Damage Variant Question Options

[Darksyde]

I've just come out of a couple short lived adventures thru SR4 and while I think the system changes from previous additions are great the game played da little more lethal than I think I like. In preperation for possibly running a game of my own I've been dabling in simple ways to tweek the situation that don't re-wright the ruels.

The one I've settled on currently is takeing a nod from Exalted and rolling damage. So once all is said and done that 8 damage you dake is a damage pool of 8 dice that you roll and each success is 1 box of damage.

I was wondering if any else has given such a system a try. The absolut max damage stays the same but you ar elikely to take less. Currently the only down side I can find is that it may bog combat just that much more. I haven't had a chance to fully test this out however so figured I'd ask around in the inturm.

Thanks much for your time and input.

[GryMor]

You are going to have some issues with vehicles. Currently, an armor 8, body 22 vehicle will auto bounce 8p or less damage, and can be expected to normally soak, 10 damage. With rolled damage, it's going to still bounce 8p or less raw damage, but it's going to normally soak 30p raw damage.

That is, your going to need something on the order of a force 15 spell, rolled with 45+ dice to have a 50/50 chance to score a single hit against that kind of target. Same thing goes for spirits.

Even the 15+ Str uber trolls with super bows (point for point, the deadlies man portable, non magical, weapon around), are going to have issues doing anything to well armored borgs.

[Darksyde]

True, I had not considered vehicle armor. We had never gotten to a point that it was much of an issue. Beings that I'm steering toward a more cinematic direction it may come down to rolled damage VS PC's and main character NPC's and unmodified damage against vehicle class armor. Vehicles ignore the stun damage issue which plagues squishy targets any hoo.

Thanks for pointing that out.

[venenum]

[raggedhalo]

If you wanna go really Exalted, give unmodified damage against grunts, too...

[ruknabard]

I think you might find that all that dice chucking may slow things down to a crawl. A good way to make the game less lethal without having to chuck extra dice is to simply make armor a fixed vale, instead of rolling it every time you make a damage resistance test.

When armor automatically deducts from the DV of a weapon, the results tend to favor the defender, hence, less lethal results.