Right, so here are some quotes from a different that I'm making into a new one. In short, I'm musing about a home game with more limits at chargen and more challenges that include the whole team to encourage making more generalist characters. Availability is high so augmentations are acquired through alot of cash, luck, and maybe some story situations. This could be a very fun sidegame to run during the semester, while all of our regulars are not consistently available.

I would like the characters to not be so separated in their abilities. Face is the only one that gets to talk because he's the only one that can. Everyone but Sam might as well skip their combat turns because hes the only one that can overcome the guard's reaction score that you made high to challenge Sam in the first place. I already play a game with classes like rogue and barbarian and I want to take it to the other extreme where an extra couple dice is enough for your character to be the one who's good at X while everyone else can still try for some sort of advantage to the group.

I also want advantages like smartgun systems and warez like muscle replacement to be a big deal rather than an extra few rolls on top of your pile

CHALLENGE

the rolling system may cripple my idea entirely. The meta is the way it is because being the 'very best' fluff-wise and having those 16 dice means you can still fail often even if it's only moderately difficult. You know how it is, you can tell yourself '5 hits on average' but that doesn't mean alot in the face actually rolling.

Players constantly failing is no fun. I was thinking about allowing more opportunities to buy hits and creating a houserule that lets you roll for more hits after buying but with a -3 to your pool for every hit you buy. So for example if I'm rolling to leap to a rooftop and I have 9 dice, I could buy 2 hits and still roll 3 adding additional hits to the total.
Or I could change how edge works and allow them to reroll more often than what is usually allowed. I like this idea because it still has the random aspect rather than a consistent baseline of successes, but I'm not sure how to rule it exactly.



Thoughts? Ideas? I am open to more houserule ideas, I am even open to running a different edition of the game if it cooperates better with my goal, I have many 2ed books in the basement that my older brothers left behind.

I was thinking about focusing more on skill groups. I think it is something that existed in SR2, but I have never read those rules.

The core idea:

• Every skill is linked to a group
• The dice pool is Attribute + Group + Skill + modifiers
• Groups and skills are limited to 3

This should lead towards more generalist characters in two ways. First, someone who wants to really specialize in one domain will necessarily have some proficiency in all areas of that domain. No more Automatics master who can't shoot a pistol. Second, as getting very high dice pools becomes more expensive, dabbling into several domains by cherry picking individual skills only should become a more viable option.

It requires some heavy reworking of the skills to work, though.

The way I see it, there are two extremely distinct advantages of running a more generalist game.

1. If everyone/thing overlaps well enough there shouldn't be too big of a portion of any one night where a majority of the players are sitting around waiting on one person to accomplish something (I'M LOOKING AT YOU MATRIX!!!) It wouldn't take a heck of a lot of investment for someone to go along with the hacker to specifically provide support for example.

Another example is the players divvying up social responsibilities based on their character's personality. All having an adequate amount of dice for social interactions and a good chunk for what their "social role" is. For instance the polite Adept handles formalities with etiquette, the mercenary street sam deals with negotiation, the former UCAS rigger deals with Leadership, and the brutish orc handles intimidation. This lets the characters share the spotlight more adequately (of course it's all on the assumption that everyone in the group is not playing the "typical" antisocial mirrored shades Gen-X archetype shadowrunner).

2. The "mooks" in the book work well enough as written. They are capable of being a nonlethal threat in numbers roughly equal to the runners themselves. I find this makes combat more tense for everyone involved while simultaneously being less prepwork for the GM.

I honestly don't think you'll need too many house rules at all. If you just default to a grittier game with an emphasis on more realistic opposition you should do just fine. You make a note that 16 dice doesn't stand up to 5 average successes during the course of game play, but for every roll that's failed, one should statistically have a brilliant success. I think it should even out. I even think you'll find that Shadowrun Missions and most other prefab campaigns are a bit more satisfying for everyone involved.

Except for the Dawn of the Artifacts series. You would probably have to significantly lower the power level of some of those Prime Runners a bit. Some of them are a little ridiculous compared to 400bp characters no matter what the creation rules are.

That is a pretty decent idea actually, and I never thought of it that way. It certainly gets away with a few character inconsistencies that tend to crop up.

Put stock to shoulder, aim, pull trigger. How the hell can you do that with an assault rifle at 400 meters with brilliant success but suck so much at it with a shot gun at 10 meters?

What do you do about skills that aren't in groups (Heavy Weapons or Pilot for instance)? Create groups for them, perhaps something like spacial maneuvers for the Pilot groups? Take them to 6 instead of 3 without a group? Most of them are pretty specific and narrow so I don't imagine there would be too much of an issue with just taking them to 6.

At first glance I really like this idea. I'll have to pick it apart a bit more, but solid idea for a generalist game.

For me the issue isn't that someone is really good at something. The issue is that the character is horrible at everything else.

One thing I would suggest is that the characters need to be at least good at 3 things:

1) Recon/Intel
2) Execution
3) Plan B (Combat).

Each of those fields is very wide, and contains a number of possible skill sets.

Recon can be accomplished through hacking, stealth, con, contacts, sensors in the sky, etc.
Execution can be accomplished through providing transportation, breaking and entering, bypassing security, social engineering, etc.

If everyone is competent in each of these areas, the scenarios can be built that highlight everyone's capabilities, giving everyone a chance to shine.

I think if you find all the characters can do all three things in different ways at a competent level, you'll be happy with the results.

I like this idea. How would it work with the "only one skill at 6" limitation? Change that to only one skill at 3 and only one group at 3?

I like the idea alot too, maybe the individual skills should be capped at the skill group rating, that would help reenact the old skill web without the unrealistic barriers

I think if you want a game of competent generalists, you should, in addition to having some limitations/suggestions on characters, give them more build points. Because the way the game is set up, building an effective generalist is a lot more expensive than building a specialist. Alternatives would be using karmagen or Frank's house rules, both of which are more friendly towards buying skills.

Other than that, I would suggest going back to SR4 basic (as opposed to SR4A) thresholds and refreshing Edge fairly often. But mostly, it is simply a matter of talking it over with your players, and letting them know that this is the kind of game that you want to run.

I agree with Glyph, instead of trying to force your players to make weak characters, telling them how to make their characters and creating weird mechanics forcing them to make generalists, which really just screams "tyrannical GM" and "not fun game", just run a more high powered game.

Start with more BP (or I'd just recommend a high Karma Karmagen since that encourages spreading points into more skills and attributes naturally) and then after your players are comfortably proficient in whatever it is they want to do, they'll pick up some side skills. No one has a gimp character, you have the group of generalists you want and the only "price" is that you need to make enemies more competent than you usually might. Everyone wins.

Just reading this thread and seeing words like limit, cap, require, etc. make me think the idea is simply punitive and not fun. Go the other way, same result but more player freedom.

It's called communication.


If you want a game that's not as hyperspecialized, tell that to your players at chargen. Tell them you'd like them to create characters that can handle a variety of things.

Make sure in the campaign that you challenge every character in a variety of ways. Instead of letting the Elven Face do all the social stuff all the time, challenge other characters too;
- Their contact is a bigoted ork who won't give elves the time of day; the ork PC would have better chances. (Seriously, they should have put a Racial Prejudice modifier in the social modifier tables, that would stop too-exotic-too-live builds at last.)
- All characters need to succeed at a Con check against the guard they need to bluff past, but the Face can use Teamwork to help them.
- Someone does something funky over the Matrix to the non-hacker; how well can he respond, before the enemy learns crucial information?
- Stalk the Sam with a very good stalker; if the stalker gets in a surprise attack, the Sam might be in big trouble.
- As above, against the mage!

On the other hand, don't justify people in hyperspecializing in their niche; don't escalate their niche opponents beyond all reason just to challenge the PC. At some point, you should be able to kick back and realize you can start working on a second niche, because you've got the first one solidly covered (instead of chasing dice 21-30).

Don't let people hide in their niche; don't let them easily avoid out of niche problems by letting a teammate specialist do it. And don't force people to become hyperspecialized; give them breathing room to expand laterally.

The game I am running now is a more experienced game with 500 BP and 100 karma characters. I capped their starting skills at 16 dice across the board - no matter how you get the dice (skill, attribute, specialization, augmentation, equipment, etc..). If I was to start a "basic" shadowrun game I would give out 500 BP but limit the starting dice pool to 12. This is to do 2 things: encourage/enforce a bit of a broader group of skills and give them room to grow, these are supposed to be beginning characters, rgiht?!?

As you can probably tell, I don't like the idea of uber specialized characters; being good at what you do is great, but not if it means they can't do anything else. The cross-training concept is very important for those in to shadowrunning, I believe.

They are only supposed to be beginning characters if that is the kind of game you are running. This isn't D&D where you start out killing kobolds. In Shadowrun, you start out pretty damn good at what you do, because you have to be pretty damn good simply to survive.

That's the "heavy reworking" part . What I am sure of is that the system must be the same for all skills. See the thread about Assault rifles against LMG: you can't have two weapons with different skill costs.

I hadn't really thought about it, but what you propose sounds good .

This would rather drive towards specialization: if you have to buy groups before skills, then a general PC with plenty of groups will be much weaker than a specialist with a few maxed groups and the corresponding skills. My idea was the opposite: the Face who wants to defend herself will just have to invest a few points in the Pistols skill whereas the Sammy will have to buy the more expensive Firearms group on top of a weapon skill.

please don't misunderstand me as a psychotic GM with an iron grip. During the school year only about 3-4 of us will be able to play in the dorms. I can tell the other players are bored and uninterested when group responsibilities are divided and have to take a backseat while 1 person gets to play one-on-one with me because he is so terribly good at that one thing

I am not new to running a table, just new to Shadowrun with a background of class based games and my players and I have realized that splitting it up so viciously in shadowrun doesn't make for the cooperative experience a tabletop rpg is supposed to be

I don't want to restrict them, but give them room to move laterally rather than just up up up. My players would be informed that in exchange for losing one massive dice pool difficulties, thresholds, and most enemies would be toned down so they can succeed but be involved in most aspects of the run. So far Traul's idea is fitting my wish perfectly.

Maybe it's not in the spirit of Shadowrun for most people, but the friends I will be playing with till summer don't think it's terrifying. My mostly RAW game still exists, they are attached to those characters and I won't be taking that away.



I understand and on looking back I spoke too soon trying to get rid of the whole 'great at this, but unreasonably untrained in something similar' situation. A man with pistols 3 and no skill with a rifle is perfectly reasonable and I didn't think that.

If you want to make a generalist game...

Use karmagen. Seriously, it encourages generalization. (when level 3 in an attribute, an average human value costs 25karma instead of 20bp, it makes a difference. Ditto groups at 1 - same cost in karma/bp. The scaling cost just goes up more than BP around the rating 4-5+ mark)
Limit Active skill caps at start to 2-3. I say active skills, because knowledge or language skills shouldn't be limited.

Next: Do away with glitches. Just toss em out. You want characters rolling low dice pools and not failing spectacularly? Get rid of glitches. Use only Critical glitch rolls for bad stuff.

And that's it.