Shadowrun Play > Gamemasters' Lounge

Handling large dice pools as a GM

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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.

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