[X] My Assistant

[emo samurai]

How dead is a person who's been chopped up into small, easy-to-carry pieces?

[cetiah]

3 physical damage.

[mfb]

trick question! you don't run through monowire--monowire runs through you.

[TheOOB]

Well, the damage would depend on how much monowire there is, if it's moving (moving monowire way more deadly then stationary), and how much your GM wants to keep you out of that area.

[BishopMcQ]

Presuming they fail their perception, soak 8P. (SR4, p 252)

Don't forget to add all those wonderful penalties for being distracted, wounded, in smoke, etc.

[djinni]

[BishopMcQ]

technically a threshold of 3 which means you need on average a dice pool of 9 to see it in normal lighting conditions without stressful modifiers, 12 if you just buy successes.

[Kesslan]

If you want to scale damage for the person being moving, driving into or running into the wire. I THINK this was adressed somewehre in the SR3 books.

Even if it wasnt you can sorta take a page out of the vehicle collision and falling rules. Like say.. walking into it or at a light jog is base damage. But running full out into it adds say.. 1-2 power. And driving a bike to it adds +1 power every 10kph you were going.

That makes it incredibly deadly.. but then.. it's monowire. It's -supposed- to be ultra deadly in my mind.

[emo samurai]

What if they fall 10 meters into it, but hit a house's rooftop first?

[Mistwalker]

I would also think that the number of strands would also affect the damage.
Say, for every extra strand, add 1 or 2 to the DV. But also add in the same as a dice pool modifier for perception?

[Kesslan]

[Ben]

[Kyrn]

I would adjudicate based on the amount of damage the troll took and how fast he was going. The less damage and the higher the speed, the higher chance he broke through the monowire. The more damage and the lower the speed, the higher the chance he hit it and stopped.

In either event, you now have a very angry, heavily armored troll. Enjoy!

[Austere Emancipa...]

The troll could swat the wires away, nevermind what happens when he runs into one. Carbon nanotube strands at a thickness of a human hair will snap with a free hanging weight of 65kg (less than the troll's arms), and already at that point you have to press bare skin forcefully against the wire to achieve any kind of cutting. If it's thicker than that it'll just trip you.

[Eryk the Red]

However, if we assume that monowire does what it says it does, rather than what science says, you would have the troll take damage from the wire, but also have the wire suffer damage, using the rules for attacking barriers. I would probably base it loosely on the ramming rules, using Body to determine the DV that the monowire suffers. If it suffers pretty much any damage (the wire might have a high Armor, but it wouldn't have a Structure higher than 1), the wire snaps.

That's probably how I'd run it.

I also rule, though, that monowire attacks (and lasers, or anything similar that doesn't hit with a lot of force) do not damage at all if the DV doesn't beat the armor. (Monowire causing stun damage doesn't work for me.) If that happened (the troll would have to be wearing some heavy duty armor), I would give him a bonus to the DV the wire suffers.

[Ben]

actually, the stun damage thing isn't completely stupid even with monowire, because it would mean that even if you're not actually cut, you are still bruised because you have hit something at a run: if you run headlong into barb wire, even if you don't take damage from the barbs (say you have heavy clothes), the shock still knocks your breath out.

[Eryk the Red]

I'll give you that. The rule was largely intended for combat with monowhips, anyway, where it really wouldn't make sense to suffer stun damage.

[Austere Emancipa...]

So monowire must be illogically difficult to break the rules say so, but a monowhip mustn't do stun damage through armor, because "it really wouldn't make sense"?

[Ben]

[Ed_209a]

As written, a monowhip almost has to be a weapon focus. 8P _and_ slices effortlessly through 4 pts of armor?

I see Monowire being sharp as the edge on the finest razor blades (pretty close to a 1 mol edge IIRC), but relatively weak. It would pull right through clothing and flesh, but would hang up on anything denser.

So, IMO, when you run through monowire, your snap it like a spiderweb, but it cuts unarmored locations to the bone first.

Would snapped nanotube shrivel into a little ball, or is it stable enough to exist w/o an end cap?

[Jaid]

[Austere Emancipa...]

I meant the heavily armored troll's arms together weighing 65kg. Count out the weight of armor, and that's about 1/4th - 1/5th the body weight of a troll, which doesn't seem much.

Does SR4 no longer make any mention of carbon nanotubes anywhere? That was the canon explanation of monowire in SR3 anyway.

[Jaid]

[Eryk the Red]

Alas, this breaks down (yet again) to the classic argument of realism vs. "realism". I'm all for "realism", which means I have a particular (and decidedly cinematic) vision of the way stuff is supposed to go, so I want to rules to serve as a simulation of that, rather than as a simulation of actual reality. Knowing the real monowhips don't work doesn't change that in my SR "reality", there's some kind of compound/alloy/weird-ass material or chemical process that produces ultra-fine strands that cut through stuff effortlessly. In that vision, a man getting the wind knocked out of him (but no other injury) from the impact of that ultra-fine strand just doesn't fit.

Wow. We're not just beating a dead horse here. The horse died, got zombified, got killed again, and then we hit it with the bat.

[Dakhran the Dark]

Don't suppose it would help the discussion to mention that simple standard carbon nanotubes aren't the end-all and be-all of materials sciences regarding nanostructures, and that there are structures harder and more resilient to shock such as polymerized single-walled nanotubes (P-SWNT), with hardness equal to or exceeding diamond. :read:

I'm sure that materials science research will be much more advanced in the next 50-60 years, if we've already come up with materials which can scratch diamond, who knows what will come up with by then... :)

At any rate, I would probably use GM fiat to hand-wave a rule, using base damage of the monowhip (8P, -4AP), and give it a number of dice "to hit" based on the placement and anchorage of the monowire, the amount of wire involved, and the speed of the soon-to-be-salsa victim. If the target manages to perceive it, they can try to "dodge" the "attack", otherwise it's soak damage time, and soaking may involve sponges...

This way, you can let the dice tell the story -- if the runner decides to Edge out on either the dodge or soak, or the wire's "to hit" roll comes up Critical Glitch, you can have either the wire break due to manufacturing flaws (damn those atomic vacancies and Stone-Wales defects), or the placement of the wires failed to take into account the next weakest point of the wire -- the anchorage, therefore the wires pull loose. OTOH, if the runner is going full-tilt into a nest of wires without looking and critglitches a soak roll, there might not be enough big chunks left to interest a ghoul... :evil: