I am still trying to gauge this for my self and I wanted to know what you thought.

lets just ignore the fact I am a retard that didn't know that tags don't work in polls ok.

It's okay Egon, thanks.
Okay, important safety tip, don't cross polls with tags.

In all seriousness though, I find SR4 more deadly, as far as mundane combat goes. It hurts to get shot at unless you are a walking tank or a nimble little minx.

Damage is much more gradual. A hold-out pistol hurts a fair amount in SR4 and it was a pathetic joke in SR3. Meanwhile, a full burst from an SMG is "pretty lethal" in SR4 and it was "an instant death sentence for even the toughest Troll" in SR3.

A full-auto burst of APDS from [fill in weapon] is no longer forcing your opponent to have to come up with a 6 followed by another 6 twice just to stage it down from Deadly - and that means that at the high end things are a lot more survivable.

So while people can accumulate a kill with multiple shots from a light pistol in SR4, it's a lot harder to find a weapon that will necessarily kill a troll in one round. And that means that overall the game is less lethal.

-Frank

Trolls have always been tough to take out in a single round. I've done it, seen it sone and worked out the specs for 1st through 3rd edittions, but it's still not something your average Joe with a self-defense weapon will manage. Hell it's tough with a full clip for an average Joe.

Overall i'm not sure yet. But i do highly recommend that you not be near SR4 fragmentation grenades when they go off, be it with chunky salsa effect or not.

it varies really, its less deadly for a troll but more deadly for a human or an elf,

trolls have the body to be able to stack on a ton of armor on top of their already hardened hides, making them nigh impervious to anything short of a panther cannon, where as my measly little body of 4 elf is SOL because i cant wear anything totalling more than 8....and armor doesnt stack the way it used to, which really stinks, they finally get it right for third edition and then frag it up again in fourth....

Honestly I don't have clue one as to what you are talking about.

Sure, in SR3 you could stack armor and in SR4 you can't. But in SR3 your armor didn't make any difference against anyone with decent equipment willing to spend a complex action to kill you.

Let's say for the sake of argument that you had 12 points of armor. That's great, right? It's Military Grade, and not normally available to most shadowrunners. But now let's say that someone is taking a complex action to end your life:

They have a lousy submachine gun and use APDS because they are in SR3 and aren't stupid. That means your armor only counts half, and they can add up to +9 to the power level of their base 7 weapon and that means that you have a target number of ten. Which means that one die out of every twelve that you roll comes out a success. And you need more than one. So if you have a body + unused combat pool of 24 dice, you might get away with a serious wound.

In SR3, if someone who was halfway well equipped shot you with a weapon, you went down. Period. In SR4 you might survive a burst from a submachine gun firing EXEx rounds (the SR4 equivalent to the SR3 APDS no-brainer). Probably not, but it could happen. That long burst is coming through for a base damage code of 12 DV at -3 armor, and you need to drop it down to 10 or less just to stay up with a body of 5. That's not even hard, let alone impossible. It just means that you have to come up with 2 more successes on 11 dice than his Agility + Automatics skill beat your Reaction roll.

Sure you can't stack armor, but armor values are larger to start with and also actually matter against high-end anti-personel weaponry.

-Frank

Well, in any cases, extreme examples will give extreme results.
Firing 10 bullets with a SMG in full auto mode will induce some recoil, that you will hardly compensate; and you didn't include the SR3 Dodge Test, that will likely save the target's hoop.

At a TN of 7 before other modifiers the SR3 dodge test will absolutely not save the target's hoop. I think the example is ridiculous (APDS is neither inexpensive nor easy to get—I agree that it's likely if someone's specifically preparing for a Troll in mil-spec armor, but to call someone without it not "halfway well-equipped" is insane), but that point is wrong.

~J

I'm finding, in practice, it's about the same as far as lethality. The low-end weapons are slightly more powerful, the high-end trolls can soak damage better (erp!), but the main real change that I'm finding is the fact that electricity and stun magic are both incredibly more effective than they used to be (and they were pretty powerful in SR3). The only time our PCs have not knocked out something on the first hit from electricity damage was against a drone that was rolling a lot of dice, and the only time our PCs have not stunned a non-mage target with a Stun Bolt on the first spell was against a ghoul with a willpower of 6.

I can't tell you how closely I've been watching our friend Egon, waiting for him to make a post where I could use that...

Hell, I just registered recently and I was already waiting to pounce.

Well no books here so my math might be off but firing 10 rounds from a SMG doesn’t have to give you that many plus to TN.

Gas vent 4
Personal grip
Stock pad

That’s like 6 recoil that will all work I think.

You can add on the gyro arm for another 3
Or like high strength for a point maybe.

Then you have a smart gun link for -2 target numbers.

10 rounds with the above including the cyber gyro and smart is -1 TN so short range its 3.
10 rounds without the gyro but with strength is still only 5.

Of course if it were me shooting I would only do a 9 round FA and take the numbers down by one.

FA gets more deadly if you are using an Ares alpha with the nice 2 points of recoil built in.

Without a Gyro cyber arm you can fire nine rounds for no recoil modifier.

and everyone else within the "blast" area...

I'm on the fence on lethality. Edge seems to have a bigger kick to the dice pools in "save my bacon" usage. The Rule of 6 can make a world of difference, especially if you have enough edge to re-roll failures.

I will say that teaching someone SR4 is much faster than SR<=3. Modifiers are the only non-intuitive thing (what range am I at? Visibility penalties?).

Grenades don't make attack rolls particularly, so their modified DV is just their base DV. That means that if you have 10 points of hardened armor you can go all Starship Troopers (the book) on people. Run around with some short range autolaunchers on your back and you won't ever take any damage. Everyone else will turn into a fine red mist, and soon.

And yes, that means that you can rig up such a device on a force 5 spirit and set them to work.

-Frank

Well, if you want to enter magic into it: Grenades and Magic Fingers are fun. Especially if the grenade started out on the enemy's belt.

A bit more deadly since you can never be "immune" to dmg any more, if your armour is greater than the power of the weapon you suffer stun dmg.. and there aint not many ways you can trick out Willpower non magically, and you would need a _ton_ of armour to have the dice to stage down the dmg enough so you wont suffer any stun dmg..