A couple of things have prompted me to consider just what those augmented attributes actually mean in real world terms. One was watching Banlieue 13 recently, which got me thinking about muscle augmentation and the other was flipping beer mats in the pub and seeing how many times I could make them spin before catching them. Wired reflexes would make a big difference to this, I thought.

So I doodled out the consequences of a not overpowered samurai character to see what he could do. Preliminary results are here, images are to scale with 1.5m tall Samurai:
[IMG]http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/4402/wwsd1mr.th.png[/IMG]
This is based on average roll results without edge. Edge could obviously make a big difference as could other factors like higher rated cyberware, different metatypes or hydraulic jack craziness, etc.

Depending on interest, I'll knock up some more interesting and / or detailed examples, later.

Other things I thought of were (with Wired Reflexes or Increased Reaction), the knife trick from Aliens, catching flies with bare hands or between fingers, one-handed handstands.

I'm sure there are a lot more things that an augmented character could do and I'm really looking for ideas from other people to provide some colour and reality to the game world. Str 7 is more than just an extra hit on a melee damage roll. It's awesome and should show up in endless amusing ways in normal life.

Any ideas, please?

Well, the problem a lot of cyberpunk style games have is how unaugmented guys are just more meat for the grinder. If the cyborg killer can catch bullets and so on, what's a poor meatbag to do? The contrast between Togusa and the rest of section nine is a pretty good one, of course his background seems to be different from everyone else in section Nine as well.

The idea with most cyberpunk is that unless you have been rebuilt to catch bullets you try to avoid doing so. Section 9 was a organization incorporating many specialties, Togusa was not the only meat bag, although I have forgotten the names of the others the sniper, the dedicated hacker and the chief spring to mind as others that wouldn’t last a moment in the kind of combat section 9 operations tend to involve, but then they don’t try.

In SR4 I have found there are non cyber ways to survive combat, high power spells cast buy bound spirits is presently my favorite, you don’t even need to be a powerful magic to manage it

Edward

Interesting. It's not something I'd put much thought into. To an extent it depends on how you want to depict 'ware. Having a lot of high power 'ware is, in my SR world view at least, uncommon. The surgery is usually quite extensive and expensive. Thinking in modern day terms of plastic surgery, someone who's had a lot has either been in some horrific accident (burn victims) or has a serious body image problem (Michael Jackson or Lola Ferrari or The Bride of Wildenstein).

The point I'm trying to make is that a tricked out Street Sam is far from the norm, so their capabilities should still seem beyond the bounds of possibility. While everyone and their dog might have a datajack or similar (much as today there are quite a lot of people with nose jobs or even breast implants), they still might think twice about having wired reflexes or muscle replacement, even if that allowed them to do the knife trick from Aliens or lift up 4 people at once or leap buildings in a single bound. Some peoples view of this sort of cyberwear is obviously quite different in light of one explanation for his cyber that I received from one player. His Wired Reflexes 2 and Muscle Replacement 2 were a gift from his wealthy uncle for his 21st birthday!

How common that extent of body modification is will alter how the general public perceive street sams capabilities. In a world where the average essence is around 2 leaping a 20' gap or lifting a motorbike over your head will be small beer. In a world where the average essence is around 5 (such as mine) that sort of thing will appear in the trids mostly, and Sams who augment their bodies are regarded as people with serious problems.

Of course in a low essence world it makes more sense for Star officers to have extensive 'ware, where in a high essence world they rely on combat drugs.

My efforts to get people to contribute ideas as to what can be done with augmented abilities are not going well.

I'm sorry, I thought you were asking what the public perceived augmented abilities were capable of...

One example of the capabilities of street sams from my game is an unarmed character taking a gun from a thug that was threatening him, shooting and killing both the thug and his buddy before either could use their drawn weapons to shoot him. (Wired Reflexes 2, Muscle Augmentation and Muscle Toner 3, Cyber Eyes with, among other things, Smartlink, Alumninium Bone Lacing and Enhanced Articulation). OK... the character did have a friend with him who distracted the second armed assailant during that NPCs combat turn by punching him.

What I'm getting at is that augmented abilities are really quite impressive and we (those not in the actual setting) may need to think through the consequences of them in more detail to get a feel for just what they mean. A lot of our intuition about what is possible (like jumping 20' between buildings, hurdling cars and hoisting four people in the air) is now wrong.

Two more examples I have come up with:

With SR4 falling rules, our standard Sammie can fall up to 6m (20') and expect to suffer no damage on average. That's being thrown out of a first floor window which is nonchalently laughed off as insignificant. And on average rolls a 10m fall is only going to result in light physical damage (-1). Realistically, if a character is deliberately jumping rather than falling, I'd certainly reduce the effective drop. Our augmented character should not consider it a big deal to leap from a 2nd floor window. (That's a British 2nd floor, btw., so 3rd to americans).

Ignoring dodge and hit rolls, i.e. a base strike with no staging either way, standard Sammie can, even when naked, be whacked by the average joe with a cricket bat or other club and take no damage. Even should the Sammie just stand there and let the other guy hit him (the Kung Fu movie villain approach), then normally he will take only very light damage. Imagine standing there and daring someone to wind up and hit you with a baseball bat. Would you? Sammie can.

I'm really warming to this. If a player bears in mind the full implications of their boosted stats then it makes the game more interesting and the setting more realistic, I feel.

That illustration is great! Considering these are 'average' augmented numbers I'd be interested to see even more number-crunched examples. Metric values are hard for me to imagine so sometimes I underestimate what 6m looks like.

I added in those falling statistics so you can see exactly what falling 11m looks like and damage taken at various stages:
[img=http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/2250/wwsd8gu.th.png]

Mostly for my own interest, I did a size comparison chart of the different metatypes:
[img=http://img157.imageshack.us/img157/589/metatypes3fc.th.png]

I've sort of done some more comparisons for number-crunched characters, mainly based on different metatypes. I'll post those when I'm done, though. Still hoping for some suggestions from others here to bring home the reality of augmented characters.

-K.

Seeing exactly how much damage the augmented can do with just their fists would be interesting. How much force would it take to kill a person with a single blow?

Well, you can tie people up with steel bars, no locks they can pick to get out of them. I Enjoy Bending Steel!

Here's an handy list of olympic records even the 'average sam' with stats of 7 and a 4 in the athletics group should be able to get close to any of them.

So: Running long jump ~ 9 meters, lift over head ~260kg, 100 meters in ~10- seconds, 1500 meters in ~3 minutes and 30 seconds, 20 km in ~ 1 hour, 20 minutes. If the sam has even better stats (9s instead of sevens) he'll probably be able to do these records while wearing a reasonable amount of gear, as opposed to just shorts and shoes.

This is actually pretty helpful stuff to know. I've been working on making sams a little more interesting in my game, and it had never occurred to me to figure out "bizarre shit they can do" like leaping from building to building. Or, say, from one car to another on the highway, or out of a tree into the middle of the players, or from any kind of distance (say, across a street) onto a character hiding behind a car.

Just wait until they bring back martial-arts maneuvers like jumpkicks. I'm going to reassemble the 'borg combat styles

With gymnastics 4 and reaction 7, for 3-4 hits you'll dodge semi auto fire from an average joe (3 stat, 3 skill = 2 hits). You could do that all day and not get tired, though eventually you would get hit.

As an interesting aside on the running, the 40 yard dash they do at NFL scouting combines is about 36.5 Meters. Some of the fastest Recievers and Corners in the NFL do the 40 in around 4.3 seconds, meaning that in the SR combat turn they would be roughly 6.6 meters behind the Samurai.


EDIT:Of course you might want to take those NFL Times with a sizable grain of NaCl
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20..._1s18forty.html

Ben Johnson only makes 25 meters in 3 Seconds.

Gecko gloves don't work so hot in 2070 Seattle... it rains all the time

If you've got a high enough DV with something like spurs or handblades, climbing up the outside of a structure should become pretty easy (since you're not trying to destroy the barrier, just "shoot through" it). Say goodbye to big concrete walls being an effective stopper!

With the combination of 'ware pushing your Body (to let you wear heavier armor), your natural armor (to up your total armor value) and having a decent willpower, possibly something like a platelet factory, and a pain editor or pain resistance, a lot of sams can flat-out ignore the first few hits they take in a gunfight... the damage isn't significant enough to slow them down. But take this even further... hit them with a car, have them use themselves as a shield for another player (wrap him in your arms and turn your back to the incoming fire), have explosives toss them into things, and they just stand back up.

Thrown weapons can become pretty bizarre. I recall a comic I read at one point, where cyborgs used what were essentially depleted Uranium ball bearings as weapons, because they could get them up to a high enough speed that they could go through the armor other 'borgs were wearing. While that might be stretching believability a bit, a high-stat/skill sammie should be able to pull off some pretty amazing knife or shuriken throws... incredibly long ranges, devastating impacts. Not enough for you? Well, that sammie can pick up a motorcycle, right? How about dropping it on someone? How about tearing off a car door, and then throwing it? Punch a building, knock a bunch of bricks loose, and then throw them fifty-plus meters.

Get a sammie with a little bit of rigging ability, give him a sensor network, and he can become the ultimate urban hunter. With a few microdrones like the fly-spy slipped into the rooms around him, crawling through ducts, and things like blimps monitoring the outside of a building, he doesn't need to see his targets to engage them. Guy in the next room over? Put your fist through the sheetrock and drag him back through the wall towards you. People approaching from the front of the building? Get into the kitchen, get the fridge between you and them, stick your smartgun around the corner, and use the smartgun's +2 and the +3 for good AR information to counteract the -6 for blind fire... chew them to pieces through a couple of walls, when they don't even know you're there. Stalk someone with your drones, keep him marked on your AR, and simply leap across rooftops and streets to keep up... your signature is much lower than than a dedicated rigger hanging out in his sedan.

Get some air filters, some eye covers, and a few of the other anti-toxin implants, and all of a sudden you're wading through tear gas, pepper punch, nerve toxins, and puddles of toxic ooze without batting an eye. An urban warrior in the cyberpunk era could move into a superfund site or a plating factory and simply shoot up the environment to generate cover for himself... most people would want hazmat gear to follow him into the fume-ridden, horribly toxic environment he was leaving in his wake.

Trying to flee in your car? If he picks up the front end, your front tires don't have any traction, and you ain't going anywhere without 4-wheel drive. Managed to get going? Sammies (especially when the Kid Stealth legs or the cyberskates come back) might be able to keep up for a while, and they're a hell of a lot more maneuverable in traffic. Watching a sedan drive around traffic, up onto the sidewalk, and generally swerve all over while a sam leaps from cartop to cartop firing at them with his gyrostabilized cybersubmachinegun is probably not entirely unheard of in SR.

Gotta grab something out of liquid nitrogen while under fire, and you don't have any tools handy? When the sammie disables his cyberarm's sensors, forms it into a crook, and reaches right into that liquid N2, it might screw his cyberarm up for good, but if he's elite the run could be worth it.

And you know another thing sams are good for? When you've got to carry a few hundred pounds of gear up ninety flights of stairs, cyberlegs don't get tired.