No more takers? I sure could use an answer for both of these questions...

I think a parry and a block are broadly the same thing. It doesn't really change the game much to allow an unarmed specialist to fight a melee weapon wielder. Consider that the unarmed guy has thrown off the weapon swing or thrust, such that it does less damage than it would if the attack had been uncontested. Not all unarmed blocks are hard blocks, after all.

Personally, as regards your 6th question, I'd leave the mage astrally active, although he'd have a hefty action penalty. The alternative, is to have him unaffected by damage to his body, but as compensation any damage he takes in the astral is P.

Unarmed block = Boxing.

Unarmed parry = Kung Fu.

Your examples are perfect, but for the sake of playability I'd just consider all unarmed combat styles to use the same rules. Indeed, they use the same rules as armed melee combat.

Specific martial arts can be made distinct using the martial arts manouveurs and qualities.

That's how I would rule it as well.
Full Parry: REA+2*Melee Weapon Skill
Full Block: REA+2*Unarmed Combat Skill
Full Dodge: REA+2*Dodge skill

Well, I now know where the auto-return-to-body comes from.

In SR3 BBB, check the following page & text:



Much of the text in SR3 for this portion of the BBB is word for word in SR4. The above piece however was left out.

The Astral Combat section in SR4 is significantly gutted in comparison to previous editions. That has the side effect of not providing clarifying text we previously had.

Yeah, that would be be a good guide if that Wujen had been disrupted on the astral, but he suffered a full unconscious knockout to his body while he was projecting. Different scenario.

I fully agree with this, but by the rules, there isn't such a thing as a Full Block.

It would make sense to have a full block as far as game mechanics go. I mean, I don't see why having a weapon would allow one a player to use his skill x 2 + Reaction for a full defense, but an unarmed combatant couldn't use his skill x 2 + reaction for his full defense (by the RAW, he'd have to add dodge instead of his unarmed skill again).

This still doesn't fix the fact that some of the martial arts styles give bonuses to parry techniques. Either the developers are telling us that a player can parry with their unarmed skill, or they only gave those bonuses to styles that they think would incorporate weapon use. Here's the list:

Aikido (Judo, JuJutsu) (+1 Die for full parry)
Arnis de Mano (Escrima, Kali) (may inflict damage with called shot to disarm or the disarm maneuver <which means it relies on full parry, which is necessary for the maneuver>)
Karate (Kenpo, Soo Bahk Do) (+1 die for full parry)
Kung Fu (Hwarang-Do, Wushu) (+1 die for melee parry)
Muay Thai (Kickboxing, Savate) (+1 for full parry)<can be assumed die, it's not listed as die or DV in the book, just +1>
Pentjak-Silat (Bersilat, Gatka) (+1 for full parry)<again, can be assumed it is meant +1 die>

Out of all of these, weapon use is pretty prevalent. Aikido/jujutsu sometimes train with swords wooden and otherwise. Escrima/Arnis use rattan sticks. Karate has a wide range of weapons (nunchaku, kama, tonfa and staff). Kung Fu has straight, broad, and butterfly swords, not to mention all of the clubbed weapons like the staff, three section staff, etc. Pentjak-Silat even mentions the use of the Kris, so I'm okay with that. From these examples, I am perfectly okay with having to use a weapon to achieve these bonuses and keep melee parry according to the rules.

But, I've never heard of weapon training with Muay Thai though. Maybe I'm just out of the Thai boxing loop, but I was pretty sure that style used knees and elbows and the sharp edges of the hands and feet. This would be the bonus that breaks that trend, and might suggest that one could parry with their unarmed skill.

Maybe I'm just a little bitter too. Why can't I have a full melee block? Why do I have to learn dodge to defend myself better while not holding a weapon? Why can I not learn the maneuver "disarm" and use it because i am not holding a weapon? A skilled unarmed combatant can disarm just as efficiently as one using their blade or club to parry (I'd even argue more so).

Could we please get a developer to shed some light on this?

In the BBB there is no Blocking. Whether you use a weapon or your bare hands, the defensive action is called parry. In all skills in the Close Combat Group there is a specialization called Parrying. So it makes sense if you only use that book. In the Arsenal however, they must have renamed the defensive action without weapons against melee attacks to Blocking for more diversity. I guess they forgot to rename the Full Defense options. So i advise that you look over the Martial arts advantages and change it to +1 to Full Block where appropriate, or use this Parry in the sense of the BBB. In that case the character would get +1 to all full defense options except Full Dodge.

Nope, see, Unarmed skill to melee block is in the core rules.

Now, you do bring up a good point. If they put the specialization of parrying in under unarmed combat, can't one use unarmed as their "melee combat skill" to parry?

That's assuming that damage to the physical body is carried over to the astral body, which is fairly obviously not the case.

The rules are contradictory. There are two ways to resolve this contradiction. One of those ways is stupid. Logic dictates that the other must be correct.

So, strike the part that says that says "immediately" and replace it with "when the astral form returns to it's body".
Thus, the rules for killing the body actually make sense, and you don't have atral forms floating around "unconscious" which is very well impossible by all previous rules.

Well the thing is a melee combat skill is any skill in the close combat group, whereas a mele weapon skill obviously is a skill with a melee weapon. So according to the wording on p. 151 blocking is included and on p. 147 it isn't but it is mentioned separately.

@hyzmarca: Why is one stupid? Which part of "Any damage inflicted to one form immediately affects the other." says that damage to the phyiscal body does not carry over to the astral? The following lines only tell us the exceptions to the normal rules, which are that an astral form (of a projecting mage) without a living physical form, "continues to project on the astral plane" and a mindless body can continue to exist on lifesupport untill the end of its lifespan. The first rule does not mention that the astral form can still do anything, only that there still is a form on the astral plane, in the second case it is obvious that neither the astral nor the physical form can do anything.

Another thing, rules of previous edition have no meaning for this one. the game has to be playable without knoowledge of previous editions. Also some things have been intentionally changed from edition to edition so these rules do no longer apply such as tunneling, spirit summoning and spirit domains.

As a side note, if damage did not affect both forms equally, why are spirits, if either one of their condition monitors are filled, sent back to their home metaplane and are forbidden to enter either the physical or astral plane for a certain amount of time?

Probably because from the spirits' perspective, they are projecting into the Physical. Think a mirror of what humans do with astral space.

Physical - Astral - Metaplane

We know spirits come from the metaplanes. Kill one on the metaplanes and it's gone. Poof. Kaput. Kill one on the Astral or Physical and it blips back to the metaplane. It's just the opposite for Humans. Kill us on the physical, we're dead. Gone. Poof. Kill us on the Astral or on the Metaplanes, we blip back to our bodies.

The big difference us and spirits is we are only barred from Astral for however long it takes us to wake up from being beat up. Spirits have to wait (28 days - Force).

But yeah, as it stands, there is a hole in the rules that ought to be plugged.

As for the damage affecting forms... the previous editions always included the fact that if you suffered a wound, that wound and its effects followed you whether you stayed physical or went astral. Which makes sense. Now if that is no longer the case in SR4, then the section on SR4's Astral Combat needs cleaning up.

What I was trying to say as simply as possible is that the Unarmed Combat skill should be allowed to block and parry, since we have obvious real life examples of it. Other weapon skills should be allowed to block as well. It should come down to a personal preference thing. Do you see your swordsman as one who blocks with his sword (slightly different from parrying), or better yet, your staff fighter blocking with his telescopic staff?

However, if you specialize your Blades (Swords), you get the bonus to both uses, so it becomes a moot point (except where Martial Arts advantages ccome into play [literally]).

@ the Astral Projection discussion... I just crack up with the mental image of a mage losing his body, and right before he'd normally discorporate he Stunbolts himself to immediately return to his body.

Well, yeah... it works. Keep in mind though, he'd be back in his body where ever it is but he'd be unconscious.

That said... what happens if the body was taken over by a shedim or other some such bad thing? Where does the mage go back to if someone else is driving his body? Does he force out the other consciousness since he didn't let them in willingly?

I always thought that unconscious always meant "willing." Kind of like vampires and essence drain. They need to be willing (conscious and wanting to) or subdued (unconscious would work here).

I suppose disrupting yourself (stun damage) on the astral plane would send your astral form back to your body. That would suck if your body was already dead because then you'd just bleed out and die while unconscious, likewise if your body was stunned, you'd just unconsciously rest in your body till some stun went away.

So how do we determine when an astral form (projecting magician to be accurate) gets disrupted? Do they have an astral damage track that is separate from the physical body's?

Maybe someone with the pdf of the latest version, which is the official errata, could answer the question.

Are there any changes to the "When you were out" bit (p. 184 in the previous edition) that we were arguing about earlier on in the thread.

Specifically, do we know if a mage remains active in the astral if his body is dead or stunned? Or does the astral form remains projecting, but inactive? Or something else entirely?

We've determined that the astral form does indeed remain ACTIVE in the astral if the body is stunned or killed. This is confirmed in the book Corporate Enclaves. It's the mission "Almost Midnight" chronicled in the Game information (Tokyo) section p.134. A mage is killed but projects just before she dies and roams the astral for several hours, contracting the runners trying to find her killers. I'd say that an official mission out of the canon is good enough proof that damage to the body doesn't disrupt the astral form (save for when your form dissipates because your body's been dead for far too long).

He'd revert to being a passenger in his posessed body.


All the mages I play Astrally Project when they're close to death. That way, at the very least, they can take massive amounts of revenge. If you know you're already dead, overchanneling powerballs (used to) doesn't matter. Kinda like this, at about 14:30.

Affecting anything not active on the astral plane is impossible like that since SR3 or even SR2. Not hte greatest idea.

He could manifest onto the physical plane and cast that way. By my reading of the rules, the barrier for casting at non-astral targets is that "aura alone isn't enough to target"; manifesting allows the disembodied caster to extend his senses onto the physical plane, and allows things on the physical plane to affect him. It therefore follows, IMO, that it could affect the physical plane through magic (physical interactions are explicitly ruled out, but not magical ones).

Acording to the errata only this is possible "Manifesting is a psychic effect that allows an astral form to make itself visible and audible on the physical plane through an act of will." Otherwise the character is still on the astral plane and thus can only affect things one the same plane.

No, doesn't work that way. Manifesting isn't materialization. You are still on the astral. You can't be attacked or attack the physical plane.

I'll have to double-check the errata, but my copy of the BBB states "Manifesting characters and spirits, however, are vulnerable to mana-based magical effects on the physical plane."

That seems to indicate they could be Powerbolted. Which would indicate to me that they should be able to Powerbolt back. But, like I said, I need to check the errata again; Dakka Dakka's post indicates that has been changed since my version of the rules was printed.

No, you have an old version of the book. They errata'ed that paragraph and made sure that everyone knows that when you manifest the reason you can be seen by non awakened characters is because you are affecting them on a psychic level. Video cameras still won't pick up magicians who are manifesting.