I was thinking about the Hand of God in 4.0 the other day, and was thinking that the way it works now is a bit too light. Now , jsut to get it out of the way, I didn't read over it again since, but what I remember of it was the when you use Hand of God, you permanetly burn off one point of edge. Wow. [sarcasm] that sure is daunting. [/sarcasm].

We were looking at it, especially compared to SR3, when you lose all of your karma and pool. So the solution that we came up that if you used hand og god, your Edge was burned down to 1. Thoughts please. Does this seem overly harsh? Adding insult to injury? Did I read something wrong and am way off base?

I'd say you lose a point of edge and your edge cap is reduced by one.

kind of a 'living on borrowed time' approach then? I like the full reduction becuase it can be bought back, but not without considerable effort.

What about guys who only have one edge to begin with? Reducing the cap might be a good idea for those cases. Seems like the guy with 1 or 2 in edge could just keep burning edge and getting it back for little cost at all.

Hand of God can be invoked once in a character's lifetime to obtain an automatic critical success on any test. When the Hand of God is invoked, every die in the character's pool is considered a success for that test without any need to roll. The Hand of God can only be invoked before a roll and cannot be combined with any other use of edge.

Using the Hand of God reduces a character's edge stat to 0. This is the only case in which a stat can be zero. Edge can be increase with karma as per normal rules but that karma costs are for the character's unaugmented maximum + the new value.

Houserule, since everyone was throwing out theirs I though I'd throw out mine.

Yeah, one use per character does seem best. But the low cost is sort of annoying.

ok, no prob, just checking becuase I thought I had remembered it being something else. As this post is pretty much about house rules, please continue.

As I see it, using HOG is a freebie way to cheat your way out of certain death. Hell, I think that's how they describe it! To not only make it such a low cost as losing only one point of edge, and being able to do it more than once, IMO, takes away from character mentality far too much.

I have player that has one PC he aboslutely loves ( his first character). He decided long ao that if he ever has to use his HOG, he is retiring the character, because he doesn't want him to die . That seems a lot more realisitc (character has a very close brush with death, decides to get out while he can) than someone that continuosly nearly dies and keeps going back for more.

My house-rule: Burning Edge does not give you automatic critical success or let you automaticly escape death. Instead, it lets you buy one extra exploding die, nothing more. You can do it multiple times, and even after spending Edge on a test already. Lets you squeeze that extra little potential out of the character until it´s all over.

In situations were you just can´t afford to loose, you will propably roll with Edge, or even make a long shot test in really harsh situations. You will get a pretty good chance at a few hits no matter what. If you still fall short, you will burn a point of Edge permanently (and you can do so even if you´ve spent it temporarily allready), and roll your extra die. Still short on hits? Spend your next point and hold your thumbs. And so on until you have no more points left. Then you have to accept your failure.


I´ve done this in SR3 (don´t remember if it´s canon or not) and it´s completely unexploitable, as you can tell. It truly builds up the tention when all is riding on those last dice, and the cost for making just one more roll ceases to matter.


Possibly I will allow for spending all your Edge to do the "escape death" thing—if no Edge has been burned in that encounter. Basicly, if you´re short so many hits that the odds are too slim for you to even attempt more rolls, you can opt for escape instead and save your HOG for choosing coma over death if your nailed. You give up your chance of prevailing, but make the consequences of defeat less permanent.

Maybe my way is is too harsh now that you have to pay for it with Karma instead of just getting it for free (like Karma Pool). Edge is after all as costly as any attribute.


I´m with the lowering of the cap then. Best idea so far.

My rule worked great for Karma Pool. It made certain situations very exciting, it was equaly harsh for all characters and it was then good to have some rotation on Karma Pool points, so that you were constantly trying to get ahead of fate, instead of stacking it in your favour all the time.

In SR4 it would have a different fallout on different characters. One with a lot of Edge would not be happy about having to spend the next 10 sesions rebuilding their character´s main attribute after narrowly escaping death, and any other character would be dead in the same situation. It would be very, very unfair. You could have burnt Edge "regenerate" for every 10 Karma you earn. That would let edgy characters keep their character-concept after an incident and make things more fair. It would also be a bit complicated. But maybe it´s worth it.

On the other hand. The canon system gives you so much for your burnt Edge, no player can complain after doing it. If you waste away all your Edge under that system, you´re simply out of luck´s favour and possibly you will stay that way; if you now think other things are worth your Karma points more than filling your Edge again. A possibility for such a major change in a character after a near death experience is something I like.

Still I think if you had burnt Edge give 1 extra exploding die to any test, without limitations—then had burnt Edge regenerate every 10 Karma, it might be a bit more managable in game than the current system. Under the current system you get a very definitive option to succeed if you really want to. It´s not a gamble. Is that really fun? It´s not scalable towards the difficulty of the test either. For my part, I make a lot of judgement calls as a GM. I normaly prefer to use common sense rather than relying on dice or rules only. But when it comes to character deaths, it would feel good to have a system that leaves nothing but the dice in charge. So that it´s not me saying either "You burn Edge? Ok, you live then" or "No, you could impossibly survive that", "No you could never make that shot, even if all the gods of every pantheon guided your arm"—but it´s the player using every resource available to make my preset difficulty.

<edit> Might be easier to have burnt Edge regenerate every time Edge refreshes.

then it wouldn't be 'burnt' now would it? Just slightly charred on the edges. Give it a good dusting and get those black flaky edges off...

so you use burning edge like the karma pool form 3rd edition then? Has this come up before in your game, or are you just being prepared? I'm apprehansive about lowering the cap for edge though, as it puts a permanent gimp on said character. But I'll discuss it with my group.

Holding thumbs is "enticing"?

I now find my self sitting at my desk trying to move my hands around to a postion where I can old both of my thumbs at once. Apparently it's early. Sadly, I feel neither "enticed" or "hopeful". A bit foolish really.

now if I can just get down that whole "one hand clapping"...

I checked up on the thumb-holding. It´s old folklore. Today it´s an expression used when you´re wishing someone luck ("I´ll hold my thumbs for you") or when you´re hoping for something to happen yourself. It can be combined with a gesture (folding your fingers over the thumb with one or both hands), sort of like giving thumbs up.

Originaly it was appearently thought that the act of holding thumbs prevented the demons of bad luck from causing mischief. The harder you held the more difficult it would be for the demons to get loose. It was said to work better if you did it for someone else, and better yet if many people did it for the same person. So people (children still do it) would actually physicly hold their thumbs really hard when something they hoped for was about to happen—like for instance the outcome of a lottery or a competition.

sort of like crossing your fingers then. I'd assume that one was everywhere, but now, who knows eh?

Here you cross your fingers when you´re telling a lie. I suppose it´s making up for the sin according to some old superstition.

Perhaps we are looking at this the wrong way. There are two edges. There is the stat and then there is a translucent SR3 style edge pool. The two are tied together since the edge pool is always equal to the edge stat. However, the difference is fairly obvious in some ways. Edge pool can be used up but it does refresh. Edge stat can't be used up. If you have Edge Stat 8 and Edge Pool 8 (1) you still roll 8 extra dice if you choose to throw in that last point of edge pool.

Perhaps, instead of attacking the stat we should attack the pool directly.

for those creatures I always tied thier magic attribute to thier essence.


essence 3 vampire? magic 3
essence 12 vampire? magic 12...