A few SR 4 questions / concerns Options

[James McMurray]

I'm still pouring through my copy (halfway through the matrix section now) and a few questions have come up.

1) Is it possible to get hardened armor for characters anymore? I could find it for critters, but apparently will have to wait for Cannon Companion 4.0 to get a suit of decent armor for high-end opposition.

2) Ammo differences. Why is EX Explosive easier to find and vastly superior to APDS? Why are Flechette and Gel ammo always better than standard ammo (assuming you don't mind doing stun damage)?

By the odds, +2 DV is worth -6 AP. That makes EX ammo vastly superior to APDS, which is supposed to be the king of the walk.

The armors given almost invariably have +2 Impact armor bringing it up to the same level as ballistic, making +2 DV in exchange for +2 AP on Impact a no brainer.

Were these intended or did they somehow slip through the playtesting cracks by a last minute edit?

3) Bonus dice are limited to a total modified value of base skill * 1.5. But what counts as bonus dice?

Skill Specializations: A few seconds of reading examples makes it pretty clear specialization doesn't count as bonus dice, but more likely as a higher base skill.

Smartgun: "+2 dice" sure sounds like "bonus dice" to me, but the Covert Ops specialist has a smartgun link with only a 2 skill. Is he limited to +1 from his link, with the other +1 waiting for him to buy some more skill?

Adept powers: These sure look like bonus dice to me, but have their own built in limits (+dice <= base skill).

Reflex Recorders, Enhanced Articulation, etc.: no mention of whether these count or not.

In my game I'll probably just say that everything counts until I learn otherwise, but I'd really love to know the official rule.

4) Deadliness of combat: With magic and guns only allowing one stat for defense vs. 2 for offense, and each hit of point of DV being worth 3 points of armor, combat just got a lot deadlier a lot faster. I don't know how much of a bad thing this is, as I've always run pretty deadly games, but it's a massive rampup of threat from prior editions (at least SR3).

Anybody care to pull the fog back from this poor GM's eyes?

5) Why doesn't the spellchecker know APDS, Flechette, Smartgun, etc.?