We're thinking of implementing some house rules in our SR3 game to make more options viable and deal with some areas that are currently overpowered. Do any of these sound particularly good or horrible?

1) Pistols and SMGs are rolled into one skill, Small Arms. This is partly to make SMGs more useful, since they'll become the FA option in the pistols skill.

2) Heavy Pistols suffer recoil as though they'd fired twice as many bullets, so you'd need two points of recoil compensation to avoid recoil on first SA shot and four for the second. Additionally, their concealability is reduced by 1. This is mostly to deal with the fact that heavy pistols have incredible damage and concealability, making them too obviously a default choice. Light Pistols might start to see some use.

3) Concealable Holsters only work for pistols with a concealability of 7 or higher. This is again to help make light pistols useful, since with rule 2 heavy pistols can't ever use these.

4) Shotguns and Spray Weapons are rolled into one skill, Spray Weapons. This mostly just adds more flexibility to the Shotguns skill, since no one ever took spray weapons.

5) Rifles and Assault Rifles are rolled into one skill, Rifles. We were already combining a bunch of skills anyway, and didn't want to leave some skills covering too few things.

6) Heavy Weapons and Launch Weapons are combined into the Heavy Weapons skill. As above. It's Str based. Gunnery will have to be the only Int based weapon skill.

7) All special weapons are rolled into appropriate other skills. Guncane becomes Rifles, Bracer becomes Pistols, Gyrojet Pistol becomes Pistols, etc. Otherwise these just never get used.

Tractors can pull up to Body 7 Trailers as a special ability, since otherwise 53' trailers can't be pulled at all. Also, their max Load rating is increased to match current modern day load limits.

9) Casters can only learn a number of "free" spells equal to their intelligence. Currently using Fettish limiting or Exclusiveness can make it free to learn Force 1 or 2 spells. This limits that effect without removing it entirely.

10) Skill chips can never be stored in memory, so they have to be in your head to be used. This includes Knowsofts, and mostly comes about because right now our party includes 4 skill chippers who are all using each others chips, and as such no one learns skills.

11) Sniper rifles have recoil as though they fire 3 times as many bullets, so 3 points of recoil compensation are needed to fire one shot without recoil. This makes sniper rifles a little more balanced with other weapons, and means that it actually makes sense for a Sniper Rifle to have a bipod. It also means you may have to chose between a Gas Vent system or Silencer.

12) Characters in cover can "trust their cover" if they want. This is declaired on your action, and means that you take no penalty to hit enemies from your own cover (the Cannon Compendium rule). However, you can't dodge until your next action.

JaronK

Hm... let's see.
1. Could be done that way.
2. Hm... why? Light/Heavy Pistols are ok. The +1/-1 is fair regarding the concealbility. And heavy pistols shouldn't have double recoil. What is the REASON for it?
3. Like i said: it already IS ok the way it is. (in my opinion) I have characters using light ones.
4. Spray weapons are not shotguns. They are an exotic weapon form.... and nobody NEEDS a crapload of hits and TRAINS with the damn things. Just use your attribute and be done with it.
5. Could be done. Could include Shotguns too. So you have all small ones, and all long ones (except rocker/grenade launchers or something)
6. Hm... are machineguns in heavy still?
7. Hm hm... all ok.
8. Has anybody ever looked at that in detail? Everything should work as it SHOULD work. When the rules are broken, just ignore them.
9. Meh. They already have enough spells. They don't need to get it all cheaper.
10. Maybe even say programs are (normaly, not always) coded on chips, which get inserted into a comlink. (Which should have like System*2 slots for it). Good against piracy. Of course all can still be in raw codeform.
11. Again... WHY? Also most sniper rifle just need to fire once *g*. Just give a bonus die for shooting from a stable position (bipod, on a wall. etc). And substract dice when people take it into a house to fight in melee-ranges with many doors etc.
12. Sure, sounds ok to me.

Whoops... sorry, didn't see the SR3. Change all the (Give dice, substract dice) to give a -1 TN or something.

None of our characters use them. Right now, you can use a Conceal 7 Heavy Pistol (from Cannon Compendium), put it in a Concealable Holster, and wear a Long Coat. That's conceal 13. When you take off your coat (security guards in our games do that at check points) it's conceal 9. That's still plenty... and nearly as good as what any light pistol can do. Plus the damage is SO much higher.

So... why do you use them?



That's very different from how the SR3 rules work. Flamethrowers don't do nearly enough damage to be used without skill in this game, but they're not worth investing skill points into... and attribute -1 is just sorta bizarre, as it doesn't fit the SR3 rules at all.



If it included shotguns then that one skill would include incredible concealability (Sawed off Spas 22), incredible damage and range (Sniper Rifles) and full auto as well. I'd still like to have differences in the skills. The plan was for there to be differences. Small Arms has solid damage and concealability along with full auto, but lacks range. Rifles gives long range and high damage with full auto, but lacks concealability. Heavy Weapons gives what rifles gives, only more so, but without any form of stealth at all and often requires gyro harnesses and high expense. Spray weapons gives area damage, high power, and concealability, but can't use full auto.



You realize this is SR3 right? It's not logic and intuition. It's just Int. Machine Guns are heavy, so they're Str unless they're vehicle mounted, in which case they're intelligence like all other vehicle mounted weapons.



The towing rule isn't broken except in this case, so we just fixed them for this case.



We're making it harder, not cheaper. Free spells is RAW. Restricting them to Int just reduces the amount. Or are you saying we should do away with such things entirely?



SR3, not SR4. No commlinks.



SR3. Not SR4. None of this dice subtracting. And right now the Ranger Arms SM3 comes with Gas Vent 2, which is weird due to lack of significant recoil. This gives it a purpose. The other big issue is the right now the Walter Sniper Rifle is just better in every way than most single person carriable weapon, due to the extremely high damage. After all, 14S beats the heck out of 9S. It's even great as a close range weapon... bring the thing in with an assault team if you like. That makes no sense. The idea is to make bipods and what not make sense while also making sure sniper rifles aren't better at assaulting than assault rifles.

JaronK

Yeah, i ninja-edited while you were replying. When i saw the SR3 again when i was done. Have change a bit. But most things translate back anyway.

For example.. most spray weapons have choke? It should be still easy to hit something. Than the poison is delivered/people covered in flames. I see no problems there.
Light Pistols: Yeah, i remember how i liked the SR4 thing of damage coming more easy from skill (One of the few things i liked). But still i had characters having primary light guns in 3rd. For example in conncealed arm-slides. What is better to have at your arm. a 600 gr pistol.. or a 2.5 kg. one? And the +2 conceal is sometimes the +2 you need *g*.

For 10, ok.. DECKS schould have slots for more chips with programs.

For 9... sorry forgot everything about free spells. Ignore me on that *g*.

*shrugs* Most of 'em make sense to me.

The board made me reduce the number of quoted blocks of text I had, so some of this is going to be a little disjointed.


I question making the Pistols skill even more valuable, and I'm not sure that SMGs will actually see use—the only issue with them that this fixes is the "don't have the skill" problem, but I think the skill is so rare because the SMG niche barely exists.

Some rules for "thoroughly concealed items" might help here—I could see more people packing SMGs if they were inside, say, a duffel bag stuffed with socks, so that they could carry it without nuking the pistol advantage of concealment (since people only need to spot one weapon to get uppity) but could still sacrifice a combat turn or two (out of combat, preferably) to take out the weapon and suddenly be more heavily armed.

In #2 you're implicitly adding the rule "weapons take recoil for the current shot", which for SA and SS is not the case in base SR3.

I'm not a fan of #3's conceal-based holster cutoff, especially since it creates a two-class Light Pistol category (the Ceska vz/120, Fichetti Security 500, and Walther PB-120, which can go in a concealable holster, and everything else which can't). It really just seems inelegant.


For #4, already the only reason to take shotguns is their flexibility, since the ability to saw-off means you can cover a big range of damage/conceal tradeoffs and they've got a lot of neat ammo. Well, ok, that's assuming you nuke Cone of Horrible Death, which if you don't is reason enough to take Shotguns to begin with.

#5 is reasonable. Both original skills were narrow, overlap is only middling, and it even makes sense to the extent that not classifying by fire-mode makes sense. SR3R has enshrined this.


#6 cripples the ability of the Rigger to grab a rocket launcher and go to town; I wouldn't do this, but otherwise it's not obviously terrible.

Re: #7, getting rid of the one-weapon wonder skills is a good call. No point in waiting for someone to build a character around them.


Mm. Probably a better solution is to just nuke the Body limit for towing—load already takes care of this. What sort of load rating did you increase Tractors to?


I think the more important fix is to the spells which are nearly full-power at Force 1.


Huh. Are you using the Chipjack Expert Driver per canon? Skillwires are otherwise sufficiently expensive and weak that this seems unlikely.


Icky special cases, an implicit recoil-on-first-attack rule like above, and still doesn't really encourage the Silencer/GV decision (bipod+customized grip or bipod+STR6 takes care of it). At best it seems like you prevent a single actor from engaging two targets in a single pass, but I'm not sure how valuable that really is.


I'm not sure that I like this change—you get cover "free" for the last pass when you're faster than the hostiles, and it's already partially available by walk-out-of-cover-fire-walk-back (you take the Attacker Walking penalty, and you risk someone using a Held Action, but you keep your ability to dodge and can even end up in full cover if you want and it's available. I think the bigger issue is that the penalty for friendly cover was held until an expansion, making it feel like a "gotcha".


This is bad practice. A clear and predictable guide is necessary to do any sort of reasoning about the world; "the GM will decide" is not something you can usefully reason about.



You give the damage advantage too much credit—your first comparison is presumably Sniper Rifle vs. Sporting Rifle (and I at least am OK with Sniper Rifles outclassing Sporting Rifles, especially given the price and avail difference), while your second one is actually 11S vs. 14S—not exactly a small difference, but given that you need to be fairly heavily-armored to bring the resist TN down low for either of them, the fact that you're giving up increasing dodge TNs makes it a bad trade most of the time.

The issue of being able to use sniper rifles to perform snap-shots on newly-appeared targets while crawling through tiny ducts still exists, but this needs a more general solution—trolls with polearms don't get less scary in a tiny alley with a sharp corner either. I've been debating some kind of maneuverability score, but I have yet to come up with satisfactory rules.

~J

I was hoping the Heavy Pistol change would help make SMGs more valuable within their skill group. It may be that they still never get used, but the change makes Heavy Pistols with Burst Fire harder to use as well, so there's something. I figured someone who's focused on Small Arms could then switch to SMGs when concealment was less of an issue but raining down firepower was important.



That's only the case with single shots. When firing multiple shots, recoil applies for the current shot. In this case, that's going to apply here.



It was mostly to make Conceal 7 be more useful than conceal 6. But perhaps simply making concealable holsters apply to light, machine and holdout pistols would be more elegant. Still, I was considering allowing very concealable items like knives to also use the holster.

And yeah, shotguns are already decent enough (conceal + high damage). The issue was that nobody in their right mind would take normal spray weapons, and pairing them with shotguns might make them worth taking.



Most Riggers have a high quickness, so they can take other weapons. I was worried more about Mages losing that ability, but they've got other ways to go to town anyway. I wanted to make combinations of all skills (except Gunnery, which has PLENTY) but this one worried me the most, due to losing Int based attacks other than Gunnery.

As for 7, my only worry is the Gyrojet Pistol, which adds a lot to pistols (due to the 12M damage code). Other than that, I see no problem here (especially since most special weapons are terrible).



I might just do that too... it's a little weird. Their max load is now 36,000kg, which is the actual legal limit (so modern day trailers can definitely handle this and more, or there'd be no point in the limit.



Honestly? That's a lot of effort. I admit Forboding, Hot Potato, Increase Reflexes +3, Trid Phantasm and such are nuts, but I didn't want to go to quite that much effort. I may get into it later.



Yes, as per cannon (so, effectively a 3 point task pool for all chipped skills). Skillwires are absolutely incredible for the team right now, with a number of skill chippers all swapping around. As such, everyone on the team who isn't a mage has Biotech 6, Electronics 6, Electronics B/R 6, Stealth 6, Security Procedures 6, Rifles 6, Small Unit Tactics 6, and so on. With the CED, they are all effectively 9s (for the ones that normally don't use pools). Having everyone be top notch medics and infiltrators with decent combat is getting a bit much.



Bipod means they're planted in place like a sniper should be, not charging in guns blazing (as currently is reasonable for a sniper rifle). It's a start, anyway.



You do sometimes get cover free, but it seems weird to give a penalty to hit when you're a sniper in a window somewhere and not worried about getting shot at. It was resulting in people not wanting to use cover at all. Also, if they're much faster than the hostiles and in a superior position the fight is usually a forgone conclusion anyway, so I'm less worried about that.

Also, we give cover based on average cover during your turn (assuming things are all happening at once) so walking out and back just gives normal cover with standard penalties. You can't move at all if you're doing the trust your cover thing.



So far, people have REALLY wanted to use Sniper Rifles over Assault Rifles and Hunting Rifles in all situations, since SRs give you plenty of range while being able to blow through security armor (which burst fire ARs and HRs have trouble with). Plus SA fire can still be silenced. Anyway, it seems to have come up.

We just use a "crowded space" modifier to TNs in melee to deal with trolls using pole arms in such places (though piercing pole arms are fine in a tunnel where it's handy). We've also got a rule that says Sniper Rifles require a standard action to ready anyway, but that hasn't done enough.

JaronK

So how are they running 108 mp size programs/skillwires? Thats a lot of headware memory...

You could for example rule that the CED only applies to the chip, jacked into 1 chipjack (and not headware memory). You might even consider it works on just one slot in the multi-slot chipjacks out there. Besides, once they fork 324k for a piece of cyberware it should give them an advantage right? Slotting in the right chip for a situation takes time/actions afterall...

As for the little-used (exotic) weapon-classes out there, players shouldn't be afraid to default from skill to skill or skill to attribute. Skill to skill is only a +2 tn modifier and quite workable. Perhaps you could re-jig the skillweb somewhat to include heavy weapons under the same skill group as launch weapons and gunnery? SMG's, rifles, shotgun and assault rifles are all covered under the same skillgroup, so nothing wrong there. Just be a man and take the +2 tn modifier.

-EDIT-
Just checked, spray weapons default to heavy weapons skill. How cool is that? Really makes flamethrowers feasible again. Looks like the issue is with the players not willing to put up with a +2 tn modifier, not the rules.

-EDIT-
It would be nice to include a mechanism to make it easier to learn other skills within a skill group.

But you say you'd need "two points of recoil compensation to avoid recoil on first SA shot". In general, you never need to avoid recoil on the first SA shot. Is this something you've changed?



Aside from the cone of horrible death, they're actually mediocre—very versatile, but within a range that in my experience is surprisingly unhelpful. That said, it doesn't feel like spray weapons improve that. Flamethrowers certainly feels like it could go with Heavy Weapons pretty well; Firehose is a little weirder, and the Spray Tanks stretch things, but I think it might be a better fit overall.


Right, but they don't need to take other weapons in general—the role of the missile launcher is for Riggers who don't have enough extra space to mount missiles on their van and end up meeting a hard target, and to the extent that other weapons can damage the target the Rigger can generally just use the ones already mounted and available via Gunnery. This just takes away the missile option.


Mm, fair enough.


CED is the bigger issue, but if you've got a bunch of characters built around it it's probably too late to fix now. The SR3R rule is that the CED now gives chipped skills access to preexisting pools (if any) at up to Rating dice per test or the normal max for the pool in that situation.


Mm. I must admit that I'm not actually sure if my players have discarded this for a considered reason or if they just never stopped to evaluate the value of sniper rifles in CQB.


That sounds more like 1/4 cover, really. I'll have to think about this one.


Ok, that's a significant change.

~J

Those houserules mostly look ok.

MPs and SMGs will probably always suck in SR3. They just do too little damage, and out of the book are too unusable to be viable. Basically what I would so is half the recoil on light pistols and SMGs with base damage codes of below 6M or so. That way you can get your SMGs back to workable bullet-hoses. I don't know how to save light pistols. I would say just suck it up and accept that noone will use them outside of the cocktail party.

The other option might be to give a mandator CQB modifier to everyone using a longarm (AR, Sniper, Sporter, non-sawed-off shotgun, etc.) in close quarters, here defining any target within 10 meters or so. I suggest something like +2. This makes sense, because in CQB you need quick lateral tracking rather than pinpoint accuracy, and longarms will "drag". Also, give a melee attacker a bonus to disarming a longarms users, in addition to prohibiting use in melee (as a firearm, that is, not as a club.)
Handgun and SMG users would not take these penalties, because they are using CQB weapons.

In order to discourage running and gunning with sniper rifles (which really should be a valid tactic with smartlink, the only reason noone does it now is because they mostly don't even have ironsights), you might extend the CQB penalty to the sniper's shortest range increment. This doesn't really make sense, and I personally have never found anything wrong with having an assault-sniper rifle. But the recoil thing is a valid point. Snipers SHOULD have more recoil.

DNI linked Optical chips. .1 essence, 5Y per MP, no sweat. They're just loading all the chips into the optical chip, then swapping the info off the optical chip into their skillwires when they need the skills. They only need one at a time after all... stealth while moving into position, a gun skill (if they don't have another naturally) while shooting, biotech while doing surgery and first aid, etc).



That's a start, and worth considering, but it still leads to the issue of every corp out there wanting to have everyone chipped as it makes training unnecessary. Still, they do get plenty of advantages already (all this would do is mean they need more copies of the chips).



By why bother? Gyrojet pistols are neat but the rest of them aren't good enough to even consider using. Why use a gun cane when I could just have a dissassembleable sniper rifle if the gun cane is not only lower damage but also hard to hit with?



Hitting on a 6 is a LOT worse than hitting on a 4. Like, a LOT worse. Better to just use a shotgun.

JaronK

Firing two shots would be a short burst and follow the burst fire rules, not the SA rules. That's why recoil would apply... we're calling it a short burst for recoil purposes because it always counts as firing two bullets.



I could put them with heavy weapons, but another factor here is that we've got a shotgun adept in the party and I didn't want to combine all the other skills without putting something new in his skill group, especially since he's the only one who's not a skill chipper or mage.



Where's SR3R? That's not a bad idea at all (it doesn't solve the issue of every corp wanting to just have everyone chip or at least use a knowsoft link, but it would at least mean chipped skills aren't better than normal.



I'm thinking of the sniper in the window who's hiding but not worried about getting shot at (because he's half a kilometer away). Probably mostly in cover, but he's using the cover to prop up his sniper rifle anyway, so it's not like the cover in any way restricts his shot.



Is it? Honestly, I thought that was standard.

JaronK

To be clear, you're removing the usual option of taking two SA attacks at the same target and instead replacing it with a Complex Action BF short burst? I guess that's one way to encourage use of the Take Aim action.


Mm. That's a consideration I can't really comment on.


I've been horrifically lazy about collecting the decided-on rules into a reference, but the board is here.


Yeah, ok, that's a weird case. I think we've been implicitly assuming that the sniper had no cover in this situation. Really, I think this case may need a reexamination of what being "in cover" means; are you simply partially behind something, or does it imply that you aren't actively using your cover, that is, ducking in and out of it as opposed to just sitting with your head exposed the whole time.

The first thing that popped into my mind was the ability to drop half of your cover bonus in exchange for getting no penalties, but that would probably lead to a lot of trusted 3/4 cover situations. I'll have to think about this.

(Actually, looking at it now, the CC expansion seems to imply an assumption of ducking in and out—it mentions that "hiding behind cover also means he can't see as much of the action", which would be obviously false if you could be in cover and still leave the stalk with most of your sensory appendages out.)


That's similar to how movement penalties work (you take the worst penalty for any movement you've done for the whole turn), but that case is specifically called out. As mentioned above I've discovered that the designers do appear to have envisioned it as a bit of an average over time, but I still can't find anything to support the idea that this averaging is meant to be carried across movement.

I was hoping for something more decisive, like an example where an action is held until someone leaves cover, but no such luck.

~J

No, it's more like Burst Fire. You still get two shots with Heavy Pistols, but for recoil purposes only they're like a short burst when firing SA (2 shots = 2 recoil, or 4 recoil on the second shot).

As to the Launch Weapons/losing the only Int based personal shooting skill, I could just combine Gunnery and Launch Weapons... great for riggers, after all. But that means nothing combines with Heavy Weapons, and Gunnery was already incredibly good. So... not sure.

JaronK