Yup, I hear you. Shadowrun 3e default combat system instructed the players to calculate every situational modifier from various sources before making the roll. The fact that each modifier was different only made things worse. Here have a look:cyberzombie wrote:So long as there's some roll you can make to succeed and some roll to fail, I'm not sure it really matters actively where the numbers come from. For instance, the minotaur you try to petrify may have a will save of +6 or he may have a will save of +12. People will generally be okay with either of those options, as there's a number of ways a minotaur's will save could be different. So whether you arbitrarily decided he had a +12 will instead of officially calculating his will save to be +12 (via class levels, cloaks of resistance and Iron will), the PCs probably will never know, and most probably won't even care even if they did find out.
Ultimately the end result is that the minotaur has some will save bonus and you're going to roll it as you would any will save and live with the results. So the combat plays out exactly to the players as though the minotaur was built using an official statblock, only the ass-pulled stats method is way faster.
Ranged Combat Modifiers Table
Target in Short range: TN = 4
Target in Long Range: TN = 5
Target in Extreme Range: TN = 8
Target Running: +2
Target Stationary: -1
Attacker Running: +5
Dim Light: +3
No Light: +6
Light Smoke/Mist: +2
Heavy Smoke/Mist: +5
Total Darkness: +8
Laser Sight: -1
Smartgun: -2
Burst Fire: +3
Full Auto: +(number of shots fired)
Attacker wounded: +(wound level)
Attacker stunned: +(stun level)
.
.
etc.
My group soon discovered that if we really followed those instructions, our combats would long entire game sessions. Thus, we began eyeballing all situational modifiers, only accounting the one or two more relevant, and thats it. My group never regret doing this.