Used to be, I'd meet some dodgy NPC and realise straightaway that he was easy meat. After all, he was only rolling a single die for initiative, right? And here I was, tossing out three at a time. I was bound to gun him down before he ever got off a shot.

Well, sometimes that wasn't true. More than once, I'd watch in horror as my GM rolled the goon's initiative . . . and that d6 would roll a 6, and then another 6, and before I knew it, I had a serious fight on my well-manicured hands.

These days there are no surprises. I know exactly how many times I'm going to act each round, and when I gauge an NPC to be a zero threat, I no longer fear that he'll end up with more actions than me. Where's the fun in that?

Sigh.

With every target number a 5, gone are the days when I clung to a prayer that I could somehow hit that target-number 17 on two small dice. I liked that suspense. Everybody always had a shot, no matter how distant. The exploding d6 added an element to the game that I dearly miss.

IIRC, the rule of six didn't apply to initiative tests, but that doesn't invalidate your point.
The longshot test as a means of resolving very difficult actions seems to be one of the more dissatisfying parts of SR4, just judging by the noise on this forum.

On the other hand, that old lady with her holdout pistol can seriously wound you, so I think it's a fair trade.

In SR3, I also knew how often my char could act, if she wasn't wounded (Initiative 10+1W6).

Don't forget NPCs can spend edge to go first as well.

Do you tell the PCs if an NPC is doing this? Do they have a chance to "match" the little old lady by spending their own edge, or does she just get to go first? i.e.:
GM: The little old lady is spending edge to go first.
Player: Screw that. I spend edge too!
-or-
Player: Heh, heh, Little old lady. This'll be easy.
GM: Roll initiative. She beats you.
Player: Wha?
GM: She spent edge. She shoots you. Ha-ha!
Player: Bummer.

In my case, I don't use edge for most NPCs. Only the special ones, aka the bad bosses or the good guys, like connections.

Edit: Good and bad is here solely used to describe allies or enemies .

Well sure, but it's still possible as long as the threshold is less than or equal to your edge. Rolling 6 dice against a threshold of 4 can still provide that tense moment that Union Jane is looking for, I think.

Moon-Hawk: Nice sig. Hile Roland.

I do like many changes in SR4. It seems like the rules are more universal for different situations, thus requiring less study on my part as the system as a whole is easier to learn.

But all target numbers the same? Bah, what's the fun in that? Isn't there some way I can keep my old target-number system and exploding 6s whilst still playing with large chunks of the SR4 rules?

Thanks. Unfortunately, I have to edit the middle line of my sig because it's just over the character limit. Oh well.
It seems like there are a number of people who want a "compromise system" between SR3 and SR4. Some are trying to incorporate all the SR4 stuff they like into SR3 rules, and some are trying to house-rule SR4 to be more like SR3. It seems like a TN bonus/penalty in SR3 is roughly comparable to a dice pool penalty/bonus in SR4, but I think you'll find that anyway you come at the problem, it gets ugly quickly.

Personally I don't allow the use of edge to go first in an initiative pass.

IMHO edge should only be used to increase the chance of success. It should never provide instant, outright success.


Now if you like exploding dice just have all dice treated as exploding all the time. (Edge or no edge) Spice things up a little. I've experimented with this. It does add a little more chance to the rolls, but on the flip side it slightly slows down game play.

As I've said before, allowing Long Shot tests to explode mitigates the situation to a certain extent. That fixes the SR4 equivalent to TN 17 tension so that, no matter how high the Threshold, no matter how many dice are removed from your pool, your unlucky Ork can still throw his one Edge die and conceivably, in some distant eigenstate, pwn the ever-loving Hell out of a panzer with one punch.

I read it as the O and . are on the same side. But rereading it, I'm not sure that's what it says.

I was thinking the pip was opposite the O side to offset the weight lost when the O was engraved...

Brahm, where do you find your blank d6's?

I just looked on the Chessex website, and they offer blanks, as well as "Shadowrun® d6" but with no picture or description.

an obscure one indeed, i had totaly missed it.

hmm, at half an hour pr test in a "probe for weakness" test in VR, nasty.

I did something similar to Aaron's, but using model paint... I used black dice with white pips, blacking in 2, 3, and 4. Then I put red in the 1's, silver in the 5's, and gold in the 6's. Metallic colors are a hit, reds should be watched for in case of glitching. Gold is always king

What's WW?

I assume he's referring to White Wolf.

Personally, I don't see the problem with having a similar dice mechanic to another game. If the objection is that the dice mechanic doesn't work, I can understand that, but if the objection is simply that it resembles another game, I don't see the issue.

That is a weird comparison.

Those are pretty sweet, Brahm. If I can find some d6 blanks, I think I'll borrow a Dremel and give your method a shot.

After reading this thread today, out of curiousity I took some of my disposable dice (I have a huge back of like 40 black-pips-on-white d6's) and tried just coloring the sides with red and green Sharpies. The 1-side got colored in red, the 6-side got colored in green, and the 5-side got a thick green border on the outside. It works, and it looks pretty okay, but the red tends to rub onto the other sides, turning the 2, 3, and 4 to a shade of pink. I can confirm that this method works, but not well; I wouldn't recommend it.

Anyway, back to the original topic in the thread. I loved the Rule of Six, too. Once, in SR2, with only a 1d6+something initiative, I rolled a 73. Twelve 6s in a row, followed by a 1. Yeah, yeah, I know the Rule of Six isn't supposed to apply to initiative, but just try to tell me that when you're the new runner on a team and all the other guys have Wired Reflexes and Synaptic Accelerators, you wouldn't beg your GM to let you keep a 73, just once.

Anyway, my friends and I tried a couple games where we houseruled-in the Rule of Six, but did so in such a way that it was not completely a good thing. First of all, it was a purchasable positive quality, costing 15BP. That meant that theoretically some of the players might have it while others would not, but we found that once one player bought the quality, they all wanted it. Second, it was still very possible to glitch with the Rule of Six.

For example, one player was rolling a dice pool of 8, and came up with 1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6. He was now effectively rolling a total of 10 dice (8 in the original pool, plus two rerolled 6s), and ended up getting both 1s on the rerolls. So now he had five 1s from 10 dice, giving him a glitch, whereas if he hadn't rerolled his 6s, he would have been fine. So the Rule of Six ended up biting him in the ass with the Rule of One.

We also did something special with rolling Edge so that it was still very advantageous. I think we made it impervious to the Rule of One, so that it was impossible to glitch while rolling Edge. Either that, or the player would win back a point of Edge for every double-6 rolled (that is, roll a 6 on a die, and then roll a second 6 on the reroll of that same die). I can't recall which of the two we settled on.

So, yeah. If you're such a big fan of the Rule of Six that it just doesn't feel like Shadowrun without it, try fiddling with some house rules until you can work it back in. Personally, we found that our Rule of Six houserules were a little bit cumbersome, and somewhat unappealing in that they could come back and bite you in the ass frighteningly often.

The similarity to White Wolf that I don't like isn't the fixed TN die pool bit... that's a really basic mechanic, not something that any one game can really lay claim to. The similarity that I don't like is the use of stat + skill which, IMO, really diminishes the value of skills in low- to mid-range applications (you'll note that they didn't have to tell you "no spending more than 200 points on skills"...). This is also not a WW-exclusive thing... just something that SR4 shares with WW that I don't like.

On the other hand, they totally overpowered specializations. One point of skill plus one specialization gives you three bonus dice, right off the top. On that regard, it's no better than before: you only picked up a single point in a skill in SR3 if you planned on specializing.

Specialization hasn't been an issue in our games. If you're doing it with a weapon you'll probably want more dice. With other skills you're still weak in the other aspects of the skill.

Then you're not looking close enough.

I've mentioned several things I don't like about the game (hacking still isn't where I'd like it to be), things I wish they'd done better with (why give us encumbrance but no weights?), and things I've flat out ignored (agent blitzes), to anme just a few. I've also griped a bit about the release schedule, but with the addon that if it means more balanced rules thanks to much more playtesting I'll be happy.

I think that overall SR4 is a good game. I prefer it to SR3 because the rules flow a lot better between the various aspects, it's easier to teach and to learn, and the book is laid out much better. I also prefer the "feel" of it, but that's a highly subjective thing that I can't even really define myself.

Maybe it's because I frequently (but not always) disagree with Cain, and he frequently (almost always) bashes SR4.

I don't see less grit, but I definitely see less camp, and like it that way.