If we're talking real life, I think that there would be a big difference between a guy who had minimal or just the obligatory hand to hand combat training and has a bayonet on his rifle versus the guy who is an ardent practitioner who also has a bayonet on his rifle. If it came down to hand to hand combat in a dark room somewhere I know who my money would be on.

That's the niche that melee should fill, IMO. If Batman could just fight them head-on, guns would be reduced to niche weapons.



Please show me the part of the rulebook that says melee is supposed to be equally viable to ranged combat.



Only if you want to play it that way, which most players do not. For the vast majority of Shadowrun players, your statement is neither desirable nor true.



SR4 has drastically higher dodge DP vs melee than vs ranged. You are not going to get into melee unscathed if the gun wielders are aware of your position before you close the gap and fire full, wide bursts, unless you outclass them by a large margin.

And all the world wonder'd...how anyone could be so stupid (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Well, sure is an extreme example, but my last campaign on SR4 was with an adept jaguar shapeshifter with Combat Sense (the one that gives dice to dodge) 6 and critical strike 6.
My only bane was flying drones with Machine Guns using wide bursts, anything else I could reach easily in one action and dismember on the next one.

Phys Ads is the way to go when you want to be a melee machine, urban samurais are better off as gunslingers and heavy machine dudes.

right to own a gun, but not right to own a dangerous attack knife?

Because the vast majority of people would hurt themselves with such a thing.

In the USA in some jurisdictions it is illegal because ... because the legislators said so.

Where I live it isn't, so I have bayonets permanently mounted and do periodic drills with them to keep skills up.

The cheapest bayonet equipped rifle I have seen on the market is the Mosin-Nagant (various models), but you can also get them on old springfields, SMLEs and modern ones for the AR15 family, if you feel so inclined.

Maybe this fits into your definition of an ambush, but a typical street crime observation is that the guy who was stabbed didn't even see the knife until he was being stabbed. If hostilities do not start until the conversation turns ugly, you are already at step-and-stab range. Pretty much the only way a gunman can guarantee that his opponent will drop immediately is a head or spine shot, which is really hard to pull off. If an opponent were to attack me at that range I would not attempt to draw, but would fend off the first attack, attempt to create some space, and then draw and shoot until out of ammunition. Why? Because it is easier and faster to block my opponent's elbow, preventing a deep stab, and fend off with bare hands, than to reach for my holster.

The advantage of a bayonet is that it creates a psychological barrier as well as a physical threat to someone who would contemplate charging you. A large percentage of bayonet skill surrounds the question of centreline control, or slipping someone else's guard. There are other bayonet disciplines including facing cavalry charges, but those are largely obsolete at this stage.

I just keep my K-Bar Handy. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
I use a Pistol for Home Defense, and the K-Bar don't fit on the end. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

http://www.midwayusa.com/product/441337/la...er-sheath-black

Because we can.

Discontinued... probably wasn't use against a Raccoon much less a real threat. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Yeah, this fits the ambush scenario nicely. Ambush, in this context, basically means that the target doesn't realize he's being attacked until it's too late.

A lot of people have the notion of "knife fights" as Hollywood commonly portrays them, which just doesn't happen in real life outside of martial arts competitions. The fact that someone pulls a knife means they are not interested in anything resembling a fair fight - they are trying to stack the deck in their favor.

If I remember correctly, in RL, trained police officers hit with 1 out of 6 shots at 30 feet or less? That drops closer to 0 out of 6 past thirty feet. And "knife guy" closing 30 feet in one second is pretty reasonable, while firing off six rounds in one second is much less so.

I'm not saying that the guy with the gun does not have a substantial advantage. Just saying that having a knife isn't an automatic loss.

It varies. NYPD shoots like your average gang banger, they fire off a dozen shots, hit two bystanders and miss their target completely. Other departments get over 60% hits IIRC.

Go ahead and check mythbusters on this one.

And hello! Wak here, onboard for a couple years of Freelancing now (That long? Yikes!), and sad that Knasser's not likely to come back and have a peek, but, while I'm here, I might as well chat a bit.

Firstly, in terms of tone, there's a deliberate move away from the Transhumanism that was thick in 4th edition and stepping back a bit towards the more 'Punk' of 'Cyberpunk'. This isn't a motion of old grognards being "Oh, the good old days..." so much as a direction chosen to tell stories. Yeah, you have old farts like Bull and myself (One fairly newly aligned to the company, one with several more years under his belt) like fondly remember the old stuff, but you have newer guys onboard as well. Some of the newest Freelancers are in the 20-something stage (I think one's 23 but don't quote me on that), while most are thirty-something types. It's an unfortunate truth that tabletop games, like comics, are having to eyeball the future and it isn't the best look... as people grow up, get jobs, get married, have kids... real life will gradually remove your clients. If you don't focus on bringing in new people, you die, full stop. More and more, the people who *would* have gone into tabletop games in years past are instead going to console gaming, or PC gaming, and never even see a set of dice. The local game store is getting *demolished* by Amazon and online sellers who give great prices but don't provide a point of contact and an actual community. Those of us who love the hobby are always needing to go out and share it, but it's not as easy as it once was. That said, of the past dozen people at my personal table, no less than five had ever played Shadowrun before, with three never having played an RPG at all while four more had played D&D once or twice but never been able to get a group. Of these, two have since started their own groups, a thrd restarted his old group (And is playing SR 5 and King of Tokyo, both of which I introduced him to) while another is on his way to the military for the next seven years, taking a copy of SR5 with him that I autographed (My first ever autograph, for those curious.)

So, the best way to keep the game alive is to share it, teach other people, and try to showcase RPGs as a whole. If you have local gaming store, try to order from there, even though it's often a little more expensive, and try to organize some game days. Show off games you love (Shadowrun'd be nice, but if there are others, that's fine too), talk to the local library if you don't have a game store, and don't be afraid to talk to people ten years younger than you; you might be surprised at who all'd be interested. One geeky teacher (Hi Crit!) can have a HUGE influence.

On the more general topic of flavor, while 80's cyberpunk, with "Japan will conquer us all!" and white ninjas and so on has dated, you'll find that other aspects not only still have life, but are invigorated. Media being everywhere, disposable pop music, corruption in business and government, opressing the poor... these things never go out of style. Turn on today's news and you'll see the government listening in on people's conversations, illegal wiretaps, email harvesting, businesses taking out life insurnce on their own employees, products being filled with things other than advertised, secretarian murder and racism; just bad stuff all around. You also see good stories, like ten thousand people in a flash mob that show up to sing carols to a dying girl, or advances in artificial limbs and organs that allow wounded vets to feed themselves again, or let a deaf parent hear their child's voice for the very first time. Cyberpunk, and I can't stress this enough, owes heritage to Film Noir, to the two-fisted detectives who were surrounded on all sides by a harsh uncaring world but struggled hard past their own bitterness to, every now and then, make the world a better place, even if only for one person, even if only fleetingly. These things still resonate today, even if the forms have changed.

So, it might be easy to say "They want to make everything big shoulderpads, bigger hair, and facepaint again", or to take shots at a Cyberdeck being the size of an iPad instead of shrinking to the size of a ring, but if you look at the heart of it all, I think you'll find that it's ringing true, regardless.

So, THAT said, there are some issues, like editing, that continue to be problematic. Re-writes and revisions that don't get used, grammar mistakes, page references going to the wrong page, these are problems. If we want to look more professional, that has to tighten up. Lord knows that my spelling falters at times and my sentence structure can be somewhat ... chaotic ... as I tend to do more stream of thought than anything else. In one PDF product draft, I used a dead Jackpointer to make some posts, so had to go back and correct that because I'd switched the names of two people ... one was supposed to live and the other die, but that got changed later and I was still using the initial survivor instead of the new one. D'oh. Communication booboo there, but caught before it became an actual problem. Still, some things have fallen through the cracks that shouldn't and we gotta work on that.

Switching gears, the thread's gone into some talk about melee combat. Here's where you guys can play game designer for a minute. Guns are neat. We all love guns, some more than others (Hi CanRay!), and we like to see big baddabang. Most of us also like martial arts and dig being pointy things. Tomahawks are "in" right now, following on teh heels of entrenching tools (of all things), but knives were the big thing yesterday and katana (or KATANA! to some) the day before that. You can see a similar thing pop up in first person shooting games, where melee weapons are always included ... in many games, holding a melee weapon makes you move faster (jet propelled knives!) and all melee inflicts a one-hit kill. Other games it takes a couple of swings, but melee does inflated damage compared to bullets as a reward for getting in close.

So, should Shadowrun take a similar view, that melee combat should be more powerful than firearms, toreward those who take the time and effort of getting in close, or should it take the view that bringing a knife to a gunfight is stupid and that the assorted melee classes should vanish? It's one thing to say a knife can kill a dude if you surprise and ambush them, qite another for a guy to run through a spray of fire with a katana in one hand, slashing his way through a group of guards while bullets zip past without ever connecting. Should the game have one or the other? Both? Should there be some kind of "Awesome dial" that you can turn up or down for a more gritty game vs a more hyperkinetic game? If you do include such a dial, what should the default be for future products? How useful is a Troll, a human that's about as massive as a grizzly bear and has a similar strength and speed, for a game about stealth and sneaking? How cool is it to have someone along that can rip a door off its hinges or carry two wounded companions on one shoulder while one-handing a shotgun to keep others at bay while you evac?

Everyone wants the line drawn in one place or another, but finding the sweet spot is a real art form.

For instance, I like my game to have a more cinematic feel at times. In particular, I love those scenes where the protagonist is unarmed and unarmored, but can get the drop on a soldier, punch him out, take his gun, then gradually work his way through the rest of the mooks on his way to a boss fight, which quite likely ends with him takling the bad guy, neither having a gun, and a big bought of fist-and-foot ending things. Now, how would you replicate this? WIth the baseline rules, it's a waste of time for the average 4 strength action guy to punch someone in, let's say an armored jacket. 15+ soak dice say "Bwa-haha, nice try, protagonist! Now, watch what happens when I fire a burst of automatic fire from my assault rifle into your tender, unarmored torso!" *splatta-tatta-tat* ... That doesn't make for a roll to credits. If, in contrast, I decide that unarmed combat ignores armor, suddenly I have Trolls that start pumping to a 10 strength, adepts, and street samurai (Hey, cyberspurs are TECHNICALLY unarmed combat, right?!) going all punchtastic in every fight instead of shooting things. Is that the goal? Is that an unwanted side effect? Where can you balance things?

Ain't easy, and these things need more playtesting. I'm worried that "Get it done by Gencon!" is the pen and paper version of "It ships by Christmas!" that haunts the video game industry. For all the glitches in SR5, it ain't Knights of the Old Republic 2, that's for sure, but there's enough flaws to keep it from being, say, the Last of Us. You could call it Bioshock Infinite maybe, where's it's gorgeous and really defines a world and an approach, but when you sit down and look at it more, there's some missing paint at the corners. I think another year of playtesting and proofreading would have helped, but, you also have to watch out for the trap that you see with, say, the Last Guardian. Eventually, you have to say, "Ten more months of development will cost more than it's worth. It'll never be perfect, but it's damn near. Ship this thang." Ultimately, that kind of thing isn't my call to make, and thank goodness for that; if you think finding a typo bothers you, you should try it from someone who thinks of a product as a baby and wants them all flawless and pretty. For you, it's a product that's worth less than you spent on it, for me, it's PERSONAL in a way that's hard to really share until you've been published. (One thing with being a writer is understanding that editors have reasons for what they do, they aren't murdering your words (your precious, precious words!) for jollies; you were over the wordcount and adding ten pages to talk about corn just isn't in the budget, magnum opus be damned.)

I've probably rambled on long enough, but, you know, I've been here pretty much since Dumpshock was born (In one capcity or another), and I've been part of the fandom since '89, where I bought in for the Elmore cover, since I'm an Elmore junky. I'll be inside as long as they'll let me stay, and when the day comes that they no longer want me, well, yeah I'll be bitter, but I'll still be a fan. I'm teaching a 16 year old how to play in my current group, and if I ever have kids, I'll be teaching them as well, so they can share it with their friends. Keep the hobby alive, yo.

Much love, and I hope the new year brings everybody joy. And ample reloads to shoot people in the face. Because Shadowrun, that's why.

To me, melee vs. ranged already was in the sweet spot. For a typical combatant, punching is something you do if you don't have a weapon to stab someone with, and stabbing someone is something you do if you don't have anything to shoot at them with. For a dedicated martial artist, however, melee is a viable, if niche, role (like sniping).

SR5 raised melee damage, ranged damage, and armor, so it works out close to the same. The one change, which I like, is that using Strength without halving it to determine damage gets rid of the annoying glitch in the SR4 rules where an even number for Strength was not cost-effective.

And yes, there are some SR5 changes I like (the ones I don't are mostly bad editing - I include wireless bonuses in this, because I get the impression that some of the writers had matrix connections confused with DNI connections when writing some of them).

Not in SR5, and barely under SR4.5. Adept gunslingers are very potent forces in both editions. In SR5, it's almost always better to be an adept than a samurai.

Please show me where in the rulebook it says Melee is inferior to ranged combat. I can show you through every edition the pure melee guy was a archetype and was supposed to be just as valid to play as Detective Mc Shootie.




By most you mean you and a handful of people on this board. I'm sure the polls you ran on this were extensive but I'm going to disagree with your result. Sree you can play any game in anyway you want. But from the get go the dedicated melee character who deosn't have to rely on ambushes has been a archetype and a supported in the fluff and in most of the editions rules.




Yup SR4 made it unlikely you would get into melee unscathed. SR 1-3 and 5e didn't.

I do love me some secretarian murder.

But joking aside, here are some more relevant responses:



I'm not one of those who sees a real conflict between the transhumanism and the punk end. Maybe it's because I'm old and creaky and remember the first go-round of punk culture. The sickness of authority, the entrenchment of the legacy of privilege, the exclusion of those without, the cynical observation that whatever is created goes to those who have more. In some ways, Leonard Cohen's song Everybody Knows is a punk manifesto.

So bring on your immortal recordings of the brains of plutocrats, bring on your genetic fountain of youth. It's all just evidence of the long fall of the eloi.



I agree. It's all one slow slide down the sewer for the lower ninety percent, but once in a while we can look at each other, instead of where we're going, or back at what we lost.



I tend to base my assessments of that on my experiments in terminal ballistics and comparison with various weapons, and then understanding the kind of damage being done and the nature of the lethal or incapacitating effects. I don't really find weapons cool as such, although they can certainly be iconic in certain contexts, so I tend to be fairly unbiased (or, more specifically, disinterested) with respect to one over another. In game I tend to apply bonus dice for intelligent applications of weapons (such as grabbing someone and cutting their throat with a conscientiously honed knife, or a carefully aimed neck/spine shot with a rifle) and penalties for silly moves (such as trying to slash through body armour with a bread knife, or pull a head shot on a running target (very effective if it hits, but a ludicrously difficult target)).



As you can probably tell from other forum topics, mine tends to lie with verisimilitude. If you charge a machinegun with katana in hand, you will probably turn into samurai sauce. If you sneak up on a machinegunner from behind, you can probably bisect him. Combat is always a gamble, the trick is to load the dice in your favour.



Make the punch a called shot. Location specific armour and damage (I'm amazed this isn't in it already, given that leg A might bleed out, while leg B might leak hydraulic fluid). Connect firmly with the angle of the jaw, big bonus on stun damage. Cinematic actions suddenly possible, with a gritty, two-fisted film noir feel!
Of course, it might be in 5th edition but I haven't heard of it so far.

I'm not unsympathetic to the writers. It's a tough job, and I've certainly appreciated a lot of what has been put out, and I even recognise that I'm something of an outlier, as players go, so don't take my criticisms too seriously.

Make unarmed pierce armour, and get not just unarmed adepts, but also laymen punching through combat armour. Make melee ignore armour when the target is surprised, and you have something workable.
Or just stay within the confines of the system and make it a martial arts maneuver (like the one I offer in alt.War III): make an attack against a surprised target, if it succeeds, the target's dead or unconscious, the attacker having slit its throat, broken the collarbone, or what have you.

Agreed. The few and their lackeys get transhumanist toys, while the masses toil in poverty - that's the setup that created cyberpunk to begin with.

Not really, because every point of damage is worth three points of armor. Damage values are used directly whereas damage resistance are always dice pools, therefore the changes to weapon damage in SR5 are far more drastic than they look on paper...

You know, I've tried a few games of Sr5 now, and I'm not seeing the increased lethality in practice. In game, it
s actually proven to be very hard to take down a target with a single shot. Rather this is a feature or a bug is a matter of opinion, but I wonder if other people have experienced the same thing?

Location based armor is a very bad idea if you don't make called shots much harder than a normal attack.
Else, everybody will be shooting for, and in this order:
1.eyes. can't armor them. if you do, you can't see.(even if it's not an instant kill, because i aimed for the eye, that means i have a headshot if i hit so suck it!) or if it's not a headshot, the target is blind and therefore still easy prey.
2.mouth. can't armor it, else you suffocate/can't talk and if i get a hit in, it's an automatic headshot and even if it's not an instant kill, target can't call for help.
3.nose. you can't armor it, any hit that goes through is an automagic headshot. no additional benefit, but not needed anyway.
4.throat. can't armor it, else you can't move your head anymore. any hit is an automatic headshot kill again. no additional benefits, but not needed either.
5.ears. 5th place because you need to be able to shoot at them from the side, else it's pretty much worthless. any hit is an instant headshot and free kill again. additional benefits of being deaf on one ear after a survived hit is neglible.
helmet will cover all these you say?
so you will have everybody running around with a helmet on. every cop. every guard. every runner. was that what you wanted?
and even with an armored helmet? an armored helmet as per the SR rules provides negible ammounts of armor so . . fuck it, let them wear 2 helmets, i'll still kill them because that armor is less than anything else.
and then we get to . . oh, yes. we need armored pants. and armored shoes. and armored gloves. and armored shawls.
and everybody looks like the michelin man again!
if you don't design a combat system around hit locations, no, don't bother adding them in later, you will mess every little bit of appearant balance you had up.

Fatums idea of SNEAK ATTACK BITCH! is closer to workable . . still why should that then only count for close combat again will be the question of everybody using a gun.
if he can't defend that vulnerable spot against a knife or even a simple punch, then why should he get to defend that vulnerable spot against a bullet that will do the same from far away so he does not even get to detect me?

the fact that they did away with ballistic and impact armor makes melee less of an option, because impact was usually weaker than ballistic, so you had a better chance of penetrating there.
the fact that they went back to STR=Power will call back on plan the people complaining:"waaaah! if he gets into melee the troll is so over powered now, because he does PAC Damage with his Fists! And don't get us started on Bow and Arrow, that should not be allowed at all in SR!" again!

The SR3 Damage System was pretty deadly. The SR3 TN Mechanic was more random than the Pool System.
But sacrifices will have to be made to appeal to todays gamers it seems. But then you'd lose some of the old gamers! so you have to bring back stuff that they fondly remember in the next edition that you just did away with in the last edition. and then you get called out, rightly, as inconsistent in decisions. and rightly so. and then you need to release teaser files of the material that has already gone to the printers . . and then you don't even use it as a means of quality control as everybody in their right mind would have done!
these teaser files would have been the perfect way to get a FREE OF CHARGE CROWD-BASED ERROR/FACT CHECKING AND QUALITY CONTROL!
IF it had been done before the files went of to the printers . . but noo . . deadline is deadline, but people get jittery, we need to show them something unfinished and tell them that it will all be better in the printed product . .


oy vey, ranting again . .