Do 6s explode in SR4

There seems to be an assumption that a roll of a 6 will mean something special in SR4. Is there a developer comment I missed. Or is this just wild speculation.

Edward

I don't think there has been any confirmation.

Personally I just HOPE that they explode. Exploding dice increase the range of outcomes. Flatten the probability curves you could say. That generally favours the underdog. Personally a key thing for me in SR is traditionally the underdog is dangerous. Exploding dice would help keep that feel.

Hope they'll keep it. Best system with exploding dices is still Earthdawn, after all. Nothing mire exiciting than rolling a 67 with a d8 and d6.

The system to me so far seems to not let them dice explode. After all you got a fixed 5 as targetnumber, If I have understood the bloq correctly.

And if Iam right, thank the maker for that gamemechanics change (imo).
Nothing realy annoys me more than having a skill of 8 somewhere, rolling vs. Targetnumber 15 and getting (luckily) one success, while a very lucky person with skill 4 gets 2 success.
The system, as I see it, seems to lay more emphasis on how high ones skill is.

As I understand it, you would roll your skill + attribute die (ie 5 skill + 3 attribute) against the target number 5, but the Gamemaster decides, how many rolled 5'er you'll need to get a success. The more difficult the the task, the more 5 have to be rolled for a single success.
If so, it opens up the goody 'ole automatic success mechanics, which means one could have equippement, which generate automatic success (immensly valuable in this kinda system, he he). But how the rules in the game will really work, well, we gotta wait and see.

Could be totally wrong though, shrug, rumourland is a wonderfull and free country
Wild guessing as nearly everyone here he he.
Regards
Daniel

When people talk about exploding dice in a system with a fixed target number, they're talking about rerolling 6s as additional dice. You will never roll a 67 again. If you roll four dice and get 3 3 5 6 as your results, you have two successes and roll that 6 again for a chance at one more success (or, i guess, also a chance at getting another success and rolling it again).

There has been no official confirmation or denial of the volatility of 6s that I'm aware of; if anything, I seem to recall a "maybe that's being looked at" post by a freelancer that suggested--well, now that I think about it, I'm not sure that suggests much of anything. Since I am pessimistic by nature, and think exploding 6s would be good, I think it means that 6s don't explode. Your interpretation may vary.

Heh, when I first read the title, I was imagining exploding dice going off like little miniature hand gredades, with shrapnel taking out the whole game store.

I'm in favor of exploding dice (in either context.)

Hey, no exploding dice means SEVERE and DRAMATIC changes in the rules and the system as a whole. Telling the truth, imagine the big picture... Dies are rolled once, so you get 6, it will be 6, and that's it. OK, you roll more dice this time, maybe the underdog still has a chance to be real threat (I made quite an effort mixing ballistics research and gear listing, so much of my equipment list has ENHANCED damage... players are advised to NOT LOOK DOWN on people with light pistols...), but in no way as SR so far.

Telling you the truth, I have no #%#% idea on how the system will work. So far, I'm pretty worried.

Isn't it strange to reroll half of the succes you've made ?
How much roll for a single test ? One, two, three ???

exploding dice make probabillities very hard to calculate as well

Well TBH this wont really matter either way. In or not, at best itll be relegated to that story of "that one time we rolled perception and got 351 and saw the ambush coming before they took off in the chopper because we *smelled* the future!!1!"

Way nwe systems going to ahve to work without some kinda drastic, and I mean drastic, hack and slash to the old "values" for diffferent thigns your gonna get something like this:

A Troll with Strength 10 and Unarmed Combat 5 is in melee and rolls his 15 dice at tn 5, getting 5 successes. A ganger with Strenght 3 and Unarmed 3 rolls his 6 dice and gets 2 successes. Troll splats ganger. If they explode, thats something ballpark like 5.8 successes to 2.7 successes. Troll still splats ganger, altho he does so by a 14% smaller margin.

Thing with exploding is, the chance for any radical change decays pretty drastically each order of events you go into it. But theres not that bad a chance that with a decent number of dice, like the Troll above, (and remember, runners doing the jobs they were built in chargen to do is likely to make events using that number of dice common) that the *first* round of exploding will yeild an additional success or two.

In other words, when youre doing what youre good at, exploding wouldnt uncommonly add 1-2 successes. If youre doing what your crappy at, you might get lucky same as before. Without this mechanic, both situations will still have the same results seomthing like 99 outta 100 times, only it might feel less exciting to roll since theres no chance for something to blow up.

And really, when youre playing shadowrun, who doesnt want more chances for things to blow up!

I do not see a real probleme involved in exploding dices. But I don't think they could be easyly added -in the end of the process- because it will unbalance the rolls who are not in opposition. If they have enough time in playtesting this option in the whole system, it could be just fine.

That is true. Rolls where there is no "other roll" to compare to would get a little tilted in favor of the explodee (lol at being the explodee in a sr game being a good thing, hey its 5am lemme make my joke). And assuming they had that in mind it shouldnt be an issue. You know they could also have 1s explode, any 1 that rolls a 1 again subtracts a success. Rule of 1 and 6 all over again in a new format. In that case it would about balance each other out (slight favor in more success since a 6 could come up a 5 and still help, but were almost splitting hairs at this point). Just a thought.

yes you are quite right !

I think exploding 6's would be unneccesary.

We have a karma pool equivalent, Edge, which I believe will cover the need for extra successes in hard rolls.

One of the main complaints about Shadowrun is that it had a slow system. Many people thought it was slow because of so many dice to roll.
My experience with that is that what's slowing the system is not the number of dice rolled, but the number of dice rolling.

Try the SR4 way, and you'll see that having to only worry about beating only 1 tn, and not having to reroll anything saves you a lot of time. And it *feels* simplier.

In this context, IMO, having exploding dice as a standard rule in SR4 would add unnecessary "complexity" and would slow the system. Which would defeat one of the purpose of the new system.

eh. it can be slow, especially if you're just starting out, but the main problem lies more in figuring out what to roll, not actually rolling it. reducing the number of dice rolled wouldn't help speed things up significantly.

Rolling dices is very long for some players who have a ritual to shake them half a minute before throwing ...

But TMO the trouble was more in SR to know the mods and resolving the action according to the -complex- rules.

Untill now I have said "im gonna wait and see when its done". If they scrap the exploding dice mechanics, I WILL have to say that I dont like the new set up.

Regardless of the actual rules its going to be the most easy house rule ever.

If you get 6 reroll for 5+, if you get 1 reroll for 1. Bam, done.

Statwise youre going to get 1/36 dice as an additional 1, and 1/18 dice as an additional success (a tier 2 explode into a success would only occur once ever 108 dice, after that it gets so not worth mattering, that Im not). So itll give you a little more benefit than penalty, but thats kinda the way the rule of 1 and 6 worked anyhow.

I dont see that the number of dice rolled slow the present system down that much. What slows it down is the calculating of various target numbers, and players spending time on how and where to allocate various pool dice. SR4 seems to have changed this, and it should save a lot of time in combat.
I agree exploding dice does slow it down a little (but with the fixed TN of 5 it will still be faster than how it works now), but the extra time spent rerolling is well worth keeping exploding dice.

The whole point of dice "exploding" is (sorry ive kind of repeated this point in another thread, but i think its more relevant here) :-

Its dark, the team has taken a pounding and are all wounded after an ambush in an alley. The mage and decker are down, and the adept is laughing insanely as blood pours out of his nose ears and mouth...Now the heavily wounded Sami knows the mage who attacked them is hurt but fleeing. Judging by the garbage cans and debris moving around, he must be heavily drained and using the last of his energy to maintain the invisibility spell around him.

Exploding dice: The sami can attempt a shot at him... hes in range, but the modifiers are insane due to light, rain invisibility and wounds.... but the fact is he can ROLEPLAY what his character would do and try and shoot him (and possibly pull it off)

No exploding dice: The sami could still try and make the shot... but the player knows, the GM knows and all the other players know the shot is impossible with the dice he has available.
Kind of takes some of the fun and roleplaying aspect out of the game in my mind. Roleplaying is at its best when you can look back and have memories of when you beat the odds and pulled something out of the bag when the world is against/relying on you.

Our group has never had a problem with this. It's like deciding who to shoot first. By the time it comes around to the player, they know what they're going to do. I'm going to miss you combat pool.

I both liked and hated compbat pools.

It did give the players a chance to have a tactical option in combat deciding how it was going to be spent.

It slowed down my game when I ran it as people ummed and Ahhed about how much to spend on this action.

It also had a few meta gaming effects which kinda annoyed me. Its the last action this round so I will use all my compbat pool knowning I am safe. That kind of thing.

At the end of the day I wont miss the loss of pools much as it removes annoyances and my players can always just preform in character tactical play as opposed to out of character stuff. So they still have flexability.