Quote:
Originally Posted by Canis
Maybe it's because I haven't played any editions before 3rd, but in my experience dice pools in SR4 are bigger.... my cybered wolf shaman rolls 14 dice for a Manabolt (without spell foci or metamagic) in SR4 but only 8 in SR3, and when he uses his assault rifle he rolls 17 dice yet in SR3 he only rolls 10 (though granted he can throw 18 if I use all his combat pool).
Now I'll admit that probabilities to hit and the like are different, and armour is much more effective in SR4. But most people seem to knock previous versions for the rediculous numbers of dice used, yet SR4 almost doubles all dice pools since you're adding attribute+skill as opposed to just skill.
I personally love the SR4 setting, but would prefer 3rd edition rules. However, playing the 3rd edition timeline using current rules would also be cool - especially as we have HL  ) |
You can roll 14 dice for a manabolt in this edition yes, but everything in SR4 has a maximum of 6/9(augmented) vs the capacities of 20 that 3rd edition gave. Very Rarely does something exceed that in skills / attributes. The dice you roll are much much less.
Lets go back to the older edition where if you had 20 dice with a minigun to hit something, and the gun explicitly states you roll 5X that number of dice... 100 Dice. Sad thing is, I am not joking, that is literally how it used to work. Armor doesn't really matter much against a dice pool of 100. The only game system that is worse in terms of number of dice rolled is Exalted 1st edition, but I won't get into that here.
And last time I did algebra, it told me that 100 Dice > 14 Dice.