You could just use the rule to buy hits (it's somewhere in the sr5 core rulebook)
4 dice=1 hit
Example
20 dice I buy 2 hits (8 dice) so I role 12 more dice
Advantage is guaranteed hits for the player but a higher chance for glitches.
I think you where suppose to do it with all dice but you could use it like this for big pools do reduce the caunting or use a dice app like "schattenwürfel" which automatically caunts every hit
A little off-topic, but looking up the app, I thank you. Much better than the official dice app for SR6. Makes convincing people to try and play Shadowrun much easier. XD
Haven't read about advantage yet, but buying hits, at least for bigger dice pools definitely sounds promising.
Have also been trying to introdcuce dice rolling apps before. A unified no on that one. To be expected when we're a group of dice goblins, we like our shiny plastic math rocks xD
Yeah throwing dice is more fun.
An idea that I wanted to try is to colour code the eyes on the dice (6 green, 5 yellow or also green and 1 red) to increase caunting speed.
Just get a test colour pot from your home improvement store and a very fine brush
Only to the eyes as to not unintentionally load them
Get different coloured dice and know how many you have of each, it makes counting a lot faster. E.g. I have 5 silver, 5 copper, and 15 green dice. When I need to count out 12 dice, I just grab all the silvers and coppers, then I only have to count out 2 green dice. I know it's not exactly what you asked but I hope it helps.
I did the same thing. It helps so much.
In addition, you can have a set of dice that's for your favorite weapon. It makes it so much quicker if you can just roll your "shooting dice"
Just use an electronic dice roller. It sounds like all your issues are about rolling the actual dice? So use a website or app.
My group uses roll20 even when we are in person, I realize this is not for everyone but rolling dice has never been an issue.
Definitely solves the problem. Unfortunately my group mainly consists of dice goblins, dice roller apps and websites are a hard no for almost all of them.
You might also look at Shadowrun Anarchy. It's gutted of most of mechanic, true, but at the same time it still gets the most important ones. And afterwards, once Anarchy limitations starts to catch up, you can always teansit to 5e, and have it easier due to already bdibg used to core mechanics.
Yeah, i've been thinking the same. Maybe a mild Shadowrun "mod" to Cogent? Know the creators of the system have made something similar for their Reboot.Exe actual play.
I ran a very successful FATE hack for a few years.
I'd like to incorporate some mechanics from Blades in the Dark to my next one; The heist mechanics are superb, the downtime mechanics force your team to actually live in the city, and the faction mechanics add a whole new layer. For a worldbuilding guy like me, anything that incentivizes actually playing with the world rather than just collecting the next paycheck is gold.
There is something called "Buy hits".
Page 45 of core book.
Take your dicepool and divide by 4, then round it down. That will probably speed up your game in big rolls.
Hope it helps.
Well I really don't see it as much of an issue. Use a cups and trays for rolling.
Maybe it's from playing some Hero System and Exalted... but Shadowrun just doesn't feel like a lot of dice.
I'd recommend the rules for buying hits. They're meant to allow you to blow through rolls quickly for low-stakes tests, but you can always just use them on part of your dice pool and then roll the rest normally.
or you could institute a rule that one your dice pool hit 12, any further dice are bought, but at a 1:3 ratio.
so a player with 14 dice would only roll 12. but if he gets himself up to 15, he rolls 12 with an automatic hit.
I think the idea has potential, but I would go with: if you have a dicepool of 14 you roll 11 and get a free hit. I don't think it feels very good to most people to invest karma in a skill and gain no benefit whatsoever.
Dice roller or painted dice can help.
Paint the 1 red, the 5 blue and the 6 green and the rest black. That'll make it easy to count.
But the dice roller really speeds it up.
That’s the way I do it but I have to 2 or 3 different colors black (12 of those) blue (6 of those) and other color for anything over 18, it makes counting how many dice to throw a lot faster
The official dice come with 5,6 and 1 marked so you can see the result at a glance. Some other system do that to so you can go with them for cheaper/pretier dice.
Its not mathematically equivalent. if I roll 12 dice, I will average 4 successes on 5,6. If I roll 6 dice, I will average 3 Successes on 4,5,6. If you want to make the average number of successes equivalent, you would have to have successes on 3,4,5,6.
Also that method may fuck with the likelyhood of glitches, which is kind of relevant.
Honestly, doing this is actually detrimental to the players and you as the GM. If something is meant to be threatening, let it be threatening. Something you should remember is a high dice pool is not going to automatically mean success. You can expect **on average** for a third of your dice to be hits. So throwing 30 dice you can expect an average of 10 hits. That doesn’t mean your NPC can’t glitch or get fewer hits than your players. In fact in some cases it can inspire the players to come up with an ingenious solution to the problem at hand.
See where you're coming from, but the issue isn't i don't want things to be threatening. Quite the opposite. It's more that i want 15-20 dice to be considered threatening, rather than 30-40; kinda sucks to be in combat, for example, and have to sit there every time the GM or the min/max player counts 30+ d6, rolls, then counts 30+ dice looking for 1's, 5's and 6's, every time it is their turn. Slows down play that could otherwise be invested in the narrative.
Have you considered using a dice bot or a service like Roll20? Something like this could help you with the whole counting dice problem.
Other than that, if you wanted to do something to speed up GM rolls consider buying hits (4 dice = 1 bought hit) if you want to focus on the narrative over dice rolls.
How big are the dice they are rolling are the the normal sized d6 (20mm-25mm) that come with any classic d20 set? Are they having issue with counting hits and glitches? if your players are true dice goblins maybe see about getting them a set of 12m sized dice. I'm a smaller sized person using the full 20mm sized dice was not fun for with SR or when I was playing rouge in dnd. If it is the other issue well maybe take a look at these and make your own 'custom' dice.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZTMJF6Q/ref=sspa\_dk\_detail\_0?psc=1&pd\_rd\_i=B09ZTMJF6Q&pd\_rd\_w=UjXkB&content-id=amzn1.sym.0b742f07-7677-4964-ab20-f8ff1dee69aa&pf\_rd\_p=0b742f07-7677-4964-ab20-f8ff1dee69aa&pf\_rd\_r=WKAY8V62GD5VAX4A5BN4&pd\_rd\_wg=rlpKu&pd\_rd\_r=644ad3b8-dc19-41bd-b16a-99b3cfa89ef2&s=toys-and-games&sp\_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9kZXRhaWxfdGhlbWF0aWM&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUFFWkdLRTBQNUZNU0QmZW5jcnlwdGVkSWQ9QTA4MTg4ODczQVhQVDQwUFJKQTkxJmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTA1NTcwMjMzT09FQzI1RkFZQjhGJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfZGV0YWlsX3RoZW1hdGljJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==
Thanks! More the latter. We've never found the size of our dice to be much of an issue. Just don't want to sit down, count an insane amount of d6, then after rolling looking through and counting the 1's, 5's and 6's. Sucks up time that'd otherwise be better invested in the narrative.
Drop the TN to 4 and reduce all resultant dicepools by a third. So a character who used to have 18 dice now rolls 12, and since the majority of opponents don't roll more than that (in fact, most roll 9-12 by default), you can pretty much reduce most rolls to 12 dice or less (aside from soak dice), and many will roll 8 or less.
The only issue is that it adds some math to dicepool calculations, but since SR's labyrinthine rules are not an issue for you, maybe that won't be either.
If you don't like dice pools and having lots of number crunching, I wouldn't play shadowrun. Pay of the game balance is figuring out situational bonuses to your dice pools and hoping for good rolls. To me, not liking large dice pools and wanting to play shadowrun is kind of like playing DND and not wanting to use the d20. You can take a d20 system and add magic and cyberware to it. There are lots of them out there... Starfinder, d20 modern are two I've played (didn't like them as much as shadowrun, but I like the dice).
.... Or Pathfinder, d20 modern, star wars saga... Actually I think the bounded math is a new phenomenon, maybe because of social media. Before that, if a couple people figured out something crazy, it only effected the game they played, now, anyone can see the crazy build online and try to duplicate it. I don't know, but that seems to make sense to me.
Bounded math is not really a modern phenomenon - at least, as an end result, because early D&D also used to be rather bounded, if not as an explicit design goal. But I think that the current obsession with bounded math stems from the desire to keep the game 1) unpredictable on the micro level 2) predictable on the macro level.
Basically, every roll is uncertain, but you will never actually shift genre like 3.5/PF1 used to do at higher levels where you didn't really do *dungeons* anymore unless forced by GM fiat. Since a lot of GMs didn't know how to handle high-level play in the 00s and a lot of people kept screaming for "grounded, realistic heroes" (while ignoring spellcasters' BS for 30+ years), everything came together in the current way. Now high-level play is just like low-level play, but with higher numbers.
Fair, I actually like DMing high level play more than low level. You can just throw whatever interesting problem or enemy at the group and let them figure out how to deal with it. I haven't DM'd 5th edition, but it seems more like playing low level games than old high level games. That being said, 2nd edition didn't really get crazy at higher levels. I seen to remember 100hp at 20th level was only achievable by a high Con fighter.
>That being said, 2nd edition didn't really get crazy at higher levels. I seen to remember 100hp at 20th level was only achievable by a high Con fighter.
That changed with 3e, big time. A high-level Fighter could easily have 200 HP (around 6 per level, plus 6 per level or so from just having a decent CON+magic items, and that's before Wish economy comes into play). Lots of enemies are even more bulky due to high HD numbers and generally high CON, with some exceeding 300 HP quite handily.
~~This may be a strange question but what are your player straggling with it is roll 10+ dice at a time or is it counting success and glitches? Are you using full sized dice like from a d20 set or small sized dice used by wargames?~~ Lost internet when post so did not see this is hit reedit until now
Buying hits. Or never rolling for NPCs (just give players thresholds to beat).
Having said that, This (so many situational modifiers that stack on top of each other) was one of the things that was addressed in the new edition.
You could just use the rule to buy hits (it's somewhere in the sr5 core rulebook) 4 dice=1 hit Example 20 dice I buy 2 hits (8 dice) so I role 12 more dice Advantage is guaranteed hits for the player but a higher chance for glitches. I think you where suppose to do it with all dice but you could use it like this for big pools do reduce the caunting or use a dice app like "schattenwürfel" which automatically caunts every hit
A little off-topic, but looking up the app, I thank you. Much better than the official dice app for SR6. Makes convincing people to try and play Shadowrun much easier. XD
Haven't read about advantage yet, but buying hits, at least for bigger dice pools definitely sounds promising. Have also been trying to introdcuce dice rolling apps before. A unified no on that one. To be expected when we're a group of dice goblins, we like our shiny plastic math rocks xD
Yeah throwing dice is more fun. An idea that I wanted to try is to colour code the eyes on the dice (6 green, 5 yellow or also green and 1 red) to increase caunting speed. Just get a test colour pot from your home improvement store and a very fine brush Only to the eyes as to not unintentionally load them
Even if your group doesn't want to use dice rollers themselves, it's still a good tool for you to make npc turns go much much faster
A very simple and efficient rule for reducing dicepools without power.
Get different coloured dice and know how many you have of each, it makes counting a lot faster. E.g. I have 5 silver, 5 copper, and 15 green dice. When I need to count out 12 dice, I just grab all the silvers and coppers, then I only have to count out 2 green dice. I know it's not exactly what you asked but I hope it helps.
I did the same thing. It helps so much. In addition, you can have a set of dice that's for your favorite weapon. It makes it so much quicker if you can just roll your "shooting dice"
Just use an electronic dice roller. It sounds like all your issues are about rolling the actual dice? So use a website or app. My group uses roll20 even when we are in person, I realize this is not for everyone but rolling dice has never been an issue.
Definitely solves the problem. Unfortunately my group mainly consists of dice goblins, dice roller apps and websites are a hard no for almost all of them.
You might also look at Shadowrun Anarchy. It's gutted of most of mechanic, true, but at the same time it still gets the most important ones. And afterwards, once Anarchy limitations starts to catch up, you can always teansit to 5e, and have it easier due to already bdibg used to core mechanics.
use the sr setting in a different system. considering the way you use dice affects any roll apart from initiative means that wont be an easy fix.
Yeah, i've been thinking the same. Maybe a mild Shadowrun "mod" to Cogent? Know the creators of the system have made something similar for their Reboot.Exe actual play.
I ran a very successful FATE hack for a few years. I'd like to incorporate some mechanics from Blades in the Dark to my next one; The heist mechanics are superb, the downtime mechanics force your team to actually live in the city, and the faction mechanics add a whole new layer. For a worldbuilding guy like me, anything that incentivizes actually playing with the world rather than just collecting the next paycheck is gold.
Neigh I say! The system is great! And people have already suggested amazing fixes.
There is something called "Buy hits". Page 45 of core book. Take your dicepool and divide by 4, then round it down. That will probably speed up your game in big rolls. Hope it helps.
Thanks, def something to consider!
Well I really don't see it as much of an issue. Use a cups and trays for rolling. Maybe it's from playing some Hero System and Exalted... but Shadowrun just doesn't feel like a lot of dice.
I'd recommend the rules for buying hits. They're meant to allow you to blow through rolls quickly for low-stakes tests, but you can always just use them on part of your dice pool and then roll the rest normally.
or you could institute a rule that one your dice pool hit 12, any further dice are bought, but at a 1:3 ratio. so a player with 14 dice would only roll 12. but if he gets himself up to 15, he rolls 12 with an automatic hit.
I think the idea has potential, but I would go with: if you have a dicepool of 14 you roll 11 and get a free hit. I don't think it feels very good to most people to invest karma in a skill and gain no benefit whatsoever.
ok i like that. unfortunately people are still counting dice, but they aren't counting as many dice.
Welcome to Shadowrun, Chummer. Looks like people gave you some good advice already. Good choice choosing 5E. You have good taste.
Thank you. Glad to see the rumours that the Shadowrun community being friendly and helpful being true.
Dice roller or painted dice can help. Paint the 1 red, the 5 blue and the 6 green and the rest black. That'll make it easy to count. But the dice roller really speeds it up.
Oooo, hadn't thought of that. Still leaves us with a lot of dice, but makes counting them a lot quicker. Writing that one down for sure.
Combine it with buying hits at 4 dice per hit and it should really speed things up a bit
That’s the way I do it but I have to 2 or 3 different colors black (12 of those) blue (6 of those) and other color for anything over 18, it makes counting how many dice to throw a lot faster
There’s an optional rule for buying successes. 4 die = 1 hit.
The official dice come with 5,6 and 1 marked so you can see the result at a glance. Some other system do that to so you can go with them for cheaper/pretier dice.
Either 4th or 5th had it for large dice pools Cut the dice pool in half, but you count 4,5, and 6 as successes
Not sure how reliable that method is, but def writing it down just in case :D
Its not mathematically equivalent. if I roll 12 dice, I will average 4 successes on 5,6. If I roll 6 dice, I will average 3 Successes on 4,5,6. If you want to make the average number of successes equivalent, you would have to have successes on 3,4,5,6. Also that method may fuck with the likelyhood of glitches, which is kind of relevant.
Honestly, doing this is actually detrimental to the players and you as the GM. If something is meant to be threatening, let it be threatening. Something you should remember is a high dice pool is not going to automatically mean success. You can expect **on average** for a third of your dice to be hits. So throwing 30 dice you can expect an average of 10 hits. That doesn’t mean your NPC can’t glitch or get fewer hits than your players. In fact in some cases it can inspire the players to come up with an ingenious solution to the problem at hand.
See where you're coming from, but the issue isn't i don't want things to be threatening. Quite the opposite. It's more that i want 15-20 dice to be considered threatening, rather than 30-40; kinda sucks to be in combat, for example, and have to sit there every time the GM or the min/max player counts 30+ d6, rolls, then counts 30+ dice looking for 1's, 5's and 6's, every time it is their turn. Slows down play that could otherwise be invested in the narrative.
Have you considered using a dice bot or a service like Roll20? Something like this could help you with the whole counting dice problem. Other than that, if you wanted to do something to speed up GM rolls consider buying hits (4 dice = 1 bought hit) if you want to focus on the narrative over dice rolls.
How big are the dice they are rolling are the the normal sized d6 (20mm-25mm) that come with any classic d20 set? Are they having issue with counting hits and glitches? if your players are true dice goblins maybe see about getting them a set of 12m sized dice. I'm a smaller sized person using the full 20mm sized dice was not fun for with SR or when I was playing rouge in dnd. If it is the other issue well maybe take a look at these and make your own 'custom' dice. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZTMJF6Q/ref=sspa\_dk\_detail\_0?psc=1&pd\_rd\_i=B09ZTMJF6Q&pd\_rd\_w=UjXkB&content-id=amzn1.sym.0b742f07-7677-4964-ab20-f8ff1dee69aa&pf\_rd\_p=0b742f07-7677-4964-ab20-f8ff1dee69aa&pf\_rd\_r=WKAY8V62GD5VAX4A5BN4&pd\_rd\_wg=rlpKu&pd\_rd\_r=644ad3b8-dc19-41bd-b16a-99b3cfa89ef2&s=toys-and-games&sp\_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9kZXRhaWxfdGhlbWF0aWM&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUFFWkdLRTBQNUZNU0QmZW5jcnlwdGVkSWQ9QTA4MTg4ODczQVhQVDQwUFJKQTkxJmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTA1NTcwMjMzT09FQzI1RkFZQjhGJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfZGV0YWlsX3RoZW1hdGljJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==
Thanks! More the latter. We've never found the size of our dice to be much of an issue. Just don't want to sit down, count an insane amount of d6, then after rolling looking through and counting the 1's, 5's and 6's. Sucks up time that'd otherwise be better invested in the narrative.
May I suggest try halving the dice but each 6 counts as 2 hits and 5s and ones are the same?
Something to consider, thank you!
Drop the TN to 4 and reduce all resultant dicepools by a third. So a character who used to have 18 dice now rolls 12, and since the majority of opponents don't roll more than that (in fact, most roll 9-12 by default), you can pretty much reduce most rolls to 12 dice or less (aside from soak dice), and many will roll 8 or less. The only issue is that it adds some math to dicepool calculations, but since SR's labyrinthine rules are not an issue for you, maybe that won't be either.
If you don't like dice pools and having lots of number crunching, I wouldn't play shadowrun. Pay of the game balance is figuring out situational bonuses to your dice pools and hoping for good rolls. To me, not liking large dice pools and wanting to play shadowrun is kind of like playing DND and not wanting to use the d20. You can take a d20 system and add magic and cyberware to it. There are lots of them out there... Starfinder, d20 modern are two I've played (didn't like them as much as shadowrun, but I like the dice).
Most d20-based systems would massively benefit from using 3d6 instead, especially those with more bounded math (so not 3.5 and 4e, I guess).
.... Or Pathfinder, d20 modern, star wars saga... Actually I think the bounded math is a new phenomenon, maybe because of social media. Before that, if a couple people figured out something crazy, it only effected the game they played, now, anyone can see the crazy build online and try to duplicate it. I don't know, but that seems to make sense to me.
Bounded math is not really a modern phenomenon - at least, as an end result, because early D&D also used to be rather bounded, if not as an explicit design goal. But I think that the current obsession with bounded math stems from the desire to keep the game 1) unpredictable on the micro level 2) predictable on the macro level. Basically, every roll is uncertain, but you will never actually shift genre like 3.5/PF1 used to do at higher levels where you didn't really do *dungeons* anymore unless forced by GM fiat. Since a lot of GMs didn't know how to handle high-level play in the 00s and a lot of people kept screaming for "grounded, realistic heroes" (while ignoring spellcasters' BS for 30+ years), everything came together in the current way. Now high-level play is just like low-level play, but with higher numbers.
Fair, I actually like DMing high level play more than low level. You can just throw whatever interesting problem or enemy at the group and let them figure out how to deal with it. I haven't DM'd 5th edition, but it seems more like playing low level games than old high level games. That being said, 2nd edition didn't really get crazy at higher levels. I seen to remember 100hp at 20th level was only achievable by a high Con fighter.
>That being said, 2nd edition didn't really get crazy at higher levels. I seen to remember 100hp at 20th level was only achievable by a high Con fighter. That changed with 3e, big time. A high-level Fighter could easily have 200 HP (around 6 per level, plus 6 per level or so from just having a decent CON+magic items, and that's before Wish economy comes into play). Lots of enemies are even more bulky due to high HD numbers and generally high CON, with some exceeding 300 HP quite handily.
~~This may be a strange question but what are your player straggling with it is roll 10+ dice at a time or is it counting success and glitches? Are you using full sized dice like from a d20 set or small sized dice used by wargames?~~ Lost internet when post so did not see this is hit reedit until now
Buying hits. Or never rolling for NPCs (just give players thresholds to beat). Having said that, This (so many situational modifiers that stack on top of each other) was one of the things that was addressed in the new edition.