For people who want skills to matter more, I think the simple optional rule from the book is best (limit hits to skill x 2, with defaulting limited to one hit).

That works fairly well for the low range of skills, but 4+ it does very little. I'm rarely going to get 8 hits for most skills without a 6ish skill anyway since I am going to need every day point to get a big enough pool to pull that off.

I thought the point of such house rules was to limit the effectiveness of the low skill/high Attribute & dice pool mods characters. So I don't think it matters if it doesn't limit high skills that much. Although you are right if I misread the intention, and they wanted to limit character effectiveness across the board.

I think he means: Yes, it limits someone with high mods/attribute, but it doesn't really help someone with high skill.

Personally I prefer the way (I think) SR3 did it, where attribute determined how easy it was to train the skill, and skill was what really mattered.

Yes to both. Though I may have misunderstood what the person wanted out of their house rules as well. Anyways while yes it will stop a person's effectiveness form having a high attribute and low skill it will not reward someone with a high skill. Both of which I think are important if you want skills to matter.

And yes I agree I prefer how 3rd edition did it in regards to skills and attributes.

I joke, as my group's resident ranged specialist, that combat will last a number of initiative passes no greater than the number of mooks present divided by two. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

Which does have some merit, as Ranged Combat is often much more deadly than melee combat, but if the Melee Combatant can get up close, he can be just as deadly... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

Deadly? Maybe. Just as deadly? God no.

Half as deadly? Almost (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

This sounds like a challenge coming on. Make a melee combatant who is as deadly as a typical ranged combatant.

It's really apples and oranges. You can make a melee character who can have sky high damage codes for melee combat, while remaining hard to hit and harder to damage by other melee combatants. But that goes out the window when people are shooting at you from the windows.

Melee is a niche role, although it can come up more often in the close quarters that shadowrunners often deal with. But while stealth and/or being able to close the distance quickly can make melee more useful, every melee build should still have at least one decent ranged skill.

Generally, I would boil the best melee options down to:
1) Unarmed combat, which can reach extremely high damage codes.
2) Weapons, typically edged, with the two weapon fighting style for superior defense.
3) A monowhip, not as good as the first two if you are talking dedicated specialists, but the best bang for the buck for someone not optimized for melee, but wanting something to cover it.

I will add that adepts, with either weapon foci or killing hands, will have a huge edge against spirits and other types with immunity to weapons.

To bring it back to the topic of initiative passes, the big difference for a melee specialist in SR4, as opposed to SR3, is that initiative passes matter again. In SR3, melee combat was an opposed test, where the attacker could take damage. In SR4, initiative passes determine how many chances to inflict damage you get, and there is the full defence option to consider as well. So melee characters have one more thing they need, in order to be effective. The positive side, which I mentioned earlier, is that many of these things raise overall effectiveness in combat, not just melee.

Usually Glyph is exactly correct about everything, but he forgot to mention the AZ-150 stun baton and melee hardened pistol/SMG variant for option #2. Clubs still covers both, and that setup lets you shoot and parry with the pistol/SMG (naturally, not at the same time,) and attack anyone in melee range with a weapon with a base 7S(e) -halfAP damage code.

It's a great option for an Agile attacker who may not have much invested in strength. Hell, two stun bats is usually better than two katanas or what-have-you.

MA quality Damaging Disarm + Disarm maneuver + Two-weapon Style maneuver + MA quality Club DV+1 + Off-hand Training (clubs) maneuver
It's 16BP, but you'll kick some ass, and save the BP you'd otherwise need for strength.

Damnit! Now I want to play a physad dual-wielding stun batons. No, scratch that: a sexy Scarlett Johannsen lookalike elf physad dual-wielding stun batons while wearing a black leather catsuit.

With a custom Martial Arts advantage to cover Distracted by the Sexy. Character's Charisma as a dice pool penalty to opponents in melee, perhaps? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

Remember: TVTropes Will Ruin Your Life. Surf responsibly.

It's a joke bedded in truth. I will usually one shot any mook unless it does really good on it's damage resistance roll which requires that they have armored jacket quality ballistic armor o 4 body. So pretty much I figure the number of mooks divided by 2 is the number of initiative passes it would take me to either kill or severely wound all of them. Add in everyone else on the team and it's certain to be a number of passes less than that. If combat ran longer than that value, then something probably went very wrong.

I had talked with my groups GM at length about this. We have an understanding, I think....

The problem is that most of our mook opposition has been stuff that I will kill in a single shot between sheer damage and armor penetration the only time this isn't the case is rare mook that got really lucky on his body roll to resist damage. To make the mooks we face a challenge for me to kill would require amping them up to the point that it would be a lot harder for the two melee and gun-fu to avoid getting beaten to snot over and over. The only other option would be to stack up penalties, but it would be very difficult to find penalties that I cannot mitigate or penalties that would affect me and not the other characters. Combine that with the "melee attacks are complex actions" issue means that the only solution to bring the other characters up to my level of output is to find a way to cause me to take half the actions I do. This is one reason I'm content at sitting at 3 IP when everyone else is at 4IP.

So I play my character in ways that make that difference not so apparent knowing that if I need to I can amp up my ability.

Some examples:
Even though my initiative is good enough to be on par with one of the melee and always beat the mooks, I tend to prefer to delay and take my actions last on the pass. This lets me interrupt a mook's action before he takes it so I play as a defensive asset to the team. Many times I will outright avoid killing the target. Last run we were on had some government mooks chasing us (they were in cars we were in a plane). I play my character as having an aversion to outright killing people just doing their job, if it's a legal job, so I chose to instead shoot out tires or disarm the mooks shooting at us (yes disarm by shooting their gun, it's another of my favorite tactics). Sue me. I have the dice pools to do trick shots like that and have them be effective.

I do find it humorous that my character is averse to going off mission to do good, but is averse to killing people needlessly while the character that wants to go off mission to do good has no problem with judiciously slaughtering everyone in his path that has a gun.

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I'm not sure how to make that possible without heavily house ruling melee. You still have to get over the complex action hurdle so you're already at a 2:1 action deficit for attacks. You have to start with a base damage that is about twice what the ranged combatant is pulling.

Sure you could tweak the scenario to start favoring the melee combatant. Amping up the armor on the target by a significant amount will penalize the ranged combatant faster than the melee combatant, but in an average scenario? Anything more than a 4 body armored jacket mook (8/6) would be pushing the situation towards specialized.

We had an Unarmed Adept in the team that used the Multiple Targets rule (SR4 p 148: split dice pool between opponents and they must be within 1m of each other) to quickly plow through enemy ranks. Killing Hands/Critical Strike 6, Unarmed Combat 6 meant he generally dropped everything he touched.

Of course, he got shot down by guards with assault rifles at some point.

That's why I didn't actually take up the challenge.

"As deadly as a gunbunny" is probably impossible.

Deadly enough, and fast or tough enough to be useful besides the gunbunny, now that's a worthwhile challenge. Bonus points if the main selling point isn't "My Killing Hands make me more useful against spirits than the gunbunny."

I'm better at clean silent takedowns than the gunbunny?

Eh, that's generally a pretty impractical niche though. Killing Hands/Foci just isn't really all that good since spirits are very hard to hit targets for melee characters unless the GM really softballs things and makes the Spirits charge everything in order to Engulf. First off is the defense pool problem-- Spirits have 2 passes by default and all types have a Reaction score bonus as well as Dodge/Unarmed Combat skill equal to their Force, so Force 5s are going to be throwing around 17+ dice to avoid getting hit on Full Defense and 12+ dice when just standing around. That's not untouchable, of course, but at the very least you're not going to have as many net hits as a gunfighter will at the same range. Second is sheer movement. Spirits are generally as fast or faster than player characters, so you better break out the cyberskates or something. Third is the worst blow: Powers. Between Fear, Flight, Binding and Movement it's fair to say that Spirits typically have the tools to keep someone from getting right in their face if they need to, so breaking out some stick and shock will still be the way to go most of the time.

I think the only viable environment for a close combat fighter will be indoors anyway, where surprise and touch range are just one Free Action away.

Maybe if you're fighting in a closet. Fear is really pretty rough for melee guys considering that any time they waste running away is time and distance they need to spend on closing again when they snap out of it.

You know the main difference between the gun bunnies and pizza slicer effectiveness is tactical. The level of cover, range of the engagement, are both aware of each other...and probably a host of other factors I am missing (speed of the pizza slicer vs range of the engement for example).

Though, if juding in just terms of max damage output per IP, firearms are superior (based on the fact that most firearms are SA or BF capable).

What is the typical environment in which SR fights take place? How big is it? How many combat turns does it take to get in melee reach of enemies? If the answer is more than 1, then melee characters are useless. If most fights take place in offices or suchlike without long lines of fire, melee characters may be useful.

But I suppose the big question is: what can be done with close combat that firearms can't do as well?

Subdue an opponent. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Edit: Crap. I forgot about SnS. Subdue an opponent without knocking them out.

Yeah, good point. The best you can achieve with firearms would be narcoject or SnS, which doesn't help if you want to interrogate right away.

I think the thing needed to make melee useful in a more general sense though, is to allow parrying of firearms at very close ranges like melee attacks (i.e. with Reaction+Close Combat and optional Full Defense). So that in CQC, the guy with actual CQC skills is at an advantage.