Serbitars HouseRule Package 1.4

Have fun

EDIT: updated to 1.4

Very nice. VERY nice.

If nothing else, its a decent guide to some of the rules-holes in the SR4 core. I hope my players never see this thread.

In my next game, I'll probably attempt to incorporate these rules, but I think that switching now (while we're all still just learnign the new edition) would be a little bit like yanking the rug out from under them.

Very nice indeed, good organization too.

Cheers,

Max

One thing I would say - the change where you make Logic part of Matrix actions. Wouldn't the impact of Logic be your writing the program?

There are a couple places where these rules make changes that may make a larger difference in flavor than you might have expected:

1.) You have mtahumans with attribute penalties pay for the value not including the penalty. This causes these attributes to be massively more expensive than they ever were before (both at chargen and during character advancement), and makes logic or charisma dependant Orcs and Trolls vastly harder to build.

2.) Having logic apply to computer tests is great, but having the program rating limit successes prevents exceptional success on any computer test. It ends up being similar to a "no more than half your dice may be successes" rule, completely throwing off the probability curve of computer tests. I'd suggest eithor standardizing on program ratings from 1 - 12, or saying that successes are limited to 2x program rating.

About the flechette ammo fix:

the +2dv bonus requires 6 points of armour to be balanced, if you then consider that the impact rating is usually 2 points lower than the ballistic rating the only armour that fares as well againts flechette than standard armour under the flechette is resisted by double impact rule is a full body armour (10 for standard ammo vs 8*2-6 for "normalised" flechette). Now this might be intended but full body armour is as heavy as you can get, I'd think flechette should be fairly ineffective againts armour vests already (where under your suggested fix you have 6 for standard ammo vs 4*2-6 for "normalised" flechette).

Wouldn't it much esier to say that againts armoured opponents flechette loses the +2 DV (keeping the +2AP and resisted by impact) making it identical to standard ammo? Or even better againts armour it has -2DV, 0AP and resisted by impact, finally making it all around worse against armoured opponents without introducing weird side effects of multiplicative effects.

Or is the double armour designed to ensure that flechette will almost always stun armoured opponents instead of doing physical damage? My second proposed change should have similar effects.

The karma costs for metahumans thing is actually not too bad an idea. One thing that you're missing is something to make the Increase Reflexes spell force dependant in some way. That's something that's always bothered me since SR3, and it's slightly better but not quite there yet.

Regarding the stun damage is better than physical, what about having the stun track based off either body or will, whichever is higher (it's just wrong that a troll is just as easy to knock out as a human and easier than a dwarf).

Except it isn't "just as easy to knock out a Troll" - you still have to overcome that ungodly soak roll they have.

So what if they have one less box of stun damage if they routinely take 1/3 the number of boxes of damage compared to a human?

I'd rather it was something like:

[*] The number of boxes you have is based on your body.

[*] You pass out when you've filled in a number of boxes based on your willpower.

That way Trolls would go down quite a bit before they were close to death, unless they had pain resistance.

-Frank

Er....it's not unlike that in SR4...

There isn't a reference to "unconscious or dying" on the mental track anymore (at least that I've seen) like there was in SR3. You're just ko'd.

So you still have the full physical track to go through.

My idea is to put the point at which you go unconcious in a potentially different place from the point at which your track ends.

You go down when you have 8+1/2 Willpower boxes that count for damage penalties filled in on either track. The track is actually 8+1/2 Body boxes long.

So if you have a Body of 8 and a Will of 4, your Stun and physical tracks are 12 boxes long. But you'll drop when 10 boxes get filled in on either track. So if you get 10 Stun you go down, but it takes 13 Stun before you start overflowing into physical.

That way Willpower and Body are both important, but neither Stun nor physical damage is "better" at dropping any particular enemy.

-Frank

I like that idea, although I think at that point you should raise the limit on passing out a bit, eg 8+will, leaving a full stun track as passing out too.

I find the half stun damage due armour rule to be a bit too arbitrary.
At present all damage works in the same way (take effective DV, resist with armour, add to rack). Introducing that rule adds a unique special case to damage, which kinda clashes with the rest of the system.
I do agree that at the moment stun seems a much better choice of damage compared to physical (especially considering it does last for quite a bit) but I'd rather see a more "seamless" solution.

The conversion from physical to stun is also not very seamless and a very unique rule, so I think it doesnt matter if you make it a little more special, I think.

But here is another solution. Maybe this is better:

Physical damage transformed to stun is resisted with both ballistic and impact armor. Sounds even logical.

That's a mighty nice tweak. Alhtough it does need some consideration for flechette ammo and melee weapons.

A more general statemement might be "physical damage reduced to stun is resited both by the normal armour used againts it and impact armour (2*impact if it is normally resisted by impact armour and ballistic+imact if it applies to ballistic)

@ ankh: I consider all 8 attributes physical, in opposition to edge, magic and resonance, which are non-physical. I think the rulebook refers to all the 8 attributes as "physical attributes", too, including willpower, logic, intuition and charisma.

@Siegfired: Thats a good addition. I'll include this in the next version.

Physical Attributes are B A R S
Mental Attributes are C I L W
Special Attributes are Ess Edg Mag Res

-Frank