[Erling]

My players tend to build characters with about 11-14 dice for attack, 10-14 dice for defense, and >18 dice for damage resist. Even spindly decker (Body 1) has Agility 5 and Pistols 5, which gives him 10 dice for attack without any accessories/augmentations.
I don't accuse them of being min-max players or munchkins - they gain such dice pools just because they can with null sweat. Buying rating 5 in Agility and weapon skill doesn't cost too much (1 point for specialization gives +2 dice), as well as Armor Jacket (Armor rating 12) is a most common thing. Along with a pinch of accessories/augs it easily provides large dice pool. After all, they want to be ready to face the enemy, that's why I don't want to forbid them building such characters.

But like every GM I'd like to give players a challenge.

Sure there are some everyday rules of thumb: make rival NPCs stronger or make them outnumber PCs. But maybe there are some particular tips for bringing the balance into the combat?
For instance, in next session I'm going to use NPC which will open suppression fire from behind a good cover (just in order to make PCs keep their heads low, hehe, and suffer modifiers).
Will else shall I try? Maybe melee-specialized NPC which will force PCs into close combat (thus causing them -3 modifier against ranged attacks)? Flanking? I realize that there can be a thousand of general advices, but I'm just curious about your personal ways of balancing combat.

What I DON'T want to do:
- make every NPC have >10 dice pools;
- give NPCs bleeding edge equipment (though I tend to give them BF/FA-capable weapons in order to provide negative defense modifiers for PCs).

Looking forward for advices/expirience pools

[Csjarrat]

my favourite ace-in-the-hole card is to use security drones with non-lethal weapons on them. CS-gas grenades + pain inducers, stuff that really frags with their defenses and forces -ve modifiers on the PC's.
Drones aren't hard to take out but they're a lot harder when you're coughing your guts up and your eyes are streaming from CS :-)
usually PC's have much lower defence against non-lethal weaponry like gas/pain inducer too so they can be a really good way of keeping your street sam honest by targeting his WIL instead of his huge dodge pool.

If your players take the piss and keep going in all guns blazing, feel free to be ruthless and have HTR respond. The corps watch the news too, if there's been a series of attacks on corp buildings in the city in the last month, there's a good chance the remaining corps will up their on-site security and increase their HTR response times. HTR are legitimately better armed and armoured + will have cyber enhancements to make it a tougher fight for the PC's.

If they are too trigger happy and it's become a problem in-setting, have your fixer/johnson drop the team due to the heat of all the news stories and police attention. have them scrub around in the slums looking for work for a while while they rebuild their rep. its a subtler way of saying "this approach isn't right for this game" than dumping them in combat with a veteran vampire who'll wipe the floor with them :-)

[firebug]

Well, as you said, the dice pools they have are not problematic in any way...  That's generally the amount it's expected for a PC to have in something they focus on a bit.  A street samurai can easily end up with nearly 20 dice for their primary weapons with little effort.  So I don't think the term "balancing" is quite right; they're functioning at the base level for PCs, and their power level isn't the real issue.

So the question is just how to make combats, in general, more challenging and involving?

One thing I'd suggest is to make sure you're bringing the area they are fighting in into play.  By which I mean, think about what's around more than just the layout of the room and the furniture.  Your idea about cover is along the lines I'm talking about.  Maneuvering, line of sight, cover, higher ground, and all that can come into play.

Another thing is to have the PCs be ambushed.  Having a surprise round is a huge deal; even normally non-threatening opponents can be a serious danger when they can begin a fight with a shot on Unaware PCs.  Players may have to "waste" actions on withdrawing weapons, scrambling to cover, and so forth.

What Csjarrat said about CS Gas stands too, for sure.  It's relatively cheap and "non-lethal" so it's use against runners would be much higher than real grenades.  Even gangers might be able to get their hands on a gas grenade full of Pepper Punch.  Another thing gangers might do is use molotov cocktails.  Even if they miss, any cover they hit is going to be on fire, and that means the PC behind it is gonna have to move or risky getting burned.  You'll have to come up with your own stats for them.  Off the top of my head, 7P(f) with -6 AP (the listed AP for "flame-based weapon" in the elemental damage rules) sounds about right.  With maybe a 2-meter diameter AoE.

[Dropship]

Weather and vision modifiers for something different? If the team is outside have the rain hammering down on them, or the wind howling around them. One (or both!) cause negative modifiers and can mess with targeting as well, the rain might throw off thermo vision, a scope is hard to use when each gust of wind causes a runner to brace themselves.

Too much light can be an issue as well. Their enemy might be using flood lights to blind your runners.

It won't wok for every combat, but it'll mix things up.

[TheDai]

Well, you NEED these Numbers as a Minimum. Especially for Ranged Combat. It is easy to get something from -2 to -6 dice just because the weather sucks, or someone is partially behind cover.
For Ranged Combat, a starting Dice Pool under 10 is laughable and won't get you far.

So yes, climbing high on the dice pool is easy, staying on top is very hard.
Same goes for Damage Resist. These Numbers are absolutely necessary. 18 Dice mean on average 6 Hits. Every half decent Weapon deals between 7 and 10 Damage, plus they decrease Damage Resist Pools with Armor Penetration. So still, if you get hit it will hurt.

Other than that, Supportive Abilities are strong. Shock Grenades, Shock Ammunition, Suppressive Fire, Injection Darts, Smoke Grenades, all kinds of elemental Damage from somewhere, Enemy Deckers disabling their WiFi-Bonusses. It is very easy to diminish enemy Initiation, which can be a huge deal in combat situations. Also Gun&Run has some neat Group-Fight-Tactics. Maybe your NPC's should use some of them.

With this stuff, the enemies do not need incredibly high dice Pools, but even the "middle-class" evil NPC's in the Corebook have 8-12 Dice for shooting and 10-15 Dice for damage Resist. I see no problem with these numbers.

[prismite]

In previous years I've had no issue with presenting my players with adequate challenges. However, I've noticed a trend in the more recent editions to really make it easy to get 15+ dice pools. I mean, in 4E right off of CharGen a normal human can reach 16 with minimal effort.

I almost never have to worry about rather or not the player can endure what I'm throwing at them. Now its more of a "Can the bad-guys last longer than a round to feel like a challenge?"

I have found that the best challenge for a group of players is a similarly built group of opposing runners or Critters. Spirits can get ugly in 5th, so they make good challenges too.

[DigitalZombie]

Use drugs they are a great equalizer, and its more realistic, instead of having to equip every opposition with 100k of ´ware.

Also worth remembering is that skill now go to 12, instead of 6. Rating 6 is merely professional. So a dicepool of 10 (3 agi+6 automatic+1 lasersight )isnt crazy unrealistiic high.

[RulezLawyerZ]

If your runners are usually the attacking force, remember that the defender's best weapon is control of the environment. Several of the previous posters have hit on this, one way or another, but I'm going to pile on as well . Chaos spells, various Manipulation spells, plain old (or thermal) smoke grenades, choke-points, cover, emplacement defenses, directional and area jammers... All of these things chew away at that dice pool, and are fairly easily compensated for by the defender.

If you're not looking for a bloodbath (which my advice seems to encourage, but that wasn't the intent), then build the scenario so that the hammer is not the best option, or maybe not even a feasible one. Force them to use their brains as something other than helmet stuffing

[Reaver]

Some things to remember is that Runners are generally 'better' then most of their foes. They have to be in order to just survive!

That said, the typical opposition a runner team faces will usually out number them by as high as 100:1!! Think about it... when the alarm goes off in that office building the team is raiding, what actually happens?

Well, the guards on site respond first.... these are usually your typical 'mall cops' there for show and not much else. The spider on site (if any) usually tries to confine the team by activating the mag-locks, sending drones, and using the static defenses of the building...

BUT, the call for help is the biggest issue. Better armed and armored security is on the way, and keeps coming until the threat is gone! Also the police may be notified as well, meaning just getting off the property isn't an end to the team's troubles...

In short:

First responders (light threat, 8 to 20 in total)
2 to 5 minutes later:
SWAT style opposition (moderate threat, 10 to 30 in total)
5 to 10 minutes later:
HTR style opposition (high threat, 15 to 30 in total)
Outside of building:
Police (SWAT to HTR, 20 to 60 in total)

Of course, the fire power used by the runners will also play a part... security is not going to throw shotgun armed agents against a team using magic and mini-guns :p

Also keep in mind, the runners have a limited supply of both ammo and health... stun damage (even just a box or two per encounter) add up! And ammo gets depleted quickly in a sustained gun fight... so that Gun-ho runner team could find themselves with improvised clubs by the time they get to their escape route.

Also remember that security isn't stupid, they are not going to line up and stay static targets to be shot in the head one at a time. The are going to be using cover, suppressive fire to cover themselves, moving to outflank the team and catch them in overlapping fields of fire, using magic, spirits and drones to keep the runners bottled up, and anything else they can do to stay alive (cause hey, they don't wanna die either!).


Played smart, even a street gang can pose a moderate risk to a runner team in a stand up fight... professional security are well better trained (and have more back up!) Then a street gang!

[Poindexter]

I tend to go at it from the other angle.

A truly balanced fight is as rare in shadowrun as it is in real life. Most fights are simply ass whoopins, with one side completely unprepared for the other in some way.
The world doesn't care about balance, and neither do i. Run into some unbalanced shit you can't handle? Get the hell outta there and regroup. Figure out a way to handle it, and when you come back for it again, the second fight will feel just as unbalanced in your favor as the first one did against you.

Every now and then, through luck of the draw, balanced fights happen, and people usually die on both sides.

[prismite]

I tend to go at it from the other angle.

A truly balanced fight is as rare in shadowrun as it is in real life. Most fights are simply ass whoopins, with one side completely unprepared for the other in some way.
The world doesn't care about balance, and neither do i. Run into some unbalanced shit you can't handle? Get the hell outta there and regroup. Figure out a way to handle it, and when you come back for it again, the second fight will feel just as unbalanced in your favor as the first one did against you.

Every now and then, through luck of the draw, balanced fights happen, and people usually die on both sides.

Are you saying that you frequently have players die? Seems awfully hard to die in this game.

[Poindexter]

I tend to go at it from the other angle.

A truly balanced fight is as rare in shadowrun as it is in real life. Most fights are simply ass whoopins, with one side completely unprepared for the other in some way.
The world doesn't care about balance, and neither do i. Run into some unbalanced shit you can't handle? Get the hell outta there and regroup. Figure out a way to handle it, and when you come back for it again, the second fight will feel just as unbalanced in your favor as the first one did against you.

Every now and then, through luck of the draw, balanced fights happen, and people usually die on both sides.

Are you saying that you frequently have players die? Seems awfully hard to die in this game.

If thats what "every now and then" means to you, than sure.

[Shadowjack]

I tend to go at it from the other angle.

A truly balanced fight is as rare in shadowrun as it is in real life. Most fights are simply ass whoopins, with one side completely unprepared for the other in some way.
The world doesn't care about balance, and neither do i. Run into some unbalanced shit you can't handle? Get the hell outta there and regroup. Figure out a way to handle it, and when you come back for it again, the second fight will feel just as unbalanced in your favor as the first one did against you.

Every now and then, through luck of the draw, balanced fights happen, and people usually die on both sides.

Are you saying that you frequently have players die? Seems awfully hard to die in this game.

How is it hard to die? Maybe the GM in your games is making things too easy? There is plenty of potential for PC death, it just depends on how your GM manages the game.

[firebug]

It's hard to die because everyone has at least 1 "extra life" in the form of Edge. Unless a GM is just ignoring that rule.

[prismite]

It's hard to die because everyone has at least 1 "extra life" in the form of Edge. Unless a GM is just ignoring that rule.

THIS. Edge > GM. LOL, I dont mean that to sound harsh, but as long as a PC has at least one point of edge, God will lend a hand. We've only had 1 death at our table, and that was because the player WANTED to switch characters and refused to burn the edge.