Character Abilities for SR4

I've had a look at the new characters abilities feature and I must say that I can see its usefulness. However, for us SR4 players it's again not exactly a big help as it won't allow us to use all of its features. As you can define attributes and abilities separately and link the two, I was hoping to use it for SR4. There, every skill is linked with one attribute and the two make up your overall dice pool. I would love to use a makro that could look something like this "/r (@strength+4)d6>5". This would add 4 dice to my strength attribute and test them against a target number of five. However, this does not seem to work. I've had a look at the help section, but couldn't find anything helpful on this subject. On a similar note, as modifiers affect the overall dice pool, it would be great to reflect that as well by making the use of modifiers possible as well, so that a makro like "/r (@strength+4+Mod)d6>5 would ask for the value of "Mod". I'm hoping, I made myself clear. I really like Roll20, but please don't forget about us Shadowrunners...

Here is a workaround for your macro: Step 1: Type in: /r @strength d6>5 (there is a space between strength and d6) Step 2: move the cursor to just before the 'd' and hit backspace to delete the space. Step 3: without typing anything else save the macro (if you type in anything else you will probably overwrite the @strength portion). Step 4: Go to your token and edit the token so that @strength is one of your bars. Now, when you want to add +4 to the strength you may change that number on your token. It will change the @strength attribute and which will then be reflected in the macro. If you do not want to modify your actual strength attribute you can create a different attribute which you can then modify. - Gauss

Gauss, that's pretty slick. I'll have to keep that option in mind for the future.

Thanks Sarah - Gauss

Although not ideal, this is a great tip. Thanks for that. Almost feel stupid for having entered my character's skills that soon...

This will require some changes to the dice engine, we'll see what we can do. That would be awesome. the real problem with using macros in Shadowrun is the die pool modifiers. You might ordinarily roll 10d6, but everything from cybernetics to your remaining hitpoints to the lighting conditions will add or subrtract dice. It'd be great to have something like "@unarmed - 2d6"

I've checked out the character sheet yesterday and it worked fine. I would, however, find it very useful, if we could minimise the character sheet to the macro bar. So instead of having loads of macros in the bar, a single shortcut to the character sheet would bring it up. Although you can also do that by changing to the Journal tab, that would mean leaving the Chat tab, which again is quite annoying as you might miss stuff...

I think the macro "/r @strength d6>5 + 4d6>5" might be what you're looking for. When you use it, you can account for any modifiers (let's say the modifiers add 3d6 to your dice pool) by entering "#StrengthSkill + 3d6>5" into the chat window.