Orcs can do nasty stuff, too. But your troll doesn't need PPP to reach 18 armor, and that's almost his maximum before being a useless wall that cannot shoot an elephant in a corridor.

Trolls are supposed to be tough to kill. They're huge, can wear armor plates almost as think as a light armored vehicle's, and in game term cost 40 points and have to deal with all the disadvantages of being a troll. So yeah, they hare 3 times as hard to kill as a standard 4 body military soldier or lone star officer, but he dodges like crap, is almost impossible to miss (I think you get bonus dice against him), is totally vulnerable to APDS-loaded panther XXL fired by a guy with a bit of experience with that gun. Nearly as much as the 5 body/10 armor streetsam. Of course, smaller guns are much less efficient against a troll, and you won't see that APDS loaded panther very often, but that's the point of playing a troll.

Edit: however, PPP does make orthoskin/dermal plating useless. Especially if it can be concealed on an armor jacket. So I gues you're right: once again, an item people wouln't think about not using.

I never said our light armor can do it, just that we have armor that can do it. In Shadowrun, they've had another 60 years worth of fictional advancements in material sciences to draw upon along with a theme that franly thrives on action movie logic. Shadowrun armor is tremendously resilient by design. The idea that people can take a shot or two but keep on kicking is built right in, which is one of the reasons why hit locations are glossed over and not considered a part of the rules as much as possible. Whether armor is partial or not only matters a whit if the GM is determining if a location may be considered vulnerable to an armor bypass attempt or not, and even then he has extremely broad leeway.

And heavy pistols evolved as well. Better alloys, better barrels, better powder; the new pistols are tremendously powerful by design. And a predator cannot punch through an armor jacket, so it's alright as it is, really -at least that's my opinion. The super warhawk can, but that's a small assault canon (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) . I'm always imagining Shadowrun as a deadly setting, and having armor so efficient compared to gun just kills all that feeling. Especially now that they've reduced the power of explosive rounds and ExEx.

APDS is too cheap and easy to get, though; I have no idea why corpsec wouldn't use large amounts of them, since they don't have to worry about availability and illegality, and that they're cheap. Easy way to kill infiltrating streetsams! I think the price is 100 times too low or something. Any idea?

What I would also agree with is that, on the other hand, the rules for vehicle armor make them a bit weak: You can trash an armored vehicle (15 armor, so something like a light military vehicle, a patrol hovercraft, or a light T-bird) with a full auto of HMG with AV rounds. Yes, that's a browning .50 firing with AV rounds, and I would understand it if it *could* do some damage to a lightly armored vehicle. But 120 nuyens to rip a quite-heavily-armored vehicle to shreads is just crazy, and would make anything but main battle tank armor useless. Anyway, I think this needs a complete overhaul. Oh, and limiting armor to 20 points makes no sense either; MBT are supposed to fight each other with light gaussguns (why did they give up railguns?). Which means that they probably can sometimes withstand a light gauss gun hit; That would put a MBT's armor in the 40s, and a light tank in the 30s, which seems consistent with citymasters having 20 armor.

Wait wut?

Well, you can have bonus armor, concealed, "available", cheap, at no essence cost, and with the same drawbacks. The point of orthoskin-likes was that you could wear them "on top" (well, more like, under (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) ) of an armor jacket. Same for bone lacing.

Here's my analysis of stuff like hit locations and heavy armor: Armor, hit locations, and math. It covers armor penetration, modeling of heavy vehicles, hit locations, and various other stuff.

Okay, but it doesn't take encumbrance into account.
I am not against full body armor turning browning damage to stun; but a 4-body guy wearing it will be somewhat encumbered.
Your maths basically say that an armor jacket is okay as it is. I fully agree. FFBA isn't, however, at least not in my game.

Edit: I don't see how your values differ so much from SR4... well, you did give arbitrary values for armors to begin with. Although, turtle shell makes no sense IMO: 22 armor means that you can basically laugh at an A-10 tank killer firing at you (heavy autocanon that can take out citymaster-class vehicles). Also, your MBT armor equivalents are a bit light: modern M1 have 1000+ mm RHA front armor.

Edit: okay, 44 armor for a tank is a bit much. For MBT, I'd say 31-35, depending on how good the model is; that's the kind of vehicle that a heavy tank gun with armor piercing round seem to have been designed to take down.

SR gives an armor number by abstracting the body coverage and how effective it it at stopping attacks.

So, yes, in SR an armor jacket can stop most of the weapons in the game. But it doesn't cover your hips, etc.

It's kind of stupid when you think of it (since bullets don't hit average parts of the body), but it's part of the the whole abstraction bit that underlies a lot of the the game logic. So deal with it or do hit locations.

Handguns in SR are hugely more effective than they should be, and shotguns, rifles, LMGs, MMGs and (especially) HMGs are significantly less effective than they should be.

You can only make handguns marginally more powerful even with all the cool stuff. Recoil goes up as MV and bullet weight goes up. See this video to see what happens at the extreme...

Effective AP ammo (particularly APDS!) in handguns is a silly idea, but it's been around a long time in SR and I don't expect them to stop the madness any time soon. Fix it if it bothers you in your game.

A-10s are shooting at the rear and mostly top armor, which is much thinner. That's why they strafe in a fairly steep dive. More like 2-4 inches max.

Yep, that's what happens when you're dealing with a low granularity system, unfortunately. Pistols are better in the shadowrun universe, but when I said "overpowered" I should have been more specific-- I really meant that they're overpowered relative to modern day assault weapons. Things have moved on in the setting and killing a person with modern firearms is easier than ever unless they're countering you with equally modern firearms. And honestly, as kzt pointed out, it's kinda silly. Firearms are a rather mature technology. We're already at the point where many of the major advances in firearms is more on the production and maintenance end than anything. We've had rather effective weapons for ages now, and even the AK-47 can shoot a guy pretty dead, it's just innaccurate since it was designed to have broad tolerances for fouling rather than as a pricely calibrated match grade weapon. Since those days it's really been about approaching the holy grail of having a weapon that's precise AND low maintenance, since we've got the killin' people part down pretty well.

Anyway, I'd say your assessment of APDS is way off though. First of all, it's easier to get arrange for Synaptic freakin' Boosters tailored out of your own cells than it is to arrange for APDS, and the stuff is effectively like throwing 7 nuyen at your opponent per round. I typically limit my vanilla corp-sec goons to having one or two long arms in a facility loaded with the stuff in the event they're hit hard by shadowrunners using strongarm tactics like big Spirits, combat drones and the Uber-Troll who just won't go down, but that's really about it. They honestly couldn't make ammo prices any higher without things utterly failing the sniff test, because the stuff is already quite expensive as it is by IRL standards. I've already got a houserule in my own games that rules that "flechette" ammunition for shotguns costs the same as normal ammunition for other weapons, since it's not like 0 buckshot is some groundbreaking new technology.

Yes, and they can wreck light tanks.
Their DU ammo has 68 mm penetration, I doubt it's enough to split a heavy tank open. (in game terms, I'd give something from a -4 to a -6 bonus to armor penetration against a tank when attacking from the air).
I wonder if their standard ammo is good enough to damage any tank, although it would damage a light armored vehicle, I'm sure of it.

I also can understand how a browning loaded with expensive ammo can destroy a 16-armor vehicle. That's a vehicle with light "real" armor (as opposed to the 12 armor of crimson samurai drones and lower vehicle armors, which are just glorified armor jackets), so it gets ripped to shreds. But APDS and AV rounds are nearly free; I don't see why corpsec would ever use normal ammo: you can destroy 200k nuyens of hardware with just 200 nuyens, that's a good bargain!

If you want to kill a tank or something more heavily armored without giving your target a chance, you use a gauss gun (although today's technical advances indicate that railguns will be the weapon of choice). Those can literaly transform a tank into scrap metal.




7 nuyen to kill a runner isn't really much, especially when there's hundreds of thousands at stake, or even more. Those are AA or AAA corps, they have money, are not concerned by availability, and are probably willing to spend way more than 7 nuyens per round if it can guarantee that a runner will drop dead without having the time to do damage, such as killing a corp sec officer (bad for morale) or stealing paydata.

Same for vehicles. Using a 10000 nuyens guided AV missile to destroy an armored vehicle is cost-efficient, and quite consistent with man-portable anti-vehicle missiles.

The encumberance penalties were covered in later posts of the same thread. But the main penalties of heavy armor were that is got hot, reduced your athletics pool, reduced your passive defense, interfered with your perception, etc. Plenty of body 3 and 4 folks are walking around with class 4 armored vests and not suffering penalties significant enough to be modeled by the current SR4 armor penalty system.

Assuming you want more realistic models of tanks:



With most tanks having armor of 500/250/100 (or considerably more, for example the current revision of the M1 Abrams might be something like 750/300/100 vs KE and 1600/450/200 vs HEAT) and bodies of around 60.

You're saying 1 mm = 1 point of armor; it's wrong, as the scale they use is not linear, with good reason:

a round that would penetrate 1 mm would need a lot more to penetrate another mm. (I know, it's a very, very weak round)
a round that would penetrate 599 mm wouldn't need a lot more to penetrate another mm.
Using your scale, it just means "1 success" in both case.

I stick with my 34 armor for MB tanks. it work well, make them impervious to anything but real AT weapons or Coil Guns.
Then, as a roleplaying game, it's just trying to modelize stuff, and rules are necessarily an abstraction.

I've checked the price of AP ammo in real life, and I find it crazy: it's super cheap. The question is: is the difference between standard and AP real-life ammo the same as between SR4's standard and APDS? -4 is a lot, and it's non-linear: I would say it's the difference between 200 and 600-800 mm of armor (for tanks), or concealed and military grade armor. What they call APDS seems to be a very, very efficient round.

Edit: okay, AP is cheap ($1). SLAP is a bit less cheap ($7), apparently, and it doesn't seem to justify a -4, more like a -2. I guess APDS would not be that cheap at all.

I admit that making sense of it all isn't simple (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

It'll typically take more than a single APDS round to put a guy down too. It's about ending the threat, not necessarily killing the guy-- unless you're dealing with hardened armor or a person under the influence of a Pain Editor, it often doesn't matter that much whether you're doing physical or stun. Once you have a metahuman opponent down for the count you can always kill them via forcing stun into overflow if need be. In the case of Joe Security, it's also worth noting that they're unlikely to take a guy down in a single pass. A lot of the time cheapest yest most effective option corps have for arming Joe Mook and the security drones with cheap automatic weapons like a foregrip equipped Sandler TMP or an AK-97. One of the quickest ways of killing runners I've seen is simply using massed semi-automatic fire from the goon squad followed up by the last guard using a Take Aim action paired with a wide short burst.

I suppose it's true. And you're right about full auto fire killing shadowrunners even without APDS. I guess bruises aren't too good when your body is covered with them


In spite of this, I've decided that APDS would just be much, much more expensive in my game though; A security drone is worth a few thousand nuyens, so with a full auto APDS costing 70 nuyens, it's not going to change much, except that the drone will be more efficient at killing streetsams. But when the full auto of APDS costs as much as the drone itself, it's another thing entirely.

I can sort of justify it: APDS isn't armor piercing, apparently. It's super-powerful armor piercing. I've looked at several AP rounds, and apprently they just use tougher metals, not discarding sabot. Also, a 4 armor difference seems to be huge, and standard AP would be closer to -1 or -2, looking at the armor type chart from national institute of justice. That would make APDS a kind of luxury, high-tech round that corps use to mow down very tough runners. In D&D terms, it'd be a single-use item like a potion, a temporary buff.
As for AV rounds, I'd hate to see 120 nuyens destroying an armored truck, so I guess I'll have to increase the price here too.

Between a real life SLAP 7.62 and a standard 7.62, there seem to be a 50-100 fold difference, so I guess that's okay (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) .

I like my game deadly, but deadly with standard, mundane weapons (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) .

Are you kidding me? An A-10 30mm Autocannon using the rounds they were designed for (DU Rounds) are absolutely capable of destroying MBT's... every see any footage af the Gulf War? I have seen physical evidence of exactly what that weapon is capable of... and while it may be tasked to actually hurt an M1 Tank (and any of its variants on the front armor, that is not the tactic that they use (As mentioned above in another post)... "Light Arnored" vehicles have absolutely no chance of survivability against an A-10...

Rant Over

Another Note... If you are using MBT's in any style of Shadowrun, I think that You are not getting the scale of the game... Deniable assets are not tagged with operating on the Main Battlefield, and anythig other than backstory for such escapades is ludicrous in my opinion... how many shadowruns do you actually NEED an MBT (or LAV's or Fighter Jets for that matter)... seems to be WAY OVerkill ...

Sorry, Could not help myself... Rant Over, again...
My two cents

And this is why we have the Thunderstruck. Mr 40 armor troll takes goes down to 16 armor, vs 10 dmg, with nothing but 1 net hit.