characters can get 7000¥ for 1 BP (cap is still 50 BP). If we are playing at 350, the exchange rate is still 5000¥ per BP.

Qualities and Races

You can take up to 35 BP of negative qualities, and up to 35 BP of positive qualities at character generation. You can purchase qualities later on with permission, but there has to be a reason. As normal.

Aspected Magicians

You can use the Aspected Magicians rules that I wrote. Aspected Magician is a positive quality which is taken instead of Magician, Adept, Mystic Adept, or Astral Sight (which is also removed altogether under this system because it is dumb). Aspected Magicians excel in their field of magic, ad this is represented by starting play as a Grade 1 Initiate with a metamagic of their choice. Unless otherwise stated, they are like Magicians. The types are as follows:

• Aspected Conjurers Cannot learn Sorcery skills, cast spells, or provide Counterspelling. They can astrally perceive but cannot astrally project. They can can use other magic skills (most notably conjuring skills). This quality costs 10 points.
• Aspected Sorcerers Cannot learn Conjuring skills, summon spirits, or Banish. They can astrally perceive but cannot astrally project. They can can use other magic skills (most notably Sorcery skills). This quality costs 10 points.
• Path Aspect Must choose 2 categories of Magic and the associated spirits according to their tradition. The character may only cast spells or summon spirits of those two categories/types. They may still use Banishing and Counterspelling against any target. They may still conjure Watchers and Allies. They can astrally perceive but cannot astrally project. This quality costs 10 points.
• Astral Aspect Cannot cast any spells on Physical Targets, nor can they conjure any spirit that has Possession or Materialization (Watchers are still OK). They can still cast Mana spells on Astral Targets. The threshold for their Assensing tests is reduced by 1. This quality costs 5 points.

Some Qualities Don't Exist

We're looking at you Aptitude, Exceptional Attribute, and Lucky. The rules for exceeding normal caps are much less stringent, so these qualities don't do anything.

Metatypes and Cost

Ork, Elf, or Dwarf: 25 BP
Troll: 35 BP

Ghouls
Ghoul (30 BP):

B: 5/10
A: 1/6
R: 3/8
S: 4/9
C: 1/4
I: 2/7
L: 1/5
W: 3/8
Edg: 1/6
Ess: 5
M: 1/5
Movement: 10/25

Powers:
Dual Natured, Enhanced Senses (Hearing, Smell), Natural Weapon (Claws: S/2 + 1), Resistance (+3 dice vs. Disease)

Ghouls get the following Negative Qualities and gain no BPs for them (these do not count against the 35 BP limit):
Allergy (Sunlight, Mild), Dark Secret (Ghoul), Dietary Requirement (Metahuman Flesh), Reduced Senses (Blind).

In-Game Shenanigans

Matrix Rules

These are fairly long:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...opic=19657&st=0

Toxic Traditions

Playable ones:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=15585
The bad guys will be using this system even if the players are not.

Hardened Armor

Hardened Armor provides automatic damage reduction hits. It is also half the size it appears at in the basic book. That means that a Force 6 Spirit has Immunity to Normal Weapons that provides 6 automatic hits soaking damage. AP still reduces Hardened Armor.

-Frank

[Fuchs]

Or you can simply state "Make your character. The group checks the stats, and adjustements will be made to make sure it's within group level. No, we do not care how you get your stats, by what gear or skill or adept power. All we care about is that in the end, your character is not over- or underpowered. How efficient or inefficient your build is does not matter. And yes, character advancement falls under the same guidelines."

Min-Maxing doesn't happen if the end result is all that matters, and subject to hard caps. (On a character level, so spending saved points on more skills or gears or powers thanks to some minmaxing effort won't work either.)

[Blade]

Actually, if you read carefully the rules you'll notice that GM approval is all part of the character creation process. It's as valid as the BP costs or any other creation rules.

[Ryu]

Yes. And any houserule should fix issues, as doing better than canon is not as easy as some people think.

Idea on healing times: fixed dicepool of 3 (without medical care), extended test with threshold=damage boxes, success heals one box, high body reduces threshold.

[Moon-Hawk]

[Lagomorph]

[MaxMahem]

Thanks for the additional replies. Apparently some of these came in while I was typing my last post so I'll get to them.

[FrankTrollman]

[Moon-Hawk]