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6WE Strength useless for melee users?

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dezmont

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« Reply #195 on: <11-14-19/0506:25> »
omg, combining two attributes would have enormous downstream effects... please don't tell me anyone's considering that as a real solution for this issue.

The key to good houserules it to make it as simple as possible and consistent with the other rules as possible.
appropriate for weapons.

Depends on your goals. There is a difference between a 'write up/conversion' house-rule and a 'ruling/content' house-rule. There is a long and great tradition of people making, essentially, mini system hack houserules, and pretending the 'best' houserules are minimalist is highly deceptive. Entire D&D classes came out of houserules, as well as many popular play options like Gestalt.

Mixing Strength and Body IS something I have considered for a long time as a solution, and in some homebrew games I am making I find that in scifi settings that its hard to justify them as two different stats. Eclipse Phase, for example, rolls them into one stat called Somatics, along with MANY aspects of agility, and despite being very overtly based on SR Somatics isn't a god stat, its merely good, and its as bad to dump somatics as any stat but it doesn't feel like a catastrophe to do so and you don't feel OP for taking a lot of it. Just like it sometimes is important to look at the skills list and cut bloat (Bye bye Diving/Scuba, a real skill SR had for like ever for no gosh darn reason!) sometimes attribute bloat occurs as well.

In SR6 Strength only links to climbing, disarms, grapple rules, and unarmed DVs maybe. It doesn't even link to carry weight because... I dunno. That is such an amazingly small pool of things it does that it really is feasable to mix it into body without doing a total system conversion and just make it a side benefit to body, rather than something pretending to be its own stat. You would need to rejigger the priority table (you can't just remove an assumed number of points, otherwise you get 5e AI where, despite only having to pay for half the attributes other people have, they are MORE attribute starved because they didn't get compensation points for assumed 2 stat dumps that a meat hacker would have) and the metatypes, but it is a completely feasable 'write up' because the scope of impact is actually reasonably small (which is, in fact, part of the problem. Str isn't really good for anything in SR6). You also need to rebalance and adjust any augmentation that boosts strength, most likely by making it a more specific bonus and reducing costs. Ex: Muscle augmentation giving bonuses on jumping and carrying tests but costing significantly less than toner. Drugs would need to be rebalanced too. But, again, this is all totally doable stuff, and the stakes are low because you can just always 'elimiante' the strength bonus stuff if its too tricky to integrate it into a specific case body buff because, again, strength is effectively worthless in 6e already and no one is going to lose sleep over kami not boosting strength because in 6e no one was using it for its str boost anyway.