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Dumpshock Forums _ Shadowrun _ How much damage does running through monowire do?

Posted by: emo samurai Jan 26 2007, 04:05 AM

How dead is a person who's been chopped up into small, easy-to-carry pieces?

Posted by: cetiah Jan 26 2007, 04:24 AM

3 physical damage.

Posted by: mfb Jan 26 2007, 04:53 AM

trick question! you don't run through monowire--monowire runs through you.

Posted by: TheOOB Jan 26 2007, 05:02 AM

Well, the damage would depend on how much monowire there is, if it's moving (moving monowire way more deadly then stationary), and how much your GM wants to keep you out of that area.

Posted by: BishopMcQ Jan 26 2007, 05:08 AM

Presuming they fail their perception, soak 8P. (SR4, p 252)

Don't forget to add all those wonderful penalties for being distracted, wounded, in smoke, etc.

Posted by: djinni Jan 26 2007, 05:10 AM

QUOTE (BishopMcQ)

Presuming they fail their perception, soak 8P. (SR4, p 252)

Don't forget to add all those wonderful penalties for being distracted, wounded, in smoke, etc.

and it's almost invisible

Posted by: BishopMcQ Jan 26 2007, 05:12 AM

technically a threshold of 3 which means you need on average a dice pool of 9 to see it in normal lighting conditions without stressful modifiers, 12 if you just buy successes.

Posted by: Kesslan Jan 26 2007, 06:20 AM

If you want to scale damage for the person being moving, driving into or running into the wire. I THINK this was adressed somewehre in the SR3 books.

Even if it wasnt you can sorta take a page out of the vehicle collision and falling rules. Like say.. walking into it or at a light jog is base damage. But running full out into it adds say.. 1-2 power. And driving a bike to it adds +1 power every 10kph you were going.

That makes it incredibly deadly.. but then.. it's monowire. It's -supposed- to be ultra deadly in my mind.

Posted by: emo samurai Jan 26 2007, 07:22 AM

What if they fall 10 meters into it, but hit a house's rooftop first?

Posted by: Mistwalker Jan 26 2007, 08:08 AM

I would also think that the number of strands would also affect the damage.
Say, for every extra strand, add 1 or 2 to the DV. But also add in the same as a dice pool modifier for perception?

Posted by: Kesslan Jan 26 2007, 08:08 AM

QUOTE (emo samurai)

What if they fall 10 meters into it, but hit a house's rooftop first?

well say they fall and hit the rooftop at 4 meters. Apply 4 meter drop damage, now they fall another 6m so calulate from there. Simple

Posted by: Ben Jan 26 2007, 12:46 PM

QUOTE (Mistwalker)

I would also think that the number of strands would also affect the damage.
Say, for every extra strand, add 1 or 2 to the DV.

I would say add 1 for every strand, same as bullets in burst/fullauto.

but another question: say a troll in full body armor, with dermal plating and all, runs through the wire. He takes lots of damage but doesn't die. What happens? is the wire cut? does the troll bounce off?

Posted by: Kyrn Jan 26 2007, 12:51 PM

I would adjudicate based on the amount of damage the troll took and how fast he was going. The less damage and the higher the speed, the higher chance he broke through the monowire. The more damage and the lower the speed, the higher the chance he hit it and stopped.

In either event, you now have a very angry, heavily armored troll. Enjoy!

Posted by: Austere Emancipator Jan 26 2007, 01:06 PM

The troll could swat the wires away, nevermind what happens when he runs into one. Carbon nanotube strands at a thickness of a human hair will snap with a free hanging weight of 65kg (less than the troll's arms), and already at that point you have to press bare skin forcefully against the wire to achieve any kind of cutting. If it's thicker than that it'll just trip you.

Posted by: Eryk the Red Jan 26 2007, 01:41 PM

However, if we assume that monowire does what it says it does, rather than what science says, you would have the troll take damage from the wire, but also have the wire suffer damage, using the rules for attacking barriers. I would probably base it loosely on the ramming rules, using Body to determine the DV that the monowire suffers. If it suffers pretty much any damage (the wire might have a high Armor, but it wouldn't have a Structure higher than 1), the wire snaps.

That's probably how I'd run it.

I also rule, though, that monowire attacks (and lasers, or anything similar that doesn't hit with a lot of force) do not damage at all if the DV doesn't beat the armor. (Monowire causing stun damage doesn't work for me.) If that happened (the troll would have to be wearing some heavy duty armor), I would give him a bonus to the DV the wire suffers.

Posted by: Ben Jan 26 2007, 01:56 PM

actually, the stun damage thing isn't completely stupid even with monowire, because it would mean that even if you're not actually cut, you are still bruised because you have hit something at a run: if you run headlong into barb wire, even if you don't take damage from the barbs (say you have heavy clothes), the shock still knocks your breath out.

Posted by: Eryk the Red Jan 26 2007, 02:21 PM

I'll give you that. The rule was largely intended for combat with monowhips, anyway, where it really wouldn't make sense to suffer stun damage.

Posted by: Austere Emancipator Jan 26 2007, 02:39 PM

So monowire must be illogically difficult to break the rules say so, but a monowhip mustn't do stun damage through armor, because "it really wouldn't make sense"?

Posted by: Ben Jan 26 2007, 02:55 PM

QUOTE (Eryk the Red)

The rule was largely intended for combat with monowhips, anyway, where it really wouldn't make sense to suffer stun damage.

you have a point

Posted by: Ed_209a Jan 26 2007, 03:43 PM

As written, a monowhip almost has to be a weapon focus. 8P _and_ slices effortlessly through 4 pts of armor?

I see Monowire being sharp as the edge on the finest razor blades (pretty close to a 1 mol edge IIRC), but relatively weak. It would pull right through clothing and flesh, but would hang up on anything denser.

So, IMO, when you run through monowire, your snap it like a spiderweb, but it cuts unarmored locations to the bone first.

Would snapped nanotube shrivel into a little ball, or is it stable enough to exist w/o an end cap?

Posted by: Jaid Jan 26 2007, 03:59 PM

QUOTE (Austere Emancipator)

ummm... 65 kg arms? you do realise that's 143 lbs, right?

did you perhaps mean 6.5 kg or something? because 65 kg is a lot of weight... i mean, granted, trolls are big, and their arms are disproportionately large... but more than 65 kg seems pretty iffy to me...

anyways, who's to say it's a carbon nanotube?

clearly monowire is made from unobtanium, and is stronger than carbon nanotubes

if it weren't so notoriously hard to obtain, it might be possible to make nigh-indestructible armor from threads woven from unobtanium monowire

(point being, it's fiction. the game says that somehow the monowire doesn't snap easily, and doesn't bother to explain why. which, for the record, is a much better idea than explaining why, only to find out later you completely screwed up the science behind it imo).

Posted by: Austere Emancipator Jan 26 2007, 05:03 PM

I meant the heavily armored troll's arms together weighing 65kg. Count out the weight of armor, and that's about 1/4th - 1/5th the body weight of a troll, which doesn't seem much.

Does SR4 no longer make any mention of carbon nanotubes anywhere? That was the canon explanation of monowire in SR3 anyway.

QUOTE (Jaid)

point being, it's fiction.

That's fine if you don't mind things about the observable, physical world of Shadowrun not making sense. If you want magical monowire in your games, you go ahead and make your monowire magical. That's none of my concern. I'm just telling you that if it's supposed to be carbon nanotubes, then the only logical conclusion is that it'll snap easily.

A single nanotube, BTW, would not be able to withstand the forces necessary to cut through clothing or skin. The tiniest of forces, like being brushed by the leg of a fruit fly, could snap a single buckytube. I imagine carbon nanotube braids around 1 micrometer thick (roughly 1/10th the thickness of spider web strands, 1/100th of a human hair) would act much as described by Ed_209a -- you'd barely notice walking through them, unless they cut something.

Posted by: Jaid Jan 26 2007, 05:25 PM

QUOTE (Austere Emancipator)

If you want magical monowire in your games, you go ahead and make your monowire magical. That's none of my concern. I'm just telling you that if it's supposed to be carbon nanotubes, then the only logical conclusion is that it'll snap easily.

i certainly can't remember anything that states carbon nanotubes. heck, i can't even remember that in SR3 though.

and i still say 65 kg for a troll's arms seems a little high. but then, not having met many trolls in my lifetime, i suppose my personal vision of what troll arms are like is not necessarily accurate

Posted by: Eryk the Red Jan 26 2007, 06:16 PM

Alas, this breaks down (yet again) to the classic argument of realism vs. "realism". I'm all for "realism", which means I have a particular (and decidedly cinematic) vision of the way stuff is supposed to go, so I want to rules to serve as a simulation of that, rather than as a simulation of actual reality. Knowing the real monowhips don't work doesn't change that in my SR "reality", there's some kind of compound/alloy/weird-ass material or chemical process that produces ultra-fine strands that cut through stuff effortlessly. In that vision, a man getting the wind knocked out of him (but no other injury) from the impact of that ultra-fine strand just doesn't fit.

Wow. We're not just beating a dead horse here. The horse died, got zombified, got killed again, and then we hit it with the bat.

Posted by: Dakhran the Dark Jan 26 2007, 07:17 PM

Don't suppose it would help the discussion to mention that simple standard carbon nanotubes aren't the end-all and be-all of materials sciences regarding nanostructures, and that there are structures harder and more resilient to shock such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullerite, with hardness equal to or exceeding diamond.

I'm sure that materials science research will be much more advanced in the next 50-60 years, if we've already come up with materials which can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregated_diamond_nanorods, who knows what will come up with by then...

At any rate, I would probably use GM fiat to hand-wave a rule, using base damage of the monowhip (8P, -4AP), and give it a number of dice "to hit" based on the placement and anchorage of the monowire, the amount of wire involved, and the speed of the soon-to-be-salsa victim. If the target manages to perceive it, they can try to "dodge" the "attack", otherwise it's soak damage time, and soaking may involve sponges...

This way, you can let the dice tell the story -- if the runner decides to Edge out on either the dodge or soak, or the wire's "to hit" roll comes up Critical Glitch, you can have either the wire break due to manufacturing flaws (damn those atomic vacancies and Stone-Wales defects), or the placement of the wires failed to take into account the next weakest point of the wire -- the anchorage, therefore the wires pull loose. OTOH, if the runner is going full-tilt into a nest of wires without looking and critglitches a soak roll, there might not be enough big chunks left to interest a ghoul...

Posted by: Jack Kain Jan 26 2007, 07:35 PM

I get the impression that alot of you not only fail to understand that this is science fiction and thus the technologies get to do things that are impossible today. In shadowrun we have fully functional cybernetic replacements for nearly every body part. You can get retinal enhancements onto natural eyes to give you thermos vision and other such things.

But some high strength razor sharp fishing line is beyond the technologies of 2070? That's basicly what monowire is the whip has a weight tip so it can be used in combat. Monofilament is a thin string made from a single fiber. Barbed wire is actually monofilament. So if your going to debuk science fiction with real science at at least use real sicience.

That being said running or falling into the wire should deal just 8P. Just like a knife it can't deal damage unless their is some force behind it. If someone using a monowhip critcally glitchs they take 8P damage so that should be coudl enougth for runing into monowire or falling into it.

Dakhran above me really has some good ideas.

Posted by: Austere Emancipator Jan 27 2007, 01:41 AM

Dakhran the Dark: Fullerites clearly handle much better than multi-walled nanotubes under compression, but is there some reason to expect them to be much better for tensile strength? I couldn't find anything on that.

Of course if you do want monowire to "make sense" by making it consist of something orders of magnitude harder than diamond, you just know you're going to have someone wanting to make body armor out of it no matter how expensive.

QUOTE (Eryk the Red)

I'm all for "realism", which means I have a particular (and decidedly cinematic) vision of the way stuff is supposed to go, so I want to rules to serve as a simulation of that, rather than as a simulation of actual reality.

No point us arguing over this bit, then. You want your monowire to work in a particular way, so of course you modify the rules to make sure it does. How monowire works in canon then has just as much value for you as it has for me: fuck all. It's all about what we want our game worlds to look like.

QUOTE (Jack Kain)

So if your going to debuk science fiction with real science at at least use real sicience.

So who used "fake science"?

Posted by: djinni Jan 27 2007, 02:27 AM

QUOTE (Austere Emancipator)

So who used "fake science"?

lesse...
Microwire: 8P damage
Monowhip: 8P damage

what's the debate again? I kinda got lost in all the off topic debates

Posted by: Jack Kain Jan 27 2007, 03:50 AM

Yeah I thought I pointed that out in my post. A monowhip is just monowire modified to be used as a weapon.

The likely problem with making an armor out of the same material is at man sized it be to heavy and the person would be still be liquified in his own indestructible armor from high yield explosives.
A suit of bullet proof 10,000,000 nuyen armor doesn't do much good if you can still kill the guy in side with 10,000 in explosives.

Posted by: yoippari Jan 27 2007, 04:13 AM

I think the issue is in the game Emo is running on IRC we want to set up a monowire or 14 directly in the path of someone jumping off a bridge and through the roof and second story of a house. Typicly an armor spell would be cast on him making it safe. This time there would be no armor spell, and there will be some sort of deadly trap involved. The bridge is roughly 10-15 meters above the house. So just falling damage alone wouldn't work, and monowhip's stats don't mesh well with a static wire(s) being held taunt with a guy falling into them.

Posted by: Jack Kain Jan 27 2007, 04:34 AM

Wouldn't you have the same problem if he feel onto a spear?.

Open up the book and look at microwire unless gripped with special rappeling gloves the user takes
8P damage from trying to climb it. Can you say same material as the monowhip?

So just take 8P damage and add on the falling damage. If you need damage from extra wire just remember the rules for burst fire. Each extra wire adds 2P

Posted by: emo samurai Jan 27 2007, 04:40 AM

Actually, wouldn't the wires increase the amount of area that the weight is spread out over and lessen the damage?

Not that I'll actually play it that way.

Posted by: Jack Kain Jan 27 2007, 04:55 AM

QUOTE (emo samurai)

Actually, wouldn't the wires increase the amount of area that the weight is spread out over and lessen the damage?

Not that I'll actually play it that way.

Now that I think about it yeah. Its like how the bed of nails trick works, or walking on shards of broken glass. Not quite sure or that work with whats basicly a net of razor wire and the person falling from a great height. Even if the guy does surrive that trap. I can't imagine him walking away very easily. The machine gun fire from the guys who set the trap should finish him off.

Posted by: Kesslan Jan 27 2007, 05:14 AM

Now what can we do about making a monowire garotte? I've allways wanted one.

Posted by: Jack Kain Jan 27 2007, 05:19 AM

QUOTE (Kesslan)

Now what can we do about making a monowire garotte? I've allways wanted one.

Just use a microwire and the special gloves used to handle micowire. And you have it. Hell it work with a Monowhip to. Its already there, you just have to sneak up on them.

Posted by: Kesslan Jan 27 2007, 05:26 AM

QUOTE (Jack Kain)

QUOTE (Kesslan @ Jan 26 2007, 11:14 PM)

Now what can we do about making a monowire garotte? I've allways wanted one.

Just use a microwire and the special gloves used to handle micowire. And you have it. Hell it work with a Monowhip to. Its already there, you just have to sneak up on them.

Glee!

Well mostly I ask because I've yet to ever manage to get anyone to allow me to have one... for some strange reason. Yes! You may haev that panther assautl cannon!

Monowire Garrote? What? No way!

I'm actually sort of supprised stuff like this hasnt shown up more often. Sure it's not easy to sneak up and kill some one with a garotte. But they do have their uses at times, especially when it comes to the 'silent kill'.

Posted by: Jack Kain Jan 27 2007, 05:37 AM

My guy has skillwires loaded with rating 4 infiltration and 8 agility and a chameleon suit on shipping.
(Plus 5 ranks on exotic weapon monowhip and a reflex recorder for it)
He'll really be able to sneak up on foes after that.

Posted by: Kesslan Jan 27 2007, 05:40 AM

Well see thats the thing. The idea first entered my mind when I started playing that SR3 adept sniper. I was in the process of getting him an R12 Twinkinium suit. Add on the fact that he had 6 dice in stealth and I think improved ability stealth 2 if I recall ontop of that. And invisble walk.

Well suffice it to say he was a real sneaky bugger. Never could seem to get him so much as a garotte wire though, dispite my best efforts.

Posted by: Slump Jan 27 2007, 08:46 AM

QUOTE (Kesslan)

Well suffice it to say he was a real sneaky bugger. Never could seem to get him so much as a garotte wire though, dispite my best efforts.

That's an easy fix, even if the GM is preventing you from getting a garrote wire (i.e. no matter how good you roll, it's never quite good enough for the availability)

Buy a Piano, tell your GM your character is planning on learning to play or something. Then just take the wires, add a dowel or two, and there ya go, instant garrote.

Posted by: djinni Jan 27 2007, 08:53 AM

QUOTE (Slump)

Buy a Piano, tell your GM your character is planning on learning to play or something.

what piano uses microwire for strings?

Posted by: Kesslan Jan 27 2007, 09:21 AM

QUOTE (djinni)

QUOTE (Slump @ Jan 27 2007, 03:46 AM)

Buy a Piano, tell your GM your character is planning on learning to play or something.

what piano uses microwire for strings?

They dont, but pianos DO use some very thin strings. When pulled tight if your not careful you can actually cut yourself on the smaller ones. Infact alot of garottes are/have been made with piano wire.

I think really the issue I've run up aganist is there's no 'cannon' rules for strangulation/garottes. And most GMs dont want to come up with some rules for such things. Personally I'd just make it say... an exotic weapon proficiency if you really wanted to (Though it's abit more along the lines of something that would fall under the 'close combat' skill group in SR4) and then have it do the flat damage of monowire. Or to reflect the application of strength behind it the standard STR/2+base.

Posted by: Cray74 Jan 27 2007, 03:52 PM

QUOTE (Dakhran the Dark)

The strength isn't substantially higher, though. 310 gigapascals of hardness sounds high, but the breaking strength of a single nanotube is cross-sectional area by that strength.

At 1 nanometer diameter, such a polymerized nanotube would have a breaking strength on the order of 0.25 micronewtons - 0.05 micropounds. Or 1/20th of a millionth of a pound of force.

Posted by: BishopMcQ Jan 27 2007, 05:12 PM

Use exotic weapon (mono-garotte), reach -1 to facilitate to need to get in close to actually use it. Does damage as per a monowhip but at -2AP or 0 AP for microwire.

For a non-lethal version, it does (Str/2 +1) S resisted by body only unless the character has neck/head protection such as a helmet.

With an internal airtank, there is no need to worry about suffocation. Without the airtank, apply the rules for holding one's breath from p 119.

Posted by: Ed_209a Jan 28 2007, 11:44 PM

Having an int. airtank would still let oxygen get into the blood if you were being garotted, but since the garotte is also pinching off the blood vessels in your neck, you still pass out in 15 sec or so.

Reinforced blood vessels should be easy to do. It would essentially be dermal plate or orthoskin on a much more limited scale.

Posted by: Sir_Psycho Jan 28 2007, 11:53 PM

Uh guys, it's MONOWIRE, you're not strangling some-one with it, their head is likely coming clean off.

Also you should stage down the damage if the character doesn't perform a called shot, because really a garotte is only effective on the neck.

Posted by: BishopMcQ Jan 29 2007, 05:51 AM

Sorry, I wasn't clear that the Airtank only applied for the non-lethal version. The stun damage would facilitate the constriction of the blood vessels. When the stun track filled in, person falls unconscious.

Posted by: WhiskeyMac Jan 29 2007, 07:34 AM

Actually a monowire/microwire garrote could also be used to slice off limbs at the joints, unless that person has reinforced bones or cyberlimbs. I wonder how you would rule that? What about a monowire saw?

Posted by: Sir_Psycho Jan 29 2007, 08:40 AM

That would be pretty damned hard to do in a combat situation, where-as if you sneak up with a monowire, once you have it around their neck they're most likely fucked.