hah. with a creative enough interpretation of the word "explode"--for instance, if you drop a wineglass, it could be said to explode--my quasi-houserule fluff is canon.

The fluff strongly implies that all of the damage from the explosive round is caused by the explosion and fragments -- that the round doesn't even have time to deform from the impact.

Soon enough our military is going to have plasma based weapons (well, portable ones) that will render current armor technologies obsolete.

I don't know what my point was, but I just wanted to say that

breaking into fragments is basically a type of deformation, when you're talking about bullets. or, at least, that's how i've always seen it.

Well, yeah The term deformation, when applied to bullets, refers to the change in shape of the bullet at anytime after the bullet starts travelling through the barrel. So you're technically correct. Heheh. What are we talking about again? Has anyone even looked at my balanced ammo chart?

Hey Angelstandings and thanks for working on that Ammo chart, we are almost finished on our first draft of house rules and your chart will be useful.

We had a few ideas of our own and have worked out what I think is a interesting way for the armor to work without haveing to touch the stats on it and I am studying your chart now.

One of our issues was how the same peice of armor would either make you laugh at hits or leave you high and dry if the enemy had a great roll and your dice fell asleep and left you as a splatter. So we have been looking for a happy medium.

One of the ideas we came up with is that only the staging effect worked in the first phase of the AP penetration and the DV from Ammo and Various burst fires worked in the second stage.

What ever Armor you were wearing would work as normal for penetration. But instead of rolling the armor rating for resist you would get a flat save of half the armors rating. ie... 8/6 would be 4/3 off the incoming damage. Then add what ever resist you have from body. We had it reversed but light pistols had such a low chance of damage.

We also changed how body does resist though. We have never believed that body should be the bases for resist, the idea of a troll taking more damage then a blue whale is just crazy. So we give everyone a flat 6 for resist and the boxes on your damage chart are 10 + body. Less dice to resist with for high end but more boxes for the char to soak up hits with and make the damage conditioner in sets of 4 to reflect this. ( So Trolls can take more hits still and they have their natural armor but more in line we feel )

Con is you wont have the possability of rolling 8 sucesses but pro is your avg will be higher on damage mitigation.

We havent play tested it yet but we have hopes it will hit that happy medium that we like.

And again, thanks for taking your time to do that chart, I will be reviewing it for a bit for our game.

Well, whatever works for you guys I'd recommend changing as little as possible to get the desired effect you want since the more you change stuff, you increase the chance of breaking something else.

Aye, I hear ya. Everytime I change somthing I look at it like a chess game and think a few moves ahead and try to trace down all its effects befor I commit and the fourms here are a good sounding board.

For the most part as long as you understand the theory behind their idea, its not to hard to try to mimic it but from another direction, but change one little game effect and some major issues have a way of sneaking in.

I figure if I post what ever I am working on, I will get a chance to see what positive or negitive effects the readers give and do a revision from there if needed.

But thanks again for your time.

Ya, I am not the best getting my ideas across typing but here it goes. =)

I will try to take it step by step and explain where it differs from SR4.

Set up. From the book, EX EX Ammo DV+2, AP-2, using a heavy pistol -1AP.
Armor is 8/6

I will assign success shifts for sake of example.

Combat:

Agility+Skill vs Reaction = +4 Shift
-3 (ammo + Hvy Pistol) to AP = 5 BAL. 5+4 = 9, we have penetration.
9+2=11 (9 + Ammo shift of 2)
11-3+2= 6 Damage to char. (half of Bal of 6 is auto sucuess of 3 + we roll a flat 6 dice instead of the old body rules)

Char takes 6 damage.

Char is a troll with a 12 body. (Our rules, 10+body, this troll has 22 boxes total. He is now 6 boxes down of his 22 and the condition modifiers are in sets of 4 which now puts him at -1 for all tests and he is now 2 boxes into his next set of 4.
Also we give Troll a natural ballastic of 1 which I forgot to show but you get the picture, but it could affect the auto success if it had uped the bal to a even number and raised the auto success from 3 to 4 if it went well.)

Hope I did better this time around explaining.

We changed the way body resists work because we didnt believe in it as they did it. In the old system our Troll had as big a body as their blue whale did if not bigger. Resisting damage and being able to take more damage are two different issues.

Trolls and humans are both flesh and blood and it was crazy that it would take a small nuke to take out our troll and if that didnt work it would still frag everyone near by.

The present system stacks two seperate resists factors when it should be a resist factor combined with damage sustainable factor after the fact.

So to try to reflect this and to stay within the system we added a flat 6 dice to roll combined with armor and upped the damage chars can handle to reflect that the chars no longer can resist damage as they once could at the higher end.

Since they now have a few more boxes we shifted from a 3 conditioner box set to a 4 box set to reflect the change.

The pros of this system is that it makes it much easier for a GM to set thresh holds on creatures and machines. Some things resist damage better then others and some things can handle damage better then others but don't resist to well.

Like a troll vs a blue whale, put the same armor on both, they resist the same but the whale will handle alot more hits then the troll can from a hvy pistol.

Same for some Helos, some have decent armor but cant handle much damage once penetraited.

Or the A10, takes a licking and keeps on ticking, that plane can really take it.

Whey I brought Ammo up, I wanted AP and DV to be reflected seperately so it could be managed easier but even though I am smart I still don't have the experience that many others do here when it came to the Ammo. So I asked for help here. =)

I hope I did better this time around, let me know if I didnt and if you did understand what I said, let me know what you think.

The changes are real easy for our players to deal with so should not be to much of a issue since they are not even use to SR4 yet.

Deadjester

No, not exactly.

But disreguard my last post, the GM and I who are working on this has been over for a bit and we were talking over what you said and you inadvertently helped us realize that the GM and I had a miscommunication in our ideas on how to make this work.

Befor I look any more stupid, let me finish working this out with him and I will send you a PM within a day or two and you can give me your thoughts then I will post it for others to review, if thats cool with you.

Deadjester

Oh haha... Hey, whatever... I just like throwing ideas around

My fixes were relatively simple to apply... i just add the DV mods after the round has checked to see if it goes through the armor or not, and if it gets stepped down from physical to stun, then after ALL the math, you divide in half (rounding up). This is for P damage bullets only.... knives, gel rounds, and whatever else didn't have this applied to them

I also took out EXEX entirely and just made APDS Avail 12F.

@Angelstandings

i like your chart, and i may lobby for its use in my game. Not sure about the APDS, though. The math is fine, but it feels a little choppy. Maybe an AP of -(half ballistic), minimum -3?

Thanks for all the good advice...
I intend to modify AP, but leave everything else alone:
APDS: -half
Explosive Rounds: +1
Ex-Explosive Rounds: +2
Gel Rounds: double
Flechette Rounds / Shot Rounds: double
I did some basic calculations and this should work for my game.
Thanks again.

Stick 'n' Shock has a DV of 6S.

Notice the "quoted by Serbitars House Rules" please.
StickNShock with DV 6S(e) is the biggest bug in the whole SR4 ammo list. It hast a DV of 6 (which is extremely good), does stun (which is almost always better than physical damage), is resisted only by half the impact armor (which is way less than balistic armor), does electrical damage with the side effects that come with it AND can be loaded into your holdout.

Your point? EX-EX does virtually all of that. Okay, it doesn't halve the armor, but unless they're a spirit or wearing a suit of Full Body Armor, the difference is trivial.

Just do the math, you'll find out. Include all the effects I mentioned. Read all the relevant rules, especially the electricity damage rules.
(btw: The difference in armor between vanilla exex and vanilla stickNshock when wearing an armor jacket, which is standard runner equipment, is 6 dice vs 3 dice. And thats only one small effect. Not including stun damage, electricity damage, critical glitch effects, weapon inependent DV . . .)

Furthermore, like you might have noticed when reading this thread, ExEx is unbalanced, too.

So what is your point? Making irrelevant one-line posts and then defending them by making wrong statements?

I agree that stick-n-shock needs to be lowered a notch or two. hehe, 6S(e) is just way to good In my chart I have them as 5S(e) but I was really contemplating on lowering them to 4(S)e....

Serbitar, I'll throw your ammo values into the chart I made on page 2 for comparison.

Would be nice. Bout you definatley have to include the physical/stun conversion effect of my house rules, because thats what APDS is all about. But this also means, that the outcome depends on your base DV and your hits, and is not easily plotted in a matrix.

The good side is, that -AP is not just +1/3DV, but a completley different thing, when it comes to the question whether you penetrate the armour or not. I think, thats the way it should be.

(BTW: you have a typo in your SR4 vannilla rules damage calculation. Exex is allways -8 dice difference, not -7 as in the 11/10 example)

@Serbitor

Your ammo rules are better balanced than RAW as far as I can see.

And you're right, it's not possible to add in your modified stun conversion rule into *that* particular chart. But I can see the intended effect.

I prefer mine better But your houserule is obviously a step in the right direction. I could make another chart, which would consider your stun damage conversion rule... But it would be a lot more complicated, and based on the number of replies I got from my chart (none, unless you count private mails, then I got 2) -- no one will bother even looking at it. Math scares people.

I find it interesting that we both, quite independently, doubled the impact armor vs Flechette ammo. That is really the only way, mathematically, to make something worse vs. armored targets. Which is why I went with halving ballistic armor vs. APDS -- because it scales correctly that way instead of a mere +- AP.

EDIT: Also, I recognize that -1 AR = 1/3 DV (in most cases), and while I'm not particularly pleased with it, I don't see a reason to complicate matters further by trying to apply them in different ways (although I understand that is what the OP was asking for). I Just balanced the ammo taking that mathematical fact into consideration -- something the developers seem to have missed.

I just made a calc sheet to compare the differences, get it here:

http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck.ods

for those who dont have openoffice or excel:

http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck1.jpg
http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck2.jpg
http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck3.jpg
http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck4.jpg

note that I changed exex in my houserules from +2/+1 to +2/+2

@Serbitar, I've got an older version of Excel which apparently doesn't open Open Office files. Could you export it, I'm curious about the calculations and was thinking about expanding it past just simple average calcs.

Sure, it removes/adds the same amount, but that amount becomes more and more meaningless as the armor improves -- which is the main reason the ammo types aren't balanced in the first place.

That can be solved by doubling or halving the armor -- nothing else would be as elegant.

I guess it all comes down to how effective to you want armor piercing ammo, and how inneffective you want flechette ammo, to be against high armor targets. If the answer to both is "not very" then pay no attention to me.

http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck.xls
http://www.serbitar.de/stuff/ammocheck.ods

Found a small mistake, upgraded to version 1.1

Btw: I can easily add errorbars to my averages. Deviation of one die is 2.5. The standard deviation of x dice is sqrt(sum i=1..x i²). The number of dice is easily calculated (body+amor-ap). Voila, error bars. (though, they might be not very much gaussian with such small numbers)

But the -5 or even the -4 in RAW does not work without my additional rule of physical to stun conversion. Without it, its simply linear and pretty much useless.

I think halving armour is not a good idea, because at some point the armor piercing capabilities should stop. Thats why I prefer a fixed number.

No ammo type should be that much better than others.

BTW: With reducing exex to +2/+2 and introducing my new penetration system I can punch apds back to 0/-4 again. Ill add that to my 1.5 Version of SHP. (SHP had another penetration, which is conversion from physical to stun, which halved the damage after resistance when it was converted to stun previously)

I like the "all or nothing" simply because thats what happens with armour penetration. If it penetrates, you are screwed, if it doesnt, you are quite save.

And, as a design desicion, I dont want people to get stunned by pistol fire. The stun damage should be much much lower than physical damage.

My system achieves both of that, plus, every ammo type has its use (maybe with exception of ex, wich is allways worse than exex, but that is supposed to be so and balanced by cost and availability)

It's difficult to say for certain just how serious the blunt trauma from small arm projectiles stopped by flexible body armor tends to be. The only real statistic I'm aware of is that there are no reported fatalities when a person has been shot in a ballistic panel by a firearm that the armor in question was rated to protect against.

Considering how many thousand cases of bullets stopped by body armor in US police departments alone there are, you could say it's very unlikely that you would sustain critical injuries from non-penetrating hits. Broken ribs, internal bleeding, etc. are certainly possible, but any projectile stopped by armor is an order of magnitude more benign than one that isn't stopped.

There are reports of being people being stunned after getting non-penetrating hits to body armor, and there are as many or more reports of people not even realizing they were hit until afterwards. From what I understand, the canon penetration mechanic in SR4 makes non-penetrating hits far more effective in taking someone out of the battle than such hits would be IRL.

The canon penetration rules means that it is common that you can bring down someone wearing armor at about the same speed if your damage before soak of Body + Armor is slightly below the Armor rating as if it is slightly above the Armor rating. You still do less boxes of damage with the lighter attack. But because Body is easier to have at elevated levels through cyber/bio and metahum choice, often the character will have fewer Stun boxes (8+Will/2) than Physical boxes (8+Bod/2). This is exagerated in cyber/bio Trolls, who could have as many as 16 Physical boxes, and at the very most 11 Stun boxes. Although in some characters, such as Dwarf Mages, the reverse can easily be true. Just not to the same extent because 12 is the maximum Stun boxes of any Metahuman, and 9 is the minimum Physical boxes.

I see a few of problems with converting entirely to Stun, whether you halve or not, and why I instead see splitting between Stun and Physical as a good idea.

- Cracked or broken ribs, possibily leading to a punctured lung, and such. I know SR, or pretty much any game, gets icky when you try to sort actual injuries into Physical or Stun. But that sure points in the direction of Physical. But with the extra bruising as Stun.

- Getting hit by a Narrow three round burst. The armor may stop a particular round of the three reducing it to mostly stun-like damage, but either of the others might catch the target where the armor is not.

- Armor is abstract, especially with the partial pieces. I'm trying to abstract the hit, not match up a weapon with a given rated piece of armor.

- If the DV is below the armor rating you have no chance of dieing unless you were literally a walking tank with somthing like rating 20+ armor and Glitched your soak. But since Full Body Armor with Helmet Ballistic Shield falls short of that, the chances of Gitching that are miniscule, and to be able to even move with that much armor on you have to have a pretty good Body. It is safe to assume nobody is going to die from a DV that fell below their armor rating.


Clarification and Refinement Of My Suggestion, All Rolled Into One

The boxes of damage are split in half between Physical and Stun before the soak roll, on an odd number of damage boxes the extra box is assigned to Stun. When the soak is rolled the target chooses for each hit on the soak roll whether to subtact a box of damage from Physical or Stun.

This means that with a good soak roll you might take no Physical damage. But if you fail to soak then you took the hit hard and something snapped or was pummeled very hard and is bleeding, or you caught a hit at least partially outside the armour protected area.

EDIT Or if you are a Troll and are afraid of falling asleep during a gun battle you are in you can avoid Stun damage by leading with your face to take some of the damage as Physical boxesthat you'll ask the team mage or medic to sort out for you later. Of course as a Troll, especially if you have good armor, you are usually going to be soaking noticably more boxes of damage overall. So definately staying up longer if you have the good sense to find a bit of cover.

I know for my group we think AP and DV should be kept seperate in effect and we are wroking on a combat formula within the present game system to try and reflect that without changeing the rest of the book.

One of the issues we have is stun. Is it really needed in its present form? Does it really enhance the game that much or just add more dice to roll and take up time that could be used doing other things?

For now we are not using stun from gun fire. We are just using stun for things that require it such stun weapons, spells and explosions, etc. Otherwise stun just seems to much of a issue at the moment.

We may add it in later but for now it is as I have said above.

Deadjester

Just forget the Stun conversion altogether is probably not the worst idea. Yes SR4 is more lethal. But the people least able to soak gunshot damage are the people least able to wear enough armor to convert it to Stun.

Dividing stun from gunfire (that's been reduced from physical to stun) in half seems to be working out okay. While it'll put a player eventually, it certainly helps with the "passing out from your armor stopping bullets" problem somewhat.

I'm currently rounding that division up (5 points of reduced-to-stun, old school, becomes 3 points of stun in my rules). I might try rounding it down in the future.

Sounds more like a "getting shot" problem to me.