Well, in the Battletech Universe, you are supposed to take a military career . . so basically any choice will leave you crippled in some way or other, if i remember correctly . .
which might not be the case, because my head hurts and i am tired. i'm going to stop right here and go to bed now.

Such a good house rule that it is what is in the rule book.



and they don't have the +2 to damage, but they do have the +2 to AP.

Or am I missing some other Gel Round bonus?

Also, it is important to note that the availability of a capsule round is equal to 4 + toxin, which means they are more difficult to obtain than just capsule rounds and just the toxin you want.

Oh, that's good. I must have missed that when perusing the book before.

only way characters can soak damage is if the DM is spraying water droplets on. yea some will take more hits and if the damage is really low last a while. Nothing wrong with that. I think what most people have been saying though is, if you take the kid gloves off and respond in any way close to how the players do then said players will be hurting soon if they take much abuse.

Perhaps though your players use all the very best tricks to become living versions of armored vehicles, but carry pistols and have only a little skill with weapons and use only basic or nondeadly rounds.

Even as a novice GM/player, it's pretty apparent that a game can be run where the runners have a casualty rate matching that of a US Army WW2 rifle company.

More like the Russian army.

Those are corp sec (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

You are talkign about Enhanced Articulation, not Synthcardium, and it ONLY applies to PHYSICAL SKILLS with a link to a physical atribute, not COMBAT SKILLS...

Just wanted to point that out...

EDIT... It looks like Whipstitch already caught that though... so never mind... That will Teach me to pay more attention before I write a respnse I guess...

Keep the Faith

So you're saying that it is unrealistic for someone who isn't wearing a helmet to die when someone he isn't aware of sends two bursts in the direction of their head? Or that someone who has likely devoted more than 50% of their training to using guns in melee only has a slight chance of killing someone while using guns in melee? From all the statistics and data I've seen regarding injuries, SR4 is the closest to matching the fragile/durable dichotomy of humans and injury of the games that I've played.

Other than taking a heavy pistol and shooting yourself in the head and only having a 30% chance* of actually outright killing yourself.

You know. Realistically deadly.^

*102% of all statistics are made up on the spot. This value will vary depending on your skill with a gun and your agility, even though you aren't dodging the shot and have it jammed up against the back of the base of your skull**

^But for a game, it's pretty close. (Dwarf Fortress will be closer, once broken necks can kill again...and some other tweaks happen--undead were unkillable for a while because they had no actual vitals, currently Bronze Collosi and vaporous "Forgotten Beasts" as well as anything made out of the two legendary materials Adamantine (aka mithril: very light and very strong) and Slade (a material over 9 times denser than platinum; currently immune to all forms of digging and stones of it--when acquired--are not usable for anything))

**Only sure-fire location that will actually kill you 100% of the time: ruins all of the nerves (brain stem) that keep your vitals operating.

This is why the guillotine was the most effective form of capital punishment.

-M&P

Even relatively sound systems fail spectacularly in some very memorable ways from time to time. Rolemaster of course, is one of the most infamous examples of this. The spirit of the rules was to show that bringing a tunic and a dagger to a full scale melee was a very, very bad idea, which is pretty reasonable. Most of the time, it achieved that goal pretty well-- depressing as it may be, it's really not all that unrealistic to believe that a strapping young farmboy looking for adventure would very likely get shanked his first time out by some goblin/orc/kobold/bandit/whatever. The problem is, much like SR and the Rule of One, it achieved some of its goals via an open ended dice rolling system which naturally led to open ended damage resolution. Good enough hits could bypass armor and let you roll again to stage up the damage and so on until you rolled (relatively) poorly enough to quit increasing the bodily harm dealt. Which again, is mostly fine, particularly since it used percentile dice so that things weren't so terribly binary. But every great once in a while, some group (often with an at best sketchy understanding of other rules that may very well have mitigated the situation) would end up with a promising young warrior being cut down in the flower of his youth by an ornery house cat who just kept rolling well. As you can imagine, such stories quickly become the stuff of FLGS legend and grow larger with each telling.

My character has a holdout (Morrissey Elan loaded with SnS) in a concealable holster in his lined coat. The -7 concealability modifier is nice when you want a gun, but don't want to have people seeing it.

My Sasha has 2 of those in hidden arm-slides, had to change to those when i took a look at the conceleament table and realised how big tasers are. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sleepy.gif)

Lead injection (suicide/execution by gun) is the only example of an injury in the game that doesn't match up to the injury's lethality in real life, though part of that is in the lack of modifiers for attacking an immobile/unresisting target, and no increase to DV for stippling (muzzle flash burning the target). In fact, the stippling alone is often lethal at suicide range.



Haven't played that one.

I have heard a story about a high school kid that took a track starting pistol and fired it into his ear, accidentally killing himself, so I'll accept that as true.



Losing is Fun

Starting pistols use .22 cap blanks, filled with about half a grain of powder (it's really a glorified primer). The 9mm is loaded with around 4 grains of powder.



I was refering to PnP games. It's actually quite simple to create a very accurate mortality system when there's a computer available to crunch all the numbers and roll all the dice.

Well, yeah. But Dwarf Fortress keeps track of individual teeth. It is by far the most accurate model ever produced (even if it does think of body parts as abstract volumes that only have a relative size and position to the body). It even takes into account material strengths and what happens if you give a creature molten gold for blood (it does assume that such a creature benefits from the molten gold as if it was blood and isn't harmed by it unless it leaks out somehow...).

If acids were coded in it would be entirely possible to accurately model a xenomorph (best you can do now is either a blood type that has a high temperature or is a "poison" that has one of a limited number of effects, such as causing rot).

Dwarf Fortress how I lothe and love you. Though the one thrown rock turning a dragon to goo was amusing. Went in the eye riped its insides to bits and came out the other eye and then hurt the thrower lightly retardedly unlikely.

Ah...Magic Bolts, how we love thee.
(And killing things by throwing vomit/water/sand/coins/booze...)

Sand is/was always fun. Though I once recall a posting about a uber penetrating goblin used against another goblin. I'm quite sure it enter the other goblins eye riped his guts out then flew onwards in to a goblin behind. Sense that makes not!

Its better with the new version (0.31) in that wounds respect body part locations a bit more closely.

Though there are issues with bites (and other attacks) unable to penetrate silk clothing...

Now there's a new idea - corp sec inspired by DF. Drawbridges... Lava traps... Pressure plates (possibly activating spikes from the floor or trap doors)... Doors with locks controlled by manual activation over fiber optic from a control room... A bunch of dwarves with axes, shields, and milspec armour... then see how long it takes players to get it.

Back on topic sorta, mostly defence isn't about having the toughness to soak damage - it is about having cover, invisibility, smoke, dodging, and so on, or all of the above, so that people miss when they try to shoot you. Because not being hit is usually better than hoping the hit won't kill you. Even better - not being shot at in the first place.

Silk clothing were known to be able to withstand arrows... actually the fabric was pushed into the skin, meaning you could pull out the arrow more easily with the silk surrounded it and it's barbs.

While true, the issue it that attacks were glancing off, same as if they'd hit steel.

I even tested it once, pitted a dwarf wearing only silk items (no weapon) against one wearing full iron plate wielding an iron sword. The guy wearing silk punched the swordsman to death without even taking a scratch. Then dropped in another dwarf wearing full steel plate with a steel sword. Steel only won because the silk wearer had been exhausted from the first fight (steel fell unconscious from wounds, silk fell unconscious from exertion, then steel recovered and killed the silk guy).