So I have to ask.

What is a glitch with no successes?

(Why, a critical glitch, you say)

And what does it become after it's been downgraded?

(Why, a glitch with no successes, you say)

Which is...?

It gets downgraded to a normal failure, is all. You don't have to downgrade it just one step to a botch, after all.

Hmm thats odd, I got the impression most stuck to option C, the second most to option A, and few to option B. Then again, this thread isn't representative for all Shadowrun groups.

I think that we have a player in our group that can give you a run for your Money in the non-successful dice rolling department. I think that his DICE have gremlins. Regardless of the game, in fact. It is quite entertaining.

Uh, check page 56.



The question is, what's the difference between a critical glitch and a glitch with a failure?

Failing the task and being inconvenienced in some way. If it's an attack, the attack misses and you messed up somehow.

Explain again how that's different than a critical glitch.

Severity, basically. You're right about the ambiguity - in all other situations 'glitch' implies success, so really a downgraded critical is a third case that lies between the two. A critical glitch might be that you hit a team mate instead of your target which can be downgraded to dropping your weapon. Either way you have failed your attempt, but one is much less painful than the other. The thing to remember, though, is that the severity of a glitch is inversely dependent on the number of hits rolled, so a downgraded critical glitch should logically still be worse than any normal glitch.

Exactly.

Critical Glitches can kill you, your friends, or cause permanent damage to gear or people. It's a major fuckup.

A glitch is generally a minor inconvenience - getting burned by your spent shell casing as you put a pullet in someone's face for example. Ripping your clothes while climbing over a fence. Getting some wrong information together with mostly correct one (data search).

a glitch with 0 hits is probably worse yeah - but it should be significantly less worse than the critical glitch, otherwise why spent Edge to lessen it?

For example, if you get a critical glitch with a Monowhip, you strike yourself. If you lessen it to a normal Glitch with 0 hits you probably just entangle it in something, having to spend time to get it untangled. In a glitch with 5 hits you might have accidentally chipped off something you didn't want to - it might not be a real drawback at all as much as possibly looking a bit silly.

It is left in the hands of the Game Master to determine the outcome. It only offers guidelines, but there are no concrete rules about the severity of a glitch or critical glitch.

Bye
Thanee

The rule is that critical glitches should be more severe than regular glitches. After that it's up to the GM how severe either is.

Exactly. To use the chasm of doom example, a normal failure might give the PC a chance to grab ahold of something so they don't fall to their death. A botched failure means the same, but you drop a vital piece of equipment or something similar. A critical means you fall to your death unless a miracle happens (such as the ECD clause). Really, it's just a matter of degree: by downgrading the critical, you make it less severe.

It could also just mean "at death's door" instead of "very dead".

Personally, I reserve that for the ECD clause. I've never had a player reach that point from a botch or critical botch, but I have had players simply fail to beat the damage threshold, nearly resulting in a very dead character. The only reason they didn't die outright was because they burned Edge.

Purely for the record, the chasm case study (in this thread at least) had the tenet that failure meant certain death.

I don't recall offhand the exact guidelines, but my memory (as backed up comments from other posters) is that the outcome of a glitch should be an "inconvenience", while a crit glitch should have "bad, potentially catastrophic" result.


I don't distinguish between a crit glitch downgraded to a glitch by edge and a normal glitch (apart from the aforementioned lack of successes in the test in the former case). I do not agree that logically the severity of the glitch should necessarily be "worse" for an edge-downgraded crit glitch and a rolled glitch, but it is certainly an interesting idea.

I would consider "at death's door" a little more than an "inconvenience".

Bye
Thanee

It just follow from the guideline that the less hits on a glitch, the more severe it is.

A problem with this though is that it rewards high dice pools even more (both in chance of glitching AND in outcome), while people with low dice pools (most people really) are screwed

For example, take a normal car owner with no exceptional skill (Skill rating 0, Reaction 3). If he is forced to do a vehicle test for any reason (encountering car in wrong lane, environmental conditions etc.), he is down to two dice. The chance of glitching on 2 dice is about 2/6 ~ 33% chance. That's fairly likely even. Now since he only has 1 hit on a Glitch (or 0 if downgrading a Critical glitch), his glitch will almost always be more severe, thus he is likely to damage his car somehow. This is incidentally the same chance of actually succeeding on an easy test - such as having to make a sudden stop at low speed, or simply passing another vehicle at high speed.

Which was brought up to illustrate why "you glitched: no rerolls for you" was a bad rule.

Only if a glitch would automatically mean that you fall down the chasm, which - of course - does not have to be the case.

A glitch could also mean that you stumble before you jump off, assuming you didn't succeed at the jump, and drop something that you are carrying, which then falls down the chasm while you scramble back to safety (or, if you also succeeded, you would lose something during the jump to the other side). An inconvenience, but not a catastrophic event.

Bye
Thanee

Fixed that for you. The glitch isn't the "you die" part of the test, it's the failed roll that kills you (you just happened to also glitch).

Works the same. Failure does not have to mean you fall down the chasm.

That would only happen on a critical glitch (if I was GMing in that situation, that is). Which you can prevent with the use of Edge. Though you would still suffer an inconvenience (which, because of the 0 hits, would be more of a major inconvenience, like dropping your commlink or main weapon). Another option to survive that would be to suffer the critical glitch and then burn a point of Edge to survive the fall.

Bye
Thanee

It's an example, and I can give you one that you CANNOT dispute is fudgable.

You have 1 box remaining on your track before you die (you are in overflow an unconscious). You get shot.

The DV is 5, and you've got 18 dice for this.

You roll.

9 ones and 4 hits.

What now?

The glitch you could live with (broken arm, ruined armor vest). But you can't live (literally) with the extra 1 box of damage.

But the GM says you can't spend edge to roll more dice / reroll failed dice.

Tough luck.

Luckily that situation is so highly hypothetical, that it is basically irrelevant.

Bye
Thanee

Point is: there are scenarios where the only possible outcome for a failed roll is, in fact, death.

And if these scenarios exist, then a failed roll with a glitch should be allowed to roll more dice or reroll. And if you are allowed it in that scenario, you should be allowed it in all scenarios.

Why?

That's what pilot programmes and GridGuide is for ... Seriously though, the chances of your average Joe (I assume no Edge, as such desperate default-on-a-low/average ATT situations for PCs are another good time to use Edge) avoiding a crash if a hacker takes control of the autopilot, or a car swerves out into the road right in front of them might well result in a crash. As happens IRL, and presumably in the 2070's as well.

In such situations your average Joe might also want to just assume a crash pose/throw hands up in panic and let the crash avoidance software and airbag do their jobs. It's the other guy's fault, it's GridGuide's fault, and now they're gonna just have to deal with the other driver, the cops and endless filling out of insurance forms. Life sucks for hapless Joe, but then again as an anonymous wageslave with a argumentative wife and two rebellious kids, plus ca change.

Let's take another example. I heard tell a story of an AGI 2 mage who defaulted on a SMG burst against an oncoming car. Apparently the player was warned against trying, but boldly declared that his character would not understand the metagame danger and he went ahead anyway. The first shot was a glitch, the second a crit glitch which if I remember correctly resulted in the death of an innocent bystander and 15 mins of fame on the evening news.

Even with the intellectual layman understanding that firing a weapon is going to cause recoil, most folks with no gun experience still struggle with it when they experience it for real. Again, game mechanics reflect RL quite seamlessly here IMHO.

The fact that the poster fondly remembered the incident in question and his sharing it caused much mirth among forum members reinforces my position that glitches are fun (so long as they don't result in random PC death) ...

Yes, there are. They are extremely rare, however, and should therefore not be given too much importance.



I don't see why that would be the only possible solution.

I definitely agree that the rule should work the same in all situations.

As said above, I don't see why this should force an otherwise preferable rule (if that is the case, as it is for me) to not work in the vast majority of situations.

And there is still the last ditch option of burning Edge. So things ain't that bad, even if such a rare situation does actually happen (including the glitch).

Bye
Thanee

Yes, I believe the premise was a Threshold 2 test with only one success and a glitch, with the inference that not getting to reroll would result in the threshold not being met and therefore failure and splat, and not negating the glitch would result in the hapless PC plunging to his death.

The glitchophile crowd argued that the inferred horrible death wasn't necessarily so, that such do-or-die scenarios are just the sort of time that PCs might want to use Edge (especially if they think there is a possible chance of failure), and in extremis there was the possibility of survival by HoG.

Do we really need to revisit the Chasm'o'Doom?

Yes.... preferably by looking down on it while successfully jumping across it.

And that's why you aren't allowed to design rule sets. Trust me. If a scenario is possible, then the rules must be able to address the situation in a satisfactory manner.

Having recently published a card game we went through the rules to try and find rare, but not impossible, situations and examine what should happen in those cases.

For example, we had a singular card that dictated that the order of the cards drawn from the deck mattered ("the next card of type X drawn is immediate discarded, do not draw a replacement") but because the situation in which it mattered was so rare (once per game, max; applied to all players for once around-the-table) that we were unconsciously auto-sorting the cards we drew, so when it did matter, we'd forget, sort the cards, and go "oops."

So we rewrote how that effect worked ("lowest value card of type X").

So yes. Yes it does matter, and those situations do need to be given weight.

Yeah, right!



That's not rare. The SR situation you have been describing is more like once-in-a-lifetime rare.

Bye
Thanee

Let me describe another scenario.

Every five minutes you, personally, have a 0.5% chance of receiving $1.

On average, every week, you'll get $10 added to your bank account.

What are the odds of receiving no money after one week?

That's a super rare chance of happening are so rare as to occur once in a lifetime.

Right?

Wrong.

One person in 24,471 will experience this every week.

That's not a very big number.*

Why are these numbers relevant? Remember Team Fortress 2's old drop system?

I'll dig it up for you.



A friend of mine was one in 2,000,000 people to receive exactly 0 drops over a two week game time period (running the game 24 hours a day, 7 days a week).
(I forget the exact duration and known probabilities at the time, but it worked out to a 1 in 2 million odds. He also knew someone else who was experiencing the same thing). That's why the current system is a "random duration to next drop" system.

Welcome to practical statistics.

*If everyone in the world had this offer, there would be 285,000 people would experience this on a weekly basis.

He's kind of got you there, Thanee. I'm not seeing how any part of your argument is better than Draco's.

Despite the regrettable ambiguity in the RAW on whether or not a glitch remains if a player elects to use Edge to reroll failures on a glitched roll, everyone who has posted on the subject has had an interpretation that does address the situation in a satisfactory manner. Regardless, I believe the RAW also says words to the effect of "the GM's decision is final in situations where the rules are unclear or lacking", so in this way the situation is also addressed right there in the BBB.

The Chasm'o'Doom scenario was suggested by the "reroll-scrubs-glitch" camp as a strawman to show how not using their rules interpretation could lead to PC death through dumb luck (or cursed dice) in a do-or-die situation. While I am sure there may be a few hardliner GMs out there who might run their game in an inflexible dice-fall-where-they-may manner, I do not remember one poster in this thread who advocated auto-killing the PC who catastrophically flubbed their roll at such a crucial moment, even if it meant bending the rules a little or pulling their punches with the glitch (let's call it the hanging-by-a-thread redemption).

And, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, even if all else fails against the hardest most inflexible PC-cidal GM in the world, there is always the HoG option.

You just don't get it, do you?

You are making post after post describing yet another rare situation, which is hypothetically possible. Yeah, sure, they are. Noone is denying that.

Bye
Thanee

But again, this is about the actual rules that you'd expect sitting down at a con table--not your hand-wavey-hopey-changey-made-up stuff. You still have yet to satisfactorily address the point, because "Meh, it probably won't happen so the rules clearly indicate that's not the correct reading" doesn't really resonate.

And again, that is not at all what people say here.

Please, read the posts again.

Bye
Thanee

Uh....

You have to jump a bit farther back to actually find it.

Hint: I am using the actual rules and no hand-wavey-hopey-changey-made-up stuff at all (other than disallowing rerolls on a glitch, of course, which isn't expressly written in the rules) to come to a completely viable and satisfactory solution to every possible situation (even the rare ones).

Bye
Thanee

Having never been to a con I have no experience anecdotal or otherwise on how con GMs deal with glitches and rerolls, but I rather suspect that their rulings will fairly mirror the myriad interpretations that we have seen here.

Any con GMs with inside knowledge, or con veterans who have seen these situations come up at their tables over the years? C'mon Dumpshock!

You got it right.

Since the rules are vague, there are many possible and viable interpretations, and you will find them all.

Bye
Thanee

As a related side topic, how often do do-or-face-certain-death rolls come up at people's table, because now I start to think about it I have never ever put my players in such a predicament. Just to be clear here, I am talking about this hypothetical "one dice roll and if you fail or crit glitch, rip up your character sheet right now" situation that some posters claim come up regularly. It doesn't matter what attributes, skills, spells, armour, superpowers or SOTA gear your character gets, you miss that 1-a-session make-or-make-a-new-character situation roll, you're dead end of story.

Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I am starting to think that GMs that force PCs into situations where one bodged/unlucky roll means auto-death aren't so good at their craft. The PCs will always get at least one more roll of the dice, even if it is a next-to-impossible damage resistance roll, but I think clever PCs can always think a desperate measure to attempt, and resourceful teammates might also jump to the rescue. Sure, their predicament just got a lot hairier, their chances slimmer and their remaining options all bad, but where there's life, right?

Fail to dodge that 24P car ram? Well, it's gonna hurt but you still have your damage resistance test. If you can stage it down so you still have a few boxes of overflow left, one of your teammates might ride to your rescue with a medkit or magic to stabilize you. A BOD 2 wimp may learn the dangers of shirking BP on BOD as they run out of overflow boxes in no time flat, but you live and learn, and if you really want to survive there is always that HoG.

Didn't get that maglock open before the Red Samurai patrol rounds the corner and catches you red-handed with no escape route? You might be able to take them all out, or perhaps you could surrender and hope you can escape/get jailbroken by your team later on.

Fall down that much toted Chasm'o'Doom? Apart from the hanging-by-a-thread possibility mentioned above, perhaps an air elemental or levitate spell from a friendly mage will come to your rescue, or the sammie pulls a Bruce Willis yippie-kai-yo stunt by jumping in after you firing a grapple gun back up to the clifftop to get a lifeline. Or perhaps your character has the presence of mind to desperately try and plunge your nodachi into the wall to halt your fall.

These are all possibilities to evade the reaper, and even if some or most of these desperate tactics have next-to-no chance of success, there is still a chance even if it is tinier than a pixie's toothpick. But a new dice roll brings a new chance to use any Edge dice you have remaining to try and beat the odds or go for a longshot. One failed dice roll equals death? My PCs always have at least 3 before they have to decide if they are going to resort to HoG.

Those damn double-post glitches!

Midas, at our table I can count 0 (zero) times that there has been a do-or-die single roll for any characters. BTW I've been playing SR since 1st edition (still have my hard-backs).

We've had planty of bleeding-out soon situations, but help is usually not too far away.

-D

Well, they do happen. But it is extremely rare. And certainly not just a situation that I throw the players into, but more one that might evolve from a series of bad luck or bad decisions. Even so, I cannot really recall one such situation.

Bye
Thanee

Just because you haven't doesn't mean they don't happen (the wonders of statistics).

It's important to bear in mind that roleplaying is more about decision-making than skill-checking. Even if a GM were pathologically intent on contriving a pass-or-die test for the PCs for the sheer hell of it, he'll still find it very difficult if they are intent on safer options. Taking the chasm example again, even the GM can't force you to jump. Throwing yourself across a gap of non-trivial trivial width puts you into a pass-or-die situation and if you fail it was your decision to jump that killed you. I guess what I'm saying is that pass-or-die tests do not exist independently of other factors. They're not a dick move in and of themselves.

Besides - don't all characters who die do so on their last roll?

I don't think any GM would deliberately put a PC in that situation, but really, if you think about it, that situation does come up every time an already wounded pc gets hit with a high calibur/automatic whatever weapon. Every time the DV+net hits>remaining hitboxes+overflow, the next roll is pass or die. It's very very rarely die because you may only need a couple of passes on a dozen dice, but it still is pass or die all the same.

You should have spent Edge...