That's because you get twice less attacks per IP, no DV bonus for bursts (how is this realistic, btw?) and less IPs on average, too.


Eh, ever looked at Lone Star art? See those fancy helmets?
Hell, ever seen photos of actual combatants in urban settings? FSB Alpha, for instance?

In my case, for two reasons. First, a surprised character hit with a firearm is most likely dead anyway. Second, the maneuver is called "guard takedown", and is intended as such. And it's a martial maneuver.
However, yeah, I see no reason for it not to work with guns at point blank range, you're right.

Because you don't need a vulnerable spot to break someone's neck. Except maybe for the heaviest of combat armours specifically safeguarded against that. Besides, people off duty often have their helmets (and other elements of their armour) not in combat position - visor up, rebreather down, what have you.

I don't get how the same people expect me to track twenty Matrix damage tracks (for each piece of my equipment with wireless) and calculate square roots (for explosives), and don't believe I can keep track of two static numbers for Ballistic and Impact.

I've definitely noticed the difference but I think you'll get mixed results depending on what side of the GM screen you're on. The NPCs seem more dangerous to the player characters now. If a single net success passes through the defense test you'll tend to see some damage stick on to the players. But like Fatum said due to single attacks and not being able to scale up DV through bursts seems to have had the opposite effect for players. NPCs will be a bit more like the players in regards to soaking and it seems to take two connections to take 'em down or get 'em close. So in this way SR5 isn't really deadlier but rather the damage seems to be normalized between low-skill security versus dangerous cyborgs. It just so happens players tend to connect with their shots more often than corporate security will.

My players have mostly responded to normalized damage by trying to find situations where they can bring bring weapons that have damage codes of 10+ and accuracy 5+ (Ares Alpha) and by making sure to stack out defense pool on every character. Dodging gets kind of absurd because I like to use the stats of corporate security in the book (page 382) and maybe trick 'em out a bit depending on where they're at. The "this is the matrix" defense pool my players then try to achieve is about 13 dice, which is not at all hard to achieve. This means they start to dodge long bursts more than 50% of the time and only a lot of sustained fire from a group of guards rocking 8ish dice pool has a reasonable chance of connecting. There are definitely days I long for how dodging worked in SR3.

which was:
combat pool is used to roll.
combat pool is the result of int+will+qck/3 rounded down.
you get attacked, take note of how many hits the attacker has.
roll an ammount of combat pool you decide to use for dodging.
(you need to allocate dice for each attack you want to dodge. so after 2 or 3 attacks at the most, combat pool reaches 0 usually. combat pool resets only in the next round after initiative has been rolled.)
if you have more or equal hits, the attack does not connect.
if you have less hits than the attack, the attack connects.
but the hits you rolled do not get lost in an all or nothing fashion.
they get substrtacted from the hits of the attacker on his roll.
and only net hits count towards the damage staging on the attack.
which makes resisting the damage taken a bit easier in most cases.
under certain circumstances, even a glancing blow with only 1 net hit will still kill you.


and yes, i like this better too.

Actually, I mean single shots. I played the first Chicago Mission, and not only did the ork soak three hits from the sniper, but I was unable to kill him in one high-success shot. In other games, I hit targets with maxed-out rolls (hitting my limit) and still couldn't drop them in one shot.


I definitely prefer SR3, but that's beside the point. In SR5, I haven't been able to score a one-shot kill to date, and I have a very accurate shooter with a lot of Edge. Neither has anybody else, PC or NPC. If this was on purpose, it's fine; again, if it's a feature or a bug is a matter of opinion. However, I thought the game was supposed to be more lethal?

No Thanks...
Not only does it look stupid, but it really cannot be all that functional compared to wielding it in your hand without the pistol.

I don't know any thing about the Chicago mission. Maybe this Ork is some sort of cyber monster or using edge. I mean generally speaking if you shoot some one with an Ares Desert Strike even with one net success you're gonna pull in 14DV on top of another -4 AP. To reliably soak that so you'll live to another see another shot you're gonna need to either be lucky or pushing around 20 soak dice. Luck plays a big part in these opposed dice pool games. My players refer to it as "Axis & Allies dice" referring to the board game where crazy dice seem to dictate the entire direction of the war. A bad shot with an Ares Desert Strike and a good soak roll could decide every thing and vice versa. I see my players typically pulling 3 or 4 net successes on basic security and blowing 'em away in one hit. But more often than not it's just one or two net successes and the security just barely survives to require another shot.

Overall though I think the system as designed is set up this way on purpose. It's just normalized weapon damage and it's intended to put tension back on to the players not so much on to the NPCs. I'm not totally certain what changed between 4th and 5th when it comes to lethality. I just remember my players in 4th edition shrugging off car bombs and literally standing out in the open dodging bullets, and 5th seems a little more deadly (to the players). As I mentioned in the previous post the dodging thing is still an issue.

edit: I think weapons in 5th have most their damage baked in so it's less about having large skill pools, tricked out guns, and being able to handle lots of recoil to pump up damage. So in the hands of joe security his guns seem to have gotten a lot stronger but for Sam the Street Samurai the tricked out guns don't pack the same whallop cause you can't burst for tons of additional soak.

How is a DV bonus for bursts in any way realistic? Either you hit with no bullets, one bullet, two bullets, etc. If a bullet does 6 damage, then two bullets should do 6 damage and then 6 damage if both hit. SR4 treats bursts as if each extra bullet hits and does 1 more damage. You can't sit there and say that the SR4 DV bonus from bursts is in any way realistic.

The last one to be really (quasi)realistic was SR3, where a burst made it both harder to dodge and increased the power and damage level of the attack proportional to the number of bullets fired.

Yes and no. Shooting the average guy with BOD 3 and an armor jacket will most likely not kill him, but leave him with one or two CM boxes instead. Which makes the death on the second shot a foregone conclusion, and accordingly a runner who catches one shot is out of action unless you're playing a really suicidal character...

I did?
It is certainly much more realistic than one bullet and ten hitting doing the same damage, though.

My team's sniper routinely 1-shots things. People with monowhips too. It's happened a few times with the sammy firing his assault rifle, though only once or twice.

Never with spells though, not anymore!

Straight BBB street sam. I don't recall how many soak dice he had, but he took three shots and was still fighting.

If this is the way the game is supposed to be, I'm fine with it; I'm just curious to see what other's experiences have been.

This is what I'm curious about. So, high-damage outputters (like snipers) can still do routine one-shots, but average weapon users have more trouble? My character is a pistol adept, so it's more due to his choice of weapons than his outrageous dice pool?

The difference between a security guard and a "standard" shadowrunner seems narrower, but judging by the Saturday Night Pit Fight thread, you can still create combat-optimized characters who are good at both inflicting and avoiding damage. Even for them, with their already high defensive dice pools, it looks like taking a hit to your initiative score for some dodging actions is an advisable tactic.

That's probably the case. Pistols typically have low DV and low AP. Try a Ruger with some hollow points or explosive rounds and you might see some more one shot kills. (With one net success you'll be pulling 11dv.)

Weapons with a two digit base DP have a good potential to onehit people in the hands of a competent shooter.

Only if you consider that burst = multiple bullets hitting. The abstraction doesn't handle that well in either case (though again SR3 handled it relatively well by doing more damage and making that damage harder to resist as well as harder to dodge).

In most cases in SR5, fewer dodge dice = more net hits for the attacker, which means more damage done. The weird edge case in SR5 involves shooting the unaware opponent with burst or full-auto, which has no benefit over shooting them with a single shot.

My response to the title, "So What Happened In The End?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrYvcFDNmBM

Apocalypse Now remix of The End by The Doors



Speaking of Vietnam, I've read a lot of Vietnam War memoirs. From reading them and the anecdotes contained therein, I get the impression that when someone eats a multi round burst to the torso from a .223 or 30 cal rifle they almost always tend to drop dead.

The only instance I've read about of someone possibly taking a burst and not dying was in "The Ultimate Sniper" by John Plaster, in which he states that he shot someone with a suppressed 9mm SMG. He states he is "sure" he hit the person, and the person went down, but a little bit later apparently managed to crawl away.

So, if we're thinking game design, SR3 was almost spot on with that. Basically, if all the assault rifles had had their base damage code raised to S (just like the "sport rifles" and "sniper rifles") you could have it so that a routine burst that hits has got a D damage code. I suppose the only argument then would be if rifles that would be running cartridges equivalent to or more powerful than 7.62 NATO should have base damage D, and if the .50 cal equivalents (like the assault cannon) should in fact start doing naval damage since they're antivehicular weapons.

That's part of why it's sad to see that, just like in D&D, for some reason the idea with new editions of SR was not to refine the existing popular system that has some unique good things about it, but rather to re-write the system just because. It's kind of like the time they made a movie that was called "I, Robot" but it had nothing to do with Asimov. Why keep the product name the same if the rules or content are completely different?

You have to remember personal armour was uncommon during the era, and what was available wasn't exactly the height of human genius in personal protection.
At the same time, assault rifles have changed very little.

Atmosphere for the post: Vietnam combat footage and radio chatter set to period music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBd1hBT9vNc

So if we applied SR3 rules to Vietnam and assault rifles had base damage code S, then we would typically see people who get hit with a burst fired by a drafted guy with mediocre skill (marginal success) taking a D wound which seems to feel pretty realistic.

It doesn't yet take into account people having great future body armor, which could still be applied on top of that paradigm.

As it is, the typical armor in the SR3 BBB (e.g. lined duster, armor jacket, whatever) probably reflects 80s soft armor, where you expect that a mondo handgun or a burst from something will chew through it and still injure the wearer. Which is fine as I suppose that's the era when those rules were first written.

If you want to have something like modern NIJ IV rated stuff or some superior future stuff all you have to do is continue to jack up the armor values and get results where people are soaking vs. effective Power 2 most of the time so most of the time the armor absorbs the rounds and the person is OK, being able to usually scale the damage all the way away unless someone just nailed them to the wall with a 10 round burst or something like that.

So basically, I agree with that you're saying, but think it makes a great basis even for the hypothetical firefights of the future.


Personally this stuff is very interesting to me and I would have preferred to see later editions preserve the same basic rule set but figure out how to implement new things in realistic ways. On my list were long range marksmanship, better handling of suppression fire including psychological affects, more detailed treatment of combat trauma and first aid as well as medical treatment and rehab later, and refinements to the probability curve of the statistical engine.

All the talk about caseless weapon systems was interesting too. Everyone used to think that "the future" would be characterized by caseless weapon systems and indeed as appropriate SR really talked that up. That could have been fleshed out a bit...there could have been caseless systems with higher cyclic rates of fire, and then basically that could tie in with a more realistic handling of general firearms cyclic rates of fire and suppression fire mechanics. Of course there are certain drawbacks with caseless systems such as greater propensity to overheat so there could have been a lot of research and strategic gameplay stuff to flesh out with that.

I felt like there was this enormous treasure box of rules and probability engines represented by SR3 and then when SR4 rolled around the writers just turned their back on that and threw it away.

I liked SR3 damage, but the problem with a variable TN for ranged combat is that TNs went up in difficulty, exponentially, too quickly, and fights with even a few negative modifiers could turn into both sides just whiffing against each other - and there wasn't much difference between a world-class shooter and a security grunt in those cases.

Close combat was even worse in some ways. I like the general idea of it being an opposed test, and being outnumbered affecting things. Unfortunately, this led to situations like the kung fu master beating up the sammie with wired reflexes three times faster than he beats up the mundane guy (more opposed tests = more chances to do damage), or a troll getting his ass handed to him by a group of girl scouts with pointy sticks (the friends in melee rules).

SR4 was, in many ways, a gross oversimplification of a lot of stuff, but I felt their handling of burst fire was acceptable - it was either harder to dodge, or did more damage, and a full auto burst was pretty lethal.

Just as a note, soldiers in modern conflicts routinely take multi-round hits from small arms, as well as IED and grenade injuries, and live.

They generally come away with permanent damage, but Shadowrun's med-tech is more than good enough to make that not a concern for runners. Limbs can be replaced and cloned, and nanotech is a thing to do fiddly internal repairs.

Multi-round solid hits? That might just be a bit of an exaggeration.

Pistol damage was net-hit driven, and still is under SR5. You get +2 DV, opponent has defense +3-6 dice from INT and some 3 more armor. You stun more often for less damage.

Assault Rifles get DV+4 and can still fire wide bursts so suffer less. There is still a loss of lethality, just not enough for Joe Average to survive.

Depends upon what you consider a Solid Hit. Solid hits in the extremities are still solid.

Anecdotal: when I was in the Corps, during the first Gulf War, we had a guy get hit multiple times in the limbs with solid hits from a MMG. He survived. Still had many shattered bones, to be sure (and his recovery was extensive, though he did not lose any limbs because of it), but none of them were life threatening beyond the potential lethal blood loss and post medical complications. Also, there was a guy (Marine Barracks Duty) who took a .45 round slug into the chest cavity at close range (total of almost a dozen entry/exit wounds because it bounced in and out and reflected off of the torso body armor back into the chest cavity) who lived for 45 minutes before he died (though he did die, in the end, he survived the effects of multiple gunshot wounds to the torso for an amount of time that was excessive compared to the damage inflicted).

Mind? Blown. Was it an accidental discharge or did one of the bad guys happen to be toting a .45?

Combat whiffs were a feature, not a problem, since damage was relatively unforgiving. You could entrench yourself and make it very difficult to hit you, pretty much just like a real firefight. Since Combat Pool was the only dodge you could get, one success was all you needed. A typical scenario involved firing controlled short bursts at a target (for an assault rifle this made the damage go from something like 7M to 10S, and made the dodge TN go from 4 to 5). So your target, probably with a combat pool of less than 6 if he was typical security, would have to burn the majority or all of his Combat Pool or take a nasty hit if you ever got a single success on him. Having really good armor would make it so that the damage might stage down to M, but most mooks would still require TN 5 or 6 Body rolls (two hits per) to bring it down any.

Once you depleted someone's Combat Pool for the round, though, even with difficult shots you were likely to be putting 10D on them (requiring only two successes).

And, of course, any damage modified your TNs. Putting an S wound on a target meant +3 TN making most actions other than crying quietly in a corner too difficult to contemplate. So you could knock people out of a fight without actually incapacitating or killing them (unlike -3 Dice Pool from SR4/5).

Really, the SR3 combat system was nuanced and awesome, and made gunfights tense and frightening.