You all have been a tremendous help so far. Here's another brainteaser for ya.

PC is in his apt doing whatever. Sitting down eating chow, for instance.

Another team is rappelling down the side of his building right outside his window and placing "window buster" charges on it.

1.) I have him roll a perception check to see if he hears anything (w/ a -2 modifier for him being distracted at the time).
2.) Assuming he does not hear anything (or even if he does), the enemy team outside blows the window in and simultaneously tosses in a tear gas grenade.
3.) Assuming he hasn't heard anything prior, he'll be surprised.
4.) Now what? He rolls what? And with what modifiers? Let's assume his weapons are close at hand, but his main goal is to grab them and run? Also, assuming the enemy merely wanted to take him down unconscious (but not kill), what would be the fastest weapon to use? Would they have free actions the first round due to him being surprised? What technical issues, if any, do you all see arising in this situation?

I just want to be prepared and make sure there's no rules I'm missing here.

Thanks

don't feel like looking it up myself, but the surprise test is reaction based iirc.

and as far as weapon for the people breaking in, i'd say you probably want to hack his commlink, switch him to cold VR, and hit him with grey/black IC. that's the only sure non-lethal weapon i know of.

a lot depends on the character here. But generaly, he is screwed.

first of all, tear gas,or CS gas, is a contact agent. holding your breath wont help.

if they want him alive, i advise gel or stick-n-shock ammo, narcojet darts, or tasers, and stun batons/shock hands. maybe a flying drone with such ammo?

if he is outnumbered, combat should be VERY short. acual result depends a lot on the character. expect him to complain about how you screwed and railroaded him. loudly.

In Shadowrun, victory is extremely biased towards the ambusher. In order for a character to escape a hit on their own apartment, especially if they aren't expecting it, it will require either some serious incompetance on the attacker's part, or extraordinary luck. An example might be a fumbled demo roll on the door/window charge where the attacker's lose half their forces to injuries, etc...

If whatever weapon the enemy uses is capable of harming the runner then if the multiple bad guys jumping through the window catch the runner by surprise than he is screwed. The classic movie way to handle this is to set up a situation where the bad guys think they're going to surprise the runner but instead themselves get surprised.

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"You're drinking your morning coffee, and look out your window. They finally got around to cleaning the building across the street. The cleaning drones did such a good job polishing its windowed exterior that you can almost make out your reflection. You can make out the reflection of several armed men rappeling down the side of your building toward your apartment."

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Yeah it's a free-bee, but if your sure this is the way you want the story plot to go then it may well be justified. Unless this is some sort of superhuman PC multiple guys busting through his apartment window and catching by surprise is no where near a fair fight. You've got the entire encounter hinging on a perception roll he probably won't make. Throw the runner a bone. Give him a lucky break.

As far as hacking a commlink and making somebody go cold VR that is only possable if the character in questions has a sim module in their commlink which only a hacker would.


If you want the dude to escape but want it to be a sloppy escape you should let him spot the ambush to atleast stop him from being suprised. Maybe a glint of light from the window or the trid unit he was listening to as he cooked food goes out.

It dumb for the pc not to have some type of security set up on his building. Thank god for neighbors. Maybe one of them seen these guys and decide to yank the fire alarm of the building or something.

As far as weaponry i would be going with smg's w/ gel rounds and pistals with narcojets. Maybe one or two mele guys with stun batons outside his apartment door. People dont just use tear gas. They use flashbangs primarily. Also its like 10x better to get a spirit to goto his apartment and sleep/gas/stun him.

What the heck did the pc do to get raided like this?? 1 guy vs a whole raiding party? That doesnt sound like there is any chance for the character to get away. Something like that should only happen if he committed murder against civi's or he decides to take stolen property back to his own house.

For some smaller infraction i would have the corps hire a gang to torch the apartment and try to kill the guy as he runs or send 2-4 operatives to his front door to ask for the items back with a failure to comply resulting in an ass whoopin.

If the 2-4 corp guys thing happens i would make them break some stuff in the apartment (and eat his breakfast) and most definately make the threat that if there are ever on the recieving end of said character again they know where he lives now. Making the guy move or set up security.

(i dont see much possable chance for him to escape from guys with repelling forces and such. Maybe smash through a wall into a neighbors apartment and then either smash out a window and repel down or make the elevator go all the way up and slip into the shaft as it passes and slide down and escape from a backdoor or something. Hmmm I might try to take out the guy in the window, attempt to shoot the people coming through the door as i jump out the window and use that repel guys own equipment to escape.)

If guys can just rappel up to the window of his apartment (i.e. he has not provided any of his own security) then he probably deserves whatever he gets. Even some hardwired cameras concealed around the neighborhood and monitored by an agent that looks for cops or other heavies moving around and then giving you a call will be somthing simple like this. A high lifestyle should include stuff like this already.

Of course, the SR4 rules set give all the advantages to the attacker, so really once someone knows where you are, you are basically screwed.

As for dice rolling.......

well suprise and ambushing is covered on sr4 pg155-157. I guess it goes like this.

Make a hidden perception test. If the character succeeds then he has been alerted to the fact something bad is about to go down somehow.

make a suprise test. Roll an intiative test(reaction+intuition) +3 if the victom succeeded in his perception test and +6 for the ambushers. Record Hits.

If the victom failed his perception test roll intitiative and only give +6 to the ambushers.

Now roll intiative again for the actual turn sequence. If the character passed his perception test then he can only attack or defend againt people who scored less hits than him during the suprise test. This is only in affect for the first initiative pass. if the character failed his perception test then he can only take non combat actions such as crapping himself and or diving for his guns. He can not attack or defend against anybody. This is only in affect for the first initiative pass.

On Initiative Pass 2 suprise is no longer relevant and combat can go as normal.

The book talks about how if the character fails his perception test and gets ambushed than he can make perception tests against the people who scored less hits than him in the suprise test but I dont know if i agree or if i understand it correctly. That would be like seeing the butt of a rifle right before it slams into your nose.

There are two situations in which I can see using this scenario. The first is where it is being used as an encounter. The second is where it is being used to move the plot forward. Here's how I'd handle each case.

In the first case, I would, as was done, give an Intuition + Perception roll. I would then have a Surprise roll for both parties, giving +3 to the NPCs and +3 to the PC if she noticed something; I would not use the rules for an ambush, since the NPCs do not know precisely where the PC is (they're staying out of sight). Combat rounds would then ensue.

In the second case, I would simply narrate what happens. As a player being moved into a plot by a GM's fiat, I find it frustrating to be allowed the false hope of being able to change the result of what is about to happen. On top of this, the extra rolls just delay the inevitable. I would probably allow the player to react somehow, and allow a certain amount of success based on the reaction's entertainment value (a short but witty monologue, or "I grab a pack of cigars and tuck them into my jacket before I get knocked out" would be successful, whereas an attempt to run out the door would end with an unconscious PC halfway across the apartment), but the end result would be more or less the same.

Jaid your talking about the average joe blow. Shadowrunners dont have time or probably the desire to watch trid shows and get special emotions from the internet. They clean guns, work, learn spells , build toys, practice their melee and other crap.

And what the hell kind of shadowrunner would link to something in his HOME lmao. Not one that wants to live very long.

My point is sim modules + commlinks are not 100%. Nobody knows to what extent its being used but if i had to guess i would say its probably only 50/50.

I know my runner would not risk turning into a chip head or open himself up to nasty things like cold/hot sim just for some extra bells and whistles while interacting with the matrix. If you want yours to, more power to ya.

One thing to consider is where the character lives. If he's in a cheapish apartment, or indeed most any apartment outside a penthouse or something, there's not going to be a team coming through his window at one time - only one person at a time could jump through the window. So they could blow the glass and gas the room, but then it'd take a little while for them to get the team inside - time the character can use to grab his jacket & guns on the way out and book it down the hall...

Or, if he's smart, he has a claymore mine set up under his window. They boom, they jump, they boom.

That's great for killing anyone attempting entry through the windows, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to be inside the apartment when 0.65kg of C-4 sandwhiched between a steel plate and 700 ball bearings goes off in there. If you're lucky you'll just be deafened, suffer minor injuries and still have 3 intact walls, a floor and a ceiling afterwards.

On the side note of sim modules, all of my players' characters have them.

Why?

We run in Europe, and while every character speaks 3-4 languages, it's always nice to have more. With the sim module, you can edit out that pesky foreign language and have the slotted linguasoft dub over their words - a good quality set will even reimage the speaker's mouth to match the translation. By subvocalizing through a microphone, the commlink speaker can produce the needed translation (if the other guy also has a commlink set for translating, then this step is unnecessary). Of course, some runners prefer to hear the actual words said by the other guy even if they don't understand them, and for these the commlink provides subtitles.

That's the point of a claymore. It only fires in ONE direction - specifically, up at the person who just climbed into the window.

yes, one direction, but you don't want to be near the backblast. It might not be a lot, but can you imagine sitting next to it when it goes off?

Eh, installing it in the flooring? Huh... I'd hate to be the upstairs or downstairs neighbors. But then again, as a shadowrunner, who cares about them?

Oh, read the ranges for the claymore. Dang, you'll easily hit the building across the street too if you have it aimed not from the ground. Heh, better make sure people across the street are people you don't like.

Claymores are scary, scary shit (which AE has done a pretty good job trying to convey). You'd be a lot better off putting your own homebrewed boobytrap on the window (something like SR "defensive" grenades) then trying to use a claymore for something like that.

If I was trying to get a player to survive this, I'd have the window blow in and some tear gas come in, but give him several seconds delay before the flashbangs come in behind it and the entry guy on the team (armed with a handgun full of Gel ammo) comes through the window. The people behind him are running SMGs with Gel ammo. That few seconds gives the player the time to grab (in theory) a couple of items/weapons, and go for his door. Outside the door, he'll probably be teared up some from the gas, but there's just a couple of guys covering his hallway. Use some Edge and some Full Dodge, that shouldn't be a problem. Stand and fight in the hallway, you're going to have the window entry team to deal with...

You know if you want to boobytrap the window, something like a M-80 (the firecracker) stuffed inside a Beer Bottle is probably closer to the scale you want then a claymore. Now you just need to figure out a trigger for it.

Hell no. If I'm a Shadowrunner, I'm a career criminal. I want the son of a bitch dead. Not just injured, not just hurting, dead dead. The kind of dead that's not a touch from the mage away from being alive. The kind of dead that not even a Great Dragon within arm's reach can bring you back from.

As for the guys above or below? I'll install impact armor under the mine and over it's projected blast area. And yeah, it won't be FUN to be in the blast radius, sure...

But it beats the holy hell out of having someone who just busted into your window shoowing you up with ex-ex or gel or stick'n'shock or whatever. Any maybe the guys behind him will think for a few combat rounds before they follow his footsteps - time for me to scoot.

A couple side notes:

1: Tear gas is not a contact poison. I know for a fact you have to breath it in. (When i was in the USMC i was on the company NBC team for 2 years and did the gas chamber every year i was in.)

2: If i remember correctly, about 1/3 of the claymore front blast ranch also went backwards in the form of a back blast. You won't have the ball bearings coming at you like the front side does but you will have a couple pounds of C-4 blasting at you though.



What kind of apartment is this? If it is a high rise then you can rule that the windows are in fact made of safety glass instead of regular glass. (While i'm no expert on high rise apartment buildings this would make sense to me.) If the windows were made of safety glass then it would take a little bit of time to get through.

Have the guys launch the gas grenades into the apartment through the windows and have them spend a round or two jumping on the windows to get through them. This should give the PC enough time to grab his gun and high tail it out before they come through.

Sucks when realistic repercussions invade your techno-fantasy RPG, doesn't it?

Much like anything in Shadowrun, if the cops/corps/government really wants you dead and they have the time to prepare then you're going to die in a 'realistic' game. Shadowrunners only live by keeping themselves below this level of attention.

Players that know and expect such things in a 'realistic' game will play accordingly but Gamemasters that don't enforce this evenly will end up with really upset players the first time they do have the big boys show just how big they really are. Make sure the tone of the game is clear between players and GMs from the start and stick to it.

BTW, the first in on the entry should likely be drones to map everything out for the HUDs provided by the entry teams' commlinks. These would also soak up most of the improvised explosives that some people think are a good idea without exposing any flesh to danger. If runners can use them, then the big boys can certainly do the same.

Good call on the drones, absolutely no reason that something like the Fly Spy wouldn't be the first thing in the window/door/hole in the wall etc.

Here's an amusing thought: How well to small flying drones handle bead curtains?

Probably about as well as airplanes handle invisible radio masts.

depends on model and firmware

My read on the situation would be that the "contact" vector means "in your eyes/mouth/whatever." I'd rule that you would be protected from the effects if you were wearing a gas mask.

I guess in a way i did say shadowrunners have no lives outside running but thats not what i meant. I just dont see how you can think that more than half of all shadworunners would feel the need to go full VR. You can still do alot of crap in the matrix with just normal AR, watch and listen to sims without putting yourself at risk.

I think your 6th world is to wired up and you dont think mine is wired up enough.

It's only in this edition of SR that I have begun to feel like the world is even approaching wired up enough...

AR is rather new and most runner's were living normal (or abnormal) lives before the crash. Most runner unless they are real technophobes will have used and continue to use VR to experience the Matrix. What's the point otherwise? AR might be great for walking around but not web surfing. I go so far as to say that unless you're an idiot, a Luddite or REALLY paranoid you have a sim module. There's just too much simsense content out there not to use one.