Shadowrun: Dice & Strategy Guide

Shadowrun drops magic and monsters into a near-future corporate dystopia, and it resolves the action with one of tabletop’s most tactile dice systems: gather a pool of six-sided dice, throw them all at once, and count the ones that came up winners. Big handfuls of d6 are the sound of this game.

What dice Shadowrun uses

Shadowrun uses ordinary six-sided dice — and lots of them. Every test builds a dice pool by adding a relevant attribute to a relevant skill (for example Agility + Firearms, or Charisma + Con), plus or minus modifiers from gear, wounds and circumstances. That total is how many d6 you roll.

When you roll the pool, each die is checked on its own. A 5 or 6 is a “hit”; anything else does nothing. You count your hits and compare them to a threshold the gamemaster sets for the task (an easy task might need 1 hit, a very hard one 4 or more). Meet or beat the threshold and you succeed; the hits above it often measure how well you did.

Opposed tests and glitches

Many actions are opposed: you and a defender each roll your pools and compare hits. In combat, your attack hits are set against the target’s defence hits; net hits (yours minus theirs) can add to damage. Then the defender rolls a separate pool to soak the damage.

The system’s signature twist is the glitch. Because you roll so many dice, 1s pile up, and if half or more of your dice come up 1 the roll glitches — something goes wrong even if you succeeded. If you glitch and score no hits at all, it’s a critical glitch: a genuine disaster. Bigger pools generally succeed more, but they also make ordinary glitches easier to trigger, which keeps even skilled runners honest.

Edge

Edge is your luck-and-grit resource, and it bends the dice in ways nothing else can. Spending a point of Edge can, among other options, let you add dice to a pool, re-roll your failures, or turn every 6 into an exploding die that rolls again and can hit repeatedly (the “Rule of Six”). Edge can also be spent to shrug off a glitch or to act first. It is precious — a small pool of points that refreshes slowly — so it is the tool you save for the roll that truly matters.

How a turn plays out

Combat is organised into initiative passes. You roll initiative (an attribute plus an Initiative Die or dice) to get an initiative score, and characters act in descending order; those with augmentations or magic that grant extra initiative dice may act more often within the round. On your action you declare what you do, assemble the appropriate pool of d6, roll, count hits against the threshold or the opponent’s defence, and resolve. Damage is tracked on a condition monitor split into Physical and Stun, with penalties as you take wounds.

Winning and effective strategy

• Build a big, relevant pool. Success scales directly with how many dice you throw, so invest attribute and skill points where your character actually operates. A specialist with a large focused pool outperforms a generalist with mediocre pools everywhere.
• Stack the modifiers before you roll. Aim, take cover, use the right smartgun or spell, and exploit good conditions. Every bonus die is roughly a one-in-three extra chance at another hit — those add up fast across a whole pool.
• Spend Edge decisively. Don’t hoard it all campaign. Use Edge to re-roll failures on a mission-critical test, to push through a glitch, or to guarantee going first in a firefight. A point spent to save a run is worth more than one saved for “later”.
• Play to your role and let the team cover the rest. Shadowrun runs are built for a mixed crew — a face to talk, a decker or technomancer for the Matrix, a mage for the astral, a street samurai for muscle, a rigger for drones. Trying to be all of them thins every pool.
• Plan the run, not just the fight. Legwork, contacts and a good approach let you win with social or stealth pools before bullets fly — and firefights are where runners die.

Beginner tips and common mistakes

• Only 5s and 6s count. Everything else, including 4, is a miss — don’t tally the wrong faces.
• Watch your 1s. A pile of 1s can glitch a roll you thought you’d aced; count them every time, especially on huge pools.
• Don’t dump your whole pool blindly — but don’t under-invest either. Balance your attribute and skill so your key pool is genuinely large.
• Lean on your contacts. New players skip legwork and walk into ambushes; a little information reshapes the whole run.
• Track your wound penalties. Damage shrinks your pools; players forget this and wonder why the dice turned cold.

Like counting successes on a pool? See how a different d10 system does it in our Vampire: The Masquerade dice & strategy guide.