I always come back to Shadowrun. I haven’t actually played it in years, but it’s still the one game closest to my heart. I suffered through the mess of the original edition, and as the system progressed through 2nd and then 3rd edition, I really thought of it as the best roleplaying game around, at least of it’s type. Now, when 4th edition appeared, I was angry. I swore it off, and honestly thought I’d never play anything after 3rd edition.
After all, I had at that point collected every single 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Edition book they put out. Every single one of them. Read them voraciously. Had the whole system down pat, and could GM it with not too much referring to the rulebooks. And then 4th Edition changed everything. I felt like it made all of my books, my precious collection, obsolete. So I hated them. For a time.
When 5th Edition came out, I understood it was just a better version of 4th, so I ignored it. Until I read an exhaustive review of it, and learned that there was a lot more to this than I thought, and I decided to take the plunge. Bought the 5E core rulebook, and read it through. Found out that the reviewer was right, and this was overall a much, much better version of the game that I love. 3E is like that girl in high school you never forget, but 5E is my partner now.
Now, here’s a funny story I gotta tell you. I had started running a 5E game with a new group several years ago, and this group was all new role-players, new to not only Shadowrun, but new to gaming in general. They were a good group, though, and I thought they’d be able to handle the crunch and enjoy Shadowrun as much as I did. One of my players, thankfully, was also an experienced Shadowrun player, and she really helped get through session zero and was able to help the other players create characters and learn the system.
Until the first combat round. A bad guy had taken the first shot of the game at one of the players, and we got the shot done; showed the player how to do this particular step and I thought we were through it. Until that experienced player asked me, “What about defense?”
“What defense? What do you mean?”, I asked. She showed me in the rulebook that the defending character gets to roll defense to lower the number of hits (successes) of the attacker. I was blown away. I had never seen that part. I had only ever adjusted the shooter’s target number (or pool dice in 5E) to reflect any defenses on the part of the target.
“Well, that’s new.” I said. Until she pointed out that the same rule had been in effect SINCE THE VERY BEGINNING. In every edition up to then, ranged combat had always been an opposed roll, or the target got to roll to dodge, evade, whatever to avoid the incoming fire.
Gawd I felt like an idiot. How on Earth had I missed that part for so long? Such an important, core part of the system? Of every edition since the beginning!
I immediately threw that rule out, and continued to do it my own way. Let me explain why, and demonstrate something I think works better. To explain this, I have to go way, way back to a game I was playing with friends. It was the excellent West End Games version of Star Wars, and of course we were all playing “scoundrels”, to put it in terms you would understand. At one point, the GM had an enemy soldier (stormtrooper) take a shot at me, so I told him I was going to try to dodge. The GM, Mike, said, “Nope. blaster shots travel at the speed of light, and you can’t dodge the speed of light.” I and the other players tried to make him understand that I wasn’t dodging the actual blaster bolt, I was weaving and dodging to make myself a harder target to hit; I was in effect dodging the stormtrooper. We argued the point at length and eventually came to a resolution that basically is what I use since then.
If someone is going to actively going to make themselves harder to hit, by weaving, dodging, moving erratically or serpentine, they need to declare that at the beginning of the round. If they declare that, then the shooter takes a penalty to hit them. The target shouldn’t be able to roll against every single shot that comes their way, especially if they’ve not made it clear that they’re trying to evade beforehand.
Here’s how I see it working in Shadowrun, 5th Edition. Remember that this hasn’t been tested, since I can’t play any RPG’s anymore, but it sounds do-able to me.
At the beginning of each round (the three second combat round), every player should declare if they are evading during the round, and just how much effort they are putting into it. They can choose to make each attacker suffer a negative dice pool amount equal to the player character’s Reaction or Agility, whichever is higher. Everyone who attacks them with a ranged weapon or attack suffers that amount as a negative pool adjustment. However, the player character also suffers that SAME amount to each and every action they take during that round. This represents that they are bobbing, weaving, whatever and it’s hard to do anything when you’re putting that much effort into moving erratically. The player character has an advantage, though, in that they can reduce this amount by the number of initiative dice that they currently have.
If a street Samurai is being shot at, and she has an agility of 5, she can force everyone who shoots her to suffer -5 dice from their pool. Since that same Samurai character has 3 initiative dice during this round due to wired reflexes or something similar, she only suffers a -2 dice pool to each action she takes. This may sound like quite an advantage, but evading like this has other disadvantages, namely that the character’s movement is halved, and you may rule that concentration might be broken during this attempt.
For the largest percentage of characters and situations, this shouldn’t end up being more than about 2 or 3 dice either for the attacker or defender, but this system would eliminate the opposed roll… the defender would not roll to defend, but has already compensated for incoming fire by being defensive. Also, having more than 1 or 2 initiative dice is very rare, so unless the player really wants to avoid getting hit at the expense of everything else, not too many players are going to put more than 1 or 2 dice into evading.
I hope this system makes sense. I really hope someone tries it so I can live vicariously through you, my readers. Please take a moment to comment, either negatively or positively. Tell me what you think of this, or of my site in general.
Dziękuję!
Tim
Dice Mechanic 