A friend said he's making a Dwarf Adept with some power that adds to his body for soaking and that it bypasses the normal modified maximum? Is this right? What's the power called?

Does it actually work that way allowing you to have 40-50 soak?

Only if you are an Initate Grade 34-44.

So I can safely assume that if he's saying he has 40 dice with his body plus ballistic armor he's full of it?

He could also just be using hyperbole (just wanted to use that word) and saying "I'm rolling like 40 dice" when he really means "I'm rolling 15 dice and that seems like a lot to me." Have you seen his sheet?

For one point of Karma Edge, he can reroll any non-successes. In Hahnsoo's example, that would mean an average reroll of 22. Total dice rolled on average would be 55; total expected number of hits would be 18 (11 + 7).

You mean for a point of edge. Yes if he has maxed edge and spends it on every roll he can indeed be rolling 40 dice. Shudder now...

But, you can only throw edge once per roll.

Yeah, the trick is to spend it before and take advantage of exploding dice and the +7.

~J

Ach... forgot about the 'only 1 point' rule. I still think that spending a point after the roll makes more sense than before the rule, especially if your Edge is significantly smaller than the potential number of misses. In the case of 33 dice, spending a point pre-roll to get the Rule of 6 working gives you

33 (base test) + 6 (# of 6's on base test) + 1 (# of 6's on reroll) = 40 dice

on average. Compare this with one point spent for the reroll giving you 55 dice in my original example. Granted, this is an extreme example, but I think it scales down fairly well. Consider Spellcasting with Edge-3, Magic-6 and Spellcasting(Combat) - 3. That one point of Edge will give you either:

12 (base roll) + 2 (re-rolls) = 14 dice on average if spent before the roll
or
9 (base roll) + 6 (re-rolled non-hits) = 15 dice on average if spent after the roll

In addition, waiting until after the rule doesn't limit your options as much as spending it before hand. If your base roll gives you a Critical Success by itself, you won't have wasted any Edge. Conversely, should you get a Critical Glitch, you'll still be able to whip out the Edge and save your hoop.

The only thing the Ro6 has going for it anymore is if your threshold is greater than your dice pool, IMHO.

You also get +6 dice to your roll in addition to the explody goodness, so while it's still a bad call in the first example it soundly trounces the reroll in the second (20 dice average instead of 15).

Granted that's with a high edge. As edge goes to 1 the value of the reroll increases.

~J

When you have the rule of six going, every one of your dice are worth 2/5 of a success on average. When you reroll all failures, all of your dice are worth 5/9 of a success on average.

That means that rerolling failures is worth 7/45 of a success more per die in your test. But ass has been noted, getting the rule of six comes with (your edge) in extra dice. So if 2/5 of your edge is more than 7/45 of your whole dice pool, you should add in an edge before you roll. If not, then you should wait and reroll failures.

Of course, this assumes that you are going to spend Edge. Waiting to reroll failures afterwards has the advantage that you can wait and see if you are getting the successes you need before you worry about it - and that's a literally incalcuable advantage.

To see this in action, if you are rolling 33 dice on a damage resistance test, rerolling failures is going to get you an average of 5 and 2/15 more successes than is getting the rule of six. In order to pull ahead, you'd need to have an Edge of 13.

The breakpoint for when you'd be better off spending edge before the roll when you have an edge of 6 is 15 dice. If you are rolling less than 15 dice you should spend the edge to add dice and get the rule of six. If you are rolling more, you should wait and reroll failures (if you need to). The breakpoint for an edge of 5 is 12 dice. The breakpoint for an edge of 4 is 10. The breakpoint for an edge of 3 is 7. For an Edge of 2 it's 5. And for an Edge of 1, you should only buy that die if your starting pool is 1 or 2.

You should never spend an edge to negate a glitch or critical glitch, since you can jolly well reroll all the failures for the same cost which will in almost all circumstances negate the glitch anyway.

-Frank

Oh wow. I thought they'd explicitly forbidden that, but no…

Swiss cheese.

~J

Thanks for taking the time to do the full math, Frank. I'm sure every SR4 munchkin is going to sleep with your little Edge Breakpoint table under their pillow tonight .

I definitely appreciate it from the bottom of my little munchkin heart.

This is insane... I just gotta know how the poll of "liking" SR4 is showing a huge majority in favour of the new system.

I am writing up my own custom combat system, I am dissatisfied with SR3/SR4.

I do like a lot of SR4, though I admit. I dunno, at the core it does not feel much better to me though, equal at best.

EDIT: But now I feel like I am thread-jacking into the SR3 vs. SR4 match, so ignore me and I will post more in the other topics.