I caved and bought the core rulebook. It definitely has a different system to what I'm used to in the d20 system. Seems like rolling so many dice for basic skill checks and such would be kind of a pain. The initiative pass system seems a bit odd too.
Say I make a gunslinger char and get into combat. I could get 4 initiative passes and fire twice per initiative pass. That's 8 separate attacks per combat turn. Depending on how the char is made it looks like I could easily roll upwards of 15 dice for each of those attacks (say 5 stat, 6 skill, 2 for specialization, 2 for one of the gun bonuses like smartgun). So I'd be rolling a total of 120+ dice per combat turn just to determine my attack. And the GM would roll about the same to determine the defense of whatever I'm shooting each time. And he'd roll the attack dice for them shooting back. And I'd roll the defense of my char when they fire back. Even out of combat you do the same thing for skill checks. And chars really specialized in stuff with cyberware or whatever look like they could get 20 dice or more to roll.
It just seems like all that dice rolling would get kinda troublesome in a tabletop game. It's worse than D&D where you have to roll Xd6 for damage for casting spells and stuff. I suppose it's all moot over the net though, since you could just make a macro to roll all the dice and count up the 'hits' automatically. It seems kind of strange that you could make a char that could fire a clip out of an assault rifle in 5 long bursts, reload, and fire another two bursts - all in the same turn that a char not specialized for combat might just be swinging a knife once.
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Topic: Shadow run RPG (Read 4424 times)