Shadowrun SR5 lethality house rules

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malak
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Shadowrun SR5 lethality house rules

Post by malak »

Are there any common/good house rules to reduce the lethality of SR5 combat? Rocket launcher tag isn't ideal IMHO.


(While I can appreciate that SR4 is the better rule-set according to the den, most people around here have switched to SR5, and seem to really like the german (Pegasus) editions of the 5e ruleset...)
Last edited by malak on Mon Sep 28, 2015 8:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Aryxbez »

malak wrote:that SR4 is the better rule-set according to the den
It's less "in accordance with the Den" and more, "after having taken a deeper look at this game, able to conclude it is an inferior product to what came before". This is something any other forum that's not eating paste could've come to the conclusion of. Not our fault we actually LOOK at mechanics, and try not commit to rabid fanboyism (I.E we take introspective look into the things we like).

My suggestion would be to 50% back nearly all the damage codes, or use the ones back in SR4 (course that point, should just play SR4). Alternatively, I imagine you could increase the Body/Armor ratings to be more on par with the new increased damage codes. As the designers upped the damage codes, but failed to increase the soak to go with it. You can also add in a "soak" system, kinda like DR, that ideally mathematically counters the increased damage codes (I guess like SR5 Power armor as I've heard, but scaled better).

A United houserule I've heard people use is to not let Grenades "Bounce" damage at all. If you're using pre-made adventures at all, I know the fraggin grenade bouncing rules were REQUIRED for us to not have died (damn shedim, and final boss of the adventure they feel is "balanced" around having a DM-penis character).

Pepper Punch Grenades are super awesome, and resolve combat quickly. If you don't like PC's having those, you could scale back its "Power rating", to around 5? making them effectively useless on two successes (likely as most foes probably have 6 dice to make it happen).

Damage spells suck, my own group used a super secret houserule where successes increased the damage to it making it better. They always blasted for some reason, despite an SMG or whatever does what they're doing but better most likely. Otherwise, much as people will tell you, don't nerf them because people who like SR 5 aren't very savvy with the rules in the first place...
What I find wrong w/ 4th edition: "I want to stab dragons the size of a small keep with skin like supple adamantine and command over time and space to death with my longsword in head to head combat, but I want to be totally within realistic capabilities of a real human being!" --Caedrus mocking 4rries

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Re: Shadowrun SR5 lethality house rules

Post by Korwin »

malak wrote:Are there any common/good house rules to reduce the lethality of SR5 combat? Rocket launcher tag isn't ideal IMHO.


(While I can appreciate that SR4 is the better rule-set according to the den, most people around here have switched to SR5, and seem to really like the german (Pegasus) editions of the 5e ruleset...)
Really?
Red a little the last few days on the german Shadowrun forums and did not get this impression.

Curriously, there seem to be many 3ed Shadowrun Players who skipped 4th and think 5th is an improvement to earlier versions... (my impression)


Edit:
Granted, I red the Shapeshifter thread, about missing Regeneration, dual natured and Allergy Silver.
Last edited by Korwin on Tue Sep 29, 2015 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
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Post by pragma »

I'm curious what your specific concern is because I've found firefights in SR5 don't look much like rocket tag. If you're using gigantic pools then things are obviously more dangerous, and my players and I tend to scale back combat dice pools in favor of more crimey skill sets. But other than sniper rifles I've never seen anything get terribly close to one-shotting a PC.

Grenades, on the other hand, are a tremendous clusterfuck. Reducing grenade DV across the board and abandoning chunky salsa both seem like really good ideas.
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Re: Shadowrun SR5 lethality house rules

Post by malak »

Korwin wrote:Really?
Red a little the last few days on the german Shadowrun forums and did not get this impression.

Curriously, there seem to be many 3ed Shadowrun Players who skipped 4th and think 5th is an improvement to earlier versions... (my impression)
Well, the history of the german versions of SR4 were...problematic. The translation of original SR4 was called 4.01D and included additional rules and stuff that was not in the original. Good or not, this led to a bad initial reception of the ruleset.

Years later, the anniversary edition was released, staying much closer to the original ruleset. But.. the books were really cheaply made and are famous for falling apart after no time.

So I guess it's fair to say that independent of actual rule changes, SR4 was not well received in many german-speaking circles.

SR5 is better in this regard; the book is of reasonably high quality, the translation features much better editing than the original catalyst release and they included errata, but no custom changes.
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Re: Shadowrun SR5 lethality house rules

Post by sandmann »

malak wrote:
Korwin wrote:Really?
Red a little the last few days on the german Shadowrun forums and did not get this impression.

Curriously, there seem to be many 3ed Shadowrun Players who skipped 4th and think 5th is an improvement to earlier versions... (my impression)
Well, the history of the german versions of SR4 were...problematic. The translation of original SR4 was called 4.01D and included additional rules and stuff that was not in the original. Good or not, this led to a bad initial reception of the ruleset.

Years later, the anniversary edition was released, staying much closer to the original ruleset. But.. the books were really cheaply made and are famous for falling apart after no time.

So I guess it's fair to say that independent of actual rule changes, SR4 was not well received in many german-speaking circles.

SR5 is better in this regard; the book is of reasonably high quality, the translation features much better editing than the original catalyst release and they included errata, but no custom changes.
And it is dirt-cheap. The pocket-edition costs 10 bucks. Many people in my gaming circle bought 5th because "hey, its 20 Euro for 300+ hardcover, fullcolor. How bad can it be".
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Post by Dogbert »

The only solution is a roll back to SR 4. It's not even a matter of whether SR5 is crap (though it is), but of genre and design objectives.

Following in the OSR renaissance, SR5 is the neckbeard edition, and so it moved from the Post-Cyberpunk SR4 was in back to the regular Cyberpunk with all its implications, including both Cyberpunk's nihilism and disempowerment mixed with the old school's hard-on for revolving-door massacres.
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Post by silva »

Multiply armor by a factor ? Say, 1.5 ?
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Re: Shadowrun SR5 lethality house rules

Post by Korwin »

malak wrote:
Korwin wrote:Really?
Red a little the last few days on the german Shadowrun forums and did not get this impression.

Curriously, there seem to be many 3ed Shadowrun Players who skipped 4th and think 5th is an improvement to earlier versions... (my impression)
Well, the history of the german versions of SR4 were...problematic. The translation of original SR4 was called 4.01D and included additional rules and stuff that was not in the original. Good or not, this led to a bad initial reception of the ruleset.
Edit: Just noticed 3rd Edition also had the same naming i.e. 3.01D
Years later, the anniversary edition was released, staying much closer to the original ruleset. But.. the books were really cheaply made and are famous for falling apart after no time.

So I guess it's fair to say that independent of actual rule changes, SR4 was not well received in many german-speaking circles.
Quality must have been better with the later books, my books dont fall apart.
The Problem I remember, was after the main rulebook got out, there was noting comming out for some time.
Ah, yes: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun
Auf Deutsch erschien Shadowrun bis Anfang 2007 bei FanPro. Die übersetzten Werke wurden dabei mit dem Suffix „.01D“ gekennzeichnet, etwa „4.01D“. Für Deutschland, Schweiz und Österreich veröffentlichte FanPro eigene Hintergrundbände, die teilweise auch ins Englische übersetzt wurden. Nachdem FanPro seine Rollenspiellizenzen aufgegeben hatte, gab es bis Sommer 2008 keinen deutschen Lizenznehmer. Im August 2008 gab der Pegasus Spiele Verlag die Übernahme der Lizenz bekannt und begann damit Regel- und Quellenbücher zu übersetzen. Das Suffix „.01D“ wird dabei nicht mehr weiterverwendet.
A Little over 18 months...
malak wrote:SR5 is better in this regard; the book is of reasonably high quality, the translation features much better editing than the original catalyst release and they included errata, but no custom changes.
So nothing new? This happened all the time with the (late?) 4ed books?
But the german forums looks dead to me since 5ed got out.
(But I'am mostly on shadowrun nexus, more happening in the Pegasus Forum?)

I think the problem with 4ed you listed, where not problems with 4ed, but with Fanpro…

@sandmann, I agree. The price is very attractive.
(Bought 3 so far)
Last edited by Korwin on Wed Sep 30, 2015 5:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
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Post by Username17 »

Anyway, on the lethality issue. SR5 has very terrible combat rules. You are only allowed to make one attack per pass, which means that any attack that isn't very large is a waste of everyone's fucking time. Most attacks are very large, which in turn means that everyone's soak is basically meaningless and body and armor are stupid things to invest in because they don't work and slow the game down by making you roll a bunch of dice.

If you made attacks smaller, the game would suck. If you made attacks larger, the game would suck. People have ~10 hit points and there is a shift of 1 hit point every three dice rolled. Dice pools and damage numbers have to be titanic for you to even notice, and then basically everything is extremely deterministic. It's a bad system.

SR4 made a strategic error in converting away from LMSD damage. It introduced the "two shot problem" where battles were less exciting and more deterministic (though still not as bad as nWoD in that regard). SR5 could have been a moment to fix that, but instead opted to double down and make everything worse. Seriously. Everything.

The solution to SR5's bad combat rules is to not use SR5's bad combat rules. The numeric inputs are bad because all numeric inputs would be bad. The underlying rules are bad.

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Post by Korwin »

FrankTrollman wrote:SR4 made a strategic error in converting away from LMSD damage.

-Username17
Am I missremembering, or did you post updated LMSD rules for 4ed?
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
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Post by malak »

FrankTrollman wrote:Anyway, on the lethality issue. SR5 has very terrible combat rules. You are only allowed to make one attack per pass, which means that any attack that isn't very large is a waste of everyone's fucking time. Most attacks are very large, which in turn means that everyone's soak is basically meaningless and body and armor are stupid things to invest in because they don't work and slow the game down by making you roll a bunch of dice.

If you made attacks smaller, the game would suck. If you made attacks larger, the game would suck. People have ~10 hit points and there is a shift of 1 hit point every three dice rolled. Dice pools and damage numbers have to be titanic for you to even notice, and then basically everything is extremely deterministic. It's a bad system.

SR4 made a strategic error in converting away from LMSD damage. It introduced the "two shot problem" where battles were less exciting and more deterministic (though still not as bad as nWoD in that regard). SR5 could have been a moment to fix that, but instead opted to double down and make everything worse. Seriously. Everything.

The solution to SR5's bad combat rules is to not use SR5's bad combat rules. The numeric inputs are bad because all numeric inputs would be bad. The underlying rules are bad.

-Username17
I hear you, however, my choice if I want to play with people I know in RL boils down to: Play SR5, or don't play Shadowrun.



Do you have any ideas on how one could hotpatch LMSD into SR5?
Last edited by malak on Wed Sep 30, 2015 10:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by JesterZero »

Frank's outline for patching LMSD damage back into SR4 can be found in the alt.War thread. Most of the weapons and armor from the core book and Arsenal are in there as well, and since SR5 largely copy/pasted those, it's not much trouble to convert anything that remains.
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Post by Username17 »

Do you have any ideas on how one could hotpatch LMSD into SR5?
It was kindof a lot of work to do that for SR4, it's more work to do that for SR5. The core engine of shadowrun works fine: you roll dice and about a third of them come up hits and the spread is a polynomial such that as you add dice things transition smoothly and quickly from "vanishingly unlikely" to "expected." And that's great. And it means that you can map hits to LMSD damage such that a gun that routinely takes out a postal worker needs to be lucky to do more than scratch the paint on the postal worker's armored car.

But the system is a relatively small part of all of this. I could write SR's system on a single page. The books are hundreds of pages, in large part because much of the game is taken up with page after page of gadget and gizmo. In SR4 they present light pistols that do a base strength 4 hit and high powered rifles that do a base strength 8 hit. That's a difference of 4, which means is coincidentally enough that the system is mappable to a state where a target can be tough enough that you need to be relatively lucky to damage them with a light pistol and they need to be relatively lucky to avoid getting taken down when you hit them with a heavy barreled rifle. That's something that we can work with (and I did).

In SR5, the presented light pistol does 6P and the high powered rifle is 14P. That's a difference of 8 damage points between the two which is more than the entire acceptable range of dicepools can differentiate. It requires, on average, twenty four more dice to map the one onto the other. So no matter what rules you create, the game isn't going to be playable at the scale where that high powered rifle is a thing you care about. And that's not even the end of it. Actual heavy weapons do even more damage, and there simply aren't enough dice in my dice bag to roll up hitting something big enough to warrant a Panther Assault Cannon being used in anger.

The numeric inputs on the SR5 equipment list are simply unsalvageable. You'd have to rewrite the entire equipment list from scratch.

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Post by silva »

So, multiply all armor by 1.5 ?
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Post by Username17 »

silva wrote:So, multiply all armor by 1.5 ?
Are you trolling? It doesn't matter what transforms you apply to the armor rating, or what you declare the outputs of the opposed roll to mean. The inputs are simply too far apart. In order to cover the range of weaponry between a light pistol and a heavy rifle you need to present one thing that gets 8 more hits than another, which in SR5 is a difference of 24 fucking dice. We're not even talking about heavy weapons versus hardened targets here, just the range of shooting children with light pistols up to shooting tough armored people with heavy rifles. And we still need to fucking add 24 dice to go from one to the other.

You could give people 2 or 3 soak dice per point of body and double up armor values or some fucking thing so that you actually had the soak values be 24 points higher for one character than another, but that's too many dice. The game has completely broken down at that point. There aren't 24 more dice to roll. And that's not even the range of smallest to largest weapon vs. softest to hardest target - just the range for the expectable hand held weaponry carried by stealth specialists against human targets.

The equipment numbers in SR5 are unsalvageable bullshit. There is nothing you could declare them to mean that would be playable and give acceptable outputs. They simply differ by amounts which are too large for that to be a thing you could do.

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Post by Korwin »

JesterZero wrote:Frank's outline for patching LMSD damage back into SR4 can be found in the alt.War thread. Most of the weapons and armor from the core book and Arsenal are in there as well, and since SR5 largely copy/pasted those, it's not much trouble to convert anything that remains.
Thanks!
Was searching for that thread.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Do you have any ideas on how one could hotpatch LMSD into SR5?
It was kindof a lot of work to do that for SR4, it's more work to do that for SR5.
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Maybe I'm thinking to simple. But he could just use the same you worked out for SR4 (replace all weapons and armor).
Anything else would need replacement?

Edit:
Found the rules (finaly) in the thread: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51934& ... &start=188

Edit2: Or go the second last post, where JesterZero allready did an mechanics summary document.
Last edited by Korwin on Thu Oct 01, 2015 12:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
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Post by silva »

Frank and Malak, my group used to use a factor of armor+body (I think it was 1/3), as an auto-reduction to weapons damage. It worked fine for us, as it resolved the problem of throwing too much dice.

And if it still gets lethal for you, you could adjust the factor.
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Post by Korwin »

Download did not work for me, so I (think I) reposted all the rules from Frank's thread into an new thread.
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56258
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
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Post by malak »

Wow, amazing. Thanks!
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Post by silva »

You're welcone. ;)
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Post by JesterZero »

I've updated alt.War with a post linking to the PDF; the previous link was broken.

The PDF is not going to win any beauty contests, but it's sometimes handy to have all the material in one place.

Anyhow, there you go.
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