Shadowrun Dice Pool Changes

[Whirlwind]

Is there a thread anywhere which summarizes all the changes that dice pools went through in the various editions in Shadowrun? Or could someone briefly run through them for me please?

[Trill]

Going by the books and the info I've gathered on this site:
You can generally divide the dicepool systems into two groups: 1-3e and 4-6e

1-3e
1e introduced the dicepool system as it was used in the first three editions. When you tried to do something you rolled a pool of d6s equal to the Skill or Attribute needed (although there are special pools you can add in certain situations such as combat).
You roll the dice, and try to get over a Target Number. Dice that come up 1 count as an automatic failure (and if all come up 1 that's an enormous failure), dice that come up 6 are rolled again and added to the previous result. So if you rolled 6->6->4 your result for that die is 16 (6+6+4).
Generally modifiers affect Target number. This means that quickly determining the chance of success requires some combinatorics.

4-6e
Coming in with 4e the basic resolution system was changed to one with a fixed TN. Your dice pools are now Attribute+(Skill/ other Attribute).
4e and 5e had Edge as an Attribute with a edge pool. Edge points could do things like increase your dice pool (and cause 6s to be rolled again) or reroll all dice that weren't hits or downgrade (crit) glitches
You roll the dice and count each die that is equal to or above the Target Number of 5. Dice that come up 1 aren't automatic failures but can lead to (Critical) glitches if they are half or more of your dice pool (and no hits are scored). 5e changed that to more than half your pool.
Modifiers change the dice pool size. This means that generally it's very easy to determine what you'd manage on average (dice pool/3).

6e introduces Wild dice that count as three hits on a hit, but on a one cause all dice with 5s to not be counted as hits.

[Whirlwind]

Thanks. In the 1-3e, how did the special pools change (I see that they changed a bit) and why?

[Username17]

First Edition Shadowrun is a very avant-garde piece of work and dicepools are asked to do pretty much everything it's possible to image them doing. You roll different numbers of dice and look for different target numbers on those dice, but you also have different numbers of successful dice required to push you to the next success level (called staging) and you have different numbers of starting successes (called "damage level" or "automatic successes" depending on what kind of test it is). Later on in Shadowbeat they even created the "Open Test" where either instead of or in addition to reporting how many dice came up over a certain number you reported what the highest single die result was - and since 6s "explode," that number was incredibly random.

Second edition removed a lot of that. The big difference of course is that tests no longer have staging numbers. Combat actions all move in two success increments and other tests move in one success increments, the end.

Third edition got rid of all the automatic successes except damage levels on weapons and magic drain. Armor changes target numbers and Adept powers grant extra dice, and the various Matrix stuff that did automatic successes is just quietly written out entirely. But you still have open tests hidden away in some weird places like the surgery rules.

4th edition did away with most of that. Variable target numbers are gone, and now the target number is always 5. Open tests are gone. Exploding dice are gone. The only thing you count is the number of dice that come up five or six, and then you compare that to the number of hits you need to succeed. The only spanner is that on spells specifically, the number of hits is capped at the spell's Force.

5th and 6th edition are basically just bad attempts to add some complexity and obscurantism into 4th edition. It did not go well.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

5th edition then introduced limits, which is basically capping the hits at more or less random points since you could do several things to influence where your limit for a certain action would be.

[OgreBattle]

What I thought 5e just came out

[Whirlwind]

Thanks for that.

Did the change from 1e special dice pools (defence & dodge) to 2e (combat) make physical combat noticeably more deadly (since you could now boost attacks rather than defence)?

[Trill]

What I thought 5e just came out

Dude, SR5 came out July 2013
6e is the next edition (and out in a month or so)

[Username17]

Thanks for that.

Did the change from 1e special dice pools (defence & dodge) to 2e (combat) make physical combat noticeably more deadly (since you could now boost attacks rather than defence)?

Not especially. The change to 2nd edition made combat deadlier because armor stopped being a blob of free damage resistance successes and started being a target number modifier on the damage resistance roll.

So you stopped rolling 3 meaningless Body dice looking for exploding sixes and started rolling 3 very meaningful Body dice looking for 2s. But instead of having 6 bonuses successes you... didn't have that. It meant the entire damage resistance roll went from being a formality that had a virtually nonexistent chance of staging Light damage down to nothing to being a formality that was almost certainly going to stage damage down from Deadly to Serious.

When the edition changed from 1st to 2nd, it went immediately from padded sumo to rocket launcher tag. A lot of characters turned into a fine red mist in their first combat with the new rules. The Combat Pool played very little part in that.

-Username17

[Whirlwind]

Great, thanks very much for explaining that.