SR dice rolls and hits and stuff
Posted: May 6th, 2010, 19:02
Ive seen some comments recently that makes me think people are not quite getting the dice roll system in SR. Mainly, these have been where people have got 3, 4 or 5 hits and seem disappointed. This is wroooong. Heres why:
Every dice rolled in shadowrun has a 1 in 3 chance of being a hit.
That means that, on average, a third of dice rolled are hits.
That means that you can roughly estimate how many hits you are likely to roll by dividing your dice pool by 3. For example, a dice pool of 6 will average 2 hits.
Thats all very well, but what does that mean in real terms? Well, put it this way: a rating of 3 in a skill is classed as "professional". So, a standard army grunt would have a firearms skill of 3, an airline pilot would have his vehicle skill at 3, and so on. As the average attribute rating for a regular human is also 3, that means that most professionals, doing what they do for a job, will be rolling 6 dice. Just 6. So they will get, on average, 2 hits. That means that most of the things a professional does in his average day job require *less than* 2 hits to succeed. If they do something that needs 2 hits, even though it is something they are trained to do to a reasonable level, they will fail a fair amount of the time.
Of course, you guys are Shadowrunners, not regular joes. You are supposed to be a cut above the rest, and therefore are going to be rolling much higher dice pools on some things. Just keep in mind the following table from the SR rulebook:
difficulty - threshold
Easy - 1
Average - 2
Hard - 4
Extreme - 6
So a roll of 4 is pretty good, really.
Every dice rolled in shadowrun has a 1 in 3 chance of being a hit.
That means that, on average, a third of dice rolled are hits.
That means that you can roughly estimate how many hits you are likely to roll by dividing your dice pool by 3. For example, a dice pool of 6 will average 2 hits.
Thats all very well, but what does that mean in real terms? Well, put it this way: a rating of 3 in a skill is classed as "professional". So, a standard army grunt would have a firearms skill of 3, an airline pilot would have his vehicle skill at 3, and so on. As the average attribute rating for a regular human is also 3, that means that most professionals, doing what they do for a job, will be rolling 6 dice. Just 6. So they will get, on average, 2 hits. That means that most of the things a professional does in his average day job require *less than* 2 hits to succeed. If they do something that needs 2 hits, even though it is something they are trained to do to a reasonable level, they will fail a fair amount of the time.
Of course, you guys are Shadowrunners, not regular joes. You are supposed to be a cut above the rest, and therefore are going to be rolling much higher dice pools on some things. Just keep in mind the following table from the SR rulebook:
difficulty - threshold
Easy - 1
Average - 2
Hard - 4
Extreme - 6
So a roll of 4 is pretty good, really.