Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Rules and such => Topic started by: ComradCH on <02-18-21/1223:33>
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Basically title.
Last session my mage lost a hand getting 3 Ones one 5d6 damage resistance test (2 points of damage from a rat) without any successes. We spend some time looking up rules but didn't find anything objecting the Glitch happening.
Later i started considering it, and it seems really harsh accidental consequence for the edition that reduced damage and damage resistance. I'm surprised it is first time this comes up in our year long campaign, cause we have body 3 characters.
Anyway just wanted to check if we missed something.
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Short answer: no, glitches shouldn't apply to damage resistance tests.
Edit:
Ok, longer answer!
It's technically true that pg 44 says that Glitches can happen on "tests", without categorizing what kind of tests. But when you get to the Running the Game chapter, pg 232 discusses the role of glitches in the big picture of the game. Quote:
Glitches and critical glitches present prime opportunities
for gamemasters to add flavor, excitement,
and plot twists to your Shadowrun game.
Now a GM may technically be within their rights to apply the result of a critical glitch to your body roll to soak damage... but doing so SHOULD be in furtherance of the story/game and not just because "lol you crit glitched". As a rule of thumb, I don't like to apply glitches to any resistance test at all, but that's by no means the official take. I mean, if you're swinging at someone and they glitch their REA+INT portion of the opposed test, maybe your opponent slipped while trying to jerk out of the way. It's intentional for there to be the flexibility to adjudicate such narrative effects into 'roll-playing' (and I didn't misspell that!)
TL;DR: Your GM probably shouldn't have afflicted you with a critical glitch when soaking damage.
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My impression lines up with Stainless, not on DR tests.
Personal opinion, the glitch concept should sort of go away. Some penalty for rolling bad sure, but this whole your gun explodes thing is just silly. It will never happen to your gun guy while shooting, but it will happen far too often in peoples off skills. I don't want to make trying things so dangerous people don't feel comfortable making attempts. Its not like they are jumping a active volcano or something.
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Glitches need an update for sure. THEY DONT HAPPEN NEARLY ENOUGH. Last character, I took Bad Luck for fun, and it works. Glitches show up 1-2 times per session. I like Anarchy's Glitch Die better though. Get a 1/6 chance of a glitch regardless of how skilled you are.
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Glitches need an update for sure. THEY DONT HAPPEN NEARLY ENOUGH. Last character, I took Bad Luck for fun, and it works. Glitches show up 1-2 times per session. I like Anarchy's Glitch Die better though. Get a 1/6 chance of a glitch regardless of how skilled you are.
Make them happen more often sure, just don't give people a rolemaster chart of absurdity like this is a final destination game instead of Shadowrun.
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The maim-o-rama on pgs 233 and 234 was one of the eye opening things for me too, when I first was digesting 6e. But it's important to remember that unlike the rolemaster critical hit charts, these are explicitly only "ideas". Suggestions, by another name.
They're quite a jolt from 5e and even 4e sensibilities, perhaps. I remember playing in 1-3e, where combat absolutely could put you in a situation where you have to either get an augmentation, or deal with the loss of functionality until you can afford a clonal replacement body part that doesn't give an essence hit. One of the sacred cows that 4e killed was removing this dynamic... I didn't like it at the time because being forced onto the burnout slope was one of the few inherent restraining influences on MagicRun. It's a different kind of game, sure, where you only ever take cyberware/essence hits because you chose to, as opposed to a game when you sooner or later almost HAVE to.
Depends on which flavor of Shadowrun one prefers!
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I'm firmly in the camp that considers glitches to equate to complications. I've never had a critical glitch come up in a game I've played or GM'd and I'd sure hesitate to make something crazy bad happen like a lost limb. That said, I also think injuries in SR are too abstract. For a game where replacing organic parts of your body with machine pieces is prominent, maiming is suspiciously absent.
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The maim-o-rama on pgs 233 and 234 was one of the eye opening things for me too, when I first was digesting 6e. But it's important to remember that unlike the rolemaster critical hit charts, these are explicitly only "ideas". Suggestions, by another name.
They're quite a jolt from 5e and even 4e sensibilities, perhaps. I remember playing in 1-3e, where combat absolutely could put you in a situation where you have to either get an augmentation, or deal with the loss of functionality until you can afford a clonal replacement body part that doesn't give an essence hit. One of the sacred cows that 4e killed was removing this dynamic... I didn't like it at the time because being forced onto the burnout slope was one of the few inherent restraining influences on MagicRun. It's a different kind of game, sure, where you only ever take cyberware/essence hits because you chose to, as opposed to a game when you sooner or later almost HAVE to.
Depends on which flavor of Shadowrun one prefers!
Those felt different to me as they occurred on receiving massive injury from a single attack, these were just like lol you failed an acrobatics check sliding under a desk lose both legs. While I get they are suggestions, I don't think a single one of them was even a decent suggestion.
Edit to add for us magic run did not kick in until 3e, and that was mostly from the removal of grounding self scaling spells also did not help. The virtual total lack of focuses and certainly no spell locks(sustaining focuses) due to fear of what I'd do to them kept magic in check. Also cyber was just more beefy, bioware going against bio index score and only costing essence for mages, we had sams going 4 times before the mage blinked. Mages were still crazy valuable they just rarely added much to a fight since it was over by the time they went. 6e is the first edition to pull back on it a bit but I think they targeted the exactly wrong areas. General spell casting was rarely a issue at out tables, spirits, sustained focuses where mages ended up more augmented than the sams were. Every edition seems to nerf the sam in some way, first it was bio index, then it was 1/2 essence form less of two pools then its just essence.
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It's technically true that pg 44 says that Glitches can happen on "tests", without categorizing what kind of tests. But when you get to the Running the Game chapter, pg 232 discusses the role of glitches in the big picture of the game. Quote:
Glitches and critical glitches present prime opportunities
for gamemasters to add flavor, excitement,
and plot twists to your Shadowrun game.
Now a GM may technically be within their rights to apply the result of a critical glitch to your body roll to soak damage... but doing so SHOULD be in furtherance of the story/game and not just because "lol you crit glitched". As a rule of thumb, I don't like to apply glitches to any resistance test at all, but that's by no means the official take. I mean, if you're swinging at someone and they glitch their REA+INT portion of the opposed test, maybe your opponent slipped while trying to jerk out of the way. It's intentional for there to be the flexibility to adjudicate such narrative effects into 'roll-playing' (and I didn't misspell that!)
Ok. RAW everything in check RAI maybe should tone down a bit. Severity of critical glitches in examples is ridiculous, we hade a good laugh while gone rules searching. I think i will brought it up to my GM consideration if this ever comes up again. For now i think my mage is pretty OK still, my only regret, now i need to invest in Ambidextrous to get useful Gun skill again.
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All,
RAW, I am in line with SSDR. How I run games, probably similar to SSDR.
When I have someone glitch, I try to put it into contact with what is happening. Gunfight in a convenience store and someone botches an athletics roll to run to get out of the building. Then they trip on a can of soda/coke/pop and may be prone. I think it should cause a pause in a player’s plan, but nothing that premiant hinders the player’s character. That is unless the player/character is doing something really stupid that is ruining everyone else’s experiences.
Regards,
SL
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It's technically true that pg 44 says that Glitches can happen on "tests", without categorizing what kind of tests. But when you get to the Running the Game chapter, pg 232 discusses the role of glitches in the big picture of the game. Quote:
Glitches and critical glitches present prime opportunities
for gamemasters to add flavor, excitement,
and plot twists to your Shadowrun game.
Now a GM may technically be within their rights to apply the result of a critical glitch to your body roll to soak damage... but doing so SHOULD be in furtherance of the story/game and not just because "lol you crit glitched". As a rule of thumb, I don't like to apply glitches to any resistance test at all, but that's by no means the official take. I mean, if you're swinging at someone and they glitch their REA+INT portion of the opposed test, maybe your opponent slipped while trying to jerk out of the way. It's intentional for there to be the flexibility to adjudicate such narrative effects into 'roll-playing' (and I didn't misspell that!)
Ok. RAW everything in check RAI maybe should tone down a bit. Severity of critical glitches in examples is ridiculous, we hade a good laugh while gone rules searching. I think i will brought it up to my GM consideration if this ever comes up again. For now i think my mage is pretty OK still, my only regret, now i need to invest in Ambidextrous to get useful Gun skill again.
Back in I think 4e, I rolled with -2 in shooting for over a year with a street sam who lost his main arm. I think a mage can get by fine shooting lefty for a while. That being said the idea that 2 points of damage destroys a hand, even with a glitch sounds fairly extreme. If I were to do a glitch rule on damage resistance that could cause loss of limbs I'd use guidelines form 1e-3e where the damage taken needed to be at least serious(aka 6 boxes back then), at the 2 box range I might just have you take an extra box or make it a bleeder, probably use the burning 1 status as a guideline but say its applying pressure, bandaging it, first aid kit, heal spell etc that solves the status.
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Another thing to note is that even the harsh-sounding suggestions like "losing a hand" and "taking out an eye" don't necessarily mean permanent injuries. Unless we're talking about glitches involving Monofilament Whips, Light Sabers, or juggled chainsaws, I'd envision such crippling effects as being less than permanent. Losing a hand MIGHT mean you just got Luke Skywalker'd, but it could just as easily mean a nerve got hit and it's been paralyzed until the end of the fight, or until the GM deems fit, or until a Biotetch test is done to fix it, etc. "taking out an eye" might simply mean it's swollen shut, or fouled with blood/sand/etc until cleaned out, and so on.
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My personal rule of thumb is that a glitch should be embarrassing, and a critical glitch should be damaging. I like to use the example that a glitch on a Firearms test means your gun jammed, while a critical glitch means it exploded. Losing the use of a limb for the remainder of that adventure seems like a reasonable result for a critical glitch on a damage soak.
I do like to invite suggestions from the table when glitches happen, and I would definitely involve the player before inflicting any permanent consequences on their character. Maybe the player quite likes the idea of having to get a cyberlimb after a severe injury and would jump at the rationale. If the player was reluctant to lose Essence over it, however, I'd certainly allow them to get reconstructive surgery from their street doc after the run (or maybe even a cloned replacement limb after a suitable waiting period).
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My personal rule of thumb is that a glitch should be embarrassing, and a critical glitch should be damaging. I like to use the example that a glitch on a Firearms test means your gun jammed, while a critical glitch means it exploded. Losing the use of a limb for the remainder of that adventure seems like a reasonable result for a critical glitch on a damage soak.
I do like to invite suggestions from the table when glitches happen, and I would definitely involve the player before inflicting any permanent consequences on their character. Maybe the player quite likes the idea of having to get a cyberlimb after a severe injury and would jump at the rationale. If the player was reluctant to lose Essence over it, however, I'd certainly allow them to get reconstructive surgery from their street doc after the run (or maybe even a cloned replacement limb after a suitable waiting period).
This just might be one of those I shoot too much things, but a gun exploding just seems absurd. I guess I can play up dystopian manufacturing or something but I could hand a gun to someone who has never fired a gun in their life, who was a giant freaking klutz and have them fire off 10,000 rounds, the gun would never explode. And part of my problem with the critical glitch is super bad idea is the math behind it. It punishes the street sam for trying to talk, it punished the decker for trying to shoot, the mage for trying to throw something etc. Have a 2/2 for 4 total dice and critical glitches aren't that rare given how many die rolls you can toss over a few games, and 2 is normal stat with some training. And think of a average person starting to learn a skill so 2 attribute 0 skill, do they literally hurt themselves almost 1/2 the times they attempt tasks. Odds are there are a raft of skills the PCs aren't trained in, should they just never make attempts because doing so would just get them or a teammate hurt. Unless the task itself poses some inherent danger I just don't feel comfortable hurting the PC on one bad roll. Toss the sam a med kit during a fight and critically glitch, oh you broke your arm somehow. I don;t think my players would have fun, they'd just eye roll and think i was being a jerk. I get some people like these things and think its fun or funny or something, I mean some people like brussel sprouts so the world is filled with different people with different tastes. But for me getting slightly unlucky on 4 dice it does not seem right to have some freak 1 in a million accident occur.
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I agree with you Shinobi Killfist that an exploding gun isn't a realistic outcome... but a couple of things on that:
1) Even if you set aside the elves and dragons and fireballs, Shadowrun is more of a "movie physics" or "movie logic" game than any kind of realistic simulation. Let's never forget that this is a game where you get to make a roll to avoid incoming bullets. So... imo the measure of what's "realistic" is rooted more in "would this make sense if it happened in a movie" than actual realism.
2) Either way, I agree an exploding gun should not be your go-to result of a critical glitch while firing one. Shooting yourself somehow? Sure. Shooting an ally instead of your intended target? Absolutely, especially if they're close to the target. Dropping your gun because the recoil knocked it out of your grip? Why not? The exact distinction between glitch and critical glitch will of course lie in the eye of the beholder... but again the role of BOTH kinds of glitches is to enhance the game, not to punish the player for rolling poorly. A character's gun shouldn't be exploding unless there's some sort of mitigating circumstances (it's already been prior established that the gun has suffered some damage, or etc)
3) The mathematical odds of glitching are actually pretty low. I think the highest it can ever be is 1/6 (which is ~16%), and that's only when your dice pool is a measly 1 die. It goes down, precipitously, from there. Yes, there's a mathematical oddity where 3 dice glitches more often than 2 dice, but it's only COMPARATIVELY more often. Either way, it's low odds. And the odds approach zero when you get into optimized dice pools.
3a) closely related to point 3 is the Edge wild card. This may come down to playstyle, but it's my experience that a glitch NEVER happens. All that happens when you eventually you get that unlucky result, you spend a point of edge to turn one of those 1s into a 2, and avert the glitch. Getting the unlucky "glitch" just ends up meaning (again, in my subjective experience) that you spend edge cancelling the glitch and therefore don't get to spend edge in other ways for that action. Now, of course, the flipside is that edge can potentially be spent offensively to CAUSE a glitch, if the roll was close. So, I'm calling this a 3a "wild card" rather than being its own valid point of its own :D
On the topic of training: yeah, you will and I daresay SHOULD glitch and even critically glitch a lot. One learns from mistakes. Going back to point 1, if you're learning to shoot, it doesn't mean your gun explodes in your hand more often than it does in the hands of an expert. You're right about that being silly. But again glitches and critical glitches can and should be other things, far more often than a gun exploding. True story: when I qualified on the M-16 in basic training one of the fellow trainees to the right or left of me shot a couple of times at my target instead of their own. I had more bullet holes on my paper than rounds I fired. SOMEONE was clearly glitching or maybe even crit glitching that day.
Edit: after reminiscing about that incident, I also remember that was also the time someone left their fire selector on "burst" and accidentally popped off 3 rounds at once. Lots of glitches and crit glitches going on in basic training. And we got the abject lesson in WHY they are so anal about only letting us have 3 bullets in the magazine at a time on qualification :D
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Well to go through this.
1) I guess but I never viewed the defense test as actually dodging an attack but more making yourself harder to hit.
2) Unless people were in melee or something I don't think I'd have you shoot an ally or yourself. I don't mind glitches its the assumption they lead to an injury.
3) the odds are low, yes and just wont happen in a campaign for your good skills. But with 5 players at a table we toss a lot of dice every night we game, we get critical glitches every few games. But like I said I don't have them lead to injury unless the task is inherently risky. So people feel comfortable trying to con the guard with their 2 charisma and 1 skill. They don't just stay quiet and let the specialist handle it.
3a)true but being able to disregard a mechanic does not make a mechanic good.
And as for training, yeah glitches and critical glitches should be common its them leading to injury I have a issue with. Across all of basic and years and years, injuries do occur on the shooting range, but they are rare enough that I would not be putting that in as a mechanic. Injuries in other tasks that pose more inherent danger I have seen, and hey anyone can twist their ankle. But again these are more freak occurrences not 1 in 126 or something.
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I agree that exploding guns and the like on glitches don't make much sense.
To me, since a glitch is more likely to happen for smaller dice pools, its effects should rather be a consequence of the character's incompetency. Like missing the target and instead hitting an innocent bystander or an ally. Or yourself when attempting a quickdraw, etc.
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Also, exploding guns is very specifically for explosive ammo, it makes no sense other stuff is more lethal.
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In our game, we scale glitches. So a 3 dice glitch/critical glitch is way less severe than a 20 dice glitch/critical.
We also found that the 2 Edge Action :
P.46
2-Edge Boosts
• +1 to a single die roll: You get to add 1 to a
single die. Maybe that’s making a 4 a 5 to get
another hit, or making 1 a 2 to avoid a glitch
Helps a lot! I think it is sometimes overlooked. :)
And for our game, I don't apply glitches when rolling initiatives or body/willpower for damage. I consider the damage a glitch. Unless it is a healing test.... ;D
We rarely have glitches unless the players are out of edge - or can't donate an edge to the hapless dice roller. ;D
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Yeah, I will probably toss out the glitch rules as written. Critical glitches really don't feel good to even consider using. Maiming a character or causing them a loss in a key attribute or totaling a vehicle over a single bad test is way overkill, and falls into the Bad DMing Choice realm for me.
That said, it seems extremely unlikely to ever happen, especially to higher dice pool characters, so you end up punishing people who have low dice pools, which is a bummer as a player to go through. Yeah, you can also Edge your way out of it, and pretty affordably, but that brings me back to the 'what's the point of the rule then' type feeling.
I'd rather have some kind of "drama die" type mechanic. So for example, one special die you roll with each test. If it comes up a 1, reroll it. If it still comes up a 1, you have a complication. On a 6, rerolled to be a hit, you have something good happen instead. More like a Glitch Die idea, rather than the unlikely scenario of a total wipeout on a dice pool. Then its not so much about a skill flub, and more about random chance events in combat and creating opportunities for interesting story ideas you can throw in. Save the real drama for a failed test + a complication and there's your 'fumble' effect if you want to play it that way.
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Between making 2s count for glitches, or using edge to strategically turn some 2s into 1s, your opponent can blow some edge to force a glitch. Even on big dice pools what would, in absence of edge shenanigans, essentially never glitch.
Is it worth it? Meh. Perspective lies in the eye of the beholder. Using edge to manipulate your opponents' dice is kind of a richard move, sure, but it's literally how it works :D In the case of a GM, it's less mean than making players reroll hits on their defense tests. In the case of players, maybe when the bad guys already missed anyway, getting a crit glitch might give an opportunity too good to pass up.