I personally would rule that kick attacks and nerve strike don't work together.

Its pretty easy to drop people in one combat round with melee. Without finishing strike. Nerve strike is too expensive for a fancy gimmick that wears off in 1 minute. Sure, its easier for say, stopping someone if you're planning on questioning them. But other than that, it definately isn't better than say, 4 levels of critical strike if you're looking to just drop people.

Always someone with the "why pick X, it isn't as good as Y."

You forget that once they're paralyzed, if you need to knock them out, now they can't defend, so take your time. One minute of defenselessness is death.

Yes, but typically, you won't get 4-6+ net hits on your opposition. Of if you are, you can knock them out with a regular punch anyway, especially if you put that 1 power point towards critical strike.

Also, you have 2 regular str 3 guys. They each throw the same dice around and such, except one takes nerve strike, and the other takes 4 levels of critical strike. Say 16dice or so based on your example.

Thats an average of 4 hits. Against a typical goon (rea 3, unarmed/dodge 3) they'll get 2 net hits.

It takes nerve strike man 2 attacks to paralyze one goon, with the goon taking a rea/agi penalty of 2.

It takes critical strike guy 2 hits to paralyze one goon also. Except the goon is taking a -2 penalty to everything after he is hit.

Now, this is going off your dicepool of 5 agi, 7 unarmed +2 specialization +2 for kick reach. Critical strike guy can up his str to 5 and now he knocks people out in 1 shot.

Nerve strike man needs to somehow squeeze an extra 3 dice out of this martial arts attack in order to do the same to these average mooks. Put them against someone not a mook? And they're going to be taking a lot longer to drop the guy.

Against say, a credible opponent. (Rea 5/Unarmed 5) 3 hits they'll each average 1 net hit. Nerve strike guy takes 5 attacks to disable the opponent.

Critical strike guy takes the same 2 hits to drop the guy.


Nerve strike just isn't useful unless you're using it on people who don't matter and could be walked all over anyway.

What I think people are forgetting is that Fourth Edition is geared towards whatever dicepools the developers want it to be geared. While a canon typical human professional in the field has only 6 dice pool in whatever he does before equipment, please note that he can only buy 1 single hit or achieve 2 hits on average. However a survey of the canon contacts in SR4 and RC tells us that many of the people the runners come into contact with are anything but typical human professionals. They are more likely to be Improved(if human) Experts in their field of choice if not better.

Problem is that no matter what the devs have to say on the matter, the rule system of Fourth Edition breaks the rules of the claimed genre, venturing into bad anime terrority.

What rules of what claimed genre? Genre has no rules. It is simply a limitation of the human perception.

Street Level Cyberpunk.

And of course genre has rules, I think everyone would cry foul if Indiania Jones pulled out a lightsaber and started cutting a swath through a hoard of Nazi engineered Monkey Men that bled acid.

Shadowrun is not Street Level Cyberpunk. At least unless the developers make it so.

Of course genre does not have rules, it is the games that have rules. No one would cry foul if Indiania Jones pulled out a lightsaber and started cutting a swath through a hoard of Nazi engineered Monkey Men that bled acid, if the RAW allowed it to be so.

Bad anime territory? Are you one of those people that believes that competent characters are exclusive to anime?

I would never call Shadowrun "street level cyberpunk". It is a game where people can call up spirits, blast people with lightning, hack into augmented reality and bend it to their will, and perform superhuman feats because they have physically or magically augmented their bodies to the point where a mundane pedestrian is just a sad bag of wobbling meat to them.

Sure, you have all the "grit" and the quasi-dystopian atmosphere, but it is just there to add flavor to a game more inspired by action movies, where hard-edged anti-heroes stick it to "the man".


It's still not quite anime level, though. And forget mecha or Dragonball Z. Simply look at something like Noir, where you have mundane, unaugmented humans doing things that would be impossible for a multi-initiate adept with delta-grade bioware.

It's worth noting that anime can encompass a whole slew of power levels.

Those who play the game at this level are restricting characters to the rating levels of goons. Those Halloweener gangers that are fodder listed in the back of the core book? Yeah, they're street level. Runners "live on the edge," but they are by no means "street" level. They might have their street lifestyles, but they are the good and the awesome, the anti heroes who are noteworthy. Just like with those action movies and animes that inspire this kind of quasi-epic storytelling, the characters are at a level more than the average human and their actions are something to write home about.

Of course, as a disclaimer one doesn't have to play the game at this level. If one wants a street level game where you start at 300 or 200 BP, then those gangers seem pretty rough and rightly so. I've played games like this. My players got bored because of the lack of interesting experience. Street occurrences happen at street level, and since they are the norm, We find that they're kind of average and boring. That's why we now play at 400 BP like the designers set in the parameters.

Or if you really don't want to cause any harm what-so-ever. Some people don't take to kindly to being knocked out cold. But in the same regard, that can also be said about people who don't like the loss of their motor skills.

You don't need to argue the awesomeness of critical strike. I know it's awesome. I use it extensively. I don't think I ever have martial arts adept without critical strike and combat sense. You need tons of dice to evade and dodge as you close the distance gap, and combat sense helps. You need tons of DV to drop an opponent quick, and crit strike does that as well. I was messing around with nerve strike and I was seeking answers and opinions, not a "you're doing it wrong... FAIL GET" character critique.

Genre does not have rules, it has conventions. And even then, sometimes the best settings come when those conventions are tossed topsy-turvy.

Star Wars is a mix of sci-fi space opera with liberal amounts of pulp cliffhangers and a touch of wuxia and samurai movies thrown in for good measure. Stargate SG:1 ended as exploratory fiction mixed up with Star Trek. Heck, Shadowrun itself is a major genre mash-up; high and low fantasy with Noir sensibilities and an overlay of cyberpunk. (Cyberpunk has never been that deeply imbedded in Shadowrun.)

Opinion: Its completely worthless, as the same can be accomplished via other adept powers. Which are also useful against difficult opponents, unlike nerve strike.

You're missing a step. With normal unarmed attacks, the opponent gets to soak the damage after you have gotten those aforementioned net hits. If you get 4-6 net hits against a troll with a Body of 10, wearing riot control armor and a full set of PPP including helmet, with ceramic bone lacing, then that character will roll 30 dice to soak it, reducing the damage by 10 on average. With nerve strike, though, that same troll gets instantly incapacitated.

I don't have a problem with there being a special attack that circumvents a tank's normal defenses, a la the stun touch spell, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around armor doing nothing against something called "nerve strike" (maybe it wouldn't be as jarring if it was called "bodily disruption" and described the effect as needle-thin charges of magical energy stabbing into the target and ignoring armor). Especially when armor did make nerve strike more difficult in SR3.

Toturi I disagree, unless my aging memory is failing me I clearly remember reading that one of goals for Fourth Edition is that it is aimed towards street level power scales. Also needless to say I also disagree with your second point as you are the only person I know who follwos RAW so zealously.

Janice, nope, I like Runners to be competant and strong individuals, but there is a huge difference between having a team made up by compentant and strong individuals and one that is made up of world class individuals who make the laws of physics their bitch on a casual basis. (And no, I'm not getting sidetracked about the nature of magic.)

TKDNinjaInBlack, streetlevel play is fully possible at 400BP, and can involve more than getting your butts kicks by gangers, if your players were bored I suggest being more imaginative.

While that may have been a stated goal, in practice they failed miserably. It's remarkably easy to create characters that should be running around in tights and capes; in fact, the system encourages it even as the fluff says otherwise. While you can force the game into street level play, it's not meant for it, and a lot of problems will arise. I mean, you can play high fantasy with SR4, it just doesn't work very well.

Despite the claims, Shadowrun is not meant to be street level, and it's never really been cyberpunk.

You can't really make a character with a "street level" power level at 400 BP unless you are either very new to the rules, or intentionally gimping your character. A "street level" atmosphere, however, is more than possible at 400 BP.

I just don't see the point of complaining about super-powerful characters in a game of cybernetically and magically augmented superbeings who do ultra-dangerous work for a living. The NPCs like the Tir Ghosts? They're the grunts. The opposition. One of them could give a shadowrunner not optimized for combat fits, and several of them could make most tweaked combat builds sweat a bit. But they aren't some kind of benchmark for player characters.

If player characters were as good as the grunts, they would not survive, because they are usually outnumbered and outgunned by the grunts, and have a gauntlet of combat and other activities to get through in order to complete their mission. They need to be significantly better than the grunts, just to have a chance. And the character creation rules reflect this. That said, 400 BP characters still have plenty of weak areas, vulnerabilities, and so on. They are more than human, because they are supposed to be, but they hardly break the laws of physics, unless you drastically overestimate what high dice pools can do (a common problem with, for example, social skills).

True, but I see the problem being in a flawed char-gen system as opposed to the ruleset at large Cain. As long as you play at lower dicepools the system works quite well, it isn't until you get to bad anime levels that the Fixed TN starts producing outrageous results.

Professional Dicepools of 6-8 before equipment actually works people.

I would pay money to see that. >.>



To be fair, Anime characters seem to have a higher chance of being incompetent than characters in western fiction.

But that's not even standard according to the BBB. Most of the archetypes have much larger dice pools. For example, IIRC the street sam has 15 dice in automatics. Heck, an elf can break combat dicepools of 8 without soft-maxing a single skill or stat, before equipment. And even karmagen encourages much larger dice pools than that.

The "ruleset at large" encourages large dice pools. It rewards overkill, in the form of critical successes. The very levels it sets in the archetypes are near the breaking point of the rules. There are a few arbitrary and annoying limits tossed in, in an attempt to rein things in, but they're easy to get around and result in overfocused characters.

I agree that limiting dice pools is key, but I don't pretend that the rules support that choice. I ask people to not create pornomancers, I don't come up with arbitrary and unfair rule interpretations to prevent them. Really, to restrict the power levels to what you state would take either a direct appeal to your players, or a serious rewrite of the entire ruleset so that power level would be appropriate.

One more thing: overpowered characters is not just a subset of bad anime. Superman was tossing around asteroids long before Goku learned to throw a ki-blast. You don't like the idea of shadowrunners being able to tangle with superheroes, that's great! But don't blame anime for creating superheroes.

I'm pretty sure he's discussing the "Dragonball Z Effect" in the original comment. You know the one, where the GM has to come up with some enemy that possesses, in the words of the Genie from Aladdin "Phenomenal Cosmic Power!" to really challenge the PCs, lety alone the one uber-badass who's specialized out the ass.

And no, Tir Ghosts are not grunts. Grunts are the chipped beef who surround the big boss of Chinatown. Grunts are the trog gangers chasing you blindly down that alleyway into your claymore funhouse. Grunts are the typical CorpSec goons telling you to move your illegally parked vehicle or they will start shelling in ten seconds.

Tir Ghosts, however, in the words of the Devgrp are "the masters of covert operations and have broken into some of the most secure areas on the planet undetected." In other words, these are the boys who have snuck into the Renraku CEOs office via their most secure corporate facility, raped his personal direct-connection commstation to grab the goodies on their latest newtek from their super-secure R&D servers, and left a lovely floral arrangement and "Thank you" card on his desk to be found when he steps into his office the next morning when they're halfway over the Pacific on the ride home. Oh yeah, and they do all of this with a pre-equipment dice pool of 10-12. In other words, these are the big dogs that every 'runner aspires to be.

*chuckles* Aye, so would I Platinum Dragon, but I would be extremely pissed if I entered the cinaplex thinking I was going to be treated to a real Indy Jones movie, and may the firy pits of the Nine Hells protect the poor slot would later rule that such a movie was "canon" in Indy's universe.

True Cain, but I have learned the hard way not to point to the pre-gens in my arguments since they are basically piles of shit twice warmed over, the nicer of my two theories is that whoever built the pre-gens didn't have a complete verson of Fourth Edition's rules yet, my other theory is that large qualities of crack was smoked while they were being built.

However, I think you may be misunderstanding what I'm trying to say when I talk about Fourth Edition ruleset being geared towards lower dicepools, all I am trying to say is that at lower dicepools you don't get the crazy "brokeness" that you do with high dicepools, not that lwoer dicepools are "rewarded" in some way ... well other than having a ruleset that isn't broken that is. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

As for your point about superheroes, agreed, but as I think I have said either here or in another thread I use the term bad anime simply because the style of the examples that appears on Dumpshock belong in the catagory of anime.

In pure combat, they aren't quite at the level of a player character focused on that (as their description notes). Their dice pools for combat are above average, but not the greatest by far. A dice pool of 12, before modifiers, for stealth, on the other hand, is a very good dice pool. They have a base Agility of 6, an Intuition of 6, and the stealth skill group at 6, so they are at 12 before modifiers for every stealth skill.

That said, the version of Tir Ghosts presented in the book are grunts. They are what you nab when you need some quick stats for the strike team that drops from the rooftops onto the team's van, leading to a fight. If I put together a team of Tir Ghosts, they would have more than the bare-bones 'ware they do (come on, no muscle toner? Seriously?), and have better equipment (such as armor that doesn't give them penalties, probably chameleon suits, with FFBA half suits underneath). Hell, I might even give the Tir Lieutenant some actual hacking skills.

Their biggest advantage over a team of runners is that a team of runners need to fight, sneak, and gather information, and tend to be specialists in certain roles. The badass sammie will be picking up the slack for the hacker and the face. On a team of Tir ghosts, though, every one of them can sneak and fight, making them a very tough challenge for most runners.