one of my group started talking to me about how in theory a person with low stats could stomp a person with really high stats based on skill alone. so i ruled it that every two points of an attribute gave you one die to the skill(half the attribute) similar to sr4. keep defaulting the same.

im sure the other sr3 players have done something like this. how did you handle it?

and if you didnt what do you think?

its definately simple enough.

I like the change they made in SR4, but I'm not sure I would apply it to SR3. In SR3, skills cost extra once you go over the linked Attribute. So someone with a low Attribute and high skill represents someone who has been incredibly diligent in pursuing that skill. I wouldn't pile an additional penalty on them. Also, high physical stats do have an impact in SR3 already - they are used for the Combat Pool (for Quickness), for determining the power of an attack (Strength), or for resisting an attack (Body). So someone with low physical stats and high skill could, conceivably, beat up a buff but unskilled opponent, but would be at a distinct disadvantage against someone with high stats, and similar skill.

In short, I think SR3 is fine as it is, mostly.

The one thing I would change is unarmed combat as an opposed test, where the defender can inflict damage on the attacker. That is what led to things like a guy with low skill and wired reflexes: 3 getting beat up faster. I would consider making unarmed defense purely defensive, possibly with the option to expend your next available action to make it a full counterattack.

we have a house rule that a skill rating only cost 1 point of karma each and a base skill cap of 18. in our group its easy for anyone to get a high skill if they focus on it which was another reason for this.
despite this we have only had one player ever to get a skill above 10.
the whole im faster than you so i get my ass kicked faster was another reason. also im trying to get my players to rely less on rolling all there combat pool on their turn for attack.

i see where you are coming from though.

We started noticing that problem in 2e, we gave the non wired guy the multiple attacker penalty for each time he didn't technically have an action. It worked ok but your wired guy could still get owned in the first round with everyone going at the beginning in 3e.

That was something I actually liked - the (usually old crutchety) grandmaster standing there, and turning every attack of the wired no-skill samurai into an object lesson.

As has been said, in MOST cases low-attribute high-skill characters are already penalized. In ranged combat, quickness impacts reaction, initiative and combat pool. For melee characters, strength impacts damage (although weapons damage will always be a distance second to weapons skill, but I think this is desirable, to allow for the ancient martial arts master character), intelligence links to initiative and gives you a slew more intelligence-linked skills, etc. The only areas where attributes and skills aren't really balanced against each other are most of those skills which seem only tangentially related to their given attribute (stealth, medical tech, etc.) and charisma-linked skills.

Skills get hellishly expansive with low attributes.
As soon as the skill is higher than the attribute, the skill costs 2 points per rating point . .

The emphasis on skill over attributes is deliberate, and usually reasonable. Although the nature of real-world training muddies the waters a bit, what significant real-world skill would you point to where raw physical/mental abilities with no meaningful experience can expect to stand on an equal footing with any meaningful amount of experience?

Extreme cases like characters with stats of 1 are taken care of by the extreme karma cost involved in acquiring nontrivial skill without raising that stat.

~J

This right here. In SR4, unless you houserule a skill+1 or skillx2 hit cap, the young, nooby, brash sammy with Agility 8 and unarmed 1 has an equal chance against their old, slightly feeling their age but amazingly skilled Unarmed 7/Agility 2 master. In SR3? No such luck-even with a lower Quickness, it was likely Mr. Grandmaster Oldood had a high Intelligence and Willpower, giving them a sweet Combat Pool, the high-ass skill, and he'd hand the unskilled but fast sam's ass to him almost every time, since you could only add the dice from the Combat Pool up to equal as what you had in the skill.

(at the same time I'm not a big fan of the skill hit caps, because I DO like when low skills can be quite viable-I worry about things like fixit skills being basically unusable under a 3-4 rating.)