Help with houserules?, Also, hi everyone! Options

[Kazuhiro]

Hi, everyone- As you can clearly see, this is my first post here. I have people call me Kazu, online and off.

I was introduced to Shadowrun a few months ago and something about it sparked my interest, such that I started reading the rules of my own volition and ultimately invited the friends I keep in touch with online to play with me. I usually run the missions, which obviously means I have unique problems to overcome, but it offers some advantages too. For example, the nature of my players is that they love to do things without each other, the mastermind-ish technomancer in particular.

However, we may not be great at Shadowrun but we're all gamers at heart and that means that we want our characters to 1) have interesting archetypes and 2) kick major ass, usually in that order but not always. And some of us have found ways.

I'm looking for solutions to a few things:

- The wonky nature of your options on spending Edge points. Currently I'm removing the ability to reroll all non-hits because that sort of makes it useless to declare an Edge before you roll.

- A way to punish street-sams for how damn inexpensive it is to crank up the stats on their cyberlimbs

- Speaking of which, this guy can fire a burst of 12 and take no recoil from it. That seems wrong to me.

- A way to cockblock the technomancer aside from throwing unwinnable cyberwarfare fights at him

- Nobody's gone Pornomancer on us yet, but when they do, I intend to be ready.

- Sonic Elemental Punches, oh my god

- We don't really understand Assensing, what you have to roll, what you learn from it, etc.

- We're using a nifty character generator thing that we found on the internet, but I just realized that the 20th edition book, which we are using PDFs of, has some balancing tweaks in it. I no longer have any idea what was done with what rules. I'm thinking about banning use of the character generator except that when making new characters it calculates BP for you. Or maybe there's a 4.5 generator floating out there.

I'm glad to have found this active (I think?) community as a go-to for help with my first Shadowrun experience!

This post has been edited by Kazuhiro: Mar 6 2010, 09:17 PM

[Andinel]

-The big drawback of spending Edge after your roll is that you don't get Rule of 6. Also, in cases where you have a smaller dice pool, those extra dice really help.
-Street sams already are punished in their Essence. It's not so cheap with bioware, and if they really pump up their stats with cyber, their Essence will regret it.
-For bursts, keep in mind that the damage modifiers don't add to the DV when comparing to armor. Also, if they can find a way to get 11 points of recoil compensation in a gun with 6 modification slots, I'd say let them use it.
-Technomancers are gods in the Matrix, but suck in the meat. If you really want to screw with them, have something only accessible directly through a physical link.
-A pornomancer gets a lot of dice to social skills, but that doesn't mean that everyone will do exactly what they say.
-That's a lot of power points for something that may not actually do that much damage in the end. It should be okay
-There's a table in the Awakened World chapter that tells you exactly what you learn from Assensing.
-SR4A only tweaked the Karma side of things. Nothing changed in BP. Feel free to use the generator for character creation, but have advancement be by hand.

[Fatum]

- The wonky nature of your options on spending Edge points. Currently I'm removing the ability to reroll all non-hits because that sort of makes it useless to declare an Edge before you roll.

Well, declaring Edge usage before the roll potentially allows you to score more hits thanks to Rule of Six, which balances out the issue. That said, high Edge characters can be troubling - but that can be countered by replenishing their edge less frequently (if it's ruining the game, of course).

- A way to punish street-sams for how damn inexpensive it is to crank up the stats on their cyberlimbs

This one is easy. If they only have one cyberlimb, use the test that require more than that - holding doors shut and so on and so for.
If they have more - well, low-Essence characters are easy prey.

- Speaking of which, this guy can fire a burst of 12 and take no recoil from it. That seems wrong to me.

Uh, what are his means to prevent recoil, exactly? 12 RC on 400BP? That seems a tad bit too much - are you using the rules for RC stacking from Arsenal?

- A way to cockblock the technomancer aside from throwing unwinnable cyberwarfare fights at him

This one is hard. Basically, try to make him hack on the fly by some good IC reasons. If it doesn't help, throw IC at him - it won't be long before he's stunned like hell with Fading.
That said, why "cockblock" a player?

- Nobody's gone Pornomancer on us yet, but when they do, I intend to be ready.

High counterspelling?

- Sonic Elemental Punches, oh my god

And what's the problem with these? If your mage is up in melee, he's a goner anyway.

- We don't really understand Assensing, what you have to roll, what you learn from it, etc.

Uh, there's a table just for that. SR4AE Core, page 191. In my game, I describe the effect as the mage seeing the aura colors and configurations.

[Mantis]

Welcome though I'm not sure I'm the one to do so (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Anyway to address your concerns.
One reason to declare edge before you roll is that is the only way to get exploding dice and it adds a number of dice to your roll equal to your edge. This is a major reason to declare edge before the roll. The only time we use edge after the roll is with a bad roll on a large dice pool. Otherwise we find it more useful to declare before the roll. This is really useful for characters with a 3 plus edge but even 1 edge benefits from exploding dice.

Umm punish your street sams? I see no reason to do so as the cyber mods are pretty expensive already in both money and essence. Also how is he getting a 12 round burst? Using a high velocity SMG or something? Other wise he is limited to 10 rounds max on full auto. I would guess Mr. Samurai has an arm mounted gyro mount, gas vent 3 and a high strength (9?) plus maybe a few other mods to his gun to get no recoil? Of course the high velocity weapons can't get a barrel mount accessory (sorry no gas vent 3 for you) but you could add it as a mod for the weapon at 2 mod slots. So what else is in the gun? You can limit the amount of recoil comp pretty easily. We find most guns top out at 7 or 8 points with out an arm gyro mount or high strength. If the player pays for these things then let them have them. Bad guys can have them too. Keep in mind the modifiers for ranged combat like switching targets (-2 per additional target beyond the first), lighting, movement...there are more and all can shrink that dicepool pretty quick.

Technomancers are tricky I find. They have many ways to crack through systems but remember all damage from matrix combat is applied to their stun or physical monitors so combat actually is as dangerous to them as real world combat is to everyone else. Plus medic programs don't work on them. There are some good discussions on limiting these guys on the forum already. Use advanced search and use + with each search term. This gives better search results. You can isolate systems so they have to physically infiltrate a site and other tricks to make life difficult. Technomancers are supposed to be good at matrix stuff though.

Pornomancer....well just don't forget the social skills mods in the skills section. Also things like emotitoys can help boost NPC dice pools to resist the pornomancer.

Physads and their weird magic punches. Again though, they pay the points for them so let them do it. Not every situation can be solved with your fists though. Our last phys ad thought he was all that with thrown weapons and a rating 6 weapon focus for melee. He was actually less effective in battle than the Samurai since he was so specialized and kind of limited in his options of dealing with things. I guess the penetrating punches don't bother you as much? Or distance strike? The thing is all these cost a fair number of power points that aren't going to other things like combat sense or increase reflexes. If they are focused solely on combat then they are going to be useless in other situations.

Assensing allows a magician or other with astral perception to view things about a subject in astral space. This is mostly emotion based. There is a table in the magic section in the main book that shows what you learn from a test based on hits gained. You can't read text or anything but you could get the emotional content from a letter for example or see how much cyber ware someone has. There are other things too, like being able to see wards, astral form spirits , active foci and spells and such. Very useful skill for magicians.

I personal stay away from the character generators as they tend to be broken in small ways that will screw you up if you aren't really familiar with the SR4 rules. I've had a few players show up with characters broken in minor ways from doing this that result in lots of work to fix. I thought the generators were great when we first started SR4 as we never had them for SR1-3. I don't use them now and don't let my players use them either. Others mileage may vary. Oh, one thing they can be good for is quickly testing a general build but not for details like gear, etc.

Ultimately its your game so just disallow anything you don't want to use. Remember starting characters have limits on what gear they can get (12 availability without a quality to mod that), and only one skill at 6 or 2 at 5 with everything else 4 or less. Stats can't go above 1.5 the racial max even with mods. So a character (say a human) with 6 strength max natural can't have more than a 9 strength modified. This goes for cyber mods, magic mods bioware mods etc. The only thing I've found to break this is possessed characters. Don't let your players roll over you just because something is in the book. Hope this helps.

[Kazuhiro]

Thanks for your replies, everyone. To reply to some things that people are telling me...

- Why does Essence make you "easy prey?" I don't think I've encountered something that actually messes you up worse if your Essence is low.

- Thanks for rebuking me for not looking hard enough through the rulebook for the Assensing table.

- Street sam has an assault rifle with a Gas Vent-3, a smartlink, the high-velocity mod, and gyroweights in his arms. Some other random recoil comp stuff... a sling, I think? Both arms are constantly at the human maximum of 9 agility if I recall correctly. Strength I think 7.

- Physad punches are terrifying. Yes, they're limited by the fact that they're punches and not bullets, but I'm mostly talking about the fact that a powerful enough sonic punch sends someone out of commission for 3 rounds.

[Fatum]

- Why does Essence make you "easy prey?" I don't think I've encountered something that actually messes you up worse if your Essence is low.

Because there are creatures that drain Essence. And once it reaches zero, you die.
And we both know that if you die in a game, you die for real. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

- Physad punches are terrifying. Yes, they're limited by the fact that they're punches and not bullets, but I'm mostly talking about the fact that a powerful enough sonic punch sends someone out of commission for 3 rounds.

Still, getting close to the opposition means that you're not behind cover or anything, giving them a perfect shot at you.

[Red-ROM]

Hey!

welcome to the Mental meat grinder of running SR4!

If you want to keep characters challenged, and yet somehow living, without rewriting the book, You're gonna have to come at it from all angles.

-theres always more cops, gangers, and mobsters

-PERCEPTION, what they don't know will hurt them A LOT

-protracted engagement, Make them reload, build up drain, come down off those combat drugs

-theres 3 planes of existence, and nobody masters them all

-give them tricky jobs, keeping someone alive, moving delicate chemicals or machinery

-nobody's a good swimmer and Seattles a coastal city

-make them feel their flaws

-don't forget to double cross them, Shadowrunners can't trust anyone

I guess thats my (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) 2, have fun

[Mantis]

Is your sammie stacking his gyro arm mounts? ie. one in each arm, cuz I don't think they work like that. At least I don't allow those to stack that way in my games. Perhaps I'm misreading something but I've always run it as you only get the bonus once for 3 points of recoil. Call it a house rule if it isn't actually cannon. That would cut down on your samurai's recoil comp for his rifle. Also assault rifles tend to attract cops which makes it hard to sneak around, hide and do other shadowy tasks. It should be brought out for big fights but the rest of the time they should be thinking pistols and SMGs. Much easier to hide.

I know a lot of the rules of this game are hard to find. Sometimes it's like 'Where's Waldo?' with a hunt through the books to find the rule you need. As you play more you get used to them. Another thing you could try is limiting which character types you allow until you've got a handle on all the basics. Say no technomancers or something like that or run with mystic adepts until you get a handle on normal world magic and then go for the full mage with astral perception/projection and all that entails.

Most fights (at least for us) don't last much beyond a couple of rounds. Stick-n-shocks, tasers and other electrical stun weapons also disable your opponent for 2 or more rounds. They can be fired from a distance too. There are lots of ways to counter the players little tricks. Of course the problem being GM is you have to know all the little tricks for everyone and their counters. Lots of work but pretty fun and rewarding too.

Anyway, just a few other ideas to play with.

[Faraday]

Is your sammie stacking his gyro arm mounts? ie. one in each arm, cuz I don't think they work like that. At least I don't allow those to stack that way in my games. Perhaps I'm misreading something but I've always run it as you only get the bonus once for 3 points of recoil. Call it a house rule if it isn't actually cannon. That would cut down on your samurai's recoil comp for his rifle. Also assault rifles tend to attract cops which makes it hard to sneak around, hide and do other shadowy tasks. It should be brought out for big fights but the rest of the time they should be thinking pistols and SMGs. Much easier to hide.

This is important. Full Automatic bursts are loud, they will bring more corp sec, and a good day can turn very bad very quickly if you attract more attention that way. A well silenced SMG or pistol is less "effective" but far, FAR quieter. Remember, shadow runs are usually supposed to be quiet and discrete.

[Dragnar]

Rerolling misses is the most important use of Edge. You're really better off not removing that, otherwise people without an absurdly high Edge attribute can't recover from really bad luck, which is usually deadly in Shadowrun. Declaring Edge use in advance isn't intended as the regular use, but as an extra kick if you need to do something you're really bad at, which is were it really and truly shines even now. I highly suggest leaving that rule alone.

Cyberlimbs being cheap nuyenwise isn't bad, either, because cyberlimbs cost a lot of essence. Basically the streetsam is paying for his cheap attributes with less ware on the whole and streetsams tend to use all of their essence sooner rather than later.

The fact that an attack can knock a person out of the fight for 3 rounds really isn't a problem, because people don't survive being attacked anyways. Shadowrun is a game of "eggshells with giant hammers", as it's usually put. A regular 400BP character will almost never leave a regular guy standing after attacking, so it doesn't matter too much which status effects the enemy may or may not suffer from later on.
That kinda makes enormous RC not that important as well. A properly build combat character will waste any target even with less bullets, and would hit his targets even if he were to miss some dice, so he doesn't really get anything overpowering for his ressources.

Technomancers don't work mechanically. Like, at all. They are absolutely horrible at 80% of everything a hacker can do, but basically unstoppable at the other 20%. If the player knows how to cover for the first with the latter, there's nothing you can do to ever meaningfully challenge him without making him automatically fail. Sad, but true. At least, you can skip the inordinate amount of dice the rules force you to throw for even the simplest matrix actions... (the basic matrix rules don't work, either, and the technomancer rules manage to be even worse)

The easiest way to make pornomancers (and other DP stackers as well, for that matter) at least roughly balanced is to enforce the optional rule of limiting all dicepools to twice the attribute+skill. The rulebook suggest that rule for social skills only, for some reason, but it's mostly benefical to use it in all contexts.

[Draco18s]

A quick note on edge use:

If you have a small dice pool it is always better to spend edge first due to the number of gained dice (doubles your dice pool).

If you have a large dice pool it is (almost) always better to spend edge to reroll, as 12 dice will get about 4 hits, giving you a whopping 8 dice to reroll, compared to adding edge (say, 3 dice). 15 dice with exploding sixes will get about 6 hits. Whereas 12 dice with average hits (4) and 8 reroll dice will get about 6.6667 hits.

As your base dice pool gets larger adding edge beforehand is less helpful (when edge is less than a third of your dice pool), though exploding 6s, when they occur* can be amazing. Exploding 6s make "average roll" go from 1 hit in 3 dice to 1 hit in 2.5 dice.

*I've routinely pulled off more successes than dice pool size when it matters. I once ignored a grenade because "I don't want to die, I'm rolling edge too" and rolled several 6s, which exploded into more 6s. I staged 12P damage down to none (armor + body + edge was about...19 or 20 dice, so I got 50% more hits than average).

[tagz]

Nobody said anything about the "Essence makes you easy prey" thing yet so I'll mention that.

Low essence scores can be kinda dangerous. If you run out of essence you die, and there's a bunch of different ways to lose it. Obviously getting cybered will take some out, but then there are certain things that can use "Drain Essence" as a spell, burnout addictions, etc. It's pretty scary for the .8 Ess street sam to run up against a Banshee, a Goblin, or a Nosferatu. Your game may see much or little of this though as the GM (you right?) decides. If you do intend to do those things with frequency let your players know first though because almost all Essence related drops happen "because the GM felt like it" and can seem pretty unfair if it starts happening all the time without some warning.

[Andinel]

It's a lot more minor of a point (since it doesn't kill you), but low Essence also makes First Aid and magical healing quite a bit harder.

[Fatum]

Don't want to sound egocentric, but being the one to raise the whole "Low Essence = Easy prey" question, I also commented on Essence-draining creatures already, tagz.

[Blade]

I personally house-ruled Edge rerolling so that it's only possible if the character got no hits.

Even if I agree that some characters are sometimes hard to "control", please don't forget that if a character has spent 400 BP to become the ultimate hacker/fighter, he expects to play one. Sure, it's no fun if he doesn't get challenged, but make sure that when it happens, it's by something that should really feel challenging.

Another thing to consider is that a character who can kill 10 guards in 3 seconds won't be able to do much when his sister gets sick because she lives in a dump. Adversity is not just a squad of corporate guards or a highly secure node.

[FriendoftheDork]

For the full-auto thing.. keep in mind that the way autofire works in SR it is all or nothing. If anything, recoil is too high without massive RC, as it means that normal grunts with kalashnikovs can't fire a normal burst and actually hit something. Most SMGs and assault rifles can fire 10 rounds in a single second.. are you saying that it's inconcievable that a soldier can squeeze it for a second and still hit with the burst?

Also, since the burst is a single roll that means that at least some of the bullets miss anyway so even with no recoil it's not like everything hits the target.

That said let the Sammie shoot like he's supposed to. In the end he'll easily get taken down by a manabolt or vampire.

[cndblank]

Also your Street Samurai is packing some serious expensive and illegal ware.

There is a price for that. You can use that to drive your plot lines and to give your other players spotlight time.

4th edition is tilted towards the Awaken PCs just based on how much less they have to spend to stay SOTA and on how easy it is for them to walk through security.

So don't feel too bad about letting him OWN the streets when it is time to break out the big toys.

I'll have to admit that I run a 2050 game using 4th so I avoid a lot of problems especially Technomancers.
I even have an NPC decker (which really helps).

[Kazuhiro]

So far my street sam has been playing an alternate character (giving me time to think of new, more dastardly ways to mess with him-- like the Chaos spell, or with things that take half damage from bullets) and I've been pretty much letting the technomancer do his thing, but ensuring in various ways that he can't bypass every security system on his own.

[Faraday]

I've been pretty much letting the technomancer do his thing, but ensuring in various ways that he can't bypass every security system on his own.

Data bombs are pretty much the ultimate anti-TM solution. Planting numerous (higher-level) data bombs all over the place forces the TM to at least slow down, and if he doesn't make his Analyze AND his defuse tests, he gets to enjoy (rating*1d6) boxes of matrix damage. Since TMs take matrix damage as stun damage, a higher level (5-6) data bomb can potentially be LETHAL to them.

Also remember that the Data Bomb program is very VERY cheap to implement, as the program just sets down an executable file onto the node/file it is protecting. I would consider its use as commonplace in corporate or otherwise secure nodes. Even drones, smartguns, and cyberware can hold data bombs.

[raggedhalo]

Low Essence also causes you problems on social rolls and can lead to cyberpsychosis (see Augmentation) or augmentation addiction. Always good for a laugh.

[Heath Robinson]

Low Essence also causes you problems on social rolls and can lead to cyberpsychosis (see Augmentation) or augmentation addiction. Always good for a laugh.

Cyberpsychosis is a retarded optional rule. Not because I disagree with the basic idea, but because the character I'm currently using (0.01 Essence) is basically immune to it, when he should be victimised by it.

I don't see a cite for a social penalty and the Anniversary BBB printing mentions it... not at all.

[raggedhalo]

Augmentation, pg. 20, Body Mods and Social Interactions.