[All4BigGuns]

You start monkeying around with such an intrinsic part of the system (or just about any part) it will have a cascading effect throughout the rest of the system. Best to leave well enough alone and to bury this unreasonable disdain for large dice pools.

[iamfanboy]

It will also significantly impact opposed rolls, if you reduce those too. And if so it greatly impacts skill-versus-attribute balances. So any balancing SR5 is based on would no longer exist if you do this around the board.

Balance, balance... I forget, am I talking about a wargame where balance is needed to make sure that the determining factors of the outcome are skill and luck, or a role-playing game where dice are used to add drama to a story?

Look, I'm not disparaging your point of view, I'm just cracking a joke. I've DONE work on games where balance is of the utmost importance (my homebrewed points system for Battletech Alpha Strike comes within 1 point, on average, of the official system's values, and was a helluva lot easier to calculate!) and I am all for balance - in competitive games. But the moment the GM thinks of an RPG as a competition, he's lost the plot. If the players do something stupid in the game world, come down on them hard, but don't view it as an adversarial relationship right from the start.

Except in Paranoia and Hackmaster, of course.

All the posts contrary to this notion has informed me about my incorrect calculations, and has certainly changed my own plans. I'll at least TRY the notion of dice-boxes, but if the large amount of dice continues to slow down my game then I'm going to nix that crap.

My group has two 'actors' (more interested in the role-playing) and three 'casuals' (mostly doing it because their friends, or in one case brother, are doing it), so I prefer to keep the game moving at a fast pace versus fretting my head about rules crunchiness. The nice thing about keeping it fast is that it's making the casuals more interested in the game - I got one of them (who's playing a radiation-mutant priest in Hell on Earth) to actually stand up for the poor mutants in a town and ROLE-PLAY her attempts to prevent the townspeople from going on a pogrom! Without any prompting! Some of my runs have ended without a single shot fired! It's INSANE, compared to other groups I've been in.

Each group is different, and all I'm trying to do is adapt the rules of the game to fit my own table without throwing them out entirely. Knowing the way the odds change definitely helps, and that my own math was wrong - sometimes wildly so - influences my decision.

So, yeah, thank all of you, and I think it's time for this thread to drift quietly down to the bottom of the forum.

[Michael Chandra]

But the moment the GM thinks of an RPG as a competition, he's lost the plot.

I don't think of it like that, thank you very much.

[ZeConster]

Still, I... am not too sure I care, even now that I know the odds - and since I found that handy-dandy table from the SimAntics blog that lets me see the odds more clearly. In the end, I don't mind if a task is easier for a PC to accomplish, as long as the same odds apply to NPCs.

That's not what it boils down to, though - like I said in my earlier post, halving dice pools and thresholds will make it more likely for someone who is bad at something to succeed, but it will also make it more likely for someone who is good at something to fail. So not only does this mean being good at something becomes less useful, it also means that being better than the opponent becomes less useful, as it's more likely for them to dodge/hit/resist you anyway - and the bigger the difference, the bigger the difference in odds gets.
Let's do some examples:

• 18 dice versus 16: 47.63% of not getting any net hits; 53.49% with half dice pools; 12.30% relative increase
• 18 dice versus 14: 37.82% of not getting any net hits; 46.63% with half dice pools; 23.29% relative increase
• 18 dice versus 12: 28.15% of not getting any net hits; 39.44% with half dice pools; 40.11% relative increase
• 18 dice versus 10: 19.26% of not getting any net hits; 32.09% with half dice pools; 66,61% relative increase
• 18 dice versus 8: 11.78% of not getting any net hits; 24.82% with half dice pools; 110.70% relative increase

As you can see, being better at something than you'd have to be to get there on average becomes less useful if you cut the dice pools in half, as the chance of failure goes up - and this affects every time you roll dice for anything, so negotiating, smoothtalking someone, running, climbing, hiding, summoning...

But the moment the GM thinks of an RPG as a competition, he's lost the plot. If the players do something stupid in the game world, come down on them hard, but don't view it as an adversarial relationship right from the start.

I don't see how this remark relates to the discussion at hand - we're not the ones planning something that devalues dice pools of 14-20, which typically only players have.

Some of my runs have ended without a single shot fired!

But there is still a significant amount of rolling, or you wouldn't have made this topic.

All the posts contrary to this notion has informed me about my incorrect calculations, and has certainly changed my own plans. I'll at least TRY the notion of dice-boxes, but if the large amount of dice continues to slow down my game then I'm going to nix that crap.

Then get an app. There's free Shadowrun dice rollers available for both computers and smartphones.

[Michael Chandra]

There's even a Cyberdeck app for Android, which is real nice for people who don't know all the matrix actions from the top of their head. Includes rolling function for both attacker and defender for each action.

[Critias]

Calculate dice pool as normal via normal rules, cut dice pool in half (blammo, less dice!), make everything "TN" 4 for a hit (instead of 5), to compensate for lower dice?

It's ugly, and it messes with probability in weird ways, but it would be (a) fair to PCs and NPCs, more or less, and (b) it would mean less rolling.  As it is, the "roll in a box" might not even work depending on the characters, so if nothing else it'd hack your pools down to manageable sizes.

[ZeConster]

As it is, the "roll in a box" might not even work depending on the characters

I have to disagree with you there - while I'm a bit clumsy, rolling in a box has tremendously decreased how often my dice go rolling all over the table.

[Michael Chandra]

I bought several sets of 36-dice, split them into separate bags of multiple sets of 9 of different colors per bag, and got a few small game expansion boxes that I keep them in. I pass the dice to those who lack them, and the boxes all around the table. It quite helps for the dice rolling and the different colors really help with quickly putting together a pool of the right amount. It'd be even easier with sets of 6, but since attributes can easily go up to 9 that seemed clumsy.

[iamfanboy]

I just really, really don't understand why people are taking the whole thing so personally. I'm not going over to your table, spilling soda on your hardback book, and talking about how ugly your gamers are; all I want to do is run the game faster than it was going, and trying to explain that balance isn't my primary concern, keeping the game moving is - and I'm enough of a GM to compensate.

Hell, I'll be rebalancing stuff anyway, since I'm doing my campaign just before Bug City happens all the way through Dunkelzahn's assassination. Last time I checked, none of those adventures had been translated to 4e/5e.

I also do not like computer dice rollers. Not because I don't trust my players to use one that's on the up-and-up (though I had to kick one guy away from my table that was using a rigged one!), but because I don't have electronic devices at my table. The casual players spent more time involved with their phones over the game, only looking up when someone would nudge them.

I WANTED to like 'em, because I thought it would be helpful in sending private notes as well as speeding up dice rolls, but... it impaired participation. Kinda sucks when the players get twenty minutes into a combat after an unskilled fail roll because someone texting their boyfriend didn't hear me when I asked, "Who has Repair?" <_<

So, banned from my table. *sigh* Maybe I'll give it a try again, it has been almost a year since that happened, buuut...

By the way, I DID mention that I'm gonna try a game using dice boxes before I do this, right? As in, yes, you persuaded me that it's a harsh change, so I'll try something less extreme, but I'll take a harsh change over dragging my game out.


And Critias, the problem is that cutting dice pools and thresholds in half somehow leads to better odds of success even using 5-6 for Hits - usually just 3-5%, but sometimes even higher. Raising it to 4 makes it insanely easy to succeed.

[Michael Chandra]

Given the misrepresentation of my GM style and posts, I am withdrawing from this debate.

[All4BigGuns]

The box was suggested to protect your little miniatures.

The best solution for speed is to tell your players to have their most relevant and most common dice pools pre-calculated and written down on their sheets. If they're taking an inordinate amount of time gathering the pool of dice together to roll, then the problem is with them not the system.

[ZeConster]

I just really, really don't understand why people are taking the whole thing so personally. I'm not going over to your table, spilling soda on your hardback book, and talking about how ugly your gamers are; all I want to do is run the game faster than it was going, and trying to explain that balance isn't my primary concern, keeping the game moving is - and I'm enough of a GM to compensate.

We didn't take a "thing" personally. You presented a problem and the solution you planned on using, people gave you alternate solutions and explained your solution had a flaw, then when you misunderstood the explanation, clarified - and that is when you made flippant remarks and in fact insinuated that the people who told you it is a bad idea to change the game balance are bad GMs who don't care about the plot and want to 'beat' their players.
So yeah, if your goal was to explain that you're capable as a GM of handling the balance change this would result in, and not to insult people, you failed on both ends - and that is your fault, not ours.

I also do not like computer dice rollers. Not because I don't trust my players to use one that's on the up-and-up (though I had to kick one guy away from my table that was using a rigged one!), but because I don't have electronic devices at my table. The casual players spent more time involved with their phones over the game, only looking up when someone would nudge them.

You could just roll for the players - they tell you how many dice you have, and you tell them the result. That way you're the only person with an electronic device.

[iamfanboy]

It is, honestly, giving me a headache to imagine that anything I said was insulting. I cracked wise, admitted that I'd screwed up mathematically when given specific examples of the odds, said that I'd try the alternatives first, and tried to explain why it's more important at my table to keep the game moving over adhering strictly to the rules (my preference of dice for drama, and the fact that 5/6 players aren't huge dice-nuts.)

The only two posts that have made sense to me on the second page are ZeConster's and Critias's.

If I wanted to insult you guys, I would.\

DELETED, POSTING FROM ANGER A BAD IDEA

. Indirectly (and accidentally) implying that some folks are more obsessed with rules-adherence than actually gaming? I actually am sorry for that. It wasn't my intention.

I can lock a topic? Woo-hoo!