While trawling through the boards a thought popped into my head, on which i'd like your input.


Considering the rampant use of houserules and alternative systems, how good is SR4 really? I preferred the SR4 rules to SR3 up until now, but when I actually sat down and thought about why, I only came up with 'the world feels alot fresher'. This isn't even a rules issue, this is a settings issue.

Look at what we've come to. There's dozens of ways to rework the Matrix (and you and I both know that this is neccesary). I don't know anyone that doesn't houserule combat to some degree (armor, IPs) and the magic system causes more than a few gripes in the community.

Don't read me wrong here, SR4 setting-wise is still excellent, but when I look at the pile of handouts of rules rewrites i have laying about for my players I start wondering if i'm still playing SR4 or some sort of community-developed (Ty, Dumpshock!) mutant offspring. There's hardly any need for them to actually buy the rulebooks, as 70% of their contents are obsolete. The fact that most of my players do own them says something about the quality of the fluff really.



So, what are your thoughts on this? How much do you houserule? Does it still feel like you're playing SR4? Who here plays 'core'? Was the ball dropped, and dropped hard, on the rules design? What parts are actually good?

The amount of houserules on dumpshock, IMO, are not conducive of what goes on in every game played.

For example, in my game, I think I use a total of 3 houserules:

1) skill + 1 caps successes
2) logic + skill, capped by program rating
3) adjusted movement rates to be divisible by 4 IPs

Everything else my group uses is RAW. Some may make a case that different interpretations of RAW are houserules as well, but I do not believe that is the case.

I would like to think most groups only use a "handful" of houserules in practice...but I could be mistaken.

So for our group, yes, it feels like SR4. I think the published books are solid and could be successfully played with just "core". Honestly, I have never played any RPG without tweaking a handful of things...

Ha, I thought Deek's houserule #3 was canon! Every game I've been in uses Deek's house rule #2 for matrix tests and I'm hoping future games switch to Frank's new matrix rules. If I ran a game, I would use Frank's matrix rules (minus naked brainhacking) and remove Long Shot rules and trodes, but other than that everything else in SR4 seems great...but maybe there are other houserules I've been using that I didn't know were houserules...

...and the dumpshock community here is quite anal about everything SR.

I believe SR4 has been welcomed by most except for a few who clearly stated they didn't like it over SR3. That being said, a "welcome" in this Forum comes with heavy modding, tweaking and houseruling, just to adapt it better to our very precious takes on the game.

Bah, it might even be an effect of the "Web 2.0" society. Power to the user. Nowadays everything is customizable chummer.

Just my two

Cheers,

Max

One of the core achievments of SR4 is that it uses a consistent game mechanic for most of the system and the probabilities are open and available for you the consumer. This means that people can, with a much smaller expenditure of effort, understand why the rules work a particular way and what would happen were you to change them.

So house ruling in an effective way is easier than ever before. And that's a good thing. Furthermore, it is demonstrable fact that when the SR4 BBB came out it was a rush job. The original ammunition chart was demonstrably mathematically flawed. Noone can come up with a really good reason as to why a skill group costs as much as an Attribute. The cyberlimbs are dreadful. The Disease rules and Technomancer Burnout rules don't... exist.

Well the secondary material is not a rush job. Quite the opposite really. While I was involved there were long hiatuses with no work being done at all while the editors fought with people in Deutschland or whatever. I'm no longer a Shadowrun author, and that particular issue has been resolved, but the pace hasn't been blistering by any means.

Some of that genuinely does translate into quality. The Disease Rules (when they finally arrived in Augmentation) are pretty good. The Cyberlimb options in Augmentation don't fix (or change) the crap rules in the BBB, but they do provide decent high end limb modifications that people like. Cyberlimb house rules used to be everywhere all the time. Now I don't know anyone who bothers.

But some of that translates into player frustration. I saw completed sections of Arsenal while I was writing for Augmentation. That's now over a year in the past. I honestly don't know what happened to that project. And so where the supplemental rules aren't being printed, people are writing their own. And with the accessability of the SR4 mechanics - they can do that.

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Now I'm actually openly dubious that the design constraints that Unwired is operating under can fix the problems that the Matrix system has. It's one of (though by no means the most important) reason that I don't write for Catalyst anymore. I suspect that people will continue to make Matrix houserules for some time after Unwired comes out.

But that's not new. I don't know anyone who didn't houserule the crap out of the Matrix in SR3, SR2, or SR1. Most people actually hand waved the whole system. They did it before and after Virtual Realities, they did it before and after the Matrix books for SR2 and SR3. And they'll do it before and after Unwired. The Matrix is just really contentious and people house rule it a lot.

But one thing that I think is encouraging is that in SR4 most people trot out house rules which assume that the Matrix Specialist is a player character who is running with the team. And not, for example, an NPC who hires out to the party to accomplish things off camera.

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Personally, I tinker with rules constantly. I think "how could this be done better" -and I usually think of answers. I have lots of house rules which I think make the game work better. But I don't think that in most cases the failure to implement these house rules involves "failure." A lot of the rules that I can think of a way to do slightly or substantially better (purchasing Contacts or Recoil, for example) aren't game breaking in any way in the manner they are actually printed. I personally find the fact that recoil is an irrelevent concern in a hold-out pistol to be dumb, but the game functions just fine with that being the case.

-Frank

Keep one thing in mind when discussing anything on the internet, and in this case, discussing Shadowrun on the internet.

At any given time, you are dealing with a small part, of a small part, of a small part of the whole. What you see here on DSF is a what a niche group of a niche group of a niche group thinks. And as you have seen, we rarely agree on any of it.

I use the rules exactly as written with several clarifications of buzz words.

..we only use a few houserules so far:

...Blakkie's 2 x Con for contact points - this seems to have been widely accepted & is even included in a couple of the chargen spreadsheets/programmes

...The Logic + Skill capped by Programme rating rule for matrix. This has been working very well so far.

...Edge treated like Karma pool. Basically everybody starts with a rating of 1 (2 in the case of humans) and the attribute cannot be bought up at chargen. Instead there is a progression it increases by based on karma earned. the Lucky Quality only increases the cap.

Our current GM was considering possible ways to streamline combat, but the more we have been playing, the quicker combats have been moving so this may become moot.

The thing is, most of us are Shadowrun fanatics and we choose to spend our time coming here to talk about Shadowrun. You can only discuss the rules as written so much among an extremely diverse group of people before you inevitably delve into the things that individuals do to add flavor to their own games.

Add to that the fact that some of us have varying degrees of expertise in numerous fields covered in the game itself, like for example computers, hand to hand combat, guns, and even medicine. Each of these factors is important to that person, and usually this results in that aspect sprouting house rules in that person's game. That doesn't mean we all use those particular rules, but we are definitely willing and able to pick them apart and twist them into a million different, mostly unrecognizable pieces.

Of course, a lot of us just like to hash out rules just for the hell of it, or to take an idea to the extreme.

...there are times I set up what are more guidelines than hard & fast rules.

For example, in the last run of RiS. Since it took place in Europe, and, in involved countries where there was strong racial bias, I pointed this out for players to consider during chargen. A Troll sneaking around the Musikverein in Vienna is likely going to attract unwanted attention. I also mentioned that since the campaign was Euro-Centric, characters would more likely be from the region rather than say North America or Japan. This didn't prohibit a character from coming from another part of the world if they had a good reason in the character's backstory, though I did mention it would have an impact on the accessibility to and usefulness of contacts if they were half way around the world.

I think some of us like to bash heads too

A couple of thoughts:

- From a gameplay perspective the matrix rules in SR4 work better than those in SR3. You don't have Decker characters monopolizing an entire game session. This said the common house rule of logic + skill capped by program is a good one to maintain internal consistency with their own rules and they really could have used some good examples. Hell, I would happily pay for a book that was full of nothing but examples of different systems (Matrix and others) in action.

- The rules for skill tests are generally much better in SR4 over SR3. SR4 Manages to achieve relative simplicity by only adjusting two factors (dicepool and threshold) while maintaining a lot of power.

- I was going to suggest that Wizards of the Coast would have more people to throw at D&D but if you compare both books there are actually more writers for SR4 than D&D 3rd edition.

- Other games still have there problems. I have a friend who was following the Star Wars Saga forums for a while and he has pointed out that one of their favored past times was moaning about the game and of course D&D had a 3.5.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am still a novice with all SR game systems, SR4 included.

We use very few set-in-stone houserules. Beside the thing about easier math for calculating propability, no one really gives a damn if he has one die more or less. TNs were ugly in that errors changed chances... much or not at all, depending on base TN. Debating with the GM is mostly a thing of the past. Whoever runs the show on a given day calls the shots.

The matrix will be houseruled (skill+attribute, needed as the PCs are not starving for money), yet using agent smith or an IC storm would be punished outgame.

I think the SR4 core rule are very strong. They do have a few weaknesses, but for the most part the game plays very well as written. The mechanics are easy to understand.

One part of the core book I like a lot is the magic section. After taking the time to learn SR3's magic system, I really appreciated being able to understand and really comprehend SR4's magic system with 1.5 read throughs. (compared to much confusion and continued crossreferenceing in SR3).
Sure the Matrix rules are the weak point of SR4 (honestly they remind me of SR3's magic system with regards to their complexity, probably 'cause I never learned SR3's matrix rules), but I think that is just because the rest of the rules are so straight forward.

On the subject of house rules: if I ran a game I wouldn't plan on useing any. That doesn't mean I wouldn't, but I think that the RAW is an excelent starting point. Even if the Matrix rules are Arcane and Obtuse they still work. As far as I can tell they aren't broken, they just aren't up to the high standards set by other portions of the Core Rules.

Anothere section of the BBB that I thought was done very well was the skills chapter. Pretty much everything you could want to know about skills is in there. Of course there are still some things to find fault with, like the fact that I don't know how to use Diving or Paracheuting, but since those skills are used infrequently at best it really doesn't detract from the usefullness of the section. Heck I should probably say that I use the page that describes what the ratings of skills translate into in real world (or game world) examples more than probably any other resource during character creation. To whomever was responsible for that page: You Rock! Players need to be able to tell what the abstraction of the numbers is supposed to represent. A similar chart for attributes would be cool, but I guess you can't have everything.

Wow, that got quite lengthy. I suppose I should reiterate my primary message: I find SR4 to be a very strong system that isn't broken in any area as far as I know.

Well, I'm one of those guys that don't liked that much the 4 edition rules. In fact, I disliked it so much that I simply scrapped it altogether and, instead, I'm using another, totally different, rpg system in the 4th edition storyline and setting.

Things we houseruled:
- Melee combat (Ported over the martial arts techniques house rules from SR3)

Things we may end up house ruling:
- Assault rifle damage compared to pistols

Well, current rules i like:

Chax2 Contact Points(works really nicely)

We don't use Availability. Never have, even since the SR2 days, and never once could a GM not challenge us. You pay the nuyen, you can get the item. And we only ever end up with an item or two above the limit anyhow.

I also make exceptions. If someone asks if if they want to play a character who'se a rich, spoiled college kid(well, early 20s or whatnot) that's physically and mentally very able(studying physics, has access to rich ass parents gym, whatnot) but doesn't have much in the way of skills and is really wet behind the ears in that case, i'd allow them to spend more than 200 Attributes, if they wanted to, say, begin with a 4 in everything. I'd work out how their skills might be more limited, but that example is something i don't have a problem with. IMO, the important thing is that everyone is having fun, and im not going to let a rule get in the way of it. If someone wanted to play a really, really Charasmatic Face troll, and they wanted a natural 6, i'd work out a way to get them there(have them take Exc. Attribute and maybe knock one off their Body and/or Strength). It's about compromise.

There's a limit, of course, i wouldn't let every troll at the table start with 1 less Body and Strength for a 6 Charisma, but i make exceptions for something someone is really into.

Also thinking about changing the Armor rule so Strength affects it, to perhaps not have it such a dumpstat.

I remember sitting in the chair at my local game store, reading this cool-looking book about a game called Shadowrun while waiting for the next chump I would have to slaughter in the Magic tournament. Two things really drew me to the game (Shadowrun, not Magic). First, the setting was extremely rich, and would make it easier to come up with stuff on the fly. Second, the skill+attribute system was brilliant. I was staggered. I had been griping about how in D&D, you basically had no choice but to buy max ranks in a small number of skills, and keep increasing those same skills as you went up in level, so even though you could eventually walk on clouds, you couldn't escape from a pair of handcuffs. In Shadowrun, the way the progression worked meant that you wouldn't fall prey to the SOTA wolves by not maxing out your pistols skill - in fact, the system seemed to encourage diversification. What a concept!

And then, of course, I noticed some inconsistencies in the rules, and in searching for answers I found Dumpshock, and it all went downhill from there.

But seriously, Shadowrun is a house-rule heavy game, and that's fine. There's still a sort of creamy center that works well, and we get along well enough.

i think the rules overall work brilliantly. I've only ever played SR4, and while the matrix rules appear to have been written by monkeys, the rest of it is great. The magic system in particular is the best magic system I've seen in an RPG ever, and the core mechanic of dice rolling is pretty good.

The rest of the system has a few sharp edges, but they are pretty good.