Electricity damage too good?, 6S(e) stun batons and stick n shock make close combat silly Options

[noonesshowmonkey]

As written, stun batons (and their derivatives) and Stick n' Shock weapons do absurd things to anybody hit. A taser or stun baton has become standard on all characters that I run, and generally is more effective at taking an opponent out - especially during surprise rounds if mounted on an arm slide - than any nearly gun in the game would be. Close combats have turned into 'do you have shock gloves / a stun baton?' rather than a slugfest of gore and destruction.

Body + half Impact vs damage is not too bad. Even the Body + Willpower + half impact (3) test or fall down on the ground and drool test is not that bad. Really, it is the

even if the target succeeds, he suffers a –2 dice pool modifier to all action tests due to disorientation from the shock for [2 Combat Turns + net hits]

that really gets me. That is just brutal. Mind you, you take the fall down and drool test with negative dice from the stunning hit you just took (pun!)...

I am not sure if I am going overboard, but I don't think that everybody in the 'Sprawl runs around with nonconductive armor.

I have been pondering house ruling it that staging up damage from an electrical weapon takes 2 hits to increase the DV and may not be used with the trading dice for DV rule. You can't make the shock any larger by hiting a vital area. You can shock someone in a vital nerve plexus that is more... shocking... sure. But I think that the +1 DV per 2 hits allows for plenty of staging.

[Belvidere]

And don't forget, if it's metal armor they don't get anything for armor. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif) Though almost all armor is non-metallic in shadowrun. Aside from the chainmail shirt in arsenal. Haha

If you've got the issue of your players being abusive with it, just start using it against them. No better way to teach someone not to do something, than by hurting them with it.

[Badmoodguy88]

I think making nonlethal damage in some cases better than lethal damage is an intentional move on the part of the 4e creators.

The downside to knocking someone out is they may come after you later. If you knock out a whole gang and then leave. The gang will be awake tomorrow and they will be pissed. Nonlethal is not as illegal.

The downside to killing someone is that more people might come after you than if you had left someone alive. If you left someone alive they might have more of an idea about who to come after.

I don't know if nonlethal shock damage is too good but there are better weapon in the game than stun batons. It is up to you if you want stun batons and such to be in the same league with more deadly things.

[noonesshowmonkey]

If you've got the issue of your players being abusive with it, just start using it against them. No better way to teach someone not to do something, than by hurting them with it.

A bit of a fallacy in that if my response is to abuse it back, it is still too good...

That and my whole issue with this is that I don't want combat to turn into games of Tag! with electrical shock weapons.

[Lanlaorn]

The downside to knocking someone out is they may come after you later. If you knock out a whole gang and then leave. The gang will be awake tomorrow and they will be pissed. Nonlethal is not as illegal.

If you want to you can just slit their throats afterwards, or change magazines and do a coup de grace if you want to waste money on the bullet.

[Mäx]

Body + half Impact vs damage is not too bad. Even the Body + Willpower + half impact (3) test or fall down on the ground and drool test is not that bad. Really, it is the that really gets me. That is just brutal. Mind you, you take the fall down and drool test with negative dice from the stunning hit you just took (pun!)...

I'm pretty sure you dont, damage resistance test aren't exactly action tests.
And -2 dice to do stuff isn't exactly a massive penalty.
ANd there are still more effective ways to damage people in melee then shock weapons.

[Mesh]

...A taser or stun baton has become standard on all characters that I run...

...I don't think that everybody in the 'Sprawl runs around with nonconductive armor...

So everyone runs around with electricity based weaponry, but you don't think anyone has non-conductive armor? Why aren't people wearing armor that protects against such a common threat? I would expect police forces to have it at a rating of at least three to prevent being shocked from the non-lethal weapons they carry and employ.

There are frequently threads about how overpowered and unbalanced shock weapons are. There is a cheap and readily available defense against them. GMs, scale your opponents. If your players shoot guards with regular ammo, you're going to put them up against guards that have ballistic armor, right? Because without it, they get mowed down without a chance. Use the same common sense when scaling challenges to your players and mix things up. Make them think twice:

1) Melee is in an inch (or foot+) of water. Shock the guy in front of you and share the buzz.
2) That ork gang lt. wears shock frills. Shock him, and you're liable to short out his and your electric weaponry.
3) Cheap security force doesn't have non-conductive threads? Well one guy got a nasty shock before, and never wants it to happen again so he put Rating 5 non-conductivity in his jacket.
4) Force coming specifically after your runners knows all the runners use shock weapons first? Put them not only in non-conductive threads, but also give them non-conductive ponchos or overcoats.
5) A runner shocks out a guard quickly and easily? Shorten his time to finish him. Then have the guard wake back up and cause problems. It's non-lethal after all.

Pro's don't shoot guards in the face for money. They find ways to accomplish their objectives while pissing off the least amount of people. Players should be encouraged to find non-lethal solutions rather than whipping out their sniper rifle and firing an APDS round through a wall and a guard's armored vest to splatter him before he even knew he was targeted. Don't hate on shockers too much. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Mesh

[Traul]

Pro's don't shoot guards in the face for money. They find ways to accomplish their objectives while pissing off the least amount of people. Players should be encouraged to find non-lethal solutions rather than whipping out their sniper rifle and firing an APDS round through a wall and a guard's armored vest to splatter him before he even knew he was targeted. Don't hate on shockers too much. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Which actually supports the opposite to your point. Nonlethal damage should be its own reward. Currently, players are not using stun weapons because they are nonlethal. They are using them because they are flat out better, and it just so happens that they are also nonlethal.

[toturi]

So everyone runs around with electricity based weaponry, but you don't think anyone has non-conductive armor? Why aren't people wearing armor that protects against such a common threat? I would expect police forces to have it at a rating of at least three to prevent being shocked from the non-lethal weapons they carry and employ.

Mesh

Indeed it is as you say. Everyone does run around with electricity based weaponry. Both corpsec and Lone Star (Rating 2 and 3 Grunts) have stun batons as part of their equipment loadouts. And they do not have the nonconductivity modification to their armors.

[Mesh]

Which actually supports the opposite to your point. Nonlethal damage should be its own reward. Currently, players are not using stun weapons because they are nonlethal. They are using them because they are flat out better, and it just so happens that they are also nonlethal.

I think you missed the contrasting comparison. What's the combined AP from your typical sniper rifle using APDS ammo?

Mesh

[Dumori]

-7 to -9 with at DV of 8-9

[Runner Smurf]

Taser weapons are pretty darn scary in SR. Mind you, they are that scary in real life too. Taser weapons are designed to disrupt your ability to move, so they should have some nasty side effects. When it comes to stun batons and actual tasers, I don't have a problem with them being that nasty. Stick-n-shock is a little more dubious to my mind, but I don't want to dredge up that old argument again. In real-life, the US military has been very hesitant about non-lethal technology because it is generally less effective than lethal weapons at stopping opponents, and also because non-lethal very often isn't. Heck, here in the US, police forces are getting in trouble because of how often tasers end up killing people.

In addition to the realism issue, there is the game balance question, and how you deal with it. I agree it can be a real problem. I like it when my team goes non-lethal, but I don't think non-lethal should be that much more combat-effective than regular weapons. A couple of options I've considered/used:
- Everybody has non-conductive enhancements to their armor. This actually makes a lot of sense to me - with SnS and tasers being around, I'd think anybody making armor would design it to protect against it. A couple of ways to reflect that: tweak the rules so that it's resisted with full impact (or ballistic) armor to reflect that it's just standard, or just have most every armor you can buy have a couple of points of non-conductive armor.
- Nerf stick-n-shock. Tasers are effective, but their range sucks, which is the primary balance on them. Stick-n-shock utterly shucks that balance. Drop the effective range (to reflect a lighter bullet), eliminate the -2 penalty or the fall-down option (to reflect the lower available electrical power), don't let it be fired from non-shotguns, don't let it stage at all. Heck, feel free to eliminate it as a silly idea that the game designers obviously didn't think through. (Seriously, why would you have tasers at all with Stick-n-Shock on the market?)
- Make non-lethal occasionally lethal. Tasers and stun batons seriously screw with the nervous system (by design). As a house rule, if somebody glitches their damage resistance test against a taser/stun baton, they flatline. Yes, it does make them more effective, but greatly increases the out-of-combat consequences, and should make the runners think twice about just unloading on people, and justifying it to themselves by saying "hey, it wasn't lethal".

My 2 cents.

[MikeKozar]

Indeed it is as you say. Everyone does run around with electricity based weaponry. Both corpsec and Lone Star (Rating 2 and 3 Grunts) have stun batons as part of their equipment loadouts. And they do not have the nonconductivity modification to their armors.

Okay...why?

At some point, as a GM, I'm going to have to write for this world. There isn't enough published material for me to avoid writing some things. If I am writing, the first rule is it must be fun for everybody, including myself. I prefer logical causality in my world; if you are raiding a Matrix node working on a new generation of Black ICE, then the security had better include some cutting edge ICE. If the opposition always uses spike strips, go-gangs will either buy run-flats or be made laughingstocks.

...and as soon as the bad guys start using Electric ammo, the armor is going to get upgraded. Security knows there are electric weapons in play; they're carrying them. I should hope it doesn't take a friendly fire incident or a downed officer's stolen weapon to make it clear to them, but at some point they will realize that they need to be ready for electric damage.

Furthermore, of all the armor upgrades, Electric is by far the most valuable. Chemweapons are more rare, and generally deployed via a dart; most of the other damage types are mage gimmicks. Electric damage is something that not only can a mundane use against you, but tasers are *legal*. They should be the most common self-defense weapon among the general population, and any time Security busts down a door they have to consider that Grandma is going to try and give them half a million volts to the beanbag.

I think in the future, I am going to make it clear to my players that there are degrees of response, and somewhere between asking politely and the helicopter minigun is a wide band of electic-armed "take them alive" security policies. This might not make sense for Shadowrunners, but as has been pointed out in numerous sourcebooks, Corporations would just as soon take you alive for information. They can always kill you later, or send you to a lab to... You know, let's just leave it at "don't get taken alive".

At any rate, the bulk of police and security should be using electric ammo, and that means they should have the insulated armor upgrade. I can't come up with a good reason not to.

[noonesshowmonkey]

Having everybody geared out with nonconductive armor is the same kind of absurdity that form fitting body armor is:

If it is so good / so necessary that everyone has it or needs to have it, there is something wrong.

Stick n' Shock is busted-sauce. There really is no good way around it. I think my game will not have stick-n-shock.

Any opinions about changing the way that stun batons etc. stage damage?

[DrZaius]

A quick and dirty solution would be messing with the number of charges a stun baton can hold before it goes dead; additionally, making it ineffective for use as a melee weapon after it's dead would be another option to discourage players from using them exclusively.

-DrZaius

[Belvidere]

Instead of having it use a number of charges and then die out the nothing, another way to go at it may be a draining battery effect. Swings 1-5 are fulll DV, Then 6-10 are -2DV, THen 11-15 are -4DV, then it's just a stick.

[Mäx]

Damm there are like half a dozen of these threads right now, all whit people claiming shock weapons are super duper good and million times better then anythink else.
But no one ever post any actuall facts showing that is the case.
Yes they are good but there are better options that do more damage for both melee and ranged combat.

[DrZaius]

Damm there are like half a dozen of these threads right now, all whit people claiming shock weapons are super duper good and million times better then anythink else.
But no one ever post any actuall facts showing that is the case.
Yes they are good but there are better options that do more damage for both melee and ranged combat.

The reason they are better is because you can sneak them in. Why should my light pistol be more effective at taking down a target than a LMG? The main issue I run into as a runner is getting my 'ware into places; of course I want to go into every meet with an Assault Rifle and a Katana, but that obviously isn't going to work out of the D or C zones. Electricity damage lets me take a very effective weapon into almost _everywhere_.

-DrZaius

[MikeKozar]

Having everybody geared out with nonconductive armor is the same kind of absurdity that form fitting body armor is:
...
Any opinions about changing the way that stun batons etc. stage damage?

...thought I made a pretty good case for nonconductive armor, but...

The main dealbreaker for most people is the Dazed/Incapacitated secondary effects. You could always just take them out, and make SnS just 6E with the armor penetration, still pretty sweet. You could also make the Dazed effect resistible.

Something somebody said earlier has me thinking - the reason that the military today doesn't use tasers is because they're close-range weapons, especially compared to firearms. You could explain that because of the poor flight characteristics of SnS, the range is doubled before figuring penalties, effectively halving the max range of the weapon. This makes SnS-loaded pistols only slightly better reach then standard Tasers, while long-arms firing SnS rounds are still pretty effective. It's a simple nerf, it has a good explanation, and it will dramatically reduce the combat effectiveness of SnS in some (but not all) tactical situations.

[CanRay]

Well, let's take a look at it.

IT'S ELECTRICITY!

How many people have been electrocuted in their lifetime, even by a minute amount? Anyone? *Raises Hand*

OK, "Stick and Shock" Ammo is starting to get out there, but the idea of using Stun Batons and Tasers are a great idea for Shadowrunners infiltrating a Corporate Compound, or dealing with Lone Star. Next to no noise (As long as you catch the body, and rifle if he has one.), and, most importantly, you didn't just KILL A COP. Major No-No for a lot of reasons.

That said, "The Right Tool for the Right Job". Stunning a Gang isn't going to get you much respect, and will get the gang after you. They're not exactly the most enlightened of people in realizing that you're being nice by not killing them. They'd see it as a sign of weakness. That's when you break out the standard ammo and have a nice day painting the walls in red.

As for the more lethal forms of ammo, well, there are times when you absolutely, positively need to kill every Motherfragger in the room! And that's when you slap in your EX-EX rounds into your AK-97 and Rock and Roll!

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

The reason they are better is because you can sneak them in. Why should my light pistol be more effective at taking down a target than a LMG? The main issue I run into as a runner is getting my 'ware into places; of course I want to go into every meet with an Assault Rifle and a Katana, but that obviously isn't going to work out of the D or C zones. Electricity damage lets me take a very effective weapon into almost _everywhere_.

-DrZaius

But where is the problem with that? I mean really... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

The average Joe Citizen is doing the same thing most likely. Guns are restricted, Tazers are not... The most common form of protection is thus going to be the Tazer... and just because it is legal does not mean that you can just whip it out whenever you feel like it... There will be repercussions for their use. They will likely be less severe than an otherwise armed response, but a runner whipping out a Tazer to zap someone BETTER be in a situation that his life may be in danger (and really, against the average Joe Citizen, that will be almost never), or the LEO's may want to have a little chat with him... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

[Yerameyahu]

I'm not sure why people keep acting like S&S isn't lethal. A helpless enemy will be a dead enemy. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[CanRay]

I'm not sure why people keep acting like S&S isn't lethal. A helpless enemy will be a dead enemy. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

And then left in compromising poses.

[Inpu]

That said, "The Right Tool for the Right Job". Stunning a Gang isn't going to get you much respect, and will get the gang after you. They're not exactly the most enlightened of people in realizing that you're being nice by not killing them. They'd see it as a sign of weakness. That's when you break out the standard ammo and have a nice day painting the walls in red.

Heh, yeah I imagine counting coup became a lot more popular once the NAN became a power.

[noonesshowmonkey]

I am more likely to effectively 'kill' a target by hitting them with my taser than with my Ares Predator loaded with standard rounds.

They get less armor, I can still aim to increase the DV and even if I don't knock them out, they may get auto incapped. On top of this, they will have a disabled effect that is the same as 6 boxes of damage on top of the damage they already took.

I simply can't understand why anybody that can read the rules can't see that they are absurdly good.