Questions about Distance Strike Options

[Tyro]

What effects get transmitted? Is it just the kinetic energy of the punch, or is it the punch itself? For example:

If you're wearing Hardliners, do you do normal unarmed damage code or Hardliner damage code?

If you're wearing shock gloves... same question, plus do the Electricity damage secondary effects (resist with half impact armor, stun) work at a distance?

[TheOOB]

The strike is pure concussive force, so a big no-no on the shock gloves(it can't even use the elemental strike adept power for that matter).

The power also mentions that it must be a normal unarmed strike, doing such things as ignoring reach modifiers and such. So another words, it ignores pretty much any modifiers except the mentioned killing hands power.

[Tyro]

And weapon foci, I should hope. What if the hardliner gloves are a weapon focus? Do you just add the focus dice, or does it act like astral combat and turn all the weapon's attacks into magical force?

[Edit]: Post 100!

[Stahlseele]

distance strike and kiling hands allready does that.
you basically can kill spirits and other astral things in your magic radius.
you don't actually need a weapon focus to hurt such beings.

[Tyro]

distance strike and kiling hands allready does that.
you basically can kill spirits and other astral things in your magic radius.
you don't actually need a weapon focus to hurt such beings.

Weapon foci also add bonus dice to your attacks. And if you have weapon focus gloves and they work with distance strike, why do you need killing hands?

[TheOOB]

Except that distance strike requires a normal unarmed attack, and an unarmed attack with a weapon of any kind is not normal. Look, if being a troll and having a naturally long arm can't give you a bonus to it, then neither can a weapon.

You might be able to pull of a distance strike focus, but a weapon focus wouldn't work because you aren't hitting with the weapon, you are hitting with a concussive force that happens to use your unarmed skill for it's dice pool and deals damage equal to an unarmed strike+killing hands.

[Stahlseele]

there's no ranged magic weapons, simple as that.
and with improved attribute and improved skill, an adept with distance strike and killing hands in effect becomes an weapon focus of his own right . .
with astral perception for all intents and purposes and with an theoretically unlimited killing radius . .

[Fortune]

I hate Distance Strike.

[Stahlseele]

who doesn't?
oh, yeah, those pests that use it <.<

[Larme]

What's the problem with distance strike? Yes, it's powerful. But it's still a complex action maneuver. Clobbering one person at a time is tactically worthless unless you're facing a small number of opponents. It can't force anyone to keep their heads down like covering fire, it can't blast a bunch of people at once like a grenade or area spell. It just clobbers one person, waits, does that again...

The one problem I can see is that it really ruins the day of a GM whose plot culminates with "OMG now here comes the big bad guy final climax battle!!!!" But those kinds of encounters have always been fucked in Shadowrun. One single badguy is never a challenge to a powerful team unless you make them mathematically incinvicble, like something with 40 hardened armor against every weapon the runners have. I've always heard about disappointing climaxes where one full auto burst took out the uber ninja, a single round of sniper fire (from the mage!) killed a dragon... The distance striker does the same thing a mage would do: make the "omg force 12 spirit" into a pitiful nothing, because it has 0 armor against the attack. The way to negate this is to challenge runners with frightening tactical situations. Instead of making the run culminate in fighting one powerful thing, make it actually dangerous, like a dozen well trained parapmilitary troops with drone support, where the runners have to be smart (or fast at running away) to survive and they'll never blast their way out of it by distance striking (or troll-bowing, or pistol-adept-shooting) one guy at a time.

[Stahlseele]

granted, in SR3 it was only really bad, when you had a Troll Adept . .
the really bad thing about this is, that it is only unarmed combat for the adept.
everyone else does not get to use his unarmed, because he is usually out of range to fight back . .
so maximum is dodge and armor, but no actual active defense . .

[BlueMax]

The one problem I can see is that it really ruins the day of a GM whose plot culminates with "OMG now here comes the big bad guy final climax battle!!!!" But those kinds of encounters have always been fucked in Shadowrun.

I was right with you till the above line. In 1992, I could spin some decent baddies.

As for Distance strike, I think Larme is right. Only think as our phys ed died running at a drone and never got to expand his list of powers in that direction.

[Tyro]

Thank you everyone for the clarifications. You've been very helpful (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Larme]

the really bad thing about this is, that it is only unarmed combat for the adept.
everyone else does not get to use his unarmed, because he is usually out of range to fight back . .
so maximum is dodge and armor, but no actual active defense . .

Oh my god, that's so cheesy! Someone can attack at range, and the enemy's only defensive option is to full defense or be stuck with reaction. It's like if someone invented some kind of really unfair tube made of metal which fired smaller chunks of metal that were difficult to avoid... Oh wait... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/ohplease.gif)

What I'm saying, sarcasm aside, is that distance strike just makes an Adept's attacks into a gun. It can be a very powerful gun, what with stacking on troll strength, killing hands, etc. And it has the distinct advantage of being quieter than a gun, and more concealable. But is disadvantages compared to firearms are multitude. Shorter range, complex action instead of simple, no rapid fire, no special ammo types, no smartlink bonus... Distance strike is a quiet, short-ranged cannon with a very low rate of fire. It might seem unfair that someone can fight unarmed without letting the enemy take their full unarmed defense bonuses. But if that's unfair, then so is shooting someone's face with a shotgun, because that's all distance strike really does. For that matter, if distance strike is unfair, then combat magic is mega super unfair because mundanes can't even full defense against it!

In a world where a cyberarmed samurai can cap you in the jewels with 22 pistol dice (twice per turn!) it's hard to get excited about something as inoffensive as distance strike. The only real place where it upsets game balance is spirits, because it really can wipe the floor with them. But spirits are awesome enough as it is, and I think it's perfectly fair for them to have some kryptonite. (in fact, isn't the idea of a distance-striking spirit hunter cool? purging them with his ki and all that. sweet! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) )

[TheOOB]

It can be nasty, but 2 power points is pretty steep for an adept power, you can get another initiative pass for that.

[hyzmarca]

granted, in SR3 it was only really bad, when you had a Troll Adept . .
the really bad thing about this is, that it is only unarmed combat for the adept.
everyone else does not get to use his unarmed, because he is usually out of range to fight back . .
so maximum is dodge and armor, but no actual active defense . .

Actually, in SR3 it was only really bad when you combined it with Killing Hands and Delay Damage II. You could walk into the mall, kill 250 while shopping, and walk out without anyone being the wiser because they don't die until several hours after you left.

[Glyph]

What makes it so potentially cheesy is how high unarmed damage can get. Between strength boosters, bone lacing or augmentation, martial arts, and critical strike, you wind up with something nearly as nasty as the trollbow, only much more concealable. And unlike regular melee combat, your offensive dice pool will be much higher than your opponent's dice pool.

[Rad]

there's no ranged magic weapons, simple as that.

Really? Tell that to our group's GM who put us up against a tribe of native americans with magic bows.

I'll repeat:

Magic. Bows.

In. Shadowrun.

Can't believe the team voted down my plan to wipe them out. They only did it because the GM said we'd get a karma penalty for committing genocide...

[AngelisStorm]

Wait, your GM cheated (by changing the rules), and then threatened you with a metagame penalty for doing what Shadowrunners do best?

[JonathanC]

Who says there are no ranged magical weapons? What's to stop someone from making orichalcum arrows, or simply having an adept attune to a quiver of arrows as a weapon focus?

Failing that, couldn't you just have a dagger or boomerang weapon focus and throw it?

[Fortune]

Doesn't work. Weapon Foci must maintain contact with the (Bonded) wielder's Aura. In other words, no ranged Weapon Foci.

[Rad]

Wait, your GM cheated (by changing the rules), and then threatened you with a metagame penalty for doing what Shadowrunners do best?

And thus got my teamates to act completely out of character and rewarded them for it? (one of them hunts hobos in his downtime)

In a word, yes.

Everybody else got 4 karma for the mission, I got 3 for suggesting we kill them all as an expedient and practical solution--I didn't want any survivors using those magic bows on us.

Doesn't work. Weapon Foci must maintain contact with the (Bonded) wielder's Aura. In other words, no ranged Weapon Foci.

To be fair, he's throwing in elements from GURPS now or somesuch--talked the rest of the team into that "Run in other dimensions" crap I'd been saying hell no to. Since we were in an alternate universe at the time, the rules could have worked differently. Also, you can get magical ranged weapons by having a possession-tradition mage bind spirits into them.

Fear the dual-natured possesed Thor-Shot!

[Fortune]

To be fair, he made no such disclaimer in his post, and I was responding with the canon stance on the matter.

As to your last remark, Spirit-Bound weapons are not Weapon Foci.

[Rad]

Ah, but they are magic weapons--just not weapon-foci. (To paraphrase the FAQ (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) )

[edit]Oh, I should clarify: The "he" in the last line of my previous post is our GM, not Fortune. I wasn't meaning to imply that Fortune was throwing in GURPS rules, our GM has us retrieving researchers from a quantum-physics experiment gone wrong so another system is being plugged in for the dimension-hops--thus the magic bows may have been as non-SR as the Mass Cannon we picked up in the post-nuclear dimension. (10P damage, AP = All, 8 shots unless we can figure out how to duplicate the power source. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) )[/edit]

[AngelisStorm]

Attune (item) doesn't make the weapon magical, it simply attunes you to the item.

Yes, you can have a throwing weapon foci. But as soon as the foci leaves your hand, it switches off. So not so useful.

And he said magic bow. If he had said magic arrow, I would have gone with it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I just couldn't think of any spells that would be useful to have permanently on a bow.

(Disclaimer: all of the above is off the top of my head.)