A friend and I played a few rounds of combat last night to get a feel for the game. Some of our thoughts:

- It's a whole lot easier to damage someone one. The automatic damage based on one net hit in the opposed test really hurts.

- Related to this, characters get knocked around like tenpins. The characters had body 3 and 4 and I think 90% of the damage we took was over the character's body attribute

- What's with the roll to stand up? I had a Sammy spend 3 simple actions just trying to get up (with a -2 wound penalty) after being knocked down!

- The automatic extra initiative passes are very powerful. My friend had converted a character from SR3 that didn't have any Wired Reflexes and I used the sample Street Sammie. He had reaction enhancers so he went first generally whereas I got 3 actions per turn. It was like I outnumbered him 3 to 1. I'd just go full defence for his attack and then counterattack when he didn't have Initiative Passes left.

- I'm not sure I like the change for Burst Fire to a simple action. my Sammy had 6 burst fire shots per turn. Combined with the high automatic damage, this was very dangerous.

- I really liked the penalty for defending multiple times after your Action Phase. It became a problem for his one action spur weilder to try and defend against my 3 action Katana guy.

- The list of Defence mods isn't with the list of attacking mods. We didn't find these until after our first sample fight. There should have been at least a reference to point you at the other table. As it is, you need to flip to two pages to get all the mods you need. File this under 'What were they thinking'

- Also from 'What were they thinking'; the index isn't the last pages in the book. It makes it a real pain to get to the index compared to normal books where it is the last page.

- Also from 'What were they thinking'; Why is the character creation summary in the book twice? (end of the book and end of the character creation section)

- After a frustrating time being out actioned by my wired sammy, he was wondering how you compete with/counter wired reflexes. My opinion is that teamwork can help, but one one one, you'd be toast.

- We found that the rolling was simple and easy to follow. We both play WW games, so Att+Skill vs. fixed TN works for us.

For the most part, combat worked pretty well. It is a whole lot more dangerous than the last game so it becomes more important to stealth your way in and bug out if it all goes south. I found that in SR3 a properly prepared team could shoot it out and walk away mostly unscathed, whereas a bad roll now will hurt a lot.

Chris

Did you take into account the armor rules? Whereas if the modified DV (after AP) doesn't exceed the armor rating it does stun damage?

As for the attack and defense mods being in different places, it wouldn't be a problem if the GM screen were out.

Wait till magic comes into play. We had our first session with the bad guy's slinging spells at us. Unless you are a mage and can counterspell, you''re pretty much toast. KK 4.1 (with a 4 body Attribute) took 9 boxes from a single Power 5 powerball spell *Yeowch!* Thankfully someone in the team was pretty good at first aid.

There is no threshold rating to replace the SR3 variable target number for combat spells. It is only a simple opposed test with the number of damage boxes dealt equal to Net Hits + Spell power. Basically a mage will always have the upper hand over a mundane or adept.

It should be well seen that mages are going to rule to new edition with no force limitation and no magic attribute cap like every one else. A mage can raise magic to 10 and logic and intuition to 9 cast a force 20 powerball and maybe need a spirit, foci or edge point to make drain. All he need is the sparsely limited adept for a bodyguard. Balanced and fair aye.

...bear in mind how much KARMA that's going to take to get, dang it! Take some perspective into things...

for one thing, you can't rase the mental stats into the augment maximum WITHOUT augmenting. THat means you can't train it, you gotta spell it or modify it. Unless you stock up on the right gear, that's very hard to do. And of course, a smart GM isn'g going to put you against chump bait all the time if you got that much power.

Sometimes, there has to be someone severely twinked in the world, that's how you make movie stars, heros, and legends.

what going to take a force 20 plus net hits

Geek the mage first will be even more important it seems.

Even a starting mage can trow a force 9 stun bolt with 11+ dice (5 magic + 6 spell casting). He only needs 1 net success to put most targets down for the count. He then resists 3P drain with 10 dice (and probably shrugging it off).

Off course a pistol adept can shoot you down with his EX loaded warhawk, throwing 20? dice and are just as dead at 8P AP2.

Still, the hacker can make sure that they are both wanted for a variety of fun crimes with a little legwork and editing in some databases.

He wont even need a gun.

Back to the first post ^^.

Have you ever thought of the fact that a Reflex-Boosted Char is supposed to be wicked fast? Hell in all the Books, Flavour texts,... were a reflex booster is described from the view of the user its more or less like this:

- Booster kicks in.
- World stops moving.

And of course you could create an UBER MUNCHKIN TOON, but thats possible in every system, and exactly for that reason there is a GM who has the last say ^^

I did get to use supressive fire last session. Rating: A+ , Cost: high (200¥ for ExEx). Survivable but reason enough to dive into cover, a reason to fire more than single shots to the head. Nicely done!

Quotes from original post:

After the sammie has finished the ganger there’s the repeating sounds of “Ka-Klik” as a dozen rounds are chambered and someone yells “What the frag did you just do to one of ours wireboy.”

Rule number one – No ganger fights alone
Rule number two - If they are alone it means it’s an ambush.

Rule number three: No Streetsam worth that title will enter the turf of an overly aggressive gang without some sort of 'heavyfullautomaticequalizerforsuperiornumbersthroughcoverfire'.

Rule number four: No Streetsam worth that title will attack the turf of a not overly aggressive gang without some sort of 'heavyfullautomaticequalizerforsuperiornumbersthroughcoverfire'.

Well, I´d say the gang had better be the offender.

"If you are ambushed, your survival depends on the inablitity of the attacker" ...The art of war

Well, you are only ambushed, if you don´t recognize the ambush attampt beforehand .

Kyoto, it sounds more like the problem isn't in the magic system, but in your GM building twinked out NPCs.

Magic 5? Five net hits (implying an average of 10 Spellcasting dice)? Troll? Sustaining focus? These are things that cost a lot of build points.

Oh, entirely possible for a starting PC right out of chargen, but we're talking an NPC here. Your GM effectively built a tankmage for you to fight; that's the real problem.

I could just as well build a tricked-out sniper with only 300 BPs and be even more untouchable and deadly. That doesn't mean there's a problem with the gun system.

second that. They were supposed to be Gangers

But I consider magic a bit overpowered, too. In my game its a bit more costly to be awakened. I´d allso considder higher drain if it still seams to tough for me in actual play (haven´t played SR4 that much yet, no magic battle ocured)

Sounds like your GM was really pulling out the stops against you. Five hits on a magic roll is pretty high unless he was loaded down with foci or using edge. I guess the question is, why were you running up against mages without one of your own? A mage on the team gives you at least a few dice of counterspelling support.

Thats right. Imagin having a team without a Hacker encountering an enemy group with matrix support and you probably would have a simmilar balancing problem.

I agree the gm may have caused the problem but the example does not talk about overcasting and area effects making mage even deadlier

Kyoto Kid, remember (and remind your GM too) that vision penalties affect spell casting, so if you have full cover, that mage is at -6 dice to blow you away. If they are looking through optics, thats -3 (or -2 can't remember exactly). I think its been stated many times before, but in an sr4 combat, go for cover.

Thanks for the support.

Lagomorph:

Basically KK was firing from the open sunroof in the team's car. After she shot she was not able to duck back in before the Troll let loose with his spell. Supposedly she had only partial cover (she is also only 4' 10" tall).

Azralon:

According to the GM, these were starting PCs of his own that he worked up (we all take turns GMing in our group). Now whether he tanked them out or not I am not sure, but yes I was pretty floored when KK had to resist so many hits (I think the Troll also may have thrown Edge in for all the adversaries we met were using it). Also a gang with at least two full blown runner mages as members did seem a bit much, though I guess it's possible.

Tinker Gnome:

Yes, we did have one player mage, but when he and I mentioned about providing counterspelling dice for her, we were told it had to be declared in advance (which I found out afterwards is stated in the Magic section) even though we were all still feeling out the rules. Not the way I would like to lose such a cool character, kinda like an NFL player suffering a career ending injury in a pre-season game.

So, yeah, I'll admit that things were a bit heavy handed. In looking down the road though, when the really big bad NPC mages show up in a regular campaign, I feel KK and most her mundane teammates will not have much of a prayer.

Too bad Leela is permanently retired. She knows how to make and use an FAE.

"try to dodge that one mage boy, heeheehee"
--Leela G.

I don't really have any trouble with it being easy for a gunshot to knock you down and it taking you a second or two to stand back up afterward. It makes the troll who doesn't go down all the more impressive.

given that there are no hit locations in SR i dont see the problem. its not like we are talking hollywood style 3 meter knockback, right?

basicly its a matter of pain response and so on. to much pain and you body may well drop like a sack of something unstable