"Exploding" Dice & Initiative, Any way to bring them back? Options

[I Hate All Life]

Hi, all. Just signed up on DumpShock. Big Shadowrun fan here, especially the latest edition. Looking forward to discussing this great game with all you people.

To give you a little history on me, I've played SR off and on since 2E. I liked SR before, but have only fallen in love with it since the advent of 4E. I feel the newest edition is an improvement over the old in almost all ways: the setting has been evolved and revitalized while keeping the soul of the original, the setting supports a wider variety of concepts and doesn't force archetype specialization, and the system is cleaner and easier to understand. I bought the 4E core, Augmentation and Street Magic more than two years ago, but ended up gifting them to a friend (who now uses them as paperweights as far as I can tell). I've kicked myself ever since, and so recently I've reinvested in the 20th Anniversary Edition, Runner's Companion and Street Magic. I plan to round out my collection with Arsenal, Augmentation and Unwired here soon, and perhaps other books in the future. And I won't be giving those away, I can assure you.

Anyway, point at hand: while I like the newer mechanics (it's probably my favorite system period) and think it's an improvement over previous editions, there are two things I miss: exploding dice and exploding initiative passes. Let me explain what I'm talking about and my thoughts on the issue.

Exploding Dice: I'm playing in a 3E game now, and as ever it's a lot of fun to roll the dice, hit 6s, and keep rolling, accumulating ever-higher numbers. Now that's not really necessary, as the system doesn't have sliding target numbers anymore; a 5 or 6 is a hit. You can reroll 6s when you spend Edge, and those hits add to what you have. Simpler, quicker, cleaner. Though I can't really justify this from a pure mechanical standpoint, the accumulating successes were fun. I've considering ways to possibly bring that back to a limited degree, without breaking the system or messing with the hits setup. Note my desire to see the exploding dice is a preference, perhaps a holdover of old habits, not an attempt to address something wrong with the system.

Option #1: All die rolls explode -- 6s are rerolled. Each 6 rolled is another hit (not 5s, only 6s) and allows another reroll; if any of these dice are 6s, you can roll again, and so on. You can never attain more "exploding hits" than your relevant attribute or skill rating (whichever is higher), however.

Then how is Edge useful? When you spend Edge, your rerolls let you treat both 5s and 6s as hits (as per normal die rolls), and your potential extra hits aren't capped.

Option #2: Die rolls explode, and you add the result of the rerolls to previous 6s -- like in previous editions. If you get a 15 or higher while rerolling, you get an extra hit; if you get a 25 or higher, you get yet another hit, and so on for each iteration of +10 (35, 45, gods forbid 55). So if you manage to reroll your way to a 26, you get two extra hits (one for beating 15 and another for beating 25). This is more manageable than the previous option, as it'll result in fewer extra hits overall, and reduces he need for arbitrary hit caps.

Option #3: It ain't broke, stupid. Don't fix it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) This is the simpler option, and mechanically, the hits system works just fine.

Option #4: You reroll 6s and add reroll results to previous 6s. If you roll "really high" (in the opinion of the GM and other players), you take a shot of liquor. If you get a super-duper high result (again, by group estimation), you take two shots. If at any point you roll three 6s, you must put on the devil cape and horns provided by the GM, brandish a plastic pitchfork, do the naughty Devil Dance and take a shot. If you're conscious at the end of the game, you win. Take a shot.

Any of these workable?

Exploding Initiative Passes: This, I think, I miss the most. In previous editions (as most of you probably already know), you rolled 1d6 and added your Reaction; some augmentations, Adept powers and spells allowed you more dice on this roll. Every iteration of 10 you scored, you got one extra initiative pass. So if you got 23 on one initiative roll, you got two extra initiative passes. If you only got 18 on your next roll, you got one extra action. I really like this, because there was a certain randomness to combat. Even if your Reaction wasn't that great and you only had a single die to add, if you were lucky and rolled high you could act twice that round; and some excessively wired sam used to going three times a round might only get two actions, or even one, depending on how the dice shake out. The number of actions one can take wasn't set.

Now, your number of actions are set. A character without a power or upgrade of some sort that allows extra initiative passes never gets them (save for Edge expenditures). And someone with certain qualities will always get extra passes. If you astrally project, you get three passes. While simple and easy to manage, this lacks appeal to me. . I'm willing to deal with extra complexity if it means recreating the semi-chaotic feel of the old initiative pass setup.

The question, would patching something like this into the 4E rules be possible without gutting the system? It seems it shouldn't be too much trouble, but I'm appealing to others that may know the system better than I or that have done the same thing.

The last word of my display name isn't capitalized, hoping to get ten posts quickly so I can fix that!

[Eratosthenes]

Exploding Dice: I'm playing in a 3E game now, and as ever it's a lot of fun to roll the dice, hit 6s, and keep rolling, accumulating ever-higher numbers. Now that's not really necessary, as the system doesn't have sliding target numbers anymore; a 5 or 6 is a hit. You can reroll 6s when you spend Edge, and those hits add to what you have. Simpler, quicker, cleaner. Though I can't really justify this from a pure mechanical standpoint, the accumulating successes were fun. I've considering ways to possibly bring that back to a limited degree, without breaking the system or messing with the hits setup. Note my desire to see the exploding dice is a preference, perhaps a holdover of old habits, not an attempt to address something wrong with the system.

Option #1: All die rolls explode -- 6s are rerolled. Each 6 rolled is another hit (not 5s, only 6s) and allows another reroll; if any of these dice are 6s, you can roll again, and so on. You can never attain more "exploding hits" than your relevant attribute or skill rating (whichever is higher), however.

Then how is Edge useful? When you spend Edge, your rerolls let you treat both 5s and 6s as hits (as per normal die rolls), and your potential extra hits aren't capped.

Option #2: Die rolls explode, and you add the result of the rerolls to previous 6s -- like in previous editions. If you get a 15 or higher while rerolling, you get an extra hit; if you get a 25 or higher, you get yet another hit, and so on for each iteration of +10 (35, 45, gods forbid 55). So if you manage to reroll your way to a 26, you get two extra hits (one for beating 15 and another for beating 25). This is more manageable than the previous option, as it'll result in fewer extra hits overall, and reduces he need for arbitrary hit caps.

Option #3: It ain't broke, stupid. Don't fix it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) This is the simpler option, and mechanically, the hits system works just fine.

Option #4: You reroll 6s and add reroll results to previous 6s. If you roll "really high" (in the opinion of the GM and other players), you take a shot of liquor. If you get a super-duper high result (again, by group estimation), you take two shots. If at any point you roll three 6s, you must put on the devil cape and horns provided by the GM, brandish a plastic pitchfork, do the naughty Devil Dance and take a shot. If you're conscious at the end of the game, you win. Take a shot.

Any of these workable?

Option 1 is actually an optional rule available in one of the books (core book, perhaps), where 6's are always re-rolled, and 5's and 6's count as hits. It benefits those with larger dice pools more, obviously. With regards to Edge, there's always the option to reroll failures, which in most cases is better than adding dice that explode.

Exploding Initiative Passes: This, I think, I miss the most. In previous editions (as most of you probably already know), you rolled 1d6 and added your Reaction; some augmentations, Adept powers and spells allowed you more dice on this roll. Every iteration of 10 you scored, you got one extra initiative pass. So if you got 23 on one initiative roll, you got two extra initiative passes. If you only got 18 on your next roll, you got one extra action. I really like this, because there was a certain randomness to combat. Even if your Reaction wasn't that great and you only had a single die to add, if you were lucky and rolled high you could act twice that round; and some excessively wired sam used to going three times a round might only get two actions, or even one, depending on how the dice shake out. The number of actions one can take wasn't set.

There's no reason you couldn't house rule initiative to behave similarly. Instead of spells/'ware/drugs adding initiative passes, they added X number of dice to your initiative dice pool, and then compute initiative the same as it was back in previous editions. I don't think it would change much (besides added complexity) as long as you were consistent.

[Karoline]

I'd think that option #3 is best for the exploding, simply because the other options are a fair bit of extra work. Keep track of how many hits are exploding 6 hits and how many aren't and comparing that to your skill, not to mention having to pick out all the sixes and re-roll them in the first place. It may not sound like alot, but combat and such can already slow down a game alot, not alot of incentive to slow it down even more by adding all these extra little fiddly things to it.

As for the initiative thing, I suppose it would be fairly easy to change. Run it like it is now, but instead of IP boosters giving extra passes, they increase your base init by d6. I do however suggest that you have everyone get an IP, then drop down by 10 and check if people still have IPs instead of how SR3 did it where someone with a high initiative could do a dozen things before anyone even got to move. While perhaps slightly more realistic, it was (from what I hear) not alot of fun for others to sit around and wait for the sammy to kill everything before they got a chance to do anything.

[Udoshi]

If you're going to add exploding sixes back in in general, I'd borrow a page from white wolf: Your sixes only explode when you're rolling something you have a Specialty in.

... to even things up, i'd let players roll stuff they don't normally get to roll, just to count the extra hits. Example: Spellcasting(roll magic+stat+specialty) vs Counterspelling(add the dice to the defense pool for the opposed test.) Okay, maybe that's a bad example.

Its less broken than simply adding it in for everything, and gives players a compelling reason to take specialties. After all, each runner -should- have something they're very good at, a reason for people to come to them for specific quality work over everyone else.

I'd be happy to offer my opinion and numbercrunching on initiative passes, but I'd appreciate it if you could give me some more detail on the how the old system worked. I'm not familiar with SR3 at all, and if you want to replicate the old feel if things, i'm going to need something to work with. Who goes first, how big is which bonus, that kind of thing.

[Karoline]

I'd be happy to offer my opinion and numbercrunching on initiative passes, but I'd appreciate it if you could give me some more detail on the how the old system worked. I'm not familiar with SR3 at all, and if you want to replicate the old feel if things, i'm going to need something to work with. Who goes first, how big is which bonus, that kind of thing.

It worked roughly like this.

Everyone's base initiative was 1d6+reaction (which was derived from quickness and... int I think it was)
Every level of IP boosting thing (wired reflexes, adept power) added another 1d6 to the initiative, and often gave a point of reaction to boot.

So a sammy with 6 reaction (from a 6 quickness and int) would have a base initiative of 1d6+6. When he chucked in wired reflexes 3, it would go up by 3d6 and his reaction would go up by 3.

So when battle started he'd roll 4d6+9. That was his initiative. As battle unfolded, the person with the highest init would go first. After he had gone, he would drop 10 points from his init. Then the person with the highest init would go (Could be the same person) and continue like that till everyone was below 0 init. Then everyone would roll again and it would all start from the top.

Might have some numbers slightly off, but basically enhancers work just like they do now, except instead of +1 IP, they had +1d6 init.

[I Hate All Life]

Option 1 is actually an optional rule available in one of the books (core book, perhaps), where 6's are always re-rolled, and 5's and 6's count as hits. It benefits those with larger dice pools more, obviously. With regards to Edge, there's always the option to reroll failures, which in most cases is better than adding dice that explode.

I see that option now. Saw it before, it just slipped my mind I guess. I've decided Option #2 is the way to go, though.

There's no reason you couldn't house rule initiative to behave similarly. Instead of spells/'ware/drugs adding initiative passes, they added X number of dice to your initiative dice pool, and then compute initiative the same as it was back in previous editions. I don't think it would change much (besides added complexity) as long as you were consistent.

Yeah, I'd keep it consistent. Anything that would add an initiative pass would add +1 to Initiative and another initiative die. Simple enough. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
-----

I'd think that option #3 is best for the exploding, simply because the other options are a fair bit of extra work. Keep track of how many hits are exploding 6 hits and how many aren't and comparing that to your skill, not to mention having to pick out all the sixes and re-roll them in the first place. It may not sound like alot, but combat and such can already slow down a game alot, not alot of incentive to slow it down even more by adding all these extra little fiddly things to it.

Yeah, no doubt. In light of this, I've decided to go with #2 in any game I run. I like how SR runs smooth now, I don't want to gum it up unnecessarily.

As for the initiative thing, I suppose it would be fairly easy to change. Run it like it is now, but instead of IP boosters giving extra passes, they increase your base init by d6. I do however suggest that you have everyone get an IP, then drop down by 10 and check if people still have IPs instead of how SR3 did it where someone with a high initiative could do a dozen things before anyone even got to move.

Yeah, counting down by 10 was how I was planning on doing it. (It's how we're doing it in our SR3 game I play in.) This can result in someone getting two actions in a row if he rolls really well, but the law of averages means this won't happen often.

While perhaps slightly more realistic, it was (from what I hear) not alot of fun for others to sit around and wait for the sammy to kill everything before they got a chance to do anything.

I see what you're saying, but I don't see how it's much different now. People still have to wait for the Sams and Adepts and the like to resolve. It's just now in 4E, someone with Wired Reflexes 2 is guaranteed to have three passes, while you're as certain to go only once without some sort of enhancement granting extra passes (unless you blow precious Edge). The way I see it, the old method at least gave non-tweakers a chance of an extra pass once in a while, and how many passes the speed freaks got was up in the air.

I appreciate your feedback. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[I Hate All Life]

If you're going to add exploding sixes back in in general, I'd borrow a page from white wolf: Your sixes only explode when you're rolling something you have a Specialty in.

Eh, I wasn't too fond of that rule in WW. The Revised editions of the oWoD games fixed that. And rerolling 10s is the default for nWoD.

... to even things up, i'd let players roll stuff they don't normally get to roll, just to count the extra hits. Example: Spellcasting(roll magic+stat+specialty) vs Counterspelling(add the dice to the defense pool for the opposed test.) Okay, maybe that's a bad example.

Its less broken than simply adding it in for everything, and gives players a compelling reason to take specialties. After all, each runner -should- have something they're very good at, a reason for people to come to them for specific quality work over everyone else.

True enough. I've decided to let dice explode and accumulate, and treat results above 15, 25, 35, etc. as hits. It keeps the spirit of the original and the hits manageable. I don't think the system can handle an excessive number of hits, and it's not what I want anyway.

[Karoline]

I see what you're saying, but I don't see how it's much different now. People still have to wait for the Sams and Adepts and the like to resolve. It's just now in 4E, someone with Wired Reflexes 2 is guaranteed to have three passes, while you're as certain to go only once without some sort of enhancement granting extra passes (unless you blow precious Edge). The way I see it, the old method at least gave non-tweakers a chance of an extra pass once in a while, and how many passes the speed freaks got was up in the air.

What's different now is that everyone goes once, and then people with extra IP get to go more, where as in 3E, the people with several 'IPs' got to use them all up, and then people with only 1 IP got to go. Don't get me wrong, sammies and adepts do and should still get a larger spotlight in combat, but it is nice that other people at least get a chance to do something before the guy with 4 IPs kills everything in the room.

[EKBT81]

It worked roughly like this.

Everyone's base initiative was 1d6+reaction (which was derived from quickness and... int I think it was)
Every level of IP boosting thing (wired reflexes, adept power) added another 1d6 to the initiative, and often gave a point of reaction to boot.

So a sammy with 6 reaction (from a 6 quickness and int) would have a base initiative of 1d6+6. When he chucked in wired reflexes 3, it would go up by 3d6 and his reaction would go up by 3.

So when battle started he'd roll 4d6+9. That was his initiative. As battle unfolded, the person with the highest init would go first. After he had gone, he would drop 10 points from his init. Then the person with the highest init would go (Could be the same person) and continue like that till everyone was below 0 init. Then everyone would roll again and it would all start from the top.

Might have some numbers slightly off, but basically enhancers work just like they do now, except instead of +1 IP, they had +1d6 init.

AFAIK that's the SR2 initiative rule. In SR3 everyone gets a combat phase in order of initiative and then the 10 points of initiative are substracted.

[Karoline]

AFAIK that's the SR2 initiative rule. In SR3 everyone gets a combat phase in order of initiative and then the 10 points of initiative are substracted.

Fairly sure that was a 3E to 4E change, not a 2E to 3E change, but I don't really know for sure.

[EKBT81]

It's a SR2 to SR3 change:

Shadowrun, Third Edition p.102

Once the character with the highest Initiative goes first, each character follows in order from highest Initiative Score to lowest. This is called the Initiative Pass. Each character will go once before any character goes again. The number on which a character acts is called a Combat Phase. (See The Combat Phase, p. 104)
Once all players have acted, the gamemaster subtracts 10 from everyone’s Initiative Score. (etc...)

[Yerameyahu]

I do like the extra little bit of uncertainty from variable initiative, as long as it doesn't bog things down. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Karoline]

It's a SR2 to SR3 change:

Ah, okay.

I do like the extra little bit of uncertainty from variable initiative, as long as it doesn't bog things down.

To be fair, there is uncertainty in SR4 as well. In combat, you are supposed to take your initiative as a DP, and add hits to your initiative to determine what order people go in. Maybe not a huge amount of variance, and it never costs or gains you an IP, but it does mean that there is some chance that a slightly slower person could go first.

[Yerameyahu]

Yes, but you're right: it's a really small variance.

[Patrick the Gnom...]

Option 1 is actually an optional rule available in one of the books (core book, perhaps), where 6's are always re-rolled, and 5's and 6's count as hits. It benefits those with larger dice pools more, obviously. With regards to Edge, there's always the option to reroll failures, which in most cases is better than adding dice that explode.

Sorry to bring this a bit off topic, but rerolling failures isn't a use of Edge, at least not as of 4a. Now you can only reroll failures if none of your dice was a hit. As for always exploding 6s...holy crap that would mean a lot of hits. Edge is fun now because you can get insane hit numbers on low dice pools with that crazy average defying die that just keeps rolling 6s, I think having 6s explode all the tie would lessen the effect and actually probably bog the game down quite a bit. I do like the idea of having low IP characters getting the chance to act multiple times, but I'm not sure how you'd implement it. I have no experience with SR3 though so maybe something based on that system would work.

[Aerospider]

Option #2: Die rolls explode, and you add the result of the rerolls to previous 6s -- like in previous editions. If you get a 15 or higher while rerolling, you get an extra hit; if you get a 25 or higher, you get yet another hit, and so on for each iteration of +10 (35, 45, gods forbid 55). So if you manage to reroll your way to a 26, you get two extra hits (one for beating 15 and another for beating 25). This is more manageable than the previous option, as it'll result in fewer extra hits overall, and reduces he need for arbitrary hit caps.

That's a lot of extra die-rolls for something that will hardly ever happen. In terms of an effort-to-reward ratio it's pretty uninspiring.

Of all dice that score a 6 on the first roll:

1/18 will score another hit
5/1296 will score another two hits
5/7776 will score another three hits
...

You're wise to limit the probability of extra hits to preserve game balance, but that's a lot of hassle for such a rare "Ooh!" occurence.

[Aerospider]

To be fair, there is uncertainty in SR4 as well. In combat, you are supposed to take your initiative as a DP, and add hits to your initiative to determine what order people go in. Maybe not a huge amount of variance, and it never costs or gains you an IP, but it does mean that there is some chance that a slightly slower person could go first.

Not enough for my taste.

With just 1 point of Initiative difference
6 to beat 7 = 14% (approx.)
7 to beat 8 = 16% (approx.)
8 to beat 9 = 17% (approx.)

With just 2 points of difference
6 to beat 8 = 3% (approx.)
7 to beat 9 = 3% (approx.)

Even in the mid-teens you're only looking at about 1/4 chance of beating an Initiative score just one higher than yours, so by and large the result of the roll is nowhere near as important as the size of the roll.

I'd be really interested to see a shrewd but subtle fix for this.

[Karoline]

I'd be really interested to see a shrewd but subtle fix for this.

Easiest would be to simply base order on hits, instead of hits + DP, with ties being decided by higher DP. This gives a fairly decent chance of someone doing really well or poor on a roll and coming out on top. In light of this change, that 'edge spender goes first' rule should likely be dropped in favor of being able to spend edge to add dice and get exploding 6s on the init roll.

[Aerospider]

Sorry to bring this a bit off topic, but rerolling failures isn't a use of Edge, at least not as of 4a. Now you can only reroll failures if none of your dice was a hit.

Careful Patrick, that's RAI not RAW. As I remember that particular thread the matter was hotly debated to no universal consensus. In fact, I seem to recall that the majority of DSers interpreted the (only arguably) poor wording the other way. Here it is for those who don't know what I'm on about:

SR4a, p.74
"You may re-roll all of the dice on a single test that did not score a hit."

Does it mean 'dice that did not score a hit' or 'a test that did not score a hit'? Sadly, either interpretation is technically valid.

For what it's worth I'm on the other side of the fence, allowing the re-roll of failure dice on a test that scored hits. I reckon the alternative would have been worded without the "all of the dice" part, since it would be tautological to include.

[Aerospider]

Easiest would be to simply base order on hits, instead of hits + DP, with ties being decided by higher DP. This gives a fairly decent chance of someone doing really well or poor on a roll and coming out on top. In light of this change, that 'edge spender goes first' rule should likely be dropped in favor of being able to spend edge to add dice and get exploding 6s on the init roll.

Yeah, I was contemplating something like that but haven't crunched the numbers yet.

The Edge change would make it more congruous with everything else and I think I prefer the idea, but it's not strictly necessary. The proposed rule change would make it more likely to beat a higher Initiative rating and thus diminish the bonus of going first automatically, which is fine since Edge is so useful already. Were one to make the Edge expenditure even more profitable then game balance really could be at risk.

[CeeJay]

Easiest would be to simply base order on hits, instead of hits + DP, with ties being decided by higher DP. This gives a fairly decent chance of someone doing really well or poor on a roll and coming out on top. In light of this change, that 'edge spender goes first' rule should likely be dropped in favor of being able to spend edge to add dice and get exploding 6s on the init roll.

That's an easy way of doing this. But that adds to much uncertainty for my taste. And it severely weakens the effect of initiative enhancers.

-CJ

[Karoline]

That's an easy way of doing this. But that adds to much uncertainty for my taste. And it severely weakens the effect of initiative enhancers.

-CJ

Not really. The real boon of initiative enhancers is extra IP, not being able to go first.

As for uncertainty, that is up to your taste.

The main reason I suggested the edge change was to make how much edge you have matter a bit more. Why should a 1 edge person and an 8 edge Mr. Lucky both get the same benefit from edge burnt for init? Mr. Lucky should get a bigger boost out of it. Still some spots where how much edge you have doesn't matter, like saving a glitch or rerolling dice, but ah well.

[DireRadiant]

Does this alternative of exploding dice in addition to the normal Edge rolls and Edge to go first rules or to replace those?

[Yerameyahu]

Psh, Mr. Lucky can already afford to go first many times. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Patrick the Gnom...]

Careful Patrick, that's RAI not RAW. As I remember that particular thread the matter was hotly debated to no universal consensus. In fact, I seem to recall that the majority of DSers interpreted the (only arguably) poor wording the other way. Here it is for those who don't know what I'm on about:

SR4a, p.74
"You may re-roll all of the dice on a single test that did not score a hit."

Does it mean 'dice that did not score a hit' or 'a test that did not score a hit'? Sadly, either interpretation is technically valid.

For what it's worth I'm on the other side of the fence, allowing the re-roll of failure dice on a test that scored hits. I reckon the alternative would have been worded without the "all of the dice" part, since it would be tautological to include.

God I hate English...

By the exact wording of that rule you might be able to interpret rerolling failures as being a possible option. Then you could go read the other uses of Edge and realize what the game designers actually meant by that sentence. But anyway, I don't want to bring this thread off topic so could you possibly give me something to help me find the thread in question? My GM only allows me to roll Search-fu if I have a keyword...