Curious how often are you seeing glitches in your game? Critical glitches?

Honestly in our games only ever seen one crit glitch and can count the minors on my hands. Not sure if its size of dice pools or just probability?

How about spending edge, if spending edge after a roll to reroll failures would it cancel out your possible glitches our would you have needed to spend the edge on that glitch?

On the edge issue I rule that if you've glitched you can either reroll the failures (and keep the glitch) or buy off the glitch. On Critical Glitches you can only reduce it to a glitch no other edge use is available.

Glitches and critical glitches are only happing if for some reason the dice roll is severely reduced, or very small to start with. Some PCs have never crit glitched, while one has done it repeatedly.

If you roll a glitch you can't reroll failures, but you can negate it with edge. To rule otherwise is to make the "negate glitch" function to become meaningless as it is always better to reroll failures because then you're actually less likely to glitch again than you were before you rolled.

Same with critical glitches, except it can only be turned into a glitch.

I see glitches about as often as I see people hit like 60% successes which is more often than you think. So far the only crit glitch has been in perception by someone with 2 dice.

Chris

Almost never seen a glitch, only time I had a glitch in a game I ran was a Crit Glitch downgraded to a glitch. The dice were really bad. Spirit Guard power prevents glitches, having a guardian angel watching over you is a good thing.

I had an NPC critically glitch on an attack roll with EX-Explosive rounds once...

and his edge was already empty.

My players were deeply amused when this heavy pistoler expert's gun exploded in his hands.

Had glitches from several players tonight. Once, had a player critical glitch a shot out the back of the bus (literally) and he was out of edge... The EXEX ammo blew out the entire back of the bus.

Had two different players who have burned edge to avoid certain death (for example: one kicked open a door, behind which three tactical operative were set up in ambush. The team made a lot of noise and he stood right in front of the door as he kicked it open. They were holding... That's 6 short, wide bursts coming into the doorway....)

We see glitches about every game.

I never see players roll a critical botch. Instead, I have an unbroken string of critical botches from every time I GM Shadowrun, at least once a game and usually on at least 5 dice, running all the way back to the late 90's. My record in a total botch (all 1's) is 12 dice.

Cain, you are like the anti-me. I average like 60-70% successes a night for some weird reason.

Chris

I do much better as a *player*. It's GMing where my luck goes south real fast.

Another reason I play Mr. Lucky: my luck is so fickle, I occassionally need to have the odds stacked that much in my favor in order to function.

Glitches are not terribly frequent for us; the group averages one or two a session. But we've had some fun with them, and they've learned to fear critical glitches. (I had a player critically glitch her resistance to the group's mage's illusion of a massive fire. He told her it wasn't real. But because she critically glitched, not only did the illusion look real to her, I also told her that she didn't believe him. Her subsequent panic about the fire was good fun.)

In our new game we started Saturday the first fight had the Street Sam rolling back to back glitches on the FIRST round of the fight and the bad guys rolled a glitch on round two.. XD

We must have all been rolling crappy.

The Street Sam was up on the roof of a building waiting for two gangs to meet up to make a deal.. She was suppose to shoot the leader of the one gang... But as she was taking aim she glitched on a perception test and glitched again just before she was to take the shot so I described it as the a brick on the roof wall was loose and fell out and hit the ground below next to the gangers.. They all looked up to see her thus spoiling her Surprise attack. Luckily her initative was very high so she nailed the target on the first IP of the first round and was only under return fire for a second.. long enough to get shot in the side from the 12 gangers lighting her up on the roof but luckily she was knocked prone by the hit thus putting her in Total Cover. with her last 2 IPs.. she got up and hauled ass.

glitches are fun.

There's always a glitch during a game session. Fun ensues.

I've noticed my luck generally runs in a rollercoaster pattern with the exception that it never hits an equilibrium. Technically if you averaged all my successes together then it might be close to 33%. but if you look at individual gaming sessions I usually run around 5-10%(I kept track for awhile and actually only hit 3% one night) or 55-75%(I hit 90% during one gaming session where I was GMing. Several people had to burn edge.) My players have been with me for years for the most part and know about it. I think it actually increases the fun for them because no matter the description they can never tell the lethality of an opponent simply because my luck is crazy. Oh, for the sessions where I kept track my % successes on total dice rolled was something like 56%. I've got the actual number around here somewhere. So... kind of weird. Heh, it almost killed my character at one point because my GM was busy and told me to just roll both parts of rebinding/invoking a force 4 plant spirit. I invoked it as part of the rebinding, I got 10 successes off of my 16 dice and was really happy till I rolled the 8 dice the spirit got and got 8 successes. So... 16S.... oh, wait it was invoked so yay! 24S to soak. with the 2S I already had from a combat earlier that day.... I was in trouble. I managed to not have to use edge, but it was close. A day later after much regeneration(yay plant spirits) I was rebinding/reinvoking it again, and I forget how many successes it got, but it wasn't too bad, I just remember I got 13 invocation successes from 22 dice. So it is one badass Force 4 plant spirit.

Chris

The problem is that the glitch system was designed with the intent that players really would average out to about 6-8 dice per roll (Skill 3 + Attribute 3 + Random Mods 0-2). A score of 4 was supposed to be an indication of a top-notch character, afterall.

It didn't work out that way, though. It's not uncommon to see specialists throwing out 15-20 dice per action. With that many dice hitting the table, you're not going to see many glitches and the Fates are going to have to be PMSing in order for you to see a critical glitch. And on those exceedingly rare occasions, you just have to spend a point of Edge to negate it (not that a normal glitch is really a bad thing anyway).

I mean, even with Gremlins or Cursed in the 3-4 range, a specialist (transation: min/maxer) is only a little more likely to see a normal glitch here or there. Critical ones are still extremely unlikely.

The only real solution is to either enforce lower scores and more negative dice pool modifiers, or completely reinvent how glitches and critical glitches are detremined.

In the last SR game i did GM'ed we saw only 1 Critical Glitch (on a Damage Resistance Test, Body 3 + Armor 6). But a player did an amazing job rolling 3 ten diced tests in a roll and managed to get no hit on none of then.

I like the way Glitchs works on SR... since more specialized you are, less chance of glitching, unless you start trying some impossible things (with a lots of modificators). On this case, the more risky, more chance of glitching.