OK, so a quick look through the toxins section shows that there are a number of ways to be completely immune to various delivery methods of getting toxins to you. If you have, for example, a complete Chem Seal, then you're pretty much fine so long as noone tricks you into drinking a rooficolada. But short of that, what exactly are you supposed to do?

Bonuses to your toxin resistance from sources which do not give you actual immunity just give you extra dice - which means that rating 3 (a 60,000 investment on a toxin extractor) on average reduces the power of a toxin by 1. And since Narcoject has a power of ten, that's basically meaningless.

In older versions of Shadowrun, protective gear and Blood Filtration reduced the power of toxins. In SR4, it takes three levels of Protective Gear to achieve the same effect. So as near as I can figure it, protective gear that doesn't provide actual immunity is a waste of your time. You can walk in with no chemical awareness at all, and it takes two squirts from a narcoject delivery system to drop you. And you can get bleeding ede Toxin Extractors and Chemical Protection, and 2 Narcoject squirts are still going to drop you.

What gives? And for that matter, why isn't Blood Filtration in the basic book anymore?

-Frank

I think the question being asked is, what are you supposed to do when someone pokes a hole in your chemical seal?

i hear dead people are immune to poisons

Well, Antidote Patches are no great help, either... let's wait & see for NanoTech in Augmention, or any Antidote Rules other than Patches...

A simple house rule to counteract this problem would be to say that every level of antitoxin system adds 3 dice to the resistance roll, not one.

Or, they could reduce the power of the Toxin one point per level...

I was trying to stay within the 4th ed. rules for armor (which filtration systems function identically to), not create exceptions.

Although Hardened Armor would work a lot better if it reduced power level as well.

Currently, Hardened Armor automatically negates damage from an attack of DV X, and protects from X/3 damage against an attack of DV X+1. That means that any attack that can hurt a target with a lot of hardened armor is going to absolutely destroy that target. It would be a lot less granular and more workable if hardened armor just reduced DV directly.

And in that light, I have no problem making that rule for chemical protection as well.

-Frank