Okay, I have been running SR in many forms for about 12 years now. For about 8 months I have been running SR4, and thoroughly enjoying it. However some of my players have old characters and still want to play them, so I converted the chars and sorted out what karma they now had and such like.

I gulped at the sniper who has 24 dice with his guns, and pleasently surprised at the fact that the mage was even with five years extra karma about where she used to be.

So last night we sat down and gave them ago...

The run was simple, snatch a potentially infectious target from and MCT cyber clinic in San Fran, and deliver him to a contact who could diagnose what MCT was testing on him. This was through moderate security. Red sam equiv guards, with lesser guys down stairs, and sentry guns. Nothing looney, this is still a hospital. This is the set up for a proper challenge btw.

Okay I won't go blow by blow, but they pulled off the job fine. However I did notice one thing... Most of the group where hurt 5+ boxes coming out. Previoulsy it was always a case of unconscious or unhurt. The sec guards did better than expected, some even survived the mages mana ball (damn good spell defence). The group won with out much problem, but had to work some for it. This was a group that flattened the Norns of Winternight last time I ran SR3.

It seems that the caps bring the little guys closer, but the big guys are still damn good. I approve heartily, I shall be running more for the team in future, and will try to report any highend oddities I found. Any questions on specifics I will try to answer.

How had the sec guys be secured? Was their a mage around with counterspelling?

Okay I've just finished the second session of high level madness and had the team with leas than normal equipment doing an extraction of an arms dealer for an SK bounty. I built the guy some orc body guard. I gave them a solid budget and built for toughness. GOOD god they each required 2 shots from the sniper's proper sniper rifle! I think the weirdness is mostly that low end damage is more effective and the high end has been bought down a bit. I threw a four man team of 700-900 karma characters against four guards(tough comparable to ghosts but a lot more ware) and four spirits (force 6) and I challenged then. In the old days these guys took on all comers and never broke into a sweat. This is to my a good thing, no need to through ever more rediculous "this guy is harder than you" NPCs, i can challenge the team with solid well prepped mooks.

Please note I run status quo encounters rather than tailored, they face what should be on the site rather than something to challenge them, I'm just seeing what challenges them.

Sounds good to me. I also like to run a campaign like that. Prepwork and will save your ass, whie walking in guns blazing will get you squished. All is as it should be.

Admittedly I kave run for groups who could just walk in there all guns blazing, I'll be interested to see how they still function under the new rules.

Speaking from a players point of view ( I Play the sniper..)
It's really nice to actually be able to play said character again, as it had got to the point of silliness to be able to challenge them in SR3.

It's taking a little bit of settling in, as I had played him for so long in SR3, that i knew that if I hit someone with x amount of successes, then they were going down, and hard with one shot. In SR4 it's all different, what with the armor adding to their soak roll, etc etc.

But it's still good

Yeah, called shots have always been scary as hell (in almost every game). There's not much rules-based reasoning for anyone with the dice to spare to not spend 4 of them +4 DV.

That's four dice less that you roll to see if you hit at all. But if you are pretty sure you will hit, even without those four dice, then you are essentially exchanging four dice for four automatic successes.

On average, that's only a loss of 1.33 successes, which will likely round down to 1. If 1 success is going to make the difference between hitting and missing, then it might not be worth it-- in other words, when things are relatively equal on both sides. But if things are more than slightly in your favor, then you should go ahead.

on average, you want more dice in your to-hit pool than your target has modified reaction. its fairly easy to get reaction up to 9 from multiple implants. i could see an adept getting 12. up to 6 more dice from dodge.

the smart thing to do, is for your first IP, declare a dodge while you dive for hard cover. a lot of enemies only get that one pass to shoot at you. after that, return fire on passes 2 and 3.

the more shots fired at you in one round, the fewer dice you get to dodge.

that +4 DV is a must for hard targets, especialy drones, barriers, and anything magic. but you need more accuracy when trying to hit someone fast, like an adept or sam.

I use the called shot rule to do more damage, as when I use his main gun (pistol grip walther with some bits salvaged from those cyber-rifles from Tir Na Nog) I am using APDS, and thus the AP for that gun is -8.

So I rarely use the called shot to avoid armor rule.

And if the situation calls for it, i can off-set the lost dice for aiming for 4 dice

I've yet to be in a 4E combat (out of three total, so keep my limited experience in mind) that didn't have multiple passes on both sides. The first was a mundane vs. a spirit. The second was the runners vs. some gangers (hopped up on some drugs). The last was against security details. I don't know if their passes were from drugs or from more permanent resources like 'ware.

Also, edge can be spent to buy another pass. I haven't seen that rule put into play yet, although I have personally spent edge to go first on at least one occasion.

I did a test fight back last year before I started running, runners in shoot out with cops. The cops only had 1 IP and the the multiple actions guys, handed the cops their toasted arses on a plate. As ever in SR he who acts most wins.

What were the opposing sides like? If the cops were average beat cops and the runners were even slightly built towards being good in combat they should have greased the opposition in a heart beat.

But keep in mind that even your average beat cop may have some ___ on him. I don't remember which one it is (Cram?), but Lone Star uses a combat drug that gives an extra initiative pass. Those combat drugs are cheap as hell and can easily level the playing field as far as IP counts go, although the guy that took them may find himself in a world of pain when they wear off.

Jazz.

Yes combat built runners won

The team was (if I remember) all SR4 pregenned

Combat Mage
Street Samurai
Weapon specialist
Gun fu adept

against about 6 cops as per NPCs section one was a morer experinced type (ie liuetenant)

I'd like to see the results of that same group versus a SWAT/threat response kinda build cop group. At a certain point, unless the cannon fodder has ambush advantage and just flat out unloads with barrages of automatic fire, they're going to be like the cops vs. Trinity kinda stuff. In this case, the cops may have had numerical advantage, but as a unit their threat level was much under the combat-team's capabilities.

As an aside, I think the challenge in higher end games, comes not from the 'faceless' NPCs, even the ones with decent challenge ratings, but the NPCs that are sorta a consequence of the runners actions up until that point. A higher end char has likely had an interesting career until that point, so they've accumulated their share of enemies. Some of the older source material had examples of such, great reads, basic along these lines:

Your team cracks security like opening a refrig, you make Red Samurai cry like little babies, Lone Star gets back in their cars when they see you coming. You've managed to survive the ire of megacorps, thinking they've got nothing new to show you, until now. When they hire a shadowrun, against you.

Or they piss people off enough so they end up like Matador, sniped in the head from afar.

A wierd thing sorta happens to me as (through 3rd ed of SR) I played chars that had actually had the playtime to accumulate 150+ karma. As a char, and a little out of game thinking on my part, I started worrying not as much on the 'oh great we've gotten ambushed by gangers again' kinda stuff, but 'oh crap I hope <x> doesn't show up while we're mopping up these gangers' or 'I wonder if these gangers are just fodder so we burn ammo and energy until <x> shows up". Wonderful paranoia

Oh yeah the way to hurt a highend team is to throw well built runners at them. I'm currently building up to a face off against some serious MCT mages with solid back up from guards, and an ass load of spiritsand drones. I'll be interested to see how the group face that lot and how they choose to engage. Then the next stage is to see how they do when someone else chooses terms of engagement. The cops thing was NOT with the high end characters please note that was a base char thing to get us used to the combat system. When one of my players is back from Uni fro the summer (about six weeks) I will see what the highend matrix/rigged stuff does, with a player who is devious and sneaky with it.

I pass Jazz out to security forces and beat cops like candy. Gangers tend to prefer Cram. But the point is, if you're not wired, you're in a world of hurt the moment you go up against someone who is, and everyone in the SR world knows this. They've all seen the movies, with the samurai or the jacked-up razorboy shredding his way through 10-15 people, and they don't want to go down that way. There's that part of you that thinks "this is a drug, it's kind of dangerous, I might get addicted to it if I take it a lot" and there's the part that thinks "if I don't have some kind of an edge on whoever's on the fourth floor by the time I get up there, they're gonna kill me."

Dead and clean is a lot worse off than alive and kinda twitchy.

Yeah pretty much how I do in my lower end games, if possible the security will be on drugs or slightly wired. In the high end where pretty much the entire party has 4 IPs from a variety of sources, it just don't hack it...
Depending on players I may have another session tomorrow, and see how it goes.

Remember, home ground is an awesome quality for NPCs .

Home ground is nice for players too...Although I have yet to be able to use said quality, as the ref is cruel..

Another trick is mixing it up a little - throw in one or two guys who are more nearly equal to the runners. It's like the old Warhammer trick of putting out a gigantic monster or war machine. The players focus all of their effort on the main threat, while your goons stick the knife in from a flank.

Nothing like watching a 10 man Space Marine tactical squad go up against a platoon of Imperial Guardsmen. That can always be a tossup, but both players are usually happy if they manage to squeak out of that one in one somewhat intact piece.