Actually _Pax._ I like your list of house rules. You've got about as many as we do, different ones, but about the same count.

=)

-D

Maybe I have you confused with someone else Pax. If so, apologies.

But I was thinking of about 40pages of house rules when the main rulebook is 400.

Well, for one - remember thqat many houerules, mine and others', deal not just with the main book but also the supplements. Just in the "main" supplements, there's ... well, let's see:

• Arsenal, 202pp
• Augmentation, 178pp
• Companion, 186pp
• Street Magic, 194pp
• Unwired, 210pp

So those, and the core book (379pp), comprise some 1,346 pages. Then there ae the secondary and tertiary sources:

• Attitude, 178pp
• Hazard Pay, 170pp
• Parabotany, 51pp
• Parazoology, 33pp
• Runner Havens, 146pp
• Spy Games, 178pp
• Vice, 194pp
• War!, 186pp
• Deadly Waves, 33pp
• Digital Grimoire, 18pp
• Gun Heaven 1, 35pp
• Gun Heaven 2, 59pp
• MilSpecTech, 39pp
• Safehouses, 18pp
• SOTA 2073, 41pp
• Way of the Adept, 15pp
• This Old Drone, 25pp
• Magical Societies, 23pp
• Unfriendly Skies, 36pp
• Used Car Lot, 34pp

... for another 1,512 pages. A grand total - and this is just the books I personally own copies of - a grand total of 2,858 pages.

Someone would need two hundred and sixty pages of houserules to qualify for your "10%" quip.

Disagree... pretty much rules are only contained in a few of those. The crunchy rules only use a small fraction of the total page count. Even when they do, normally they're written in the format of one paragraph of fluff/flavor. And one paragraph of rules. Plus a few pages of fiction here and there. So even being generous the actual rules is typically only about a quarter of those books. (the rest eaten up by fluff, new equipment lists, artwork etc).

So when someone has 40 pages of house rules without any fluff or whatnot. They're substantially altering the form of the game to the point where their experiences are hard to relate to others and they've ceased playing the same game. The house rules document is a full fledged rulebook in it's own right at that point sans the fluff.

Irrelevant. Not every page of the core book is "crunch", either - and you didn't split hairs there. Therefor, you don't get to start splittin them in the other books. Indeed, a few of those books have LESS fluff as a percent of their content, than the core book.


And here's the ultimate kicker:


SO WHAT?

Why should that get your knickers in a bunch? Why do you have a problem with the idea that someone may like, say, 80% of SR4, but dislike the other 20%? Why is that such a problem for you ...??

I mean, seriously: WTH?

one thing I've realized is that mounting multi-missile launchers on hardpoints is perfectly rational in SR4 simply because the missiles are so small and short ranged. Its trading one missile with a 100km range for 4 teeny missiles that have 3km ranges, 5km tops. Even hellfires have more range and they can be mounted in braces of 4 on Apaches.

Because Pax. When you have people going on and on about how dysfunctional the rules are when they don't even use their discretion within the rules as a GM. And don't even TRY to use the rules... but immediately go about house ruling things left right and center like you do. Then they see fit to pontificate about how bad they are when they don't even give them half a chance.

I've playtested enough stuff both under and outside of NDA to know that quite a few times my initial impressions of how bad things would be or to see how my 'superior' ideas played out to have a bit of humility on the issue.

I tend to argue for trying to stick to the rules as published and taking the authors to task when they get it wrong such as they so often do under Mr Hardy lately. Instead of letting poor quality, editing, and most importantly lack of playtesting.

It's not that I disagree that SR2-3 had better rules for riggers and modifications and the like. Even including firmpoints and hardpoints and so on. More variagated weapons sizes. (IIRC a LMG was size 1.5. MMG was size 2 and it went up to size 5 or 7 or so for big vehicular weapons... but that's all very rusty in my head).

kig:
I don't have an issue with it either, provided the hardpoint we're talking about is a heavy/reinforced weapons mount!

That was the only reason I took issue with the OP's idea. Overall not bad, just very very impractical. The drone is expensive, lacks VTOL capabilities, isn't all that stealthy. And missiles are very expensive. When by following the rules you can actually get something

I suggest adding a line that High-Power Chambering takes a weapon up a category. It's both justifiable, and adds a bit of balance.

... "left right and center" ... for a grand total of sixteen houserules. Wait, no, fifteen ... because custom content isn't really changing anything.

Furthermore ... making house rules IS exactly and precisely "[using] their discretion within the rules as a GM". Most of my houserules document is, in fact, just saying "This is how I do X, and this is how I do Y".


As have I. Indeed, I spent several years as part of (and occasionally leading) a team of IMO very intelligent and creative people, running a play-by-post, player-versus-player "arena" with the D&D 3.5E rules at an extremely high level (meaning, at the end of hte power spectrum least playtested by the publisher) ... and let me tell you, we found a whole hell of a lot of holes in THAT system. Found them, and patched them over. I'd say any one f us had plenty of experience in "RPG design" after the half-decade-plus we spent on that project. Some things we fixed to work far better than the RAW version; some things we realised the RAW was better than we'd thought. A couple things we decided simply couldn't be fixed at all (Shapechange, how I loathe thee still).

And in the end, after all that ... so what? Who fecking cares??

What someone who is not you, not one of your players, and not one of your GMs does or doesn't do with the rules is none of your damned business - and noen of mine either. It's neither your nor my place to judge someone for how many or how few houserules they might care to use, until and unless one of us is playing in their game.

Someone can have one page of houserules, or none, or five hundred. It doesn't matter.

The only thing that matters at the end of the day, is this: DID THE PEOPLE IN THAT GROUP HAVE FUN?

If the answer is yes, then whatever the GM did or didn't do was the right thing, period, no exceptions. BEcaue everything they did either (a) created fun, or (b) stayed out of the way of creating fun.

Period.

Pax, is your Tome of House Rules available on the interwebtubesnet somewhere?

From your weapon mount stuff, I wish to cherry-pick your house rules for technological distinctiveness to add to my own.

Feh. 15 houserules. I remember when making tons of houserules was practically EXPECTED of a GM.

Of course, this was for the Cancer Game.




-k

Why not a TOWER drone with 10 Ares Heimdall drone missiles.
Ruthenium Polymer Coating (1)
Signature Masking (5)

40K for the drone
15K for the missile drones

Basically invisible high altitude missile dropper.

Most of it, if not all, got posted right here on Bumpshock a couple months back. Thread started by me - of which there aren't a whole lot. hould be easy enough to find.

Pax, you're having fun wrong. Don't you realize that when you play Shadowrun in a way that's not exactly like someone else, it actually subtracts enjoyment from their game? If you keep it up, I will have to hire a bunch of strangers at a themed bar for an implausibly small amount of cash to shut down your game, and then backstab them for no adequately explained reason.

And honestly, if your going to write house rules, the more page space you give to them the better. I mean, I should make sure that the rules that i'm proposing are going to be well understood and documented so that the players of my game don't read them and go "Wait, that does't make sense..."

Sound familiar?

Edit: For example, most of the time when I write up a house-rule I'll take up at least half a page to 2-3 pages, just to describe completely, in complete sentences, without making recursive references, and providing clear and accurate examples.

WOW!!!! Really?!?!?!
Someone can have fun wrong? Is that possible??

I'd say it's a good thing he has house rules. At least he has them. I don't bother writing the damn things and I sometimes follow/don't follow rules as a GM (depends on if they get in the way of my story). I'll kill characters or find a way to let them live. I've pissed players off and had them coming back on their own with a new character. Every one of my players has enjoyed my games and has given me props. Even when I messed up and it was completely obvious.

I actually had one of my players ask me if he could continue one of my story lines for his game. And he was one of my players who had his only character die.

So no I don't follow that someone can have fun WRONG nor do I disagree with the 1 pg or the 50 pg house rules. How ever that GM runs is how that GM runs. If a player has a problem with a rule (most gamers are actually above avg intelligence) then they mention it to the GM it gets changed or modified.

This part of the reason this forum is even here. The exchange of ideas, rules, stories, etc.. Because we are all (at least I hope we all are) intelligent ppl who agree/disagree with certain aspects of the game but have fun with it anyways.

I'm too tired to go find a good douple facepalm image, so everyone just imagine one in the place of this text

You should really get your sarcasm detector fixed, it seems to be busted up.

I'd like to think he was taking sarcasm to it's next level. While I approve of sarcastically mocking apprentice level sarcastics, I'm pretty sure the Mods don't like any of it.

Why wouldn't they?

Iunderstood KnightAries' comments to be sarcasm "well intended" where I was concerned, so I'm not at all offended.

sarcasm: One of the many services in which I offer....
(like most everyone in here)

Actually, now that I stop and look at the topic again; I find it rather amusing that we're talking house rules when the topic is Air Support.

This is actually a quite common topic drift, atleast this time it wasn't because someone was basing their input on their own house rule and only told rest of us 100 posts in(that really is pretty much the only problem peoples personal house rules cause)

I think single missiles are fine even on regular mounts just because these are such teeny little missiles. Look at the Yakusoku MRL in the main book. Its a man-portable 8-shot launcher! They've gotta be the size of mortar shells, at best, and they are the standard missiles, unlike the ballista.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the sr4 gear is proper security gear, vs milspec. Milspec doesn't assume infrastructure (like the Matrix) and uses weapons with beyond-the-horizon ranges. Sr gear can barely shoot across a large mall's parking lots.. I'm not saying that was intentional, just that by sheer happenstance this worked out.