What exactly does "I like frequent glitches" have to do with maths?


Equal or more. That's more probable than equal.


Yeah, at a high level. I do understand what you want to do. I just think, personally, that would make the game unpalatable for me. And for the record, maybe your GM softballs you with glitches, mine usually involved ripped ammo berlts in drones (requires an extended test with amminutes interval to fix because you need to access it, which is automotive B/R), or jammed weapons and missed shots. In SR, where battles hardly last through more than two combat turns, this matters a lot. I actually kind of liked that the probability of a glitch drops with a character's competence, because a firearms expert maybe knows how to clean a firearm and doesn't have it jam every other battle (or misses because he slips on a banana peel or whatever). More competence = less malfunctions and mishaps. Can't see where this is all wrong.

I agree, completely. It still, statistically, would "never" happen - you should have two successes for every single one. But, luck and probability being the fickle bitches they both are, every so often, bam, something goes not-quite-according-to-plan.

I think the probability for 'more 1's than hits' bounces around a lot, but it gets very tedious to calculate for dice pools bigger than 2. I do know you get an weird blip moving from 2 dice to 3 dice, since you go from something like 11% to something like 25% chance to glitch. It looks like it should approach some percentage, I just don't know what it is.

My suggestion would be a 'glitch die' -- a separate die (different color) used as one of the dice in your pool. If it comes up a 1, there's a glitch. If it comes up a 1 and there are no hits, it's a critical glitch. Glitch rates would remain constant at 1/6, and critical glitch rates would be no worse than 16%. This would fall off pretty steadily, but not vanish altogether the way the current critical glitch system is. 16%, 11%, 7.5%, 5%, 3.3%, 2.2%, and so on, meaning that by the time you get to a semi-professional level of 6 dice you're only critically glitching 2.2% of the time. By the time you get to 10 dice, it's under 1%.

Glitch rules would have to be adjusted so that a standard glitch would only set you back a little -- something that could be resolved with perhaps a simple action on your turn, or that causes a moderate numerical setback on your next action.

EDIT:
You could also use the glitch die as a critical success die -- if you roll a 6 on it with net success, you get some additional benefit.

And you'd be living in a world made of Explodium.

Not really. That's what the part about adjusting glitches to be only minor setbacks addresses. Gun jammed, spend a simple action to clear. Resisted (part of) the damage but got hit in a sensitive spot, take a -2 modifier to your next action. Shot is on target, but went through the cover, increase target's dodge pool by 2. That sort of thing.

It really doesn't bounce around. Certainly nowhere near as bad as the current odd even thing. It's a system we've used before, because that bouncing around really irks me. Yeah, it makes glitches more likely, but we toned down glitches from "everything explodes" to minor inconveniences. It worked well in my street level game.

The odds, if anyone cares to see them. They do taper off as you increase dice pools, they just do so slowly.
1- 16.7%
2- 19.4%
3- 19.9%
4- 19.7%
5- 19.2%
6- 18.6%
7- 17.9%
8- 17.2%
9- 16.6%
10- 15.9%

I can definitely see why people wouldn't want them occurring so often. Ideally I'd like them to range from occurring on 1 in 10 to 1 in 50 rolls. Enough that it will probably happen 2-3 times a session and have an impact without constant glitching.

How would a pistol shot wound only cause a special modifier for one round? How do you un-jam a weapon in under 3 seconds (it's a complex action) while people are shooting at you? And what if you have only one to two IP per turn, like the majority of characters? That is seriously crippling, even with your kid gloves approach to glitches.

Look up Runner's Toolkit, which has suggested Glitch effects, one f which is quite vertain o cause a character's death (you glitch on a dodge roll for a long assault rifle burst, so you get to resist he damage with natural body only). Or take ExEx ammo, which flat out states it detonates the entire magazine on a glitch for a shitload of damage. Fun stuff.

Glitches are, if anything, too frequent at lower pools in a game where you can easily amass -5 pool mali. No need to make them even more common.


The odds as you present them are more like one in 6. Enough that in a normal combat turn with characters with 2 IP, everybody will glitch in that turn. That's far too often for my taste. Once a session is tolerable, even though still frustratingly often.

That's a pain... how many of us pack hordes of specially colored dice.

Actually the odds of calculating it aren't that hard... first calculate the odds of each number of sucesses... for every dice which isn't a success there is a 1 in 4 chance it's a glitch. Calculate those odds into a probability matrix as well...

Doing the numbers very quickly on 8 dice... yeah you're right it does result in a comic opera...
I came up with 19.7% chance of a glitch.... (3.9% of the time you get 0 successes and a 90% chance of at least one 1 on the remaining 8 dice... (15.6% of 1) * 55%... (27% of 2) * 17%... (17% of 3) * 0.3% of rolling all 1's on last 4 dice... and no chance of rolling more 1's than successes if you roll 5 or more success out of 8. Comes to 19.7% chance of rolling more 1's than successes.

If alter the threshold to at least twice as many ones as successes...
3.5% from 0 and any number of 1's....
2.65% from 1 success and at least 2 1's.
0.1% from 2 successes at at least 4 1's.. impossible to roll 6 1's on 8 dice with 3 success and up.
total only about 6% or about the same odds as rolling a natural '1' on a d20.


Yeah but the reason in my thinking was to flatten the glitch curve... so small dice pools weren't so utterly punishing... while still making them a reasonable possibility at higher dice pool levels.


NB: I'm all for very minor glitch results... but some like Ex ammo... hell yeah... that stuff should be very dangerous to use! Save it for the guys who have edge to burn or like living on the wild side...

I don't know, stub your toe sometime and try to run immediately. You'll hobble for a couple seconds but then you'll be okay. Extra painful and distracting for a short period, but ultimately not extra damaging.



Tap, rack, and clear.



So (statistically) one out of every 6 rounds you might lose one of your 4 actions? The horror.



Since I'm suggesting different glitch effects from the current set, no.

Hmmm, I like that idea. Let me alter my code to calculate those odds.
If it's double or more-
1- 16.7%
2-19.4%
3- 19.9%
4- 19.7%
5- 18.7%
6- 17.%
7- 15.1%
8- 13.2%
9- 11.5%
10- 10.0%
Still a bit high in the low numbers, but it does taper better and doesn't bounce around. Maybe more than double.

1- 16.7%
2- 19.4%
3- 17.1%
4- 14.1%
5- 11.7%
6- 9.9%
7- 8.6%
8- 7.4%
9- 6.5%
10- 5.6%

That seems more reasonable. There's nothing you can really do about the real low end, but 1/10 chance of a mishap for an average individual with moderate training seems reasonable. Might try that in my next game.

Just speaking for myself, I have about 6 sets of 36 dice, each set of a different color. Love you, Chessex.



Not hard, just tedious. I like the 6% number but I'm not a fan of of the method of determination, especially with larger dice pools. You'd have to separate out all the 1s and then count the hits, and then do a little calculation, every time you rolled the dice. That's also tedious, because there are a lot of dice rolls.

While the 1/6 chance I suggested is a little high, there's not a lot you can do with a d6. I suppose you could use TWO glitch dice and count glitches if they come up snake eyes (or 1 glitch die in the event of a dice pool of 1). Then it'd be 1/36, or 2.8%, but then critical glitches would go back to never happening.

Those numbers seem alright, but I'd like to think of a 'glitch' as something that has little (or far less, anyway) to do with the training or experience of a person. If you're more agile and a better shot, it doesn't really reduce the chance that your gun will jam.

Now a CRITICAL glitch should definitely taper off -- the more experienced person will know how to avoid them. For example a decent runner might twist his ankle on a dip in the ground, but an experienced runner would better know how to handle it.

I'd rather see a way that the glitch could be the random happenstance that could affect anyone, and the critical glitch being tied to ability.

Some possible thoughts: what about using either a d12, or two d4's, as "glitch dice" ...? Why does it have to be d6's, other than for tradition's sake?

If you glitch only on a roll of 1, with a d12 ... that's an 8.334% chance.

Or, if you use two d4s, and glitch if both come up 1 ... that's a 6.25% chance.

Either of those seems workable. Special dice could be supplied as well - just mark a single side on each die, leave the rest blank.

Tradition's sake -- you don't need any other dice for anything else in the game, so the best thing would be to try to use the system's normal dice. Maybe.

Exactly... this is shadowrun... we are pumped from carrying our massive tubs of d6's... who needs all those other dice! And to borrow from one of my DND'isms... it's not been a night til I've rolled *ALL* my dice at least once. (such as when you crit someone with an empowered disentegrate and they fail the save... only to have the damage handwaved away while you're reaching for 120 d6's... massive disappointment).

Really at that point why not just toss a d20... on a nat 1 you get glitch... on a nat20 you get crit succes.
Flat 5% at either end with no bell curve. Which I admit produces one set of desired results... just doesn't have that SR feel.


Epicidean: It's actually pretty easy once you toss a spreadsheet together. And i worked out a combinatrics formula the hard way a while back to quickly allow me to do the statistics on any 'weighted' coin test between two outcomes I simply need to know the ratio of the outcomes... so basic SR test is 2 failures for 1 success.. or 3 nothings for 1 glitch if a success doesn't happen (if a success does happen it's 50/50 whether it's a 5 or an exploding 6). (if the outcomes are mutually exclusive... it can be used for more than 2 as well... as you caculate the odds of 1 or (2 or 3)... then calculate 2 or 3 out of the remaining...


Thorya... something about your numbers doesn't make sense to me.... And they seem really high....
But quickly looking at 2 and 8 points... yeah you're right. My 'head' math was lowballing the numers some.

The reason is that on small dice pools there's quite a significant chance of rolling no successes. And since none of the dice came up successes... a full quarter of the failures are 1s. so it's very easy to get a single '1'.


When I was looking at my initial numbers over a month ago when i first had this idea.. I was thinking along the lines of '9' being an average dice pool (3 attribute + 6 skill... or toss in some equipment... before the equipment == force revalation). So I was looking for something that would produce about a 5% outcome then degrade slowly as the dice went up to 20'ish down to about 2-3%.

I guess could always move it up one notch more... did you roll more than 2x 1's than successes... if you rolled 1 success you'd need 3 1's not 2 for a glitch... roll 2 successes... twice is 4... need 5 for the glitch.



The one other comment i disagree with:
We already have to look at the successes, and count the 1's and do a mathematical comparison. Are 1's half the dice pool or more? If yes... glitch... It's not a big switch to go from that to did I roll twice as many 1's as successes... you still need to count the 1's and still need to either divide by 2 or multiply by 2.

When I was running SR4 I found that quite a few players tended not to pay so close attention to the amount of 1's they rolled, just because it was an extra step and they wanted to stay in the action. I'm not saying this would be an issue at every table, obviously, but it provides a tedious check for every roll, that I think would be fairly offputting in practice. Really I'd like players to be able to glance at their dice and say "I have X successes, with a glitch" without having to do math. While I like math and would be fine doing this every time, some players have a hard enough time piecing together their dice pools and counting successes accurately.

I took a cube of black dice with white pips - a GW cube, two of which are not normal d6's, so I got 25 dice out of it - and modified them with two Sharpie pens, one black and one red. I blacked out all the 2's, 3's, and 4's. I then colored the 1's in red. So, I don't have to look at what the number is anymore; whites are successes, reds are 1's, and the rest just don't matter.

I just count white dice, and count red dice, and compare the two.

what about adding a "Glitch Die" for every certain amount of die in a pool, for instance 1 Glitch Die for every 6 dice, I admit I have no idea what the odds will be, but changing the amount of dice giving you a glitch Die could help control the amount of glitching, also if you think about it, it would in theory keep the glitch levels somewhere the same, theory would say that having 1 glitch die for 6 dice would be about the same as 6 glitch Dice for 36 dice.

Once you're rolling additional dice unrelated to the task... you might as well just get a d20 (or even better some oddball nonstandard die like a d30, d16, d14, or d100). And treat a 1 and the max result of the die as the two extremes.


The only reason for trying to do something was to result in a system which still glitches at a higher rate for small dice pools.. but doesn't practically disappear as a statistical outcome once you go past 10 dice.

Standard glitch chance:
8 dice... 3% (reasonable)... about 1 in 30
16 dice: 1.93E-6... or aabout 1 in 500,000 yes... half a million.

Surely everyone has at least one misfire die?

I disliked the "glitch die" in Star Wars d6. Basically, it meant there was a 1 in 6 chance of something going wrong or you failing, no matter how good your roll was. Increasing the number of misfire dice will only make this worse.

No, increasing them doesn't have to make it worse.

Rolling a 1 on a single d6 glitch die means a roughly 16.667% chance of occurring.

Rolling a 1 on both of apair of d4 glitch dice means a rather precise 6.25% chance of occurring. That's less likely. Add a third die in, and your chance of a glitch goes down to 1.5625% (which IMO is too infrequent).

Also remember that "glitch" and "failure" are not the same thing in Shadowrun. You can succeed, even brilliantly, while also suffering a glitch. Glitching just means "unintended consequences", a side-effect that isn't necessarily what you wanted. Nor necessarily something that fucks you over, either.

But rolling d4 looks like coming from nowhere. Up to this point you could as well draw a card. It would look amateurish IMO.


Well that beeing said, I live perfectly with low occuring fumbles. A 16%, even 10% (and maybe even 5%) seems too high to me in a game where you're supposed to play and look like a pro. It's ok in several other games, but in this one it doesn't fit that well.

I mean imagine Neo in Matrix failing stupidely every 6 actions. That would just make it look stupid. And, if by "glitch" you think at a complication, I *as a GM* prefer to have the hand at that.

For exemple, if they enter a facility, there could be an engineer working late this day. I decide a probability of it occuring and go for that rather than waiting for 1 player to glitch.


Oh and, a 6 player group with 16% chances of glitch will make 1 glitch in average EVERYTIME they roll a stealth test. Toonesque.

Um. Excuse me? How is using a d12 or 2d4 "amateurish" ...?


"Glitch" does nto mean "failure".

It's ... okay, look, so let's say you're a sniper, and you need to provide covering fire for yoru team while they escort their extraction target through a mall or shopping center. You've got a sweet, fully-silenced "mosquitos FARt louder than this gun" rifle, and you're all set to keep that covering fire as discrete as possible (given the whole "making large holes suddenly appear in peoples' heads" thing). So you see a security guard, weapon already drawn, out of the other PC's LOS (and out of sight of the civilians, for the moment). Time to go to work: you drop your huge pile of dice, get lots of successes, and the guard quietly slumps over.

But you glitched; so something unintended and undesireable happens TOO. Like, that drone with the big holo-projector advertising the latest handbags on sale in the upper level of the mall, strayed into your line of fire just as your bullet left the end of the barrel. The round goes right through the drone like a plasma cutter through warm butter, and it drops to the walkway below in a shower of sparks. Noone is hurt, but there's a few shouts, and mild panick is beginning to spread throughout the shoppers. Oops, so much for keeping things quiet ...

To me, that is a glitch. The guard is still down (doesn't even get any extra soak dice), neither you nor your PC companions are directly spotted, but "discretion" just lost a lot of hitpoints. It'll take a bit of quick thinking to get out ... well, not quietly, anymore, but at least "without turning the mall into a war zone", yeah?


Again, "gitch" does not mean "failure". It is entirely possible to glitch and still succeed. Just, "with side effects".



Which is why I originally suggested soemthing other than just a single, straight d6.

2d4, "both come up 1", means a glitch will only occur about once in twenty rolls.

It gives a patchwork feeling. Like ADD and his Rogue/Thief rolling d100 for their skills while the other skills were d20 under Attribute. And which you substracted bonuses. "Yes you get a +2 weapon! So your 19 THAC0 is now 17 ofc. It sounds, ermm, badly integrated.

A french game named Eleckaze suffered the same: a little bit of Basic system, little bit od DD, and so on. It lacked of unity.



Rolling d4 in a game that only use d6 otherwise seems out of place.




okay I got it, but I rather prefer it occuring on a 2-3 (max)% on a dice-roll and decide for myself *a GM* mostly otherwise.

In your exemple:
GM:-you see a security guard, weapon already drawn, out of the other PC's LOS
PC: Time to work!
(GM remembers the drone's surveillance and decides that additionnal intensity would be nice.
GM: Wait roll 2d6. High is good, low is bad.
PC: 5
GM: roll perception first
PC: 3 successes
GM: A drone's coming from the right! If you hide back, the drone won't perceive you but you must hope the guard will not shoot early, but take time to aim.
PC: Can't I somewhat change my position to hide and shoot by doing [this and That].
GM: mmmm 'kay. But roll both stealth and shooting at -2 under such conditions.





Well, you'd rather pick 2 dices from your pool (with different colors) and it's a glitch if both shows 1's (2,8%). At least that fits a bit more to the system.

Yeah, that's just it. Under current rules, the higher your skill the less likely you are to suffer a botch. Under a flat system, you're equally likely to botch no matter what your skill is.

Pretty sure 99 percent of the time it just took away the highest die, not an automatic failure. That was only for special occurances, or ways for the GM to advance (or twist) the plot.

Thief Abilities were not skills prior to 2nd Edition. And the %ile system predated "skills", or mroe properly, "non-weapon proficiencies".


"Out of place", I'll accept. "Amateurish" ... not so much.


2d6 then, both come up 1, you glitch. 1:36, or just under 3%.

But, the higher your skill, the less likely that glitch is to be CRITICAL, still.

It's difficult to me to discuss about the terms used as I've played the game in french.

but AFAIK, your thief could have [lock picking] at 70% when a riding skill was [Dex+something]. Pretty inconsistant




Maybe I didn't used the right word. What I had in mind is that patchwork systems are more common in amateur game (where people tend to put in everything they like initiative cards from SaWo/Deadlands, dots from WoD...).

It probably sounded more negative than intended.

Not in the game I played. It was usually a botch so bad, you may as well have failed. The only exception was damage rolls, where it always took away your highest die.


Doesn't matter. The higher your skill is, the less likely you are to have made the silly mistakes that lead to a fumble. You maintain your guns so they're less likely to jam, less likely to get the safety confused with the clip ejection button, and so on.

Done your way, the most poorly-maintained gun in the hands of the worlds worst shooter has the exact same chance of jamming as a precision sniper rifle firing handmade bullets used by a professional gunsmith and shooter.

After playing D&D with fumble as standard for 10 years, I can't express how much I hate flat fumble curves on high level characters, 5% doesn't sound like a lot... It is enough to be detrimental to you feeling like the rightful badass you are.
Failure should be dictated by the strength of your opposition not banana peel mishaps, well it's fine with inexperienced characters because sod's law and hilarity like the moo(n) walking tauren attempting to sneak.

Done the other way, the most poorly-maintained gun in the hands of the world's best shooter has less of a chance of jamming, which doesn't make any sense. Glitches aren't tied to the quality of the device or the complexity of a scenario, or even the background skills, knowledge, or planning involved. They're tied exclusively to the active skill being used right here and now.

If a glitch is when climbing a rope it breaks, that's not really related to the skill of the climber at climbing. It would really be related to how well the climber might take care of his equipment or inspect things before use. The climber's response to the glitch (grab hold of the wall before plummeting) would definitely involve that active climbing skill, but in a realistic sense it wouldn't have anything to do with the actual breaking of the rope.

In that scenario, with a fixed glitch chance, the climber could roll his dice and the glitch would pop up. Rope breaks, but the climber has successes, so he grabs ahold of the wall. If he had no successes (critical glitch) then he could fall. The result of the normal glitch would be an additional climbing check at increased difficulty (no more rope).

This seems to be closer to what (in reality) happens and why than having a professional climber that never has a rope break because he's so good at (the active skill of) climbing, and having a pathetic 1-dice climber who breaks ropes every other time he touches them.

5% is certainly high if you take the tack that it's a critical fumble and something bad happens. Shadowrun afford us the idea of the Added Complication (glitch) and the Critical Failure (critical glitch). There's no reason that the standard glitch should necessarily be anything more than a small setback, or an additional hurdle to overcome, or some penalty to your next action, representing some extra detail.

Honestly I think that more frequent glitches with smaller effects could result in a pretty spiffy addition to the narrative of a run. A glitched grenade throw might result in a bad fuse (extra delay on the blast), or it might roll behind the floor safe, adding extra protection to those in the blast radius. A glitched gunshot might impact a fire extinguisher, providing some effective 'smoke' cover in the area for a couple rounds.

Yeah really... glitch is something like...


You shoot the goon, but accidentally shoot the control panel as well. You're going to need to use your electronics skill to open the blast door instead of just punching the button.


And some rounds like Ex(-Ex) should just be dangerous to anyone to use, no matter their skill.

I've had to wonder about people saying their characters are so good, a glitch / botch shouldn't come into it. I mean, I've seem Olympic-level divers crack their heads on diving boards, Olympic-level runners suddenly blow out their Achilles's tendon, and a mixed martial artist shatter his shin blocking the kick of another mixed martial artist during a fight. To me, those are critical glitches. But even just normal things can be a pain. I've slipped on the staircase running up it, and 'running up a staircase' isn't something that requires a lot of thought normally. Just because you're 'professional' doesn't mean that bad, or just plain annoying, things don't happen to you from time to time.

And, as a GM, I don't think it should be GM fiat to decide when and if an unexpected complication shows up. That's why it's an unexpected complication. The GMs in my world are neutral arbiters... they don't throw in curve balls just for the sake of making things 'interesting'. If I'm doing awesome on a mission that was expected to be hard, so be it, I did awesome. On the other hand, if I screw it badly, that's on my head, too. Glitches make for an interesting curveball, which comes into play not because the GM's wanting to 'tweak' things, but because sometimes crap hits fan, and nobody saw it coming.

Personally, I don't think glitches / critical glitches show up often enough at the higher end, but there's no easy way to fudge that, so I'm willing to keep things where they are.

The glitch/critical-glitch rules are just an example of a bad port from the old system. The old rules were "all 1's = something bad happening" which was perfectly fine, since dice pools were generally smaller. You might be rolling 6 or 7 dice on a task if you're pretty good -- in some instances you'd get some pool dice, but those run out pretty fast (especially in combat if you have a few IPs) and you'd end up pretty often just rolling straight skill for your 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th gunshot (et al). Out of combat you could be pretty okay at something and be rolling 4 or 5 dice. The difficulty was wrapped up in the target number.

In SR4 dice pools tend to effectively be much larger, which makes all 1's and half 1's remarkably unlikely once you get up to the reasonable skill/attribute/modifier range of 10-15 dice.

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I don't get all this griping about glitches and crit glitches and the need to be mollycoddled.
The system is not meant to perfectly emulate something bad happening. There is no underlaying thought of 'this should represent equipment failure' or anything else. It's abstract.
The SR4 glitch system is the first one I like, and I'm playing since SR2. All 1s happened to me in exactly 2 memorable cases during SR2 and SR3 and both were skills at the level of 2.
Right now, glitches happen. Critical glitches happen, too, but not very often and you can edge out if you don't want to accept them, in both cases. The system works fine, IMO.

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Yes. We all know by now that you have trust issues.
You're partly right, but the sheer range of possible glitches makes the request absurd.

I remember the rolemaster tables *snrk*

Play a Roguelike, then.

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What else would you call your _constant_ innuendo that the GM is out to get you?

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If that's all you can think of, that's what's called 'trust issues' in polite circles, 'paranoia' elsewhere.
And you seem to have that position most (if not all) of the time.

As I've said elsewhere: You let the guy run your entire game, trust him to do the details right, too. If he's doing it wrong, call him on it but stop with the constant whining about the evil GM pulling your strings and twirling his mustache.

The rules do not need to represent persecuted gamers.

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Manifest Destiny?

So the evil people are 'the others' (who?), and there you are, riding in to save all those potentially fucked-over players unsolicitedly, blunderingly and without getting anything done. Congratulations.


You know we differ on that, and why. Let's leave it at that.


Team America.

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