On a critical glitch, it blows up in your face.

I'm not very good at math, but it seems to me that if ten soldiers each fired off a hundred rounds in combat in a 24-hr period, you could expect (total guess) 50% of them to be wounded by their own defective gear.Which I'm going to guess is hard on morale, if nothing else.

Why would I issue this to my personnel?

Because it kills armored people better than APDS ammo for some mysterious reason?

I'm not arguing that it isn't dumb, it's just dumb two ways. Contrary to popular belief, that does not necessarily equal "balanced".

~J

BECAUSE THEY ARE ELITE SOILDERS!

Sir, yes Sir!

ELITE SOILDERS DO NOT GO CRYING TO MOMMIES EVERY TIME THEIR GUN BLOWS UP IN THEIR FACE, BECAUSE ELITE SOILDERS CAN TAKE IT!

SIR, we will frag them or die trying, SIR!

YOU WILL NOT DIE ON ME MAGGOT!!!

Maybe APDS aren't such bad ammo after all?


EDIT: Critical Glitches become a lot rarer once you reach 10ish dice. It is only when tossing 3 or 4 dice that you'd be anywhere close to the number injured that you are talking about.

Blakkie: You can't expect one critical glitch in 100 rolls for 50% of rollers?

Odds of a glitch on:

1 die: 16.667%
2 dice: 30.556% (can someone double-check that? It makes sense that you've now got the same number of 1s needed to glitch but increased dice on which to make those 1s, but it's still a weird jump)
3 dice: 7.407%
4 dice: 13.194%… waitaminute, it's time to reread those glitch rules. More when I figure out if this is all fatally flawed or not.

~J

That isn't right for Critical Glitch. Except for when rolling 1 die. Where every Glitch is Critical.

Why isn't it right? Not saying it isn't, but I'm still looking for the error.

~J

Those look like the odds for Glitch. Not Critical Glitch (no successes). The lower your number of dice the closer the two are, but by 3 dice they start separating. Hang on, i'll work out the numbers.

Someone with good search-fu can look around because i know someone posted a table about this.

Seriously, how often is a critical glitch even going to happen if you have more than reasonable skill in the weapon? Let's give the character completely average stats: Agility 3 and Pistols 3, with no gun enhancements or situational modifiers. He rolls six dice. To get a critical glitch, three dice must come up as 1's. The last three dice can be a 1, 2, 3, or 4 each (a single 5 or 6 would make it a hit, thus only a simply glitch).

1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 4/6 * 4/6 * 4/6 = 64/46656

That's a 0.137% chance of rolling a critical glitch for a completely average character, or 1 in 729 rolls. That's along the lines of the optional D&D rule "critical kill" (roll two 20's on a 1d20, then a threat confirmation for an automatic kill, or 1/20 * 1/20 * 10/20 (average AC) = 1/800)).

I hope my math's right (never been very good at it), but in all honesty critical glitches seem to be a vague mishap that only plagues characters or enemies doing something they really don't know how to do.

Even with just two dice:
1/6 * 4/6 = 4/36, or 11.111% of a critical glitch per roll.

As for your example of "10 soldiers firing off 100 rounds each", assuming they're NOT using burst/full-auto (significantly less chance because of less die rolls, but definitely greater potential damage) and each have an average roll of 6 dice, then on average about 1.37 (1000 rounds * 0.00137, or 1000/729) of them would suffer a critical glitch at some point. And even then, there's always Edge points to negate that.

Ok, with 2 dice:
Critical Glich = 7/36 = 19.4%
Glich (not Critical) = 2/36 = 5.5%

With 3 dice:
Critical Glich = 10/216 = 4.6%
Glich (not Critical) = 6/216 = 2.8%

EDIT: Kagetenshi, see up here with the 3 dice. If you add the percentages together for the total number of Glitches that comes to 7.4%.

Four dice will see a small rise, but you'll see quite a drop off at 5 dice.

EDIT: Veggiesama, you are coming up short on the number of possible Critical Glitches because you are calculating permutations, not combinations. This is a combinations problem.

That is because of the round-off requiring that you actually get more than 1/2 of your dice as 1's when you have an odd number of dice. Once you get higher, say going from 9 to 10, the rise becomes a lot less because the round-off is a much smaller percentage of the whole.

Of course for those higher dice counts it is really going to be the Rush Jobs (both 1's and 2's count towards Glitching) on Extended tests where the real chance of Glitches occuring are.

Soldiers roll 8 dice with their guns. If they have no bonuses or penalties to worry about, they actually fail just (2/3)^8 = 3.9% of the time. And of those failures, only 7459 out of 65,536 are glitches. Which means that an 8 die soldier has only a 0.44% chance of glitching on each shot.

So if ten guys shot 10 shots each, you have a 64% chance of no cookoffs at all.

Now, a definate weirdness in the system is that your chances of cookoffs go up sharply if you are firing at enemies who are far away. And that's pretty weird all around.

-Frank

I posted a glitch and critical glitch table over on rpg.net here. It covers 2-12 dice at thresholds 1-4. It's not calculated values, but it's estimated based on 100,000 dice rolls. That should be close enough for government work.

Anyways, as far as critical glitch frequency goes -- it's less than 1% chance once you hit 7 dice. Assuming elite troops at 10 dice in their pools, the chance is 0.1%.

So, if your troopers are run of the mill joes, tossing 6 dice, at 100 attacks each, yes, it's likely that most of them will have blown up.

If your troopers are elite, tossing 10 dice each, then under the same conditions, about 10 of them have their guns blow up.

For a Streetsam, with a 5 agility, a 4 relevant skill, and a SL, he's throwing 11 dice. The odds of him hitting a critical glitch are less than 0.1%. Unless your dice hate you, or your at some serious dice penalties, you're pretty safe using EX.

never mind

Well then nevermind this too.

heh, i missread the post i was commenting on and deleted my post so...

You know, even if you are right about the soldier firing 100 times over a 24 hours period...

Would you really want to do 100 rolls for each and every soldier?!

Maybe the system as some lack, but you gotta roleplay it. If they are experienced soldiers they'll get trough. If they enter combat with some of you PC that's a different story, but even then i guess there is no chance to fire 100 times in a firefight(100 bullets yes, 100 times to pull the trigger... no way).

It's a situation that should not happen in a roleplaying game isn't it? But i agree that maybe, in the more realistically point of view that's a lack. i still think that those rule cover situation(combat, social, action-pack or stealthy) that you wanna tell as a story and need to get done with some roll on the behalf of the player and that's were the dice rolling mechanics is integrated in the story.

Even in ADnD an army of Orcs with a 100 archers(for example) as a fair chance to score many 20 on the hit roll. I prefer to split the opposition in small group (lets say 25 per group) and do 4 rolls and keep the story going. Of course i can do 100 rolls and i can even calculate the result over a 24 hours periods and be amaze at how much critical hit or miss. But then again...

I guess if i do that i should instead become a regular Dumpshocker as i already am!

Simply don't do glitches unless they are appropriate. The same thing happened in SR3 with the "rule of one". If for some reason the character is using a low number of dice the odds of a critical failure become unacceptably high.

Here's an additional thought for ammo though......

Under SR4 Rules the odds of your ammo blowing up in your face while shooting at a target behind partial cover in poor light is significantly better than if shooting at a stationary target in broad daylight at close range.

heh, the basic problem of applying negativ dice on a test where something may blow up. the logic just dont fits.

a simple rewrite is to say that the gm may have the ammo blow up if he feels like it fitting the story at that time. but it should not happen 100% of the time a gun is loading with ex ammo and a critical glitch happens while firing said gun.

The biggest problem I am seeing with most of sr4 right now is that there are to many instances where the GM has to say 'no that doesn't make sense so we wont do that".

problem is that a great physics simulation isnt allways equal to a great story.

want ot have tables that tell you want to do for whatever small change in dice outcomes? go play some rolemaster variant

I just said, "EX-EX is not very well thought out in my opinion". So I kept the +2 Damage and dropped the AP to -1. The "standard" Explosive round I dropped the Penetration to 0.

Long story short.
If you don't like it, houserule it!

Can't edge negate a critical glitch? If you've got an "average" edge of 3, then your hundred soldiers would have a hard time blowing their guns up. On the other hand, maybe that's the reason we issue regular ammo to people even though EX is totally superior - regular ammo doesn't blow up your own grunts.

On the whole "GM has to make the call" type of situation - I wonder which is better: a system where it's obvious that the GM has to do a lot of patchwork, or a comprehensive system where the GM never quite knows when to patch or not. SR4 clearly has some places that need GM intervention in order to survive. Hero system has those, too, but the game is so well defined it's hard to know when they are.

I see a problem rivaling that one: People saying that doesn't suit my sensibilities, so it has to be house ruled.

Well, Blakkie, I don't know if that's a problem with the game or with the fact that it's not the game folk are used to. Seems like any new edition gets similar treatment.

Love the Jayne quote, by the way, finished that episode just now.

That's definitely also an awesome quote. I love how they worked it in there twice.

fine blakie explain why the rounds are more likely to blow up at nighttime

Maybe it's just Murphy's Law at work. Your gun never jams on a firing range, just like your car never makes that noise when it's around a mechanic.

Your gun never jams on the firing range because you aren't dragging your ass through the mud and the grit and the blood while spending a good deal more of your time thinking about how to avoid having your head splatter like a ripe melon falling of the back off a truck rather than how to keep your weapon clean.

Glitches and other critical failure systems are generally badly implemented, and usually a bad fucking idea in the first place.

Critical failures always penalize the PCs a lot more than the opposition, because it's the player characters that make the vast majority of checks in any campaign.

They also tend to lead mainly to two things, in my experience: slapstick, and random character injury, neither of which is something I've ever wanted in any games I've played. (never played Toon or Feng Shui, I imagine they'd fit right in there, or in any number of other more light-hearted games)

This is probably because in all SR games I've played, enough things tend to go wrong on a run (often in embarassing ways) and there are sufficiently serious consequences for failing non-critically, that I'd stab in the neck any GM who decided we needed to start failing more in new and amusing ways to spice things up. A runner's life includes plenty of ways to get fucked over as it is.

its just restating murphy with more words...