Stun damage house-rule, Potential problems? Options

[Hank]

For whatever reason, Fanpro seems to think that Stun damage is less serious than Physical damage. (I don't get it. I never have.) So all the costs of Stun spells are low, you can buy neurostun for nothing, but a Panther Canon is impossible to get your hands on, blah blah blah

So my idea for a houserule is this: extend the stun track. Maybe 12 + half will-power or something.

Pros: simple, effective

Cons: Less lethal (on the stun track)

Now, I'm fresh to 4e, so maybe I'm missing some large problems with this rule. So, any Cons to add to this? And before you start talking about drain, please keep in mind that I'm the guy that doesn't want to let mages take physical drain, so overcasting just removes dice from your drain resistance pool. (It still goes to the stun track.)

[Mercer]

The phenomenon you've noticed was present in previous editions. Doing Stun damage was considered preferable in a lot of situations because it was harder to heal and the stuff that did Stun damage (Yamaha Pulsar, Stunbolt) was cheaper and easier than the stuff that did Physical, but once you got someone to 10 boxes the effect was the same either way-- they were just as dropped and if you needed to kill them further you could do so with very little effort.

That said, there are playability reasons for making Stun cheaper than Physical. SR being a fairly lethal game, it helps to have crumple zones in places. It doesn't have to be all blood-and-guts. Making Stun weapons preferable gives an in-game incentive for not every conflict to be life-and-death. (Dead men tell no tells, but live ones can be downright talkative, and so on.)

Stun Damage is less serious than Physical Damage because when you cap out on Physical (boxes plus overflow), you have to make a new character. That's pretty serious, at least, it is to the character.

[FriendoftheDork]

I kinda like the fix. As per now, I think most the stun weapons are too good as is, and stunbolt/stunball too cheap. There really is no advantage for using lethal weapons and spells in the current system.

If the stun damage track is 4 higher than physical that changes a few things. My major reservation here is that mages will be able to fling alot more spells before going down on drain, and I think magic is powerful enough as it is.

Hmm, how about making the stun track 8+ (W/2)+(B/2) ? That means big trolls won't go down too fast on stun either. And then even average joe will have 2 more boxes. I'm not sure if that's enough though, a taser is still more effective except against high willpower enemies.

[Ravor]

Personally I just rule that Stun damage can be downgraded just like Physical can, and when it does you just 1/2 the damage and round down.

[kzt]

From a realism standpoint it's way to easy to knock people out in SR. Always has been. It's actually very hard knock someone out without likely inflicting quite serious or lethal damage to them. Heck, it's hard just make them run away without taking a chance on someone getting maimed or killed.

Whether this is an issue depends on how you want your game to run.

[Mercer]

I never liked the automatic 1 hour knockout that going unconscious entails. (Maybe that was just way my group ruled it, maybe it was in the book. Who knows? I'm too lazy to look it up.) Even if you give them a Bod/Will roll right out of the gate, people are still out for awhile. It makes it impossible to do a boxing-match knock-out, where the person gets dropped but regains consciousness fairly quickly. No one gets knocked out for a few seconds, or even a few minutes. If they get knocked out, they're out for awhile.

But the SR damage track has always had trouble representing shock.

[FriendoftheDork]

[Blade]

To avoid that kind of trouble I have them roll the Will+Body healing test when they're stunned, and divide the hour by the number of successes (if the victim has 4 hits, he'll wake up in 15 minutes).

Sure this makes tank-troll very hard to knock out... But that's what you'd expect from them, and this makes filling their smaller stun track less interesting.

On the other hand, I consider that when there are less than 3 damage boxes left (in stun or physical damage track), no matter how small the modifier is, the characters are more or less out : stunned characters have a hard time staying up, wounded characters have trouble moving around.
I also consider that when a character takes more than 6 stun damage box in one attack he's knocked out for a few seconds (one combat turn at least) and when he gets more than 6 physical damage box in one attack, he's likely to have a missing limb or a badly damage organ.

[Ravor]

[Hank]

[Ol' Scratch]

Why encourage lethal weapons over non-lethal ones?

It has less to do with the game mechanics and more to do with your actual options to go the non-lethal route. They let you eliminate a threat as needed and, after things have cooled down, you have the option of letting them live, interrogating them, killing them, or anything else you like. You don't have that option with lethal weapons.

There's also less retribution against non-lethal weapons in most circumstances. Knock that guard out and, eh, it sucks but he'll be all right. Kill him and you're now a murderer as well as a thief/whatever else, and you even risk having some third party coming after you for payback for killing that father/brother/son/uncle/etc.

No amount of house rules are going to change those aspects of why non-lethal weapons are preferred. The current rules (and rules from previous editions for the most part) simply make non-lethal weapons a viable option to actually use instead of want to use but can't justify it because they "suck."

Whether you shoot someone in the face or just knock them out, that choice is yours and both are perfectly viable options. Your reasons for choosing one over the other all rely on the other non-mechanic stuff. As it should be.

But if you're the kind of player who wants to kill just for the sake of killing... well, nothing I can do about that. I have no idea why you're worried though. Those lethal weapons work just as well as the non-lethal ones for the most part. The choice is yours if you want to be a blood-bathing monster or not. The reprecussions are also yours, though.

[DireRadiant]

Perhaps it's in the PCs interest as well that Stun is more effective then being killed. Not to mention reviewing characters sheets everytime the PC gets shot and killed can get to be a chore.

[Fortune]

[Hank]

@ the three previous:

In my game, the go-to weapon is bullets. (For non-spellcasters, anyway.) That's just the world I envision...one where it's easier to kill somebody than to take them alive. I use rules to shape the game to that premise.

[FriendoftheDork]

[FriendoftheDork]

[Hank]

[Malicant]

I really do not understand your problem. No matte how often I read your posts, it's just... weird.

It's easier to stunbolt someone, still I see my players using flamethrower and manabolt. Narcojet is da shitz? No one seems to care, they still use regular and explosive ammo.

Also, the extension of the stuntrack will make Manabolt ubereffective, since stunbolt now sucks ass ruleswise and powerbolt sucketh before that change anyway. Oh yeah, unarmed combat now sucks. Unless you have bonemods. Should hoserule them too, so that they don't become to effective mathematicaly.

I really dislike houserules. A lot. But since this does not affect me go ahead. For whatever purpose this might have.

[Spike]

It seems to me, that with all the armor that your typical PC wears that narcoget injectors SHOULD have some rule about having to go through it. I mean, really folks...

... Either he's missing something, or I am, but I'm not of a mind to let any old attack just ignore armor because. Maybe magic, but then magic has other things that get in the way (wards and background counts and the like) and generally... well... it's magic, yo.

[Hank]

Ok, re: armor and narcojet, it's just a general difference between toxins and "normal" stun damage.

Gel round: You get body + armor ~ 10 dice or so easily

Narcojet injection arrow: You get body + armor for the arrow, then resist 10S with just your body.

So, yeah, you get armor to resist the attack, but none to resist the actual bulk of the damage. And Neurostun grenades just bypass armor completely. You can use gasmasks to eliminate the threat, but folks aren't walking around wearing gasmasks all the time when I GM.

[kzt]

Isn't neurostun skin contact?

[Hank]

Inhalation/contact. It's described as a knockout gas, so I assume the most common form is gas.

[FriendoftheDork]

[ElFenrir]

I kind of recall Stun damage being pretty nice to run on in the old SRs as well, since everyone had the same tracks regardless.

Besides the obvious...knocking someone senseless doesn't make you a murderer(and if you really wanted to kill them after you could still, you'd then be a killer, but whatever fits the character, not really the big issue here), it WAS easier to stun someone out.

Take the old Unarmed Combat. You had Runner A, who was a human lets say with a 6 strength and Titanium Bone Lacing. He had a combat pool of 8 and Unarmed Combat 6. He throws 12 dice in the attack. He can choose to do either 10M Stun, or 5M Physical. He gets 6 successes.

He's fighting a guy with Body 4, Unarmed combat 3, Combat Pool 8, and an armored jacket. So he throws 6 dice to defend, gets 2 successes, putting the first guy's successes net at 4. If he does physical damage, that's enough to put it at 5D! But wait. Guy's wearing 3 points of impact armor. He now needs only to roll 2's or better to soak that. He throws his body plus the rest of his combat pool(5 dice), which is 9 total, and gets 6 hits easily. He not only cancels it out, but takes only L physical. None of the dice came up 6.

OR, the sam could have chosen to do stun. Same successes. Only this time the defender didn't resist anything. 4 net hits, 10D Stun...defender gets laid out in one hit.

Powerbolt vs. Stunbolt, if that was all the mage had? Stunbolt was 2x more likely to put out the average runner, since all they had was Willpower. Since alot of runners ran around with a comfy modified body of around 6+, it was easier to put em out.

Moving onto SR4, now, we run into the bit where the typical runner tends to have more Physical boxes than Stun. Again, easier to knock em out. While i don't mind houserules in general(i use a few myself to make the game more fun for us), id say be careful making it too hard to stun someone. A, it will probably lead to using more lethal force(if you want the Rambo/Robocop style of play, and have fun with it, no problems, but if you want a more balanced style be careful here). Second, it will make Tanks even tougher. The Tank i know has existed awhile, but in SR4 seems to really jump out due to the lengthing of physical tracks. And as you mentioned, it makes unlaced/non Killing Hands/Critical Strike Unarmed Combat even more useless. The poor combat style is already suffering enough. You could simply make the damage Str(S). Everyone dumps Strength anyway, even trolls these days. Maybe making it Str(S) damage would actually make putting some points into Strength more useful. Make Bone Lacing strength Str+whatever the lacing rating Stun, or Str+Lacing Rating/2 Physical, like it was in the old days. (Critical Strike as an Adept Power might then have to be adjusted, but then starts as you said, fixing one thing leads to fixing another.) But ive actually been inspired to make another thread on that.

Not everyone has a bad stun track, those dedicated to Willpower(and some dwarves who really pump the score) tend to be harder to stun, but it's a much harder track to extend than Physical(which can be extended by simply pumping Body and Cyberlimbs.)

I know im not saying anything new, just giving a few opinions. My suggestion? Test run this new houserule. See how it affects your game. Maybe run a weekend one or two shot utilizing it. If it ends up tipping the balance of the game toward ''kill over knockout, all the time'', or makes things overly difficult for one side or the other, it might be worth changing back. Or, if it simply makes the game less fun, it can be changed back, but id try it before working it into an existing long campaign.

[Malicant]

[Eryk the Red]

Malicant, I'm not really sure what that comment had to do with the quote. The guy said some people perceive stun as less lethal. Which is true. People do think that. So, um, what's the issue?

[Malicant]

If you increase the stuntrack a taser will have a hard time doing what it's supposed to do, don't you think? That is my point, really. The stuntrack increase houserule causes stupid problems. I think it shuould be easier to knock someone out using nonleathal means. Simple non leathel means. Witch does not work with this houserule.

Another funny sideeffect is drain. Mages FTW.

This thread sounds to me like "I can't deal with my players, how can I change the rules in my favor?".

I always get a little worked up when I read houserules. Don't take it personal. :)

[Eryk the Red]

[Ravor]

To answer the poster who asked about Stunball and the K/O Drug, well personally I've never had much of a problem with either one of those, in part because I really focus on the Pink Mohawk Aspect of Shadowrun, in my campaigns, if a Johnson were to come to a meet and be greeted by a team of Ice-Cold-Pros his first thought would be that he was being set up by a corp hit squad, Runners are supposed to have big hair, piercings, and an attitude big enough to blot out the sun. (In fact in my games the act of spending Edge means that you have just done something over-the-top and quite possibly just told the Universe to go fraq itself, something which puts the Mohawks on par with the Pros in terms of getting things done since the Pros tend not to have a high Edge, they just don't have the attitude to pull it off.)


I couple this with the idea that Spell Formula isn't just bought and sold, Magic is too rare and personal for most Mages to be willing to mass produce their hard-won mojo, so magical Formula tends to be traded as opposed to bought. (As a side-effect, Arcana is a must-have skill for every wanna-be wizard.)


When combined with allowing "custom spells" to be bought at Char-gen provided the character has enough of a Dicepool to design spells by buying Hits (Including Edge.) I get a world where most mages run around with flashy elemental spells even though the direct combat spells may be more "effective", after all chummer, rep matters, and you get more street cred when you can call lighting from the heavens or sling bolts of pure Plamsa (Fire + Lighting) then merely being able to channel Mana into your target, after all, where is the style in that?


However, to bring everything full circle, even though Runners are expected to stand out, the whole Pink Mohawk Crowd style has been throughly co-oped by the corps and posers are a dime-a-dozen, and due in part because of a smaller spell selection even the most powerful Mage still tends to rely on mundane means whenever possible.

Still it works for me and my players...

[Seven-7]

[Hank]

[Ol' Scratch]

Eh.

I don't see most non-lethal weapons being all that superior (mechanically) to lethal forms. Especially when you add in burst fire capabilities to the equation. They're simply more beneficial to whichever side is using it for all the reasons mentioned earlier. They also has their downsides, though. Neurostun, for instance, isn't going to do jack squat against a drone or elemental, and all the stunbolts in the world isn't going to blow open that door for you.

As others have said, people still use lethal forms of combat for a variety of reasons. So I really don't see the fuss; logically, mechanically, or philosophically.

[Ravor]

[FriendoftheDork]

[Stahlseele]

[Critias]

[Malicant]

[FriendoftheDork]

[Hank]

Yeah, I'm going to talk it over with my players. On the one hand, I have a guy who's planning on going unarmed, and unarmed damage is "underpowered." On the other hand, I want to throw neurostun at and the like at my players, and I'm hesitant to do that as things stand. I could make up new gas grenades, but I think the stun-track extension is an elegant solution to a lot of problems. As some of you point out, there are other potential problems...in particular, I think the unarmed damage is a good point.

However, none of the problems anyone's pointed out are, IMO, as bad as the glaring imbalance of stun damage vs physical, so I want to try it. If my players don't, we won't. I don't understand why people don't like houserules. (I was going to put some reasons why houserules are often needed/justified, but why would I? You don't like houserules. I do. I don't think anything's going to change, no matter what we write.)

(I put quotes around underpowered because it makes perfect sense that unarmed damage would be much lower than armed damage. But this is a game, and we want our characters to be cool, so unarmed characters should be playable, and do about as much damage as armed characters, although that makes no sense.)

[Malicant]

[kzt]

[FriendoftheDork]

[Hank]

[Fortune]

Maybe you could try making (non-magical) electrical damage not stage up. Keep Stick'n'Shock ammo at 6S and the taser at 8S, but rule that net hits don't actually pump more electricity into the target.

[Ravor]

[Sponge]

[Moon-Hawk]

Just brainstorming here: What about an "overflow" track between stun and physical. It doesn't make you any more unconscious, but an already unconscious person can take a few extra boxes of stun before it shows up on their physical track.

I don't know, I really don't have much of a problem with it, but I agree that the electrical weapons should probably have an incapacitating mechanic other than Stun damage.

[Blade]

It's extremely difficult to have a "realistic" system with a stun track.

If you get punched hard, you'll be stunned for a few seconds, then you'll be okay but a bit dizzy for a few minutes/hours, then you'll be okay but it might still hurt.
But it won't be the same if you get a lot of light punches or one heavy punch.

It also won't be the same if you get electrified, tired, tear-gazed, drugged...

Once again you can chose to use some abstractions (and maybe use GM call an common sense to tweak the rules for special cases) or you can chose to play Advanced Rolemaster.

[FriendoftheDork]

[hyzmarca]

Two words: Pain Editor. Stun damage seems great, until you go up against a character with one.

[Ravor]

Or if you are worried about your bottomline, have Corp R&D invent a combat drug that does the same thing and have it be mandatory SOP to pop it.


However, I'm not so sure that low grade elemental protection isn't a good deal to apply to sec guard armor, sure it isn't perfect but it is better then nothing and you can always dock the sec force's salaries in order to pay for it just like they do for the cyberware, ect...

[FriendoftheDork]

[hyzmarca]

Un-nerfing stim patches is a good alternative.

[Ravor]

Perhaps I should have clarified, what I meant was have Corp R&D invent said drug, throw the Runners into a run that just happens to be a testing ground for said drug, and when the results come back mostly positive have said drug start seeing widespread use after whatever you feel is a reasonable amount of time for the corp to gear up mass production.

Or maybe the Runners are hired to steal a sample of a new combat drug before trashing the lab and files and it hits the streets before having some of the more "drastic" side effects worked out first.


As for corp wageslaves, sec guards or not being assets, well, to each their own, I like my Sixth World old, dark, and tired where life is cheap and virtue all but worthless.

[Hank]

I'm checking out of this thread, btw. Thanks for the input.

[FriendoftheDork]