Hey everyone. Silly new GM question for you all.

When calculating damages for melee combat or for spell drain where you take an attribute value and divide by 2 do you round up or down? I can't seem to find the rule in the core book.

Personally, I round down. I don't know if you're supposed to or not, but that's what I do. It might tell you to in the beginning 60 pages of the rules, but I don't remember exactly.

Whatever you choose though, be consistant.

and

We always round according to standard mathmatical rules. Any fraction lower than .5 is rounded down, and any fraction .5 or higher is rounded up.

Which way you round is always stated in the books. As a general rule, however, you round in whichever way is most beneficial.

There are two instances I can think of where rounding is done in the non-beneficial way(and I've considered changing it, since all other rounds are done to the beneficial route, except for these.)

1-Attribute augmented maxes. These seem to be attribute x 1.5, round down.

2-Skill maxes(for determining stuff that augments skills.) These are also rounded down.

I guess I see why they did it, but...still, all others are beneficial, so I don't see why these should be, too. (Though, oddly enough, Strength is still round up when it comes to determining damage, and Body/Will are still rounded up when it comes to determining damage boxes on the physical/stun tracks.)

Augmented maximums actually aren't rounded at all. With a natural Strength of 7, your augmented maximum Strength is 10.5. Thus, you can't raise your Strength to 11, because that would exceed your maximum.

Strange. My copy of the BBB is quite specific on this subject ...

Huh, my brain must have skipped that little bit. I still like my explanation better, as it's more consistent. Everything else rounds favorably. Why not make it so the one exception simply doesn't round at all, since the end result is the same aside from letting you use an excellent rule of thumb.

As was stated earlier in the thread, Augmented Skill rating maximums also round unfavorably (that being down rather than up) for the PC.

I feel changing with would be ok as only in very few cirecanstance is it an issue even more so with skills. if you have a skill of 7 why not get one extra dice with your adept power really not that broken as thous 11 skill dice would cost a good amount in karma or BP I dont have my books on hand for the full maths but its a hefty chunk.

Actually, that's same situation as augmented attribute maximums; round down and not rounding have the same effect.

And your point is?

I feel that it is a good thing to remove fractions from a character's stats whenever possible (Essence being a obvious exception), as it tends to avoid confusion.

The rule with D&D was always "Round to the determent of the player". In SR we always round in the players benefit and I think it has a subconscious effect of improving the players outlook at the game. I keep things tricky and the situations tense, but they feel like the system itself is on their side. Rather than a mathematical death trap run by the evil GM. That's someone elses game.

Under SR3 I thought the general rule was also "round to the determent of the player" with the exception of Spell Drain. I have applied the same rule to SR4.

So, in your games, people with a Strength of 1 have a base damage of '0' in melee?

I don't have a copy of the BBB with me to check but I'm fairly certain the SR4 guidelines are the opposite unless specifically stated.