You only need d6s.

Sad but true eh?
At least for SR4 ^^

love it

Very funny... and now I've got another web comic I'll need to find the time to read.

Though since our group doesn't go in for the whole min-maxing/hyper specialization routine we so far haven't needed more than 8-12 dice per roll (most of the time anyways).

8 to 12 dice?
That's basically a 4 skill and a 4 attribute, slightly above the norm/standard O.o
or do you mean 8 to 12 dice AFTER a whole lot of negative modifiers? o.O
Also, reading that comic will take time.
It's been there for quite some time, several years in fact.
And multiple updates per week also.

first time shadowrun have been mentioned tho, iirc.

GnahGnahGnah
15 ( Maximum 20) Dice for Beginners is all thats needed
Believe Me in all of my Newbie Runs and Introductionary Games the Players didn't need more than a Dozen Dice
Later when they get more Experience and finetune their Chars they might need 15 or Max 20 Dice ,but not for Starters

with a Dozen Dances
Medicineman

In my most recent campaign (now sadly defunct) my character was throwing 14 dice for heavy pistol attacks right out of chargen: AGI 6 (natural 4 + muscle toner 2) + Pistols 4 (Heavy Pistols) + smartlink. I didn't (and still don't) consider him particularly min/maxed. He had a fairly broad skill set.

Yep. The one set of characters I have playing right now are 'conversions' of SR3 characters using the general 2/3 rule so there are a lot of 4 skill + 4 attribute rolls running about.

I anticipate that as time goes by the dice pools will steadily increase, but not having any other ongoing 4E games to illustrate how large dice pools could be, we've not been particularly feeling any sort of lack of dice so far. I am careful as a GM to avoid sending opponents against them that are significantly more optimized than they are (unless there is a story reason) and it is a generally street level game, both of which helps as well.



Thanks for the heads up... I'll save reading it for home then, when I can more likely afford getting sucked into a large comic archive.

It's a fun strip. I've been following it for years now. I read all the responses before looking at the link. I was worried I'd be like you trying to catch up on another strip. When I saw what it was, I was VERy glad to see that I've already got the RSS feed tagged at home.



At my table 8-12 is pretty normal also. For those uber skills characters have maybe 14-15 base dice pools.

Yeah, 8-12 is pretty normal. Most characters have one skill that they roll more than that for, if they're ultra specialized. My mage rolls around 10 dice for most of his castings (5 Magic, 5 Skill, ditto for summonings, which are by far the majority of my dice rolls). If I'm throwing combat spells, I hit 16 (Specialized, Lion Totem, Combat Spell Focus).

My Missions Street Sam is a bit more twinked, and even then he's only rolling above 12 for a couple combat skills (I think I hit 16 or 17 for Pistols). And he's a beefy ork with a lot of armor, so he rolls 24 damage soak dice.

But for the majority of my dice rolls? 8-12, definately. Initiative is only like 10, Perception is about 10, if I get bonus dice from Cyber/Goggle augmentations. Hell, outside a few key skills, I think I'm around 8 or less for a lot of skills.

(As for the comic, it's actually over 10 years old now, has well over 1000 strips, and at the moment generally updates 5 times a week, barring problems).

Bull

What I don't understand is people talking about rolling a big handful of dice like it's a bad thing. That's one of my favorite parts of the game--grabbing a big handful of dice and watching them fly!

Jason H.

You do not level up in Shadowrun!

You can if you play Miracle Shooter!

For anyone who's only played D&D and Computer RPGs, "Level Up" is short-hand for "increases in power". I've used that term myself when explaining the game to non-hardcore gamers.

Bull

Shadowrun isn't nearly as bad as Hero System can be.

In Hero System, you just as many (Or more) dice as Shadowrun for combat, and you have to add them all together to get the total.

It's offset a bit the fact that most other rolls are just 3d6, but adding together 17d6 for a Supers Campaign isn't quite as easy as scanning for ones and hits.

One of my pet peeves with the SR4 System. One of quite a few actually.
People complained about the SR3 System needing bucket loads of dice..
New system to make it aall better . . and it uses MORE dice actually . . .

It can be messy and time consuming if there are too many dice that you have to try to track down and go over. One of my favorite dice systems is AEG's Roll & Keep. Under that system, you never roll more than 10, and they figure that 10 is usually about as large as one good handful can handle.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer the SR4 mechanics over the SR* TN system. Just that too many dice can get unwieldy.



I am guessing that you, like me, GM more than you play. This technique is great to screw with players.

You mean just randomly rolling stuff? Yeah, I like it, and it gives my hands something to do.

Jason H.

Honestly? While I roll more dice on average (But not a lot, really), I tended to cap out a lot higher in SR2-3. With combat/magic pool to add in, and those pools sometimes getting quite large? I had a couple characters that could (and would) alpha strike, so to speak, with 20+ dice.

Dice rollings never been an issue for me. Maybe I'm just weird.

Bull

Yeah. Hero System could get pretty crazy. I had an opportunity at one point to roll 60d6 at one point after suppressing a PC's flight power when they were in middle of a high speed getaway attempt. The character lived through it, but barely.

Our HERO System game was interesting. The GM liked to cherry pick things from settings he liked, and incorporate them into the game. One of his influences was Shadowrun, so he incorporated Trolls into the game with a few modifications to keep things inline with the games powerlevel, like Fast Healing, an increased chance of having a secondary magic ability, and the ability to pose as a human. The only reason said GM added Trolls in was because he couldn't get his local group (I play by Skype, since I'm on the other coast) into a SR Game, since the HERO one was already in progress.

As silly as it sounds, It was actually pretty fun. They got a few awesome adventures, and I ended up making a Troll Detective who posed as a 98 pound weakling but still did 17d6 Damage per punch. I've also learned that "SURPRISE TROLL" was a very useful interrogation tactic. (Said Troll would also form the character basis of a cool, distinctly Non-shapeshifting, canon friendly PhysAd if I ever end up playing one, but I digress.)

However... HERO did turn out to be fairly sluggish. Adding up 17d6 (Which was the party average, by the way) slowed down combat. Especially when one went wild. Not to mention creating a Troll PC according to his heavily modified specifications was complicated.

Shadowrun is mechanically similar (point based build system, d6 Rolls), yet far easier to play. You can skim the dice to see if you succeeded or not. It's much easier to create a character without endlessly micromanaging each of your individual abilities.

How?
Combat Pool is incredibly hard to get high.
Highest i have managed in Character creation was 12 i think.
Also, you roll only SKILL with maybe some Pool-Dice.
Which is in Character generation a Maximum of 8 dice + dice from magic/control/hacking pool.
Combat Pool is a seperate roll and can only be used if you had at least one success with the aforementioned simple skill roll.
And then Combat-Pool is used by your skill level. So even if you have a combat pool of 12, if you have a skill of 4, it does not matter if you rolled 8 dice in the original skill roll due to tricks.
You are only going to roll another 4 dice . . so generally, the number of dice per single throw tends to be pretty low.
Highest i can tink of would be an adept who goes all out on one single skill. Skill and magic up to 6, improved skill up to 6 makes 12 dice for the initial skill roll.
And if it's a combat skill(pretty likely) he can roll 6 combat pool dice more in a second roll, if he managed to get one or more successes with his initial 12 dice . .

Ok, I was speaking "past" character gen for the 20+. But by 100 Karma, I could get there. The two characters I mentioned above that I'm playing in 4e? 100 Karma, or close to it. And Rush is still tossing the same max dice for combat he started with, and Sigma has only added in 2 more dice from a focus he beat up another mage for.

Meanwhile, my old Street Sam Mac under 2nd ed, started off being able to toss around 18 dice at chargen, and only got worse. Again, that was only when alpha striking, so to speak, and only once a round. But he quickly got even nastier. Plus he usually had ridiculously low TN's, so those dice also went a lot further.

Lets not talk about how many dice Bull could throw on a regular basis, after 7 years and 700 Karma.

Like I said, you definitely use more dice on average under 4e. And you can throw some ridiculously huge numbers of dice... But I'm just pointing out that 2nd and 3rd weren't exactly "dice-light".

And having a static TN makes throwing handfuls of dice even easier. Especially if you do some kind of custom die for the game.

Bull

How?
Maybe You remember Cochise and his One Trick Pony ,a SR3 Adept Melee Dwarf that had(as a Starting Char) 30+ Dice without his Combat Pool !!

with a One-Trick-Dance
Medicineman

Yep, you'll need about that many dice, but fortunately, one can buy in sets from places like Chessex. A few years back, at one ICON, I put together a couple of sets, two of each color/pips, so I use those as my SR dice. If I lose one or two, I can easilly replace it by either ordering through the Chessex main site or waiting for the next ICON.

I could honestly see 30 dice if you kept all your dice pools seperate (4ed) I know players who are that AR/OCD

We use a mixed system. For out of combat stuff we usually roll dice by hand; we use that when rolls are rare.

In combat we use a dice roller. Its useful to me as a GM where I can add penalties to the dice roll of my players without telling them that they are getting penalties (for example when rolling to spot a infiltrator in a chameleon suit).

We started using dice for everything, but found it bogs down combat, especially when players throw dice in batches of 3 or 4.