Isn't a usage of burning edge to negate a critical glitch?

Come to think of it, that is how we always handled it implicitly

Indeed, Same with us... If you glitched, you could not re-roll, you could only remove the glitch. *shrug*

Missing rule:
"Note that if a test results in a glitch, you may use edge only to negate the effects of the glitch. The other edge options are no longer availible."

A rule that will kill as many player characters as this one, shouldn't be something that you have to read between the lines. It would have far too much impact on the game, to be not even mentioned.

The purport of edge is that a PC doesn't die from the first failed test in a critical situation. PCs are supposed to die dramatically from ruthless Johnsons that betray them, evil ghosts that eat they souls, and out-of-control experimental killing machines that melt their faces.

Dying because you scored only one hit instead of two, when you jumped over a chasm (despite a decent dicepool), is when edge should help you out.
If the use of edge is blocked because you also rolled a non-critical glitch, you will just die an unnessary frustrating death. Now you can start to discussing with your GM, if the above rule means that you also can't burn edge for a critical succes or hand of god.

The main problem I see here, is that this way glitches have way to much impact on the game.
This is a problem because the glitch rules are not good. There are far too many glitches with low dice pools, and too few glitches with high dice pools. Glitches are far more likely with even dice pools, than with uneven. If you have an uneven dice pool, and raise your skill by one, then the likelihood of a glitch almost doubles, only because your dice pool is even now. Despite the fact that you should be better with a higher skill!
And with low dicepools, especially low even dicepools, glitches happen with so much reliability, that it's hard to take them all serious. (Have you ever ordered two of your watcher spirits, to fight each other to the death? Its fun, but its also madness. )

Of course I see why this glitch rules are used. Every RPG has to have some glitch rules, and these rules are very simple and allow a dynamic gameplay. Its easy to see if an result is a glitch or not. With the SR4 dice system you don't have that many options to define what a glitch is. And more "realistic" glitch rules would make everything more complicted and slow the game down.

And these simple rules are ok, as long as they don't affect the game that strong. With the normal rules, glitches are mostly fun, als long as you have edge left.
With the above missing-rule, they would randomly prevent the use of edge for important tests. Glitches are supposed to be random, but this is the wrong kind of random.

How often do glitches/critical glitches come up at your table, and does your GM appreciate the difference between the minor inconvenience that a glitch is meant to represent vs the potentially catastrpohic effects of a crit glitch?

I am firmly in the "either/or" camp, where you can either use Edge to negate a glitch/reduce a crit glitch to a regular one, or reroll failures but keep the glitch. At my table glitches are fairly rare events, so I like to make the most of them. If rerolling failures/adding Edge dice also removed the glitch, I can safely say they would never occur in my game, and where is the fun in that?

In your chasm jumping example above, for me a glitch would be something like a "take 4S for landing badly", or "you twisted your ankle landing, halve your movement rate for the next hour", not a "you fall a bazillion metres to your death", that I would save for the crit glitch ...

It's the only relevant way.



Well, nothing prevents those two to work together.

Glitch = no reroll
Reroll = old result is forgotten

Works perfectly fine in union.




Now that's a bit of an exaggeration for sure.


Glitches add drama to the game. If you completely negate their relevance by making it trivial to remove them, you will never have them, you could as well leave the glitch rule out entirely.

Bye
Thanee

Actually quite often I would say. You don't want to waste your edge, so you re-roll only if it was really important. If you could be killed or the whole run would be compromised. But in a situation where a glitch only forces you to switch to plan B ("kill everyone in sight"), the glitch usually isn't re-rolled.
I think the players are searching excuses for plan B anyway all the time .


In my example it wouldn't be the glitch that kills you, but the fact that you didn't reach the threshold of two. Now you are missing two meters horizontal jumping distance to reach the other side of the chasm. The glitch only prevents you from using edge to re-roll and get the second hit that you are missing.


The above problem doesn't exist of course with your rule interpretation. In your interpretation the glitch doesn't block the whole re-roll, so you can use edge to get the missing hit. Only that you still twitst your ankle, since its still a glitch. But you don't fall into the abysmal deeps of the chasm.
I could surely life with that interpretation. I just don't like the possibility weird results that were discussed earlier in this thread.

Whats really not my cup of tea, is the third rule-interpretation in this thread, were you can use edge to prevent your ankle from being twisted - and only for that - but still fall into the abysmal deeps to a clumsy death.

If an interpretation of a rule has the potential, to create nonsensical situtations, often or not, then thats a clue that this interpretation might be wrong. I'd rather go with the interpretation that doensn't have this problem.


Indeed. The problem I have with that is rather: "I fall to a clumsy death even so I have 5 edge left, but at least I didn't twist my ankle."


Probably. But the possibility is there and it is realistic. Sooner or later it will happen. And then its imho frustrating and unnecessary.

First of all, I refuse to use the term "glitch". It doesn't flow properly.

That said, should someone fumble a roll, I let them reroll their failures with Edge. However, on a critical botch, they cannot-- their only option is to negate it.

That opens up another option: you can spend Edge two ways if you get a normal botch, but only one if you roll a critical failure.

Well in some cases rolling badly will kill you. In these cases (need two hits on jump test), its not the glitch that kills you as much as your abject failure of reaching the threshold. You can burn Edge in these situations as thats what its for.. but really if you need two hits to avoid certain death, maybe you should have traded in 8 dice to do it automatically, or avoided the jump in the first place?

There is already easy in SR to avoid bad things, so some consequence for being unlucky isn't too bad for me.

I would not let my players buy hits in such a situation. However, if they fail to achieve two hits (which can even happen with 16 dice) AND glitch, I wouldn't kill them. Reaction tests for holding on somewhere, etc. pp.

After some thought, I'll keep doing it as I've done it before, which is exactly as Cain described.

You would not let your players who are supposed to be superb jumpers (16 dice is alot) be able to clear a fairly average long jump? There is such a thing as too much randomness.

In general, yes. If it is a situation where they can take their time and all that, buying of hits is allowed, but not in combat situations or situations where combat or similar circumstances can arise.

PCs buying hits is for relatively trivial outcomes, not relatively trivial probabilities. The best jumpers in the world can screw up an average jump, it's just that occurrences will be very few and far between. If the jump were into a sandpit at an amateur athletics event for no greater purpose than blending in then buying hits makes perfect sense. When the character's life is at stake they need to roll. Ultimately the buying hits rule is a facility for a smoother gaming experience and not an argument that some things don't ever happen.

The thing with this example is that you've defined a situation where >=2 hits => alive and <2 hits => dead, so 1 hit with a glitch is death with an added inconvenience. Said inconvenience is inversely relative to the number of hits rolled, so this should be seriously-but-not-catastrophically worse than death. Personally I'd have it that a critical glitch would pull a team mate over the edge too, whilst the glitch in question would mean something like drawing enemy attention to the location.

So really, Edge expenditure under the missing rule would avoid the worse-than-death bit but not the death bit.

Of course, that doesn't answer your point that Edge expenditure should always be able to save one from a bad roll. I don't agree that it should (and it often doesn't) but then I also don't think there should be any mechanical reason to disallow HoG, so perhaps the hypothetical missing rule would be more workable without that implication.

Why is everyone so opposed to the idea that the different uses of edge are not equally effective in every scenario? It's the same for adding Edge dice after the roll and rerolling failures (let's ignore glitches for the moment). Unless you have a high Edge attribute and a low normal dice pool, rerolling failures is expected to yield the better result. Nobody questions the utility of those two.

Now going back to allowing all uses of Edge on (critically) glitched rolls. Yes, most of the time rerolling failures will negate the glitch (by removing the 1s) and produce additional hits and is thus the better option, but that result is not guaranteed. You could also roll the same amount of 1s as before, or even more. It is even possible to make a regular failure into a (critical) glitch.

On the other hand removing the glitch or reducing the critical glitch to a regular failure is a sure thing. The former definitely has its use if the result of the glitch is very detrimental to the overall run and additional hits are irrelevant. The latter may be useful if the roll can be attempted again, but the critcal glitch would prevent another attempt.

Because its not just "not equally effective", it is so unlikely that you would benefit more from turning a critical glitch into a normal glitch rather than re-rolling everything, that It is unlikely to ever come up in gamplay.

A similar possibility would be to either

A) Re-roll the entire dice poll
B) if glitch, re-roll a single die

Option A is so much better, that option B would never be used unless that glitch FORCED it.

The normal add dice OR re-roll failures is far more situational: If your dice poll is low, you benefit from adding Edge before. If you feel lucky, you might want to add before anyway despite statistical chances of improving the dice toss (exploding sixes are fun). Granted, games with higher dice pools (where 10-15 is considered low) will seldom use Edge before or after test instead of re-rolling failures, but even in those it is useful for casting low-force spells (to ignore the cap on maximum hits).

Another major difference is that Adding Edge vs re-rolling can both be used at the exact same times, while negating glitch vs re-rolling has a prerequisite on one (glitch has happened) vs the other being (non-hits rolled).

The major reason though is probably that we think rerolling is a cheap solution to what is supposed to be a fumble - turning not just a poor toss but a FUMBLE into a very good toss.

In the phrase "what is supposed to be a fumble," define "supposed to be."

From what I've read of this thread, the main objection to the interpretation that one can reroll glitches is that it makes a rare occurrence even rarer. Why is this necessarily a bad thing?

Agreement.

All uses of edge are NOT created equal. Sometimes it is better to to reroll three dice than it is to add two more. And sometimes the reverse is true. If you have a high edge, sometimes you want to add six dice instead of rerolling two. Rerolling is almost always better, but if you're already rolling 20 dice, you may want to use it ahead of time and gamble on getting a bunch of sixes.

The usefulness of edge varies greatly with how good you are at the task and how lucky you are. That's just how it is. The best way to spend your edge depends greatly on how you're getting fucked today.

And the edge glitch rules are an extrapolation of this. Sometimes its easier to just make a glitch go away without further ado, than it is to gamble on a low dice pool not being just as bad. "The Glitch Option" is there for when you rolled good enough to succeed, and want to just move onto the next action without the hassle and annoyance of a glitch.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. In this hypothetical discussion, jumping the Chasm'o'Doom ™ is the exact situation where PCs might want to use Edge to augment their DP, reroll failures or downgrade a glitch, finite resource or no.

In the hypothetical situation where the dice gods conspired to curse a PC jumping over the chasm with (1) not enough hits to meet the threshold and (2) a crit glitch, then I would probably allow the poor SOB to use their Edge pool twice to both reroll and downgrade the glitch.

Because it's all a part of the rich tapestry of life?

Seriously, what players tend to fondly remember about their gaming are the outstanding successes and the catastrophic failures. I don't think glitches are the big bad wolves (or catastrophic failures) that they are being made out to be, indeed I feel they can add incident and colour to a game session ...

Mind you many people are trying to describe the color a glitch can add when they GM, what many long time players see is "Oh look, this run was too easy time to screw the players for making my run look easy that I spent a week making, they will RUE the day". Some GM's are just plain vindictive jerks who like to screw with the players. Is this common? most likely not, but it does happen & these types of GM's tend to color people's opinions on things like glitches & crit glitches.

Disallowing rerolling if a glitch occured also screws activesofts hard

Seems to fit well with the fluff? I dunno, I find the concept of skillwires a bit of a reach anyway, but given that the 'wires are coded a higher rate of glitching seems slightly appropriate ... and there is always of course the expert system.

This is a bad gamble. For applying Edge pre-roll to be expectationally preferable to re-rolling non-hits the Edge attribute must exceed 40% of the dice pool. So if you're as high as 20 DP, an Edge of 8 makes them equal options in terms of expected hits, whilst 9 or higher will make the pre-roll preferable.

When you factor in that you can save a point of Edge on not re-rolling non-hits on a successful test, the Edge rating needs to be even higher in comparison to the DP.

On rolls with activesofts you can't use Edge anyways, unless you have an expert system. If you do, you can still only reroll a failed test. Not only does that mean all dice, even those that hit, it also means that you can't use Edge on many glitches. Critical glitches should be allowed a reroll though, since they automatically are failed tests

Because glitches are fun, and a chance to add in randomness, hilarious moments, or just things going bad in a "ironic" way. Fits campaigns that are supposed to have elements of humor as well as the more serious ones were the main characters can fail utterly at things.

So long as they are not too common (which SR already does with higher dice pools), I see no reason to make them even rarer. Besides, this use of Edge is RAI I believe. I've had some hilarious glitches happen to me as a player.



It's not about equality. It's about the rules not making sense. Turning a critical glitch to a potential success really is a no-brainier for everyone. If you didn't think you could get a single hit in the first place, why even try the action? Even if i had Body 1 and no armor, I would still reroll than making my damage resistance test into a glitch.

It would be like:

"If you are attacked by an elemental attack you can soak with body+halv impact armor"

and

"If you are attacked you can soak with body+armor."

I would interpret this to mean you can only do option one, even if this was no explicitly stated in the rules (as it is).




I don't think this should enable a reroll on a critical glitch, just a non-glitched failed test. It's weaker for a reason.

Are they fun for you as a player? I for one hate that the dice say my super-professional runner is occasionally a complete moron. I realize that some folks enjoy them, but you should know that this is far from universal.


Which?

Well, i failed to mention the expert system ^^

Appropos of nothing if the intent was tO allow refill to cancel a glitch they wouldn't have even needed to put the option in there do at my tables the glitch/crit glitch state persists.

Run on!

The simple fact is that rerolling all non-hits does not guarantee that a glitch will be removed.

Nearly every professional of any type has succumbed to bad luck at some point in their career. Sports professionals miss their target or goal, get injured while competing, lose or damage their equipment or any number of other results. Other professionals have similar things that happen. Concluding that a “professional Shadowrunner” shouldn’t suffer the same problem as another professional is funny at best. All of the examples above are examples of glitches or critical glitches.

When playing I tend to glitch on average of at least once per session, and critically glitch probably every third or fourth session. I’ve even critically glitched on a roll that had a dice pool of 19 dice. Did I mention that dice hate me? Most of the time I take the glitch in stride and have fun role playing the results, occasionally I’ll spend edge to negate or downgrade the glitch. I find the glitch mechanic of the game well thought-out. Of course I’m a strong believer in giving the story teller maximum control of the world and keeping the written rules to a minimum when possible. The glitch rules are all about the story teller having control of the situation for better or worse.

The example given of leaping over a chasm where there was a threshold of (2) and the player rolled (1) hit and a glitch is a great example of something that would happen to me (probably on a dice pool of 12+). As a story teller I would handle this in this manner (YMMV): The character does not land on the distant ledge as intended (s)he does manage to slam into the far wall about 1 meter below the top of the cliff. The impact has rung his/her bell (s)he is now suffering a -1 to all actions for the next 5 minutes. (This represents the failed roll.) (S)he is only hanging on by his/her off hand to a small clump of soil and roots that is protruding from the surface of the cliff. (Had the player not glitched I’d have had the character with much better hand holds and possibly even a very small outcropping near one foot.) Now the player (and character) need to work out what to do next. *** Please note that normally in our group will don’t allow simple random chance to kill characters. If the player chooses to do something stupid or wishes the character dead will allow for that and will make it a worthy death, but a simple poor roll will not normally kill a character.

I understand that the majority of this thread is about trying to determine how the glitch and edge rules are supposed to be played in very specific circumstances, and I support the community’s ability to discuss it. I do feel however that it is something best discussed within your own group to determine what will work best at your table. My advice is to take fifteen or twenty minutes at the beginning of your next session to hash out what the rules mean for your group and stick with that.

Sorry this was so wordy however I have been accused in the past of not explaining myself clearly and I didn’t want to be misunderstood.

-D

Well, speaking as a GM and as someone who's fumbled at least once per Shadowrun game I've ever GM'ed-- for over 22 years, I might add-- fumbles on the player's part are indeed a rare occurrence. Usually, for non-serious rolls I simply use botches or criticals purely for comedy effect. I've never seen a skilled PC fumble a critical roll. (Which has never stopped skilled NPC's from fumbling on a regular basis for me, I might add. ) Thus, I don't see why I should make fumbles or criticals even more rare than they already are.

As for the jump example, I might let the PC fall a ways but hit the far wall of the chasm, giving them a chance to grab hold on a normal fumble. On a critical, they'll die unless they spend the Edge to negate the fumble, thereby hitting the far wall a ways down, as per the normal fumble. Death and success are not the only options available to GM's, after all.

Reminds me of how often I've rolled critical hits in That Other Game as a player.

Ziltch.

Ok, not quite true.

Exactly twice, same campaign. One was on an undead, the other was on something that was so low hp as to have keeled over before I rolled damage.

Yes, under normal conditions (a constant player group) that is a good advice.
Under not optimal condtions, like playing on a convention with a GM you don't know, is where the ambiguity of the rules is a problem.

As we have seen so far, there seem to be three interpretations of the rules:

A: You may re-rolle glitches, and unless you end up with another glitch, the glitch is gone.

B: You may re-roll glitches, but the result will still be a glitch, only with more hits.

C: You may not re-roll if the first result is a glitch. You may spend egde to negate the glitch, but you have no option to get more hits.

All these interpretations seem to be playable on there own. This is proven by the fact, that for each interpretation you can find more than one group that plays it, and they all seem to be happy with it.

Now the following senario:
A player plays his favorit character on a convention. The GM didn't declare at the beginning how he interprets the edge rules, because, if you had to declare your interpretation of every ambiguous rule in shadowrun, that would be at least one hour less time to play.

In combat, an enemy driver tries to run over the (pedestrian) PC. He drives a van with body 14 at 80 meters/turn and scores 3 hit on his ramming test. That would be 28 DV to soak, so the PC should better dodge it.
He rolls his dicepool of 8 and scores 2 hits and a glitch.
The GM rules, the glitch means that he loses one shoe while he dodges, and the net-hit from the driver means that the PC has to soak 29 physical damage.
Now if the player plays usually in a group that uses A or B, and the GM is from a group that uses C, then you can be sure that some discussion will come up.
The player wants to use edge to get more hits, by re-rolling his failed dice or by rolling edge additional dice. But the GM tells him that his only option is to use edge to negate the glitch and not lose his stupid shoe, so he is still roadkill but can at least die in his shoes.

In such a situation it would be really good, to know which one of A, B or C is RAW/RAI and which two are just houserules.
Because most GMs will tell you the important houserules before the game starts, to prevent later discussion.

I agree, however a multi-page discussion on DS will not affect the above scenario either.

There is also one more use of edge that could be used in your above scenario that is not A, B, or C... HoG.

Just another thought.
-D

I'm not. I am strongly in favor of having the "negate a glitch" option be far superior in the situation where a glitch is rolled (since the other options won't do anything ).

Bye
Thanee

You are forgetting an extremely important factor here.

With a high DP you have a good chance to succeed at whatever you do, anways (i.e. w/o Edge).

So, re-rolling non-hits is only necessary to prevent a bad roll. Otherwise you can save that point of Edge for another roll.

When adding Edge before the roll, you have less information about whether to use it or not. Once you see the result, you can make a far better decision about spending it.

Bye
Thanee

Yes, but only because no one could find a quote that proves that one interpretation is the right one. You can't know that when you start the discussion. (Unless of course you have read all the earlier threads to this topic before )


Yes, but unnecessary burning an edge point permanently can still be frustrating, even so it surely is less frustrating than dying. And often you will still have to spend the rest of the run in a hospital and/or get new negative qualities when you use HoG. That shouldn't happen just because a glitch prevents you from re-rolling.
One of my players burnt even two edge points, in a fight against a master shedim that had possessed a Hitler-clone. (It was the end-boss in a run against nazi-zombies.) He didn't complain because that was awesome and the way edge should be burned.

That's disappointing Thanee, you're usually sharper than that. If you read my post more closely and quote it more fully you'll find I didn't forget that factor.

Spending Edge pre-roll on a big dice pool is useful if you really need a critical success. I've done it a time or two, mostly to one-shot things like troll cyberzombies and main battle tanks. Unless you really need something spectacular, spending Edge pre roll (if you've got a high Edge score) can indeed be overkill. The other time it's useful is if you're gambling on the Rule of Six: you need a lot of successes, so having the entire dice pool potentially explode is necessary.

Except that there comes a point where the dice pool is so big that re-rolling failures is always more promising. A die that explodes 6s will give 0.4 hits on average, whilst a die that re-rolls on a miss will give 0.56 hits on average. So the pre-roll option relies on a lot of extra dice to make it preferable and the attribute cap rules this out for the larger pools.

Oops, my bad.

Bye
Thanee

Good example. This is a case of seriously bad luck, which little else than burning Edge will help against. This also demonstrates how awful the vehicle crash rules are - that van does more damage than most tank guns. Sure, a normal pedestrian being hit by such a vehicle at that speed (almost 100 km/h) will almost certainly die, but 28P would be enough to take out a tank.

But that's another matter. This case would happen the same way if the victim was out of Edge - there would be no way to save him other than HoG too. Luckily, situations like this is rare in most games, so players don't need to burn Edge villy nilly. If you want a more arcady game where the heroes always survive, then let them reroll anyway.

Good summary of the different positions, but I haven't seen many people preaching the C option you rightly point out as the potential dumb luck PC killer. Most people seem to be in the A or B camp from what I read, so at least this doesn't seem to be a problem on most tables.

Your scenario though, as with the Chasm'o'Doom discussed upthread, is about a PC facing a do-or-die dilemma, and as such is pretty loaded. A PC with a DP of 8 facing someone doing lethal damage with 3 hits would probably want to use Edge to augment his DP pre-roll, so the glitch and lack of net hits would probably not have come up in the first place if the PC were clever. I understand the principle of what you are saying, though it all seems fairly hypothetical to me.

Double post

I have seen 19 Dice both Glitch and Critically Glitch. So it CAN happen.

In theory, anything is possible. In practice, only I can bolo on a dice pool that size in my games, and only when I'm GMing. Heck, I think my record is a critical botch on 23 dice. My biggest record is all 1's on 13 dice, back in the SR2 days when you needed all 1's to botch.

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with distinguishing a critical botch from a normal botch. You can allow Edge to reroll on a normal botch, but on a critical, there's only one way out: spend Edge to negate.

Whether a Critical Glitch is a subset of Glitches or a similar but seperate matter is a question the GM should address before a game. I have seen it ruled either way and to date have not seen a definitive answer.