House Rules, Ammo questions Options

[Serbitar]

[nick012000]

Stick 'n' Shock has a DV of 6S.

[Serbitar]

Notice the "quoted by Serbitars House Rules" please.
StickNShock with DV 6S(e) is the biggest bug in the whole SR4 ammo list. It hast a DV of 6 (which is extremely good), does stun (which is almost always better than physical damage), is resisted only by half the impact armor (which is way less than balistic armor), does electrical damage with the side effects that come with it AND can be loaded into your holdout.

[nick012000]

Your point? EX-EX does virtually all of that. Okay, it doesn't halve the armor, but unless they're a spirit or wearing a suit of Full Body Armor, the difference is trivial.

[Serbitar]

Just do the math, you'll find out. Include all the effects I mentioned. Read all the relevant rules, especially the electricity damage rules.
(btw: The difference in armor between vanilla exex and vanilla stickNshock when wearing an armor jacket, which is standard runner equipment, is 6 dice vs 3 dice. And thats only one small effect. Not including stun damage, electricity damage, critical glitch effects, weapon inependent DV . . .)

Furthermore, like you might have noticed when reading this thread, ExEx is unbalanced, too.

So what is your point? Making irrelevant one-line posts and then defending them by making wrong statements?

[Angelstandings]

I agree that stick-n-shock needs to be lowered a notch or two. hehe, 6S(e) is just way to good :D In my chart I have them as 5S(e) but I was really contemplating on lowering them to 4(S)e....

Serbitar, I'll throw your ammo values into the chart I made on page 2 for comparison. :D

[Serbitar]

Would be nice. Bout you definatley have to include the physical/stun conversion effect of my house rules, because thats what APDS is all about. But this also means, that the outcome depends on your base DV and your hits, and is not easily plotted in a matrix.

The good side is, that -AP is not just +1/3DV, but a completley different thing, when it comes to the question whether you penetrate the armour or not. I think, thats the way it should be.

(BTW: you have a typo in your SR4 vannilla rules damage calculation. Exex is allways -8 dice difference, not -7 as in the 11/10 example)

[Angelstandings]

@Serbitor

Your ammo rules are better balanced than RAW as far as I can see.

And you're right, it's not possible to add in your modified stun conversion rule into *that* particular chart. But I can see the intended effect.

I prefer mine better :D But your houserule is obviously a step in the right direction. I could make another chart, which would consider your stun damage conversion rule... But it would be a lot more complicated, and based on the number of replies I got from my chart (none, unless you count private mails, then I got 2) -- no one will bother even looking at it. Math scares people.

I find it interesting that we both, quite independently, doubled the impact armor vs Flechette ammo. That is really the only way, mathematically, to make something worse vs. armored targets. Which is why I went with halving ballistic armor vs. APDS -- because it scales correctly that way instead of a mere +- AP.

EDIT: Also, I recognize that -1 AR = 1/3 DV (in most cases), and while I'm not particularly pleased with it, I don't see a reason to complicate matters further by trying to apply them in different ways (although I understand that is what the OP was asking for). I Just balanced the ammo taking that mathematical fact into consideration -- something the developers seem to have missed.

[Serbitar]

I just made a calc sheet to compare the differences, get it here:

http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck.ods

for those who dont have openoffice or excel:

http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck1.jpg
http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck2.jpg
http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck3.jpg
http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck4.jpg

note that I changed exex in my houserules from +2/+1 to +2/+2

[Brahm]

@Serbitar, I've got an older version of Excel which apparently doesn't open Open Office files. Could you export it, I'm curious about the calculations and was thinking about expanding it past just simple average calcs.

[Angelstandings]

[Brahm]

[Angelstandings]

Sure, it removes/adds the same amount, but that amount becomes more and more meaningless as the armor improves -- which is the main reason the ammo types aren't balanced in the first place.

That can be solved by doubling or halving the armor -- nothing else would be as elegant.

I guess it all comes down to how effective to you want armor piercing ammo, and how inneffective you want flechette ammo, to be against high armor targets. If the answer to both is "not very" then pay no attention to me.

[Brahm]

[Serbitar]

[Brahm]

[Serbitar]

http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck.xls
http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck.ods

Found a small mistake, upgraded to version 1.1

Btw: I can easily add errorbars to my averages. Deviation of one die is 2.5. The standard deviation of x dice is sqrt(sum i=1..x i²). The number of dice is easily calculated (body+amor-ap). Voila, error bars. (though, they might be not very much gaussian with such small numbers)

But the -5 or even the -4 in RAW does not work without my additional rule of physical to stun conversion. Without it, its simply linear and pretty much useless.

[Angelstandings]

[Serbitar]

I think halving armour is not a good idea, because at some point the armor piercing capabilities should stop. Thats why I prefer a fixed number.

No ammo type should be that much better than others.

BTW: With reducing exex to +2/+2 and introducing my new penetration system I can punch apds back to 0/-4 again. Ill add that to my 1.5 Version of SHP. (SHP had another penetration, which is conversion from physical to stun, which halved the damage after resistance when it was converted to stun previously)

[Brahm]

[Brahm]

[Serbitar]

I like the "all or nothing" simply because thats what happens with armour penetration. If it penetrates, you are screwed, if it doesnt, you are quite save.

And, as a design desicion, I dont want people to get stunned by pistol fire. The stun damage should be much much lower than physical damage.

My system achieves both of that, plus, every ammo type has its use (maybe with exception of ex, wich is allways worse than exex, but that is supposed to be so and balanced by cost and availability)

[Brahm]

[Krotiez]

[Austere Emancipa...]

It's difficult to say for certain just how serious the blunt trauma from small arm projectiles stopped by flexible body armor tends to be. The only real statistic I'm aware of is that there are no reported fatalities when a person has been shot in a ballistic panel by a firearm that the armor in question was rated to protect against.

Considering how many thousand cases of bullets stopped by body armor in US police departments alone there are, you could say it's very unlikely that you would sustain critical injuries from non-penetrating hits. Broken ribs, internal bleeding, etc. are certainly possible, but any projectile stopped by armor is an order of magnitude more benign than one that isn't stopped.

There are reports of being people being stunned after getting non-penetrating hits to body armor, and there are as many or more reports of people not even realizing they were hit until afterwards. From what I understand, the canon penetration mechanic in SR4 makes non-penetrating hits far more effective in taking someone out of the battle than such hits would be IRL.