[Seras]

Hi guys,

part of the huge appeal to shadowrun players is they get to roll a ton of dice. However for me the GM rolling 8 differnt goon is an absolute pain.

How do you handle your mook /NPC dice pools ?

What experiances have you made with dice roll programs/ programable calculators ?

Any advice is appriciated.

Thanks  Seras

[Banshee]

Honestly I usually don't even roll ... instead I either buy hits or make up a target number based on how challenging i want to be to the players

[Michael Chandra]

I have colored sets, either in sets of 6 or in sets of 9. This makes it quite easy. Also, usually I only have a few different kinds of grunts, so I won't be needing many different pools. Worst case I just have a few piles. The one massive fight I had once, had 8 different pools ready for me to pick up and roll. Fortunately SR6 has Grunt Group rules, I'm loving those.

The commercial Shadowrun dicerolling App (free, microtransactions for extra dice-type+background packages) doesn't support Edge rules, but for grunts it would be perfect. You can program various rolls, or just tap a whole bunch, or reroll a previous roll in its entirety. Perfect.

I did use dicerolling apps on rare occasion, but it misses oomph and a bad player could easily cheat, with the Shadowrun app it can be harder because you can agree to keep animation on to prevent rerolling. One good thing coming out of the new crisis might be that Google + Apple are now going to make their bluetooth libraries better, so I'm considering restarting my bluetooth-diceroll-sharing-app project in the future, where your phone would request a roll from the GM's and both phones would display the result. Perfect against cheating, and useful in a loud situation.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

the buying hits mechanic works wonders. if there's a whole bunch of mooks, and they all have 8 dice pool?  Great. Assume they just get 2 hits rather than rolling.

[Michael Chandra]

I once printed out tons of dicerolls with a program (noting #-hits and an exclamation mark if it was a glitch) and just scratched them off 1 by 1. Didn't work as well as I'd liked, though.

[Tecumseh]

Didn't work as well as I'd liked, though.

What went wrong, or what could have been better? I've thought about doing this myself.

[Michael Chandra]

Forgetting a modifier could massively change the number of hits, which just feels weird.

[Seras]

Thanks guys...I'll try the buying hits thing. I somehow missed that in the rules

[Michael Chandra]

Tbh it's not meant for combat. I think you'll find it turns combat quite dull.

[BeCareful]

A virtual tabletop like Roll20 can make rolling lots of dice easy. They can also take care of most of the math for you as well.

[Reaver]

There are times it is useful too.... like when dealing with that insufferable NPC....

Player: "fuck this asshat, I pull my pistol, and shoot him in his insufferable face! I Auto success it in at 8..."

[mcv]

Thanks to the lockdown, we're not playing online using roll20. Rolling for lots of mooks has become a lot easier.

[Sir Ludwig]

Seras,

I think the grunt group rules are nice.

SRC: p107 (example)
SRC: p114 (rules and example)

If it's a big battle, use different color dice for each grunt group.  I am not a fan of the dice rolling programs, they seem to have patterns when I use them.

Best,
SL

[DigitalZombie]

Alternatively you could combine normal dice and buying hits as a houserule.

Say you can at max roll between 8-10 dice, the rest has to be bought.

So say you have 22 dice for something , så you roll 10 dice and have 3 auto successes ( the remaining 12 dice are turned into 3 auto successes)

[Alrician]

I am really, really, really, really... really satisfied with buying hits as a GM. I did that 3 month ago and didn't ever look back! It speeds up fights amazingly.

Every three edge my npc gain during a fight I turn into an additional success. Thats super easy, too. And of course my NPCs share one common edge pool.