Dealing with Ruthenium Options

[FlakJacket]

Bull covered dealing with ruthnium in one of his Damage Control articles for tss. Might be worth a look for some ideas.

[Kagetenshi]

[Narmio]

The vehicle damaging system is somewhat strange in SR, yes. Personally I don't think it's a need for Damage Reduction or anything, but instead because of the insanely low Body ratings of vehicles. Yes, sure, they're on a different scale to metahuman Body ratings, but when you factor in AV ammo, shooting an armoured truck with a Predator is like shooting a tough but un-augmented human with the same. Which is just crazy.

I've considered attempting some kind of houserule to stop the ease of damaging vehicles in general, such as flat-out doubling all Vehicle body ratings, making them only require one success to soak a human-scale damage level, making attacks against them require four successes to stage up a level, and things like that, but I have not.

Why? I honestly do not know how hard it is to damage such a vehicle in reality. Hollywood can most likely not be trusted, and in any case ranges from the shot-once-then-explode examples to the completely-ignore-small-arms-fire ones.

It seems that at least from a game balance perspective vehicles carrying half a dozen enemies shouldn't be able to be destroyed by anything that can penetrate their armour.

Thanks for all the suggestions on Ruthenium, by the way, you've given me some things to think about. (By all means keep suggesting anything you like, but it seems the thread has been at least temporarily hijacked by vehicle damage rules).

[FrostyNSO]

In RL, the best way to stop a vehicle with small arms is to shoot the driver.

[Kanada Ten]

On the issue of AV ammo, a careful reading of Rigger 3 indicates that only auto cannons loading AV ammo are considered anti vehicular. Of course one can argue either way because CC was so stupidly vague, but R3 is fairly specific.

Personally, I agree with Necro Tech that the suit only provide camo bonuses, but combat ones. However, try telling your players that. Anyway, on defeating ruthenium, smoke from grenades will cling to the suit, pressure plates, freeze foam (try peeling that off without damaging the paint), stun grenades... Doors: I cannot overstresss these enough. Doors that require pressure pads to open and have cameras monitoring them - doors in secure facilities are required to close within a period of seconds or they set off an alarm. Doors make excellent ambush spots for suppressive weapons (remember, security forces know where the other security forces are: "Roger, is zone 234 clear?" "Clear" "Open fire!"). Proximity sensors on a hallway and drone weapons using sensor lock == ouch.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Just a few past discussions on how SR3 handles vehicle damage:
Vehicle Damage Resistance Test
Melee weapons against vehicles or drones?
Vehicle Damage, Are they made of balsa wood?
Anti-Vehicle weapons, Does dikote count?

As for small arms vs. vehicles IRL, an anti-material rifle firing special ammunition can deal with lightly armored vehicles. With weapons lighter than that, you can forget about stopping any armored vehicles, and even against unarmored vehicles your best bet is indeed to shoot the driver. Riddling the engine compartment also works, if shooting the driver is not an option for some reason -- the problem with that is, you may well have to literally riddle the engine with bullets before you force the vehicle to stop, or you might get lucky and it'll stop soon after the first shot. A bit like shooting a human, in fact...

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: Feb 6 2005, 02:11 AM

[Vlad the Bad]

Back to the topic ... I ran for a player whose character was a ruthenium wearing adept, who was making short work of most of my standard goons. So I gave him a run where he had to break into a Sioux military complex that was being rented out to Universal Omni. What the character didn't know is that they were working on a "stable" strain of Kreiger HMHVV, in an attempt to develope a way grant soldiers Astral Perception, and their test subjects were Wildcats.

So said character was being hunted by Ghoul Wildcats who were also using Ruthenium against him. :D

[Necro Tech]

[Sandoval Smith]

Re: Ruthenium in combat, how is he rolling TN 2s all the time with the hunting rifle? Are you taking into account that there are probably a few bonuses from that rifle that won't apply in close quarters?

Is the player wearing a ruthenium suit, or a poncho? If he's wearing a suit, then all his gear (which includes guns) has to be under it, which makes anything he's carrying pretty hard to access at a moment's notice. If he's got the poncho, that makes getting your hands on your gear easier, but unless he's gone and gotten his gun its own coating of Ruthenium + scanners, then everyone is going to see a rifle floating around. I'd say it doesn't nullify all of his concealment bonus, but the opposition would know exactly which one meter square to pour the suppressive fire into.

Where is the thermographic penalty coming from? Does the suit have thermal dampening on it? If it doesn't, then thermogrpahic vision can see it just fine, and ultrasound has no additional problem at all. Also remember that adding thermal dampening doubles the availibility, and quadruples the time (so ruthenium is 10/10 weeks).

Finally, I'm not sure if there is cannon material to support this, but does limiting yourself to moving no faster than 6 meters/turn add any TNs to your dodge test? I know you lose one point of concealment for every 2 m/t higher than 6 you go.

[Teulisch]

a couple points here.

First, Ultrasound very specificaly cuts your vision modifiers in half, rounding up. This means if you have thermo and ultrasound together, you end up with a +2, not a +4, to see that target. +3 is he has 1 or 2 points of thermal dampening. if i want to hide, im going to get some thermal dampening as well as a white noise emitter just in case

Second, what kind of suit is he wearing? how does it cover his gear? if it covers his gear, how accessible is that gear? how does a cloak affect mobility? If it was me, i would go with ruth pants/boots, and a poncho that went to just above the knee. This would give me good mobility, without stopping me from getting to my gear harnesses.

[Cochise]

[Buck Satan]

Yeah my players tried to abuse the Ruthenium polymer suit. What I did to them is that if you use a Ruthie Suit extensibly then it generate radiation on account of the energy being pumped into it and because of that and the light that is being bent to keep them from being seen I had them start taking rads. Evently they had to go to their local shaodwdock to have surgery done to remove chunks of their skin on account of their skin cancer. Evently they just started having to ween themselves off of the ruthie suit because it does more harm than good if you use for everything. Anyways you may call me a bad gm if you want but trust me anything can give you cancer. I just try to balance unbalanced things out with my sessions so that way the party will learn to be more thankful of the thing that they have to use sparingly. Also as far as sniping is concerned most my NPC's that can catch a sniper can general get to cover and call in support to get rid of the pesty bastard. Grant it that is a bit excessive. Mind you it is necessary especially if you are dealing with Megacorps that have small militaries (all of them.) Anyways the smart ones always have means of catching and killing those who are dumb enough to take them on without a plan. Then again I am a gm who believes who believes in being just plain lethal when it comes to situations that require it.

[Kagetenshi]

No light is being bent. A high-res picture of what's on the other side is being displayed.

~J

[durthang]

[Arethusa]

[Ranneko]

[Fortune]

[toturi]

:| There is no real way to counter-balance a bad GM, is there?

[Sandoval Smith]

Play with a new one?

Okay, the above example is a _very_ bad way to deal with something that gets out of balance. I will repeat my stance that most times when something like that happens, it means a rule has been overlooked, or you're somehow missing _something_ that keeps things normally in check. And if there are no rules, then you can make ways to deal with it that don't invovle unreasonable fiat.

For example, Ruthenium is not armor. If a cloaked player starts taking heavy wounds, that should mean that their ruthenium has also taken damage which should reduce it effectiveness. It wouldn't be too hard to come up with a correlation between wounds taken and reduction of concealment bonus (and while a mage might be able to heal that Deadly, there probably won't be a way to repair the ruthenium in the middle of a run).

Likewise, if the opposition knows that someone is there, but can't see them, then they should start opening up with supressive fire

Finally, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Especially if they're facing corp level opposition, with its terrible deep pockets, why shouldn't their oppenents be just as prone to using ruthenium as the players are?

[Deacon]

Players I've known are fond of fiddling with their Ruth suits (adding it to the outside of medium security armor, for example, so you -do- have armor on when wearing it, or using a clear-coat substance (like dikote) to protect the ruthenium) so any time the suits could be damaged, they have an answer as to why they can't be.

Not to mention that there's nothing in the rules covering equipment breakage... and it shouldn't have to be up to the GM to write his own. (Many are too lazy.)

I find it's easiest to spring the environment on the ruthenium-gifted. Rain never looks right, smoke and fog also make you seem like a very out-of-place picture. Any sort of substance you leave footprints in (mud, snow, water) also makes you look odd, to say the least. Oftentimes I find it easier to drop money on smoke grenades and camo suits than dink with ruthenium.

Corporations have another defense: ruthenium. The stuff makes wonderful wallpaper, especially considering it will create moving images (like kinetic art on your walls). Suddenly your ruthenium suit is trying to display a moving image behind you... and if the image is actually larger than you are, it's probably out of sync.

[Large Mike]

Just a note on ruthenium in a non-rules fashion. Firstly, displaying a picture of something behind you, unless you're really close to it, is not going to be seen at the same angle as the actual image, thus, checkered floor > ruthenium. In addition, curves would be difficult as all hell to display. Not impossible, just make sure you're still good and nervous while wearing that ruthie suit. Furthurmmore, even if, by some bizarre somehow, you have a camera on the bottom of your feet, there's no light under there when they're in contact with something. As the ruthie would have nothing to display there, at best it would have a (hopefully) colormatched swatch where you're stepping, at worst have a display error and just show grey, or worse, blue screen.

I'd like to present the possibility that hiding using ruthenium is similar to, but not exactly like, hiding normally, making ruthenium a specialization of stealth.

I may be a crackpot, but near as I can tell, ruthenium is a tool for stealth, not invisibility-in-a-box.

[hahnsoo]

We've actually come up with a home-grown security feature in our games called "stereoscopic environmental patterns" that basically are physical defense features designed to deter camo of all types. The theory is that you can create optical illusion patterns on your walls, floors, plazas, etc. that look pretty and innocuous, but mess up attempts to use ruthenium, the Camo spell, and urban camo. It halved modifiers, which stacks with other vision "halving" for the purposes of perception tests and removes the +2 profile visibility modifier for ranged attacks.

[Garland]

Wow, I really like that idea.

Though I bet the company would have problems with their cyberzombies getting lost in the details and doing nothing but staring at the walls. :D

[Sandoval Smith]

Adding Ruthenium to the outside of armor doesn't really negate the potential to be damaged, and I recall hearing somewhere that it was possible to interweave the ruthenium into the armor, but that decrease the B/I rating by some factor.

You sure as hell can't dikote Ruthenium either.

Just like invisibility, there are several sure fire ways to limit Ruthenium abuse. Personally, doors have always struck me as being the most logical.

[hahnsoo]