I am a fan of the glitch. My problem is, I don't like when a dice pool gets reduced down to 1-2 dice because your target took Good Cover or the Lights are low. The whole "ammo explosion" increasing for no legitimate reason troubles me deeply. Same argument could be made for a mage casting a spell under smiliar conditions.
Here's my idea:
Instead of actually removing dice from your dice pool, replace them with differently-colored "placeholders" that are considered only for glitching. Some examples:
[ Spoiler ]
Your 10-dice pool is reduced to 2. You use 2 dice pool red dice, and 8 "placeholder" blue dice. You are still rolling 10-dice, but only the 2 red count for hits, while all 10 are considered for glitching.
#1 You roll: reds-> 1 1, blues-> 1 1 2 3 3 4 5 5 (4 of 10 are 1's, no hits) = no glitch [Per SR4 = critical glitch]
#2 You roll: reds-> 1 5, blues-> 1 1 1 1 1 3 4 5 (6 of 10 are 1's, 1 hit) = glitch [Per SR4 = glitch]
#3 You roll: reds-> 1 3, blues-> 1 1 1 1 3 4 5 5 (5 of 10 are 1's, no hits) = critical glitch [Per SR4 = critical glitch]
A variation on this idea is
the pool-dice would be counted for a regular glitch, but only a critical glitch would occur by considering the "placeholder" dice. Some variation examples:
[ Spoiler ]
Your 10-dice pool is reduced to 2. You use 2 dice pool red dice, and 8 "placeholder" blue dice. You are still rolling 10-dice, but only the 2 red count for hits, while all 10 are considered for glitching.
#1 You roll: reds-> 1 1, blues-> 1 1 2 3 3 4 5 5 (2 of 2 are 1's = glitch, 4 of 10 are 1's, no hits) = glitch [Per SR4 = critical glitch]
#2 You roll: reds-> 1 5, blues-> 1 1 1 1 1 3 4 5 (1 of 2 are 1's = glitch, 6 of 10 are 1's, 1 hit) = glitch [Per SR4 = glitch]
#3 You roll: reds-> 1 3, blues-> 1 1 1 1 3 4 5 5 (1 of 2 are 1's = glitch, 5 of 10 are 1's, no hits) = critical glitch [Per SR4 = critical glitch]
While the original idea makes glitching less probable, the variation make a regular glitch odds similiar to SR4 (by reducing the dice pool) but the critical glitch becomes less probable once modifiers pile on.
Any comments are welcome!
~GTT