Just trying to get a feel for the house rules that are out there. My groups game has been running more or less out of the book, we have very vague house rules and nothing really worth noting. How about you? What are those rules?

I've changed the Initiative system completely, and have had a few minor fixes (like not being able to be Incompetent in skills you can't default to). I consider it under 10% although it affect most of the dice rolling actions.

Lars

My game mostly differs from canon/RAW in flavor and background, not so much in the rules.

My GM did one small change in the rules with regards to Magic/Resonance and cyber/bio/gene/nano-ware. She decided that she did not like paying twice for things, so, in Chargen, your 'Wares set your maximum Magix/resonance. Thus, if you have 2 Essence worth of Wares, your hard max Magic is 4, if you have .1 point of ware, your hard max essence is 5. You do not lose any points in Magic/Resonance at Chargen for Wares. Though, you still lose it if you get ware after Chargen, and it drops your Essence down a full point. Thus, if you started the game with a 5.5 essence, and a 5 Magic, you would not lose any magic unless you put in more then .5 more points of 'Ware, not every time you put in a piece of ware.

FYI: RAW is rules as written.

I'm not even aware if we use houserules at all.
Oh, one comes to mind. Complex Forms have a static improvement cost. 1 or 2 karma per rating, can't remember right now.

Well, we have a few:

-We use the Cha x 2 contact rule that was proposed here ages ago. It works well.

-To make the math nice and even in multiples of 10, we allow a hard max for 20 BP rather than 25. And people STILL don't hardmax, but the option's there. I find it helps new folks a bit so they aren't playing with multiples of 5 in their attributes but..again, ive not met one person who hardmaxed anything but Magic sometimes.

-No Availability limit at chargen. This has been since we started playing in SR2, with our first GM saying he didn't use it. I understand why its there, for balance or whathave you, but honestly, it's one of those things that i think is just really up to the GMs. We sort of have an unspoken little thing here and that's don't break the spirit of this houserule. You can get hard to get stuff, just make sure it fits the character. Sure, that Suprathyroid fits a sammie, damn straight he's probably get one ASAP. But no, your Ganger probably doesn't have a Panther Cannon, Heavy Machinegun, cultured bioware, and a Eurocar...unless he stole the Eurocar(hey, i'd allow that one), or was an ex Merc or something. But generally, you can get what you want, just stay within your character's framework. We do use it in-game, however.

Those are the major ones. I personally am considering something that was mentioned in the Social skill thread and having Interrogation a viable specialization to other social skills besides Intimidation. And one day i want to go through a chargen session or two for some one-shots or something that doesn't have an Attribute cap; ie, you aren't limited to half your starting BP. I have a feeling that most folks will still be quite reasonable with them.

.I find the less limits you have on a character at chargen(within reason, i actually find 400 BPs to be really accomodating as is, and without Availability there is plenty of wiggle room), the happier people are...and the LESS twinking and powergaming you come across. I know it sounds odd, but ive noticed this over the years.

No house rules.

A different matrix. Skills costs less than normal. Character advancement is the same as character generation (you missed 'character advancement as a category). The matrix differences are huge, but a mage wouldn't even notice, so I've got it as the 20%.

I actually lowered the availibity at chargen to 8. At the same time I allow plenty of stuff beyond that as long as the character has a good reason for it and it improves the overall character. The only reason I keep that avail at chargen is so players have something, gear wise, to work towards. Not everyones play style though.

For Skilltests we roll attribute + 2x skill so that attributes arent as dominant as in raw.
we use most of the advantages/disadvantages from gurps in adition to the sr qualities (we introduced that right after we got the bbb and decided most qualities only cater to hackers really).
Awakaned chars have to take the sensitive system for 0 bp but magic/resonance starts at 3, that gives players an incentive to play more fluffy magic chars but still allows for burned out mage kind of chars, though those have to use some bioware. It also provides for more well rounded adepts.
Mundanes are allowed 1 item/implant of availability above 12.
summoning spirits takes a complex action per force level, thus requiring mages to plan ahead a little bit if they intend to use mightier spirits on their runs.
Possession cant raise a players physical attributes above the augmented maximum, to encourage using homunculi and stuff like that.
ItNW gives 1 point of hardened armor per force level, not 2 as imo it was too strong with higher force spirits.
Vehicle armor has been lowered across the board.
Hardened armor generates automatic successes for reistance checks, thus allowing to slightly wound a spirit or armored vehicle. (not either 0 damage or dead)
Burning edge is not allowed, simply to disencourage suicidal playstyle (the 1 up mentality ).
at the moment we're trying out the initiative rules proposed by vladski.

Hey, cool! Drop me a line or pm after you guys experiment and let me know what you and your players think of it.

Vlad

I see a lot of changes in chargen. Are those mostly related to availibilty? Or are those mostly adjustments to the costs for skills and what not?

Mine are here:

http://toreadorvampire.co.uk/rpg/shadowrun#HouseRules

Although there are some less "hard and fast" rules in the CampaignStyle tiddler on that page.

Almost all of mine are related to new bits of gear that I have made available, such as a couple more boats (I was a bit upset that Arsenal only provided two go-fast boats and they were both either a bit small or were designed for awkward uses that didn't fit what I wanted them for).

My current chargen rules are:

"Make your character as you want, ignore availability, BP costs, and all, the only criterias are that it should fit your background, and fit in and be roughly balanced with the other characters - a call made by group consensus."

The assumption is that there will be not much if any advancement, skill and stat wise, during the campaign, apart from flavor/fluff or similar exceptions.

Ive seen this done a couple of times. It's no surprise these characters came out making more sense and had no minmaxing as opposed to ones with strict guidelines. Hell, there was even room to grow in the attribute/skill area on top of it.

We flip the dice pool modifiers for cover from the offense to the defense. Otherwise, it's pretty much according to the hymnal.

We allow skill groups to be broken during chargen.

SIN's are an extended threshold for scanners to hit now. Usually scanners only do a single scan, unless there is something going on putting them on a higher alert.

Working on some rules regarding Interrupts, Iniatiative, and delayed actions, as well as suppressive fire.

We use a handful of houserules/optional rules:

- Modified movement rates to be even divisible by 4
- 1 meter = 1 hex = 4 feet (again, to make mapping and moving easier)
- Fleshed out training rules a bit (associating costs and times to finding/hiring trainers)
- Fleshed out addiction tests, threshold and craving tests
- Matrix tests are Logic + Skill capped by program rating
- Skill tests are capped by Skill + 1
- Serbitar's rule for legal/illegal actions, including using Stealth as a threshold to set off an alert
- Add new positive quality that increases skill test cap to Skill x 2

Other than those, I run my games by RAW and everything seems to run pretty smoothly.

we're playing SR3(if you wanna call it that after you've read the following changes),
we've basically thrown out canon companion and man and machine rules and just use the nice tinker-toys from there . .
so no advanced medicine rules, no advanced close-combat and we're more or less doing the cyber-limbs in a way that actually makes em worth playing and we've disregarded inter connectivity issues between cyberware-systems . . and we've more or less thrown out deckers and riggers, save for those occassions somebody wants to try and play them again and ends up disregarding the whole character as soon as they remember how complicated they are in building and playing *g*
our character building rules allow cyber/bio up to and including an availability of 11 and allows beta cyber but no cultured bioware, as far as i can remember . . and as a rule of my own, i am not allowed to build any character with less than 3 or a minimum of 2 whole essence points and not more than 5 points in bio-index, because even with those restrictions i can min/max some pretty scary builds *gg*
i guess we've changed everything to some extent . . aside from magic i believe and we're at about 50% original Shadowrun i guess O.o

Karma based chargen rules (taken from Serbitar) with some minor tweaks... Also more fleshed out addiction rules (lifted from one dumpshock thread) plus a couple extras -downtime, etc.
Combat, social, matrix and magic are almost 95% the same.

about a 20'%mod

Cheers,

Max

I'm gonna start using Frank Trollman's modified char gen and BP advancement. Basically, Skills are cheaper and I like it! Much more simple. And it is easier than going with a Karma to Karma system.

I think you see a lot of modifications placed in Chargen because although people are often happy with the rules themselves, they're not happy with the default flavour, or rather the range of flavours available. So to get a particular feel for their game they adjust the character creation rules to get 'Street' or 'Black Ops' or whatever.

I have very few house rules and they can be found here for anyone that is interested. In short they are: fixed Lifting rules, a clarification of the Sprinting rules which I think was a dev oversight anyway and (the big one) minimum Edge to begin with and fixed progression based on karma levels. This works exceedingly well if you want the same effect in your game that I do and I recommend it.

That's the only stuff that I can remember ever house ruling.

-K.

I see the bp build limits as a good jumping off point for setting power levels in a game. It's still up to a GM to massage those statistics till they fit in the world and stomp happily and heartily on min/maxing (if it makes boring characters, the gun guy should be good at shooting guns though)

Most of our group was made with 10 availability but I started late and didn't realize the cap was lowered so used 12. We also have a hacker archetype which has 12 availability gear. Honestly though for the power level of our campaign 12 is right, I think our GM's decision to lower it was based more on unfamiliarity with the system then anything else (this is our first 4th edition campaign).

That's it so far but I'd like to see us use the following.

Tailored Pheromones would add half their rating in non-face to face encounters for people you've met once before in person. In other words people remember your pheromones subconsciencly and while the affect wouldn't be as pronounced as it would be in person the memory would have some affect on their reactions to you. Kinesics would also have a similar affect but I figure voice pitch alone would carry over the phone even if the other subtleties wouldn't, thus applying half the dice pool bonus, rather or not you've met in person.

...basically the following:

...Blakkie's Contact rule (2 x Cha in bonus Contact BPs) - almost a standard rule by now.
...Logic + skill capped by programme rating for Matrix actions.
...Edge treated like the old Karma Pool: Character starts with 1 point (2 for humans) and receives additional points based on total good Karma awarded on a progressive threshold (e.g. first +1 at 10, next +1 at 30, etc.) up to the normal cap for race.

Also evaluating:

...Adepts being allowed to gain PP's through initiation only

PP is in lieu of learning a Metamagic technique
Cap for maximum initiate grade is still the character's MA (adjusted for bio/cyber)
Adjusted MA still limits power ratings/effects

.

We're probably going to implement that contact rule, probably retroactively. I'm considering using the alternative edge rules as well, I miss my progressive karma pool.

SHP

I'm primarily running SR3R (and testing a few things on top of that). Things seem to be working very well, well enough that another GM has asked to use the ruleset (and they're all nicely codified so they're easy to pass on).

It depends on what the group wants.

1) Raw SR...we keep it the same and use SR canon.

2) Custom Campaign

Here's where I reacted to the "hack-n-slash" mentality. I became really, really sick of players maxing out their characters. It was "stat this" and "stat that" ("roll playing") versue actually roleplaying.

So, I severely restricted weapons and armor. I'm talking total gun bans...everything the Brady Campaign and .gov wants! That means no machine guns, no so-called "assault weapons" and serious limitations on handguns. Ammunition is very difficult to find and is very expensive (think "War on Ammo").

On a side note, melee weapons and non-ballistic armor are NOT restricted.

Does this mean there are no guns? Of course not! They're just really, really illegal. Armor...good luck! Ammo...good luck. The result is quite fun, actually. Using the "D&D metaphor": "guns" become "magic items". Their acquisition, maintenance, and use become special. Characters are forced to become careful and use their weapons judiciously. Whole side plots pop-up when a gun is used...they may decide to dump the gun!

3) Custom Campaign: SR History

I also run more "historical" SR campaigns. This is fun because stuff has yet to be released. What was it like when cybereyes were NEW? Bioware still has yet to be invented. What if fireball had yet to be discovered? Mages are still exploring the possibilities. Even many critters are new. This sort of campaign works great for new players since they can focus on the basics and not have to worry about all the details of cyberware, magic, and the Matrix.

4) Alternatives

Buffy the Vampire Shadowrunner --> great fun
Ghoul: The Dining --> Icky, but interesting
Hunter: The Reckoning --> Similar to White Wolf's game, but using SR rules in the World of Darkness
I Dream of Dragons --> Play a dragon in SR


5) Totally custom ballistics

I noticed a serious disparity between power levels in firearms. I got out my reloading and ballistics manuals and started correlating SR stats and real ballistics. Now, I did use velocity, ballistic coefficients, and foot pounds of energy delivered at range, so terminal ballistics are not really accounted for (which is a good thing to keep it useful). The result is a much larger disparity between handguns and long guns. By toning down armor in SR, this makes for some interesting combats (headshots with rifles are devastating). The combat rules don't change, just the gun stats (damage codes, ranges, etc). It accounts for different bullet types also.

I'm not a big fan of the Matrix fixes
X + Y (capped by Z)
using Logic, Skill, and Program

I want logic worked into programs somehow, but any of these fixes don't take into account technomancers. Logic + Skill (capped by program) will I ever get the 12 hits necessary to match my threaded program? X + Program (capped by Y) why am I rolling that many dice when I can only get at most Y hits (which could potentially be quite lower than my average with the threaded program).

X + Y + Z means hackers will have even larger dice pools to throw at pretty stationary target numbers. So the target numbers would all need to be changed. (Not to mention Agents still have their pilot rating for Logic.. so agents roll 3 x Rating dice )

I haven't seen anyway yet to effectively get rid of script kiddies and allow technomancers their matrix power. So can't wait for Unwired...

Neat, and actually very cyberpunk. Johnny Mnemonic, I think, had gone through all of this crazy hassle to refurbish a shotgun and machine his own ammo, partly because hardly anyone had guns. Neural paralysis fields sure, monofilament whips you bet, but not guns.

I am using FrankTrollman's rules right now for the matrix and for character generation.

When I am comfortable with his system I plan on changing it to fit the style of game play that I am looking for.