How could we treat less lethal armaments more realistically? Options

[Wounded Ronin]

In SR3 there was often no real reason to do physical over stun. Stun damage was just as "reliable" in dropping an enemy and in a sense harder to get rid of quickly since it couldn't be magically healed like physical could. It was in effect very easy for a group of players to decide to be nonlethal good guys and their code of honor only became a tactical liability in certain very limited situations, like if they had to fight a robot or something without a stun track.

In reality, though, things are more complicated. You don't tase someone three times and then he's incapacitated and slightly burnt for the next several hours. He might be incapacitated as long as you're giving him current but as soon as you stop actively zapping him he's fine. If you shoot someone with a beanbag round ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_baton_round ) it's probably not going to be equally incapacitating over the course of the next several hours as a load of buckshot from the same weapon.

Would the choice between lethal and nonlethal weapons be more meaningful if nonlethal weapons like the tasers were basically less effective? Would the player character choice become more meaningful as it would be electing for a larger handicap?

[Kronk2]

could we call it temp stun? Meaning that it wears off after that combat ends or in d6 mins

[Wounded Ronin]

could we call it temp stun? Meaning that it wears off after that combat ends or in d6 mins

That would be interesting. Maybe it only becomes "real" stun after overflow of the 10-box "temp stun" track, in the SR3 model. That way you would actually have to shoot someone several times with beanbag rounds to put someone down for a while, as opposed to how normally a single lethal shotgun blast with a few successes would be sufficient to incapacitate most NPCs.

[Crusher Bob]

The problem with that is that stun weapons will still be fine at solving your ghoul chewing on your head right this instant problem. One the ghoul is on the ground, even if it's just for 1d6 minutes, you can kick him inna head until he stays down. But even then, you have the problem that hitting someone with a baseball bat and then stabbing them with a knife is more likely to leave them in the fight than hitting or stabbing them twice.

You might try something like this:
Unified damage track of 8 + (body + will) /3
Physical damage soaked with Body
Stun damage is soaked with Body + Will

Stun heals in minutes, unless you have been KO'd, and then it heals in hours.
Physical damage heals in days.

So, in general, stun damage does 1 less box. And there is no disadvantage to alternatively doing stun vs physical.

[Kronk2]

My solution has one problem. Magic users. Do you really want them to loose the only rules balance they have? Course 6 mins is can be a long time on a run.
ALT we can make 1 point of all spell drain actual stun that takes an hour to get rid of, leaving the rest to go away. But the Temp stun still accumulates modifiers. So you can still get gimped on dice test by it.

I like this idea. Which makes the downward spiral less deadly but a little quicker too. (My logic here is that the players will throw bigger spells if they think it will all go away soon)

[Daier Mune]

what about a willpower roll to 'shrug off' stun damage?

[Eryk the Red]

I had thought about adding something like that that. Allow a complex action to be taken to make what is essentially a first aid roll for your stun damage (Body + Willpower vs. threshold 2). Each net hit heals 1 stun. Can only be done once per set of stun damage.

[Wounded Ronin]

I wonder if it would be necessary to have a seperate set of mechanics for tasers, since they are super incapacitating while there's current but supposedly don't do anything at all when there's no current. That would be very different than beating someone into submission with beanbags, beating him with a nightstick, etc, where the initial effectiveness would be less but in the long term the effects would wear off much more slowly.

[Blade]

The way I treat it is that stun damage boxes heal one at a time, and as soon as the character heals one box, he can roll a body (or willpower depending on the situation) to regain consciousness. The character can get bonuses, or can get a new free roll if someone or something is "helping" him to wake up. Of course this doesn't apply in all cases (if you drug someone he'll sleep much longer than if you stun him with a blow)

This way, if the runners stun the guards, the guards can still wake up and sound the alarm or wait for the runners on their way out.

What I also do is consider that most stun weapon aren't non-lethal but less-than-lethal, which means that they can still kill. In SR4, I'm toying with the idea of having a "gremlins" effect (rating 1 for taser, 2 for gel rounds) on the body roll (or the attack roll, I'm still not sure which is better). If the character glitches, the damages are physical instead of stun.