Shadowrun 4e House Rules

[Shrieking Banshee]

My gm has decided that the next game we play will be Shadowrun 4e.

I sense this forum generally likes the game (at least compared too 5e).

I hear that there are some very good house rules though, so anything I can send to my GM?

[GreatGreyShrike]

Shadowrun 4e is generally pretty playable. The biggest problem of the rule system is the Matrix (computers and hacking) rules. Your choices in houseruling are to:

a) pray nothing breaks by accident and that no-one tries to explore edge cases, exploit anything, or otherwise try to 'win' the system

b) abstract and gloss over all matrix rules heavily (and probably get an NPC to do it whenever it needs to be done)

or

c) use or make a full rewrite of the rules.

One such rewrite of the matrix rules is pinned in this forum under the name The Ends of The Matrix

Other issues are less glaring and can be more comfortably ignored. For example, the karma advancement and build points chargen systems are not equivalent which affords the opportunity for those better at math to min-max for power - you can make two identical characters on a certain BP/Karma budget except one of them just has slightly more stuff for no reason. However, this sort of thing is comparatively minor and easier to fix or completely ignore.

[Shrieking Banshee]

I heard something about a wonky initiative. Is that a real problem, or just fakeness?

[Username17]

I heard something about a wonky initiative. Is that a real problem, or just fakeness?

The default rules for initiative in 4th edition are that you roll a number of dice equal to your intuition + reaction, count hits, and then add your raw intuition and reaction to the total. So every point of Reaction is both +1 to your initiative value and a die that has a 1 in 3 chance of adding 1 to your initiative value.

It does work, but it's pretty deterministic. A high Initiative is like 14 and a low Initiative is like 6, and it's literally not even possible for the low initiative to go before the high initiative character even if they roll all hits and the other character rolls all misses. It's just kind of a waste of time is all (you're supposed to reroll the initiative every round even though it usually doesn't make any difference).

Lots of people play with just the raw number of hits from the initiative roll determining when you act. Lots of other people only roll once at the beginning of combat and just keep the initiative results from round to round.

-Username17

[vagrant]

Initiative isn't really one of things that need to be fixed, but as Frank noted, it is entirely deterministic. I recommend the approach of 'roll once for a combat scene and don't bother rerolling' because it saves time, but you'll find most SR combat is over in one round anyway. (Especially when you've got everyone popping 3-4 passes per round.) I've never found rerolling init every round to make much a difference when the combat will at most take 1.5 rounds and everyone has had time to shoot like 12 different times. Stuff is pretty much dead at that point.

Other houserules I'd recommend are a bunch of chargen changes, such as free contact points and etc. - you can find a handy list of the most common ones in Chummer, so pick and choose to your hearts content. Gameplay-wise, totally ignore all vehicle rules and run it cinematically - that is basically just go for 'rule of cool' because I've yet to see a single edition of SR where vehicle rules were something I wanted to use. You can /try/, but it'll go to absurdity almost immediately once your players have a go. I don't rather like absurd outputs, so I ignore them, but YMMV.

Matrixwise, Shrike caught it - I prefer a gentleman's agreement to not just Agent Smith the matrix, and we pretend hall of mirrors and shit are somehow, handwave-y solved. Or you could use EotM, which is great, but certain aspects of it are questionable for some groups.

In terms of 'shit to watch out for', be veeerry careful of what books you allow your players to have. The weapons in MinorPoliticalSquabblesOverTrees!!!!1 (War!) are miles better than anything else and people will literally use just those, but can be considered as OP for some campaigns. Also, ban Stick-n-Shock if you want people to use other types or ammo or have trouble with spirits at all. SnS literally makes most combat a cakewalk (honestly, even if they have insulation mods for their armour.)

Also, more as general advice than anything, give the characters money for doing shit. Or at least reward them with gear. If you look at the prices for your street sam to upgrade, that shit is expensive and giving runners 3-5k in total for a run is actually bullshit and will result in your players deciding to become a car-jacking ring or drug-runners instead. Which is of course up to the group, but does tend to derail an actual Shadowrun campaign.