Shadowrun Difficulty, For my own amusement Options

[booher]

Ok, so I was talking with some of my players today (not during a session, just casually) and the topic of difficulty came up.

Now I'm not talking throwing great dragons and cyborgs at them instead of red samurai. Just simply changing the hit system slightly. The book has suggestions for making hits occur on 4's. And it also has the idea of makings glitches occur on 2's also.

So we began pondering, and for the sake of hilarity, we pondered the ideas of combining those two ideas, to make the game swing to more extremes. Which also led us to eliminating the neutral ground, and came up with the idea of making the game swing to even more extremes by making 3's also glitches. We also had the idea of simply rerolling 3's till they became a hit or a glitch number.

So essentially, in video game style, we came up with the SR difficulty system.

Hardcore - 1's and 2's count towards glitches and 4's 5's and 6's are hits. I figure this would result in occasional funny moments, more so than a normal run.

Insane - 1's 2's and 3's count towards glitches, and 4's 5's and 6's result in hits. I figure this would result in massive hilarity due to the extremes.

Extreme - 1's and 2's for glitch. 5's and 6's for hits. And reroll 3's and 4's. Eliminating the neutral ground once again, but just adding more suspense.

These are mainly comedic ideas, I figure the large amounts of crazy successes and critical glitches would make the game a lot more interesting, almost slapstick to a point.

Crazy troll A fires a rocket launcher at crazy troll B who is also firing a rocket launcher. Troll A's rocket hits Troll B dead on, but is pointless because Troll B already critically glitched and kill himself with his own rocket.

The thoughts amuse me.

[wind_in_the_ston...]

That does sound like fun... except I often have trouble coming up with good glitch results.

[booher]

Yeah, if it would occur as often as it seem it should then I have would have to be really quick on those results, I'm not sure I could keep up. But it concept it seems like it would be ridiculous.

[wind_in_the_ston...]

There are only so many times you can say, "your gun jams".

You'd probably have to spend some time before each game and make a list.

• you accidentally eject your clip
• you tried too hard to dodge that last salvo. You held on and made the shot, but then you fell.
• you were off balance, and when the casings from your burst ejected, one of them got under your goggles - it burns!
• you flip the guy off of you, but pull a muscle. -1 AGL until you spend a complex action to stretch it out.

But the best ones are the situational ones, that make sense given what's happening.

[Maelstrome]

the game mst pretty much uses the insane system. odd numbers succeed and even numbers fail. each cancels each other out.