I know, and were I editing a single post, from a single person I probably would've done so. Not so with this many different posters.

How many posters could a poster post if a poster couldn't post posts???

Okay... it's late

Uh? We have no policy about that here. If it keeps conversations better focused, I don't see a good reason not to make multiple posts as opposed to one mamoth one.

Um, can you explain what you're saying here? My idea was that the number of dice in a dice pool is raised or lowered solely by that person's actions, attributes and skills and is spent either on the test itself or on optional things like calling shots. Basically the dice pool rolls together all the things the player has control over. If the character doesn't have any dice left in his pool to actually use on the test itself, then he'll just have to not spend all those dice doing other things; the GM isn't going to be able to take away dice except by the indirect method of taking away gear or something. The GM is responsible for naming the Threshold Number; the player is responsible for his dice pool, and bonus dice for a test are determined by gear and other such things. Or did I completely miss what you were saying?

Um, except that this is actually wrong. Read the spell description again, pg. 194; Increase Reflexes, like Increase Reaction, is a Mana spell and does not stack with any other increase to Initiative.

I have read it Eyeless ... I'm not increasing Reflexive part of Initiative, I'm increasing Reaction which is a part of overall initiative. I remember this discussion from back in the days when M&M was in playtest as was MitS for that matter. This is one that unless someone changed something I haven't found in an Errata I'm pretty sure I'm right with.

And fistandantilus3.0 has the gist of my idea. Especially since that hoping the Players get to have final control over ANY game mechanic is unexpected hopeless pipedream during the course of immediate game play.

Edit: Eep! Damn you, Adam, and your 1337 posting skillz!

Really? So your GM routinely denies your use of Combat Pool in a 3e game, and plays with your skill roll by taking away dice or adding dice as he sees fit for no good reason? Well then, I guess you have a valid concern. Tell me, how often does your GM reduce the number of dice you roll in a test to zero in your games, rather than just altering the TN?

Also I like Sunshine's idea for defaulting.

You could also see the described situation as a loss of line of Sight for a gunner of low skill, as a better Character would know, by training or "talent" how to get into a better position. IMO he should still get the possibillity to take "Supression Fire" or "Cover Fire" to improve chances for team mates, but as low skill reflects a low level of competence, he may not be able to make a hit without spending Karma Pool as sort of "Beginners Luck" or "Hero Factor" (hoping there is some thing like KP in the 4th Edition).

"Any why not?" Because I don't want a single roll of a single die to decide much of anything. Maybe you like losing a character you spent several hours creating and potentially several years playing to a single unlucky toss of a d20, but I know I don't. Simple fact: the more dice you roll, the more likely you are to get some sort of "average" result. I like rolling dice, not only because great big handfulls of clattering plastic cubes is a sound I find pleasant, but because the more dice I roll, the less random a game becomes, statistically. Actions become a little more predictable, consquences are easier to understand, and generally speaking my character sheet and my decisions matter more than dumb stupid luck.

Nit picky nitpick; with a 5/7 in your chosen shotgun, your adept power can only be +5 to shotguns. You're still ending up with 12 dice basic pool after the fact, of course, but...anyways -- with full Combat Pool boosting, you're still looking at 19 dice. Okay, anyways.. Now, ask yourself how often this character (or any other character with 12 base dice that you've got at your gaming table) is really going to be sinking their full Combat Pool into an attack. You say "you have to roll 20 dice!!!!" like it happens every time someone rolls dice. I say 10-12 is a much more reasonable and likely and common number of dice to see on a starting character. If you're going to complain about a systems core mechanic, why complain about the most min/maxed and specialized example of a "core mechanic" you can find? Why not complain about what you're likely to see?

And, again -- boo hoo. Why not enjoy a game where you can roll 20 dice? If your shotgun adept has 20 dice to sling around, that means his odds are very very very good of succeeding on a basic shotgun-related skill check, right? Compare that to the most specialized longbow-wielding guy you can make in D&D (for instance). You've got a good elven dex, a fighter's starting BaB, weapon focus, point blank shot, and enough money for a good bow. You're looking at (if someone's 30 feet away or less) a total of +9 to your attack roll, with an uber specialized character. That's still got very good odds of missing against anyone with reasonable armor and a decent dex (nevermind cover or longer range shots). It has good odds of missing because it's a single die mechanic, wherein the fickle whim of a bouncing, rolling, twenty-sided chunk of plastic determines what happens far more than the in-character bonuses, especially at lower levels. Assume this imaginary character is shooting against someone just like himself, and has on a chainmail shirt (or similar) -- it's easy to get that difficulty to hit up to an 18, isn't it? "Hey look, you've got even odds of hitting, with this super-specialized Legolas wannabe that's firing under optimal conditions."

More dice generates more certainty. Take that "even odds" of hitting with that other game's most specialized starting character that's focused on ranged combat, and compare it to this 19-die (which can be higher) shotgun adept starting character. Have this character shoot at someone inside 30 feet under the same lighting conditions as that D&D archer. See how high the TN needs to be, in order for you to come up with just a 50% hit chance.

See what I'm getting at?

"Dodge" is optional. If you've been playing Shadowrun since '89, I'd expect you to realize that (a) players don't always have the combat pool to dodge every incoming attack, and (b) sometimes it's better to just spend the combat pool as a bonus to soak, instead, meaning that © you don't always have a dodge test to make.

For the most part, a basic attack will have "roll to hit," followed by "roll to soak." I'm sorry if the basic d6 mechanic is so complicated for you that that significantly slows gameplay down, compared to "roll to hit," and "roll damage."

Y'know what bothers me? The common perception amongst Shadowrun players that everyone but them forgets TN mods. An awful lot of snobbish GM's like to brag about how high their TNs always are, and then imply that other GM's don't make the cut, because sometimes their players have low TNs. They like to talk about how easy it is for an everyday TN to be up in the double digits, and how common an occurence that is. They like to toss on something at the end of that post, about how maybe in your game everything happens in broad daylight and out in the open, blah blah blah.

Give Shadowrun players some fucking credit, when you're supposedly making up some "generic example" to show what an "average TN" looks like.

Who has a smartlink-2 and no cyberoptics or other vision enhancements? Don't say "mages," either, or I'll just ask what the mage is doing with a smartlink-2 and a hard on to shoot someone instead of cast a spell at them. I don't recall a single situation wherein my street sammie has been looking at more than a +1 or +2 visibility modifier for his shooting attacks, and that's without Ultrasound vision (which I just never got around to purchasing). It's not very hard for adepts or street sammies (and in many situations, even just normal metahumans) to ignore almost every single vision modifier in the game. Look at the chart. Remember that you use the best available modifier if you have more than one vision mode available to you. Remember how that chart is modified further by Eyelight cyberoptics. It's not difficult at all for that +6 TN you just applied for it being dark and rainy to be almost completely nullified. Don't act like an "average" Shadowrunner hasn't got access to stuff that takes away vision mods.

Secondarily -- why are you shooting at someone in cover, in this hypothetical? Is it because someone spends all day huddled half behind a wall? Is it because something just spooked this unnamed, faceless, NPC? What spooked him? Maybe an attack against him where he didn't have that +4 cover mod? Maybe a shot that killed his buddy (who didn't have a +4 cover mod)? Maybe he just succeeded in a perception roll (hey, wait, that'd be tricky with all these vision mods you like to brag about) and beat the players in initiative (hahahahaha) to use his first action to run to cover.

Why do GMs insist on pretending their players always and only shoot at targets that are in cover? Do your players never surprise anyone? Never act from darkness and ambush any body? Do they whistle a little tune everywhere they go, so that every NPC they're likely to have to shoot goes scurrying to cover and then waits for them to arrive? Are they too stupid to get their shots off early in a fight (when your average PC's init will roll over your average NPC's init, every time) before their opponents have had a chance to move to cover?

And why does "opponent in cover, +4 TN" always seem to be everyone's idea of an "average" fucking TN? Really?

But, fine. For the sake of argument, we'll say you've got a guy in cover. Base TN 4, +4 cover. We'll even say that somehow someone's put together a street sammie or adept without the vision mods necessary to penetrate your low-light and rain conditions, so we'll give another +1 for that. Oh no! TN 9! Subtract 2 for the smartlink, and voila -- TN 7.

You look for 6's, you mark them as successes. Golly, this sure is a tough game mechanic. I mean, you've got to rely on each player being smart enough to remember their visibility modifiers (scratch paper sure is tough to come by), and...hey, wow, that's really about it, huh? In much the same way most games require a player keeps track of their bonuses to hit or armor or what-have-you, in Shadowrun each player needs their own little copy of the TN modifiers for visibility, needs to be smart enough to know how to read it...and, yeah. That's really about half the work, right there.

If you go out of your way to try and set up improbably high TNs for your poor players to try and overcome, you're probably spending more time tallying up TN mods than you are rolling dice -- so why are you complaining about the die mechanic?

But, allright. The "I quote you, you quote me," back and forth crap gets a little tired after a little while. I'm not going to quote the rest of your post, I'm going to summarize.

This whole tangent started because you said it was so hard to have to sometimes pick up and reroll 6's. If you can't spot a 6 on a d6, are you sure you should be bragging about the decades and decades you've been playing RPGs? You say you've wargamed but that you hate rolling lots of dice, you imply heavily you have trouble keeping track of die rolls (I mean, you said it was hard to pick out the 6's, right?), but that you've been playing Shadowrun since day one. You say you've played "three figures" of RPGs yet you also have made it clear you have some perverse aversion to rolling dice (and that out of all those three figures of supposed RPGs, you still find Shadowrun's core mechanic complicated...

Are you really sure you can blame Shadowrun, at this point? And not something else? I really don't know what games you've been playing that have a core mechanic that is, at heart, all that much easier than Shadowruns. I don't know how you've been playing them (since you apparently hate rolling dice), I don't know how you've been enjoying them (since reading dice is hard and time-consuming for you), and I don't know how you've been doing it for almost twenty years (since you seem to exclusively enjoy games where a single toss of a single die can end the campaign).

As I said in the post you are quoting, ok so let's make a rule for that. And because some people don't want this rule, if it's not SR shaking, let's make it optionnal. No need to add multiple roll to achieve that effect.

I don't, but I like even less if that would be impossible, because without danger there is no thrill.
But that's not the point here, my point is SR1~3 is over"complex", more than it has to be. So my point of view is: "Why making the mechanic simpler ?", "Answer: "because we can without altering the simulation or the flavor.".

If I remember correctly of my highschool, not in SR (without dices added to each other). Dices have no memory, if you roll 20d6, because the first 19 one get 1 doesn't mean the last dice has less chance to get a 1.

No we are getting somewhere. You and some others in this thread disagreeing with me like dices rolling. I don't; but on the other hand I "don't don't". For me a dice roll is a tool to add randomness, and to help the GM make decisions about what happens (the Amber DRPG GM know what am I talking about, no dice concept may be fun but it's a enormous burden on the GM shoulders). It should get the job done, so we can play and roleplay, not be the main attraction.

I agree with you on the sentiment. I think, in a lot of RPG and system, there is too much randomness. I mean, when a hostages SWAT sniper take a shot at someone, he know he will hit (yes Murphy can happen, but not 1/20, not even 1/100).
I disagree on the way you want to use to achieve that. Because I think the statistic make you wrong, and it is not needed. My (high, very high) hopes are a simple and fast core mechanic and dice rolling system that give more control to the player's decisions and the character's skills (in the english sense, not the rpg one) than to a dice roll.

Pretty often, especially since SR3 dodge rules (that has been alreaydi debated elsewhere on Dumpshock), and pretty often with newbies, or with NPC with newbie or tired GM. Still, not every attack, I agree. But several times on a gaming day, and it's too much in my opinion.

Because I want to play Shadowrun... I want the adventures and shadowruns of neo-anarchist in a cyberpunk 6th world dark sprawl, or whatever. I don't want to play yam's, yatse, or 421 .

Again, I don't think so when you don't add them, not as much as you are saying. Take Fusion system, it's scale is very close to the SR universe, and it has a nice gaussian curve. You want to add more certainty ? Add a rule where someon can substract, let's say 3 from his "pool", and roll another dice.

Can't compare that. First, SR3 starting character are fucking badass one, very experienced. D&D starting character are very close to the young peasant that doesn't know anything. A starting SR3 character ir more likely to be 8 or 10 level. And most important, D&D universe is not based on reality, SR universe is (from my point of view).

It is. Not by much, but it is. And the most troubling point, it's this thing is all over the old rules. The social rules are pretty much all different, the decking one are again, the rigging one are once more, and so on and so on and so on.

Ok, that would bother me too. Haven't read that in this thread yet.

I talk about characters, not players. Because my example would apply to a NPC street cop as well for example.

I have one at my table right now. Smartlink is easy on external mode, some don't want/can't go under the streetdoc' laser.
But ok, give someone nocturne vision. My example TN is still 11.

You still have to choose one.

Didn't say that. I said this was a classical example, to be average you need to know the PC, the campaign, and so average analysis.

No, I said it was heavy to handle, not ergonomic, to have: this, and this, and that. The all dice roll mechanic overall, compared to what exist and work quite well.

"Day" two, SR hit the shelves in '89. But on the rest of the paragraph, is you are going to get personnaly hostile, do it on yourself I have better things to do.

I made my point, some will agree, some will disagree, none of this have any impact on SR4 core roll mechanic so I leave it there. Have fun with yourself.

The problem here seems to be you want to have your cake and eat it too. You want a simple system that requires rolling only one die, but you want a good Gaussian curve and decently accurate simulation of "real-world" probabilities. Unfortunately due to the nature of dice you really can't do that; in order to have a "good" distribution of results you have to roll more dice.

Ellery makes a chart of dice probabilities under the new system here. The relevant conclusion is: though yes the Gambler's Fallacy still holds true for each individual die, the fact that you're rolling several dice at the same time still smoothes out the probability distribution.

Again, see my point about having your cake and eating it too. As much as I would love to have a simple dice mechanic that gives a good distribution, it just doesn't seem possible to lower the number of dice to a low fixed number without destroying the probabilities.

At high D&D levels the analysis becomes more complex. However, the fact remains that the d20 system creates an extremely limited probability curve, with far too much granularity at the low and high ends to really accurately model anything but a high fantasy situation. "Realistic" systems require a more fine-grainned dice systems, particularly at the low and high ends, and this pretty much requires more dice to achieve.

Well, first off you can actually get vision enhancements put into smartgoggles; it just costs a little more. Check out the rules for adding options to binoculars and goggles and the like (I think under "Surveilance Measures") in the core book.

Secondly, your example TN is actually more pathological than you seem to realise. The TN *still* assumes that your target is 1) Outside in bad weather, 2) aware of the attacker and actively avoiding him, and 3) apparently vision mods on the attacker only give a total of -1 to the TN out of a total +6 due to visibility. I count a TN of about 6-7 for your case, and contend that the average case is somewhere around there.

All of that is beside the point when discussing the new system, however. Under the new system TNs don't get higher (or lower) than 5, so the only reason to reroll would be if we implement the New Rule of 6 (nRo6) as discussed in this and other threads. I still contend that it's not a problem, however, because since you're not adding dice together the math is really simple. All you have to do is count the number of fives and sixes and compare to a Threshold Number (ThN), which I'd say is actually easier than all the adding and subtracting of dice rolls and modifiers that D&D makes you do.

Of course I do. Don't you ?

Nope, I 've clearly stated what I would like and that's on the list. That's Critias talking here, trying to put word into my mouth.
I want the best system possible, fast simple and yet powerful. I think the SR1~3 system is far from it, and I welcome the changes of SR4 on that point, as it has been annouced. For the specifics likes or dislikes, I will wait until I read it.

Well in opposite of that, you have the Chaosium % system, one dice (somwhat). It's flat probability, but yet it's very simple to use, explain, and yet powerful. So I'm more interested in concrete day to day use than any theory. My point is, I have no

True indeed. But why are we talking about it ? Because we don't want the power to be in the hand of dices, but in the hands of player's strategies, ideas, and in the hands of the character skills.
I'm not sure at all that rolling 15 dices is necessary to do what I just described.

You mean that the Fusion system don't work ? The Chaosium generic system don't ? GURPS (I don't like it, but a lot does) don't ? And countless others ?

Well, at high level it become quite near impossible, because it's an insanely complex shifumi (aka dices matter less, but in a situation that is not remotely comparable to SR, and thank god it is, a SR d20 System would be awfull).

Agreed about the d20 System. I do think there is room to work with, with broad TN range to model something quite similar to auto-success and auto-failure.
"Realistic" systems require a more fine-grainned dice systems, particularly at the low and high ends, and this pretty much requires more dice to achieve.

1- yes, 2- no cover has nothing to do with the target actions vs shooter, it has all to do with line of fire, 3- if you give the best of tech to the shooter it's still TN 8 if I'm not wrong, wich is over 7 and so the dice counting, setting apart, re-rolling.
I have no issue with this, what I was saying is TN>7 can be quite commons, and so you have basically to do 2 dices roll instead of one in a system that already requires several.

Agreed, and I've already said that what we know of the SR4 system is an improvement of the SR1~3 system. Maybe (again, maybe) not as much as I would have expected, but still very nice and welcomed.

Ah, well then I misread your posts then. I guess there's really nothing to debate here.

Ah, well in that case we *do* have an argument.

I contend that it's still easier to roll against a fixed TN and reroll sixes than it is to add up dice to make a good Gaussian curve. Personally I don't have any problem physically rolling large numbers of dice, particularly if you use those nifty mini-d6s that come with Star Wars TCG packs and such. Generally what takes so long in mist dice games is adding dice rolls together with modifiers and coming up with the final number result. Cetainly you and I have no problems adding, say, 15+17 (d20+17) in an instant, but some people have trouble with that sort of thing. Weapon damage rolls in that other game can get really bad when it comes to adding them up; I once saw someone at 12th level do something like d4+4d6+2d8+d10+3 damage with one weapon hit; that took a long time, and it was worse when he critted and we had to figure out which dice and mods were doubled.

Rerolling 6s under the proposed SR4 system though is much easier; all you need to do is count. Say you have to roll 18 d6. You roll it, and you count three 6s and four 5s, an above-average result. So reroll 3 dice, current success total is 7. Of those three rerolled dice one is a 5, one is a 6. So reroll 1 dice, current total is 9. That last die comes up a 5 (you're rolling damn hot!), current total is 10. Compare to threshold number and you're done.

Note that through that entire process you only need to have one running total in your head, and the most complex math you have to do is incrementing, counting up the number of successes. No addition of double-or triple-digit numbers, no multipliers. Just counting. I'm not sure how the math can get any easier.