Removing the Dodge Step from SR4

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Korgan0
Duke
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Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2012 7:42 am

Removing the Dodge Step from SR4

Post by Korgan0 »

So, I'm starting up a shadowrun campaign soon over skype/roll20, and in order to make everything simpler and easier for the purposes of writing macros, I was wondering how easy it would be to straight-up remove the dodge roll from the shadowrun combat system, leaving only attack and soak. My knowledge of the mathematical intricacies of dicepool systems is fairly limited, so I want to run it by you guys first.

Specifically, the idea I had was to convert every three dice the opponent would roll normally into one point of threshold that the attacker then has to overcome, rounding normally, with net hits beyond that being applied as per normal. So, if you're shooting a mook with a Reaction of 3, that's threshold 1. If that mook takes Full Defense with a Dodge of 3, the threshold becomes two. Mathematically speaking, does this work out the way i think it does? Combat obviously becomes a lot less random, but I wonder how important that is. Any insight would be much appreciated.
Blade
Knight-Baron
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Location: France

Post by Blade »

It should be mostly ok. The problems I can see are:

- Taking cover, movement into account: in SR4A they're bonuses from +1 to +4 to the dodge roll. They might force you to recompute the dodge score every time to take them into account. Same for dodge bonuses from spells/powers/tech

- Same for multiple dodge penalties: in SR4, each dodge after the first one has -1 die.

- The loss of randomness isn't much of a problem. In extreme cases some characters might get completely safe instead of "very unlikely to be hit", which some players find totally unacceptable but other will accept without any problem.
Korgan0
Duke
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Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2012 7:42 am

Post by Korgan0 »

There's wide bursts on top cover and movement and dodge penalties, as well. Do you think some could be removed?
Blade
Knight-Baron
Posts: 663
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2011 2:42 pm
Location: France

Post by Blade »

Removing them would be detrimental: it doesn't seem a good idea to ignore cover, movement and wide bursts.

I guess you could include them in the attack roll instead. It does have some side-effects, but unless I'm missing something, nothing game-breaking.
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