Mmmm... Pain Editor. Yeah, that's the one. Using that pretty much says, "You're not taking me alive."

Heh. I suppose there's motivation to specialize in Subdual Combat after all.

It also reminds me that I look forward to official spell design rules for purposes of a Decrease Attribute spell with LOS rather than touch. More than one way to subdue a cat, and all.

(And yeah, it'd be very easy to reverse engineer such a spell into existence, I just don't wanna until there's canonical permission.)

Truth be told, this isn't that big a departure from SR3. Tasers were just sick in SR3.

That's what the players said...

-Frank

Nope, if either track is filled, they fall down and go night-night.

It isn't the horrendous monster you make it out to be though. If you have enough armour to convert the damage to stun then you are going to normally taking less boxes of damage anyway. If someone purposely does less damage to you to try stun you with nomarlly lethal damage then they are doing less damage, and it won't be entirely out of wack with the different size of Physical and Stun tracks. Assuming that the Physical is even larger than Stun, which isn't always the case.

All in all I consider it less of a game problem than having high armor more than halving the damage like you suggest.

Your post? Yes! Let us go through an example to see why.

Bob, with a Body of 5, takes a SA shot to the gut from a AK-97. The attacker only rolled one net hit, so that is 6P. If Bob is wearing Armored Clothing, rating 4/0 he takes Physical damage, and resists the damage with 9 dice. That will net him about 3 boxes of Physical damage. If Bob instead decided to wear the Armored Vest the damage would be coverted to Stun, and he would resist with 11 dice. Most times the result will be 1 box less of Stun damage, the average being in the neighborhood of 2 1/3 boxes. Slightly above that because while the average is 3 2/3 hits, some resist rolls will have more than 6 successes but still count towards the average as 6.

Let us say Bob is a gutless, mage-bait wimp with only a Willpower of 2. That would give him a Stun track of 9. With his Body of 5 he has a Physical track of 11. Let us repeat the senario three of times, just using the average numbers. Not likely to happen, and we are leaving some things out, but just as an example. With the Armored Clothing Bob takes 3 * 3 boxes of Physical damage, so 9 boxes to leave 2 boxes remaining before he drops. With the Armored Vest on he takes 3 * 2 1/3 boxes for a total of 7 boxes of Stun. This also leaves him with 2 boxes remaining before he drops, and incidentally a smaller wound penalty.

I am not taking into account the mounting wound penalities, or the likelihood that some shots Bob is hit with are going to exceed the Armored Vest rating and thus spread around the damage some. But even without those you can see that things are working out better for Bob when he wears the Armored Vest because:
1- He isn't squirting blood all over the place.
2- He has taken less boxes of damage, in this case giving him a smaller wound penalty.
3- He has just as many boxes of room left on his shortest track as he does when he is just wearing his chainmail underwear, or whatever the Armored Clothing is suppose to represent.

EDIT Notice that if you apply your rule Bob would rarely take any Stun damage.

The trick is to think of it being much harder to bruise the Troll, but once you do manage to hit him hard enough to leave a mark that mark hurts him just as much if not more than a Human.

You're ignoring the completeness of the situation, though. You take fewer boxes of stun damage because you have more dice of armor to roll against the stun damage. It evens out for anything but the lowest cases where the DV is very close to the armor value. If the armor value exceeds the DV by 3 or more, then it's a non-issue.

If I were going to adjust the value, I would reduce it by a fixed amount instead of halving it. Halving makes light pistol rounds just too weak.

You could also apply half the damage as physical and half as stun. That'd level it out as well.

I can indeed argue that. I'd prefer not to, though, especially since you got there on your own.

Akai Sokata openned up the whole topic in the first post. I was just trying to clear up a misconception that has built up, and I've seen it in a few other posts, that Trolls are better off stripping down to their skivvies to avoid getting knocked out.

Wearing armor slightly above the base DV of the weapons you are likely to face is great for staying standing, because it tends to splitt any damage you take between the two tracks. Although you'll pile on the wound penalties before you are done. The walking tank syndrome of having mid-teens or higher armor rating has diminishing returns for remaining standing because nearly all the damage you do take gets funneled into Stun. However you still are likely better off because you will take less boxes in total.

Good thing.

You see our reasoning as wrong because we are looking at the the results instead of you creating a hypothetical situation that cannot ever happen. You are assuming situation where for given gunshot damage that you can have Stun in one case and Physical in the other, but in both case the armor is the same.

But there is no such situation. For it to switch from Physical there MUST be more armor from the one case to the next.

Once again you fail to take into consideration that the Troll will be able to remain conscious after being shot approximately the same number of times. In most cases the Troll will in fact remain conscious longer when wearing more armor.

All you have managed to accomplish is to bring back the reign of the Troll Tank by making it even harder to damage them at all. If you work at it a wee bit harder maybe you can have the nostalgia kick of melee specialized Trolls whose technique is to close to attack and then casually drop a grenade at their feet without taking any damage themselves.


EDIT

Nevermind. You don't have to try, you are already there. Only it is even better this time around because any type of metahuman can do it with augmentation. If you want to do it without surgery though you'll still have to go Troll. Or maybe Orc. Or Adept.

He is an unaugmented Human with less than peak Body that just got shot by an SMG and suffered no ill effects.

In my estimation that is a very bad thing.

Well, there are really three parts to this topic. You can't argue the less than armor => stun rule in the same breath as pure stun vs. pure physical. Here is the breakdown of the issue:

1. Pure stun damage vs. pure physical. This is the adept with killing hands case.
2. Armor transformation of physical to stun. This is the primary "naked troll" argument.
3. Electric stun weapons vs. anything else. Don't even bother comparing, the electric weapons just about always win. Stick'n Shock >> all.

I agree that #3 clearly comes across in favor of electrical stun. #1 is also a slight edge for stun (a larger edge if the whole team goes for stun and can concentrate on just one damage track). #2 is where we are discussing the point.

I believe that they two cases are relatively close together. If I decided to tweak it, I'd simply have the damage split between the physical and stun tracks. That retains the "don't get shot" fear for the players while at the same time making rounds with poor penetration less tactically effective (because the guy goes down slower).

Agreed, with respect to physical damage vectors.

Stunbolt is a special case, but it's magic and therefore allowed to be.

What are you talking about? Im comparing a bod 8 troll with conversion rules with a bod 8 troll without conversion rules.

Nobody is making the example you gave.

My point is:

A bod 8 troll goes down faster WITH the conversion rule than a bod 8 troll WITHOUT the conversion rules. (btw: Thats what means keeping the variables in place, all of them, expect the one you want to discuss). Thats not the point of the conversion rule. The rule wants to make converted damage less effective. But thats not the case. It amkes it MORE effective.

Is that so hard to understand? it seems that some people in here deliberately want to missunderstand me.

It is based on what? Apparently nothing you are comparing. You aren't even analyzing it.

You are even doing a crappy job of this. Try giving an unaugmented Body 10 Troll a suit of Full Body Armor with no helmet and 3 fragmentation handgrenades. Then have him drop the handgrenades one by one at his feet.

With SR4 RAW it is bad enough. With your rule of halving the damage it might occationally tickle his toes. But then add in your ammunition rules, that also cover grenades as per your document, and the Troll can trade in the Full Body Armor for an Armored Jacket and remain just as safe as the second instance of Full Body Armor with your 1/2ing rule.

This is a BAD THING.

Interesting idea. I think I like it.

I'm not sure exactly what you think balanced means. From this SHP I'm gathering it means picking out two numbers and trying to square them up while ignoring the larger system.

I have already show and explained what the rule does. It puts in place a small amount of diminishing returns for raising armor, while increasing the survivability of medium armored targets.

You aren't talking about it here, you are talking about it elsewhere and pointing to elsewhere from here.

But I might as well point out here as anywhere that you don't actually understand the situation at all.


EDIT

There, I added it in the other thread instead.

That assumes the DV is homogenous, and it is always below the armor rating. Once you start varying the DV of the different shots things start looking very different under the RAW as the damage gets split out over the two tracks. If it isn't getting split out over two tracks but instead all Stun then the target likely has enough armor that they are taking very little actual damage anyways.

I would be happy to see said tank worry about being knocked unconcious before the level of violence was reached that made it basically unsurvivable by anyone that didn't have a like build. The old problem of the combat monster Troll getting everyone killed because the GM got tired of the Troll just waddling unscathed through the middle of every gun battle.