So, SR4 has rules for encumbrance...but there are no weights listed for any of the equipment. And while some things, like a few hundred bullets, could probably be extrapolated from something or other, I've got no idea how I would go about speculating on the weight of a Panther cannon. And speaking of the Panther Cannon, it says it's got all this recoil, but there's no listing for it. And it's got 1 point of recoil compensation, on a SS mode gun that doesn't, by the letter of the rules, need it at all.

So unless it's intentional that an anorexic dwarf can carry a bazooka on his back while firing a Panther cannon, I think we're due for some errata.

I think it is more a case of "use common sense".

So what would you consider to be a "common sense" recoil for a Panther XXL cannon? And really, if we're just going to leave the rules to common sense, why print rulebooks?

I think he means leave encumbrance to common sense -- IIRC, that's even the official party line as to why they left weights out (that, and their weights were so ridiculous in previous editions maybe they were just tired of us bitching).

And as for recoil, well, fluff ain't rules. If the rules say it's got recoil, it's got recoil. If the rules don't, it don't. It's not too complicated, don't overthink it.

The thing is, encumbrance rules are useless without weights. The rules actually *require* weights in order to be used. They're written as if you have access to weights. And frankly, not every situation is purely common sense. If I've got a guy with fair to low strength, and he's always carrying around a bunch of small stuff, how much small stuff is too much? And really, how much does a small drone weigh? We don't even know exactly what they're made of. Steel? Iron? Graphite? Some kind of weird polymer?

Actually the SR4 rules explicitly state that you only need to worry about weights if someone tries carrying a huge load of stuff at once. The only type of encumberance that isn't mostly left to gm discretion is for armour if I recall properly.

Most of the time, the description how they carry it around will keep this in sane levels.

Yeah -- when you see a character with a gigantic list of doo-dads and knick-knacks he wants to carry with him everywhere, just ask him where he's got it. Cargo pants pockets? A man-purse? A schoolbag?

Get a reasonable answer from 'em, and game on. Or, don't get a reasonable answer, trim the fat a little bit, work it out, and then game on. There's no reason to clutter up the equipment charts with another column, just for this (especially not given how insane their listed weights were, in previous editions, making it a column everyone ignored anyways).

the metahuman body has a weight. so your troll is more limited when using two dwarves ad clubs than he is swinging a couple iron girders.

the problem with common sense, is most people dont have any. when carrying heavy objects, the quistion is not pure weight so much as bulk of the item, leverage, and how long you can hold onto something a certain way. if you get a heavy weight in a plastic bag, the real limit is how the bag is going to dig into your fingers if you try to carry it by the handles.

if you have a way to carry your gear properly, it wont seem as heavy over the short-term. carrying a lot of weight in backpack and tactical harness for any length of time becomes more of an endurance question than a strength one.

one of the more interesting encumberance systems i remember (rolemaster? Merp?) has a rule where you counted only a small % of weight worn (armor), and a reduced amount for weight in a backpack or similar.

So, fine. We'll all pretend I just got a freelance gig to write an encumbrance rule for SR4. Everyone ready? Here's the official word from on high: if you have common sense, use it when determining encumbrance for your characters. If you don't have common sense, go on living your worthless life wallowing in ignorance and joyous liberation from the gravity-based shackles holding back lesser men from carrying everything and a kitchen sink around.

There. Problem solved.

Thing is, I don't WANT to use "common sense". I'm really not sure how strong strength 1 is, in terms of what a person can carry without taking penalties.

Common sense is all very well and good when you're talking about how awkward it would be to carry stuff around, but can a strength 1 character carry an armour vest, commlink, and an SMG without taking penalties?

Strength is such a bad stat already, it needs these rules to be worth a damn.

In the equipment section, it tells you how to define how much a person can carry based on their strength.

That aside, common sense means jack shit if you've never carried or fired a gun before. I can't name a single person in my group who's ever carried an assault rifle. While the Houserules Edition of SR does allow for a lot of leeway, this is one area where it only creates problems, as common sense tells us to not use movies as a base for our rulings, but we only have movies for any sort of experience to rely on.

And, finally, how many of you have fired a portable tank cannon in real life? I haven't. I have no clue what would be anywhere near appropriate. Would it be like that of a rifle? Or would it shatter the upper half of your body on the first shot? Well?

So since uncompensated recoil from one hand affects the other hands shooting, does that mean that if a Panther AC has 1 point of recoil compensation that you can dual wield them with ambidexterity for no penalty?

I dunno, go see if "assault cannon" is on the list of weapons that can be dual wielded.

Which doesn't work out if you have a smartassed player who mounted the weapon on a tripod and is dual-wielding them without carrying them. Especially if they smartlinked the cannons.

Edit: To be honest, the way it looks, this is yet another item where to make it functional, you have to houserule it. Now, while I don't mind it, at times it does get annoying to have to go in and complete what the developpers didn't. That's not why I bought the game.

I think the developers took a look at a big stack of To Dos.

Cyberwear. Magic. Adepts. Weapons. Essence. Skills. On and on and on.

And they looked at one stack that said "Figure out the weights for everything in the book."

And John Q. Dev said "Hey, Bob, do you use encumberance rules?" "Huh? Encumberance? No way. I just do what makes sense." "Huh. What about weird stuff?" "Eh, I work it out on the fly." "Huh. Hey, Sue, do you use encumberance rules?" "Eh, I tried to. But it was a pain." "Huh. Hey, Willie the poolboy, do you use encumberance rules?" "I do." "How do you weight things like an MCT Steel Lynx?" "Well, first I downloaded 14 schematics of modern day robots. Then I extrapoloated the weights based on chemical and physical changes over technology. I adjusted based on this grid, which plots awkwardness versus arm length. Here, let me just print out the 38 page guide to robot weights for you..." "Um, no, that's okay."

And John took that last stack, and dropped it in the trash, and said "Let's make some more ways to put holes in people."

Rock on John. Rock on.

Exactly. I don't think this is as big a deal as some people are trying to make it. If you wanna dislike SR4, fine, dislike SR4. But dislike it for the big reasons, don't go wasting your time scraping up new petty shit to hate it for.

I'm of the opinion that weight isn't a big deal for most situations.

The biggest thing is just to be consistent.

If your troll can lug around a drone with no problem on Tuesday, don't make the same drone unluggable on Saturday.

You can always just fall back on the biggest GM tool available. When in doubt, make shit up.

Just be sure to write the stuff down as you make it up, so your consistent next time your players want to do the same thing.

James: I think this thread is precisely why they didn't add weights.

The fact that no one here can reasonably agree on the weight of a single object means that it would be almost a futile effort.

That being said, someone out there has to be an engineering wonk with too much time on their hands, and have a burning desire to create a website dedicated to reasonable weights for everything you could ever want to carry, eh?

It is pretty strange to include encumberance rules and not give sample weights for various object classes. Some stuff I can guess at, but I'd hate to make a mistake like telling my group a missile weighs 5kg if it weighs more like 20.

People in this thread don't need to agree on weights if they're in the book.

Ah, now we've reached the italicized cursing stage? I was wondering when you'd go there. LOL

Perhaps you missed above where some people like to have complete rules rather than just partial ones? you obviously have nothing to add to a discussion about the numeric weights of objects because you prefer a more seat of your pants approach. That's cool. Nobody is attacking your way of gaming, so why do you feel the need to attack others?

Why do you feel the need to curse and complain when people don't agree with you? Are you that insecure? Why is it you can't understand that not everybody plays like you do, and that it's not a bad thing?

Generally behavior like this is linked to an inferiority complex, which is often accompanied by a superiority complex to compensate. Without some frank and personal discussions that's obviously far from a diagnosis. More of a "here's a possibility" then a "here's what's happening."

If you'd like some counseling on this I can probably suggest a few good folks. Although I may not know anyone in your area I can check through the grapevine and probably turn up a couple of respected names.

I haven't followed this entire thread, nor do I really want to go back and read a lot about gear weights and such, but seriously, the devs are never going to be able to pre-determine every last thing that a GM might have a question about or might not be inclined to improvise on. Even if we had the time to consider all of the possibilities during development (which, hell, we never do), you'd end up with a roleplaying book that read like a calculus textbook. And then chances are the players wouldn't read half of that stuff and would just post on these boards asking anyway.

Sometimes you just have to improvise. There is a lot of that in GMing. Believe it or not, there are still people who consider SR4 "too crunchy" and not free-form enough. You really can't win.

Demonseed Elite: a column of weights is not a calculus textbook. Those weights appeared in previous editions and would have been easy enough to transfer into 4th. As a dev, can you tell us what the rationale was behind giving encumbrance rules but not actually giving encumbrance rules?

Is there a chance that Arsenal may have a unified gear listing in the back like it's predecessors did, and that the listing could have weights on it?

There's rules for how many km the vehicles can travel in an hour, but they don't tell you how many km it is from Downtown Seattle to the Redmond Barrens either.

Given the other places in the rules that they've dropped requirements for detailed bookkeepping (i.e.: the "assume infinite storage capacity and unlimited bandwith except when dealing with enormous amounts of data" rule), combined with the fact that never in the history of any edition of SR have the weights on the table ever resembled reality, it's easy to see why they decided to leave the question of weight to the indivdual GM's research, for those rare times some caracter might try to decide to carry everything with them while attempting their covert criminal activity.

Honest truth is, I never calculated encumbrance even when there was weight listed for gears.

I'm not even bothering to look at at STR X 10 kg mechanic. It's non-sense anyway ; An average person can't really lug around 66 pounds of unevenly distributed gear with no effect on their agility!

As far as I'm concerned, PC can carry pretty much any armor (it has its own encumbrance mechanic), a main weapon, one or two side arm and a few utility gear.

And who carries more than that?

Special case, I improvise.

The thing is that while many items can be estimated, many can't. See the examples above. Heck, you can't even estimate the weight of SR versions of lots of modern items because of materials differences. In those cases the GM has to pluck something out of the air.

Guesstimating is made even harder by using measurements that are unfamiliar (metrics). Even assuming I know offhand how much a scooter weighs and I'm willing to accept that weight for a doberman, I now have to dig out my old math books and find the conversion formula for pounds and ounces to kilograms.

You're also missing the point. It isn't "guessing weights is impossible." Even the most farfetched items made from the most futuristic substances can have a weight pulled out of the GM's butt. It's "why should we have to guess weights when the rules clearly call for them and previous editions have had them?"

My group rotates GMs. The more hard and fast rules we have the better off we are. With nebulous encumbrance rules strange things can happen because GMs have differing ideas of what strange objects (like drones) should weigh.

So how often does it come up, really? Seriously. When was the last time a player said "Man, I wonder if I can carry two, or three, Steel Lynxes, and my scuba gear? And my trodes. And this slap patch. And my smart-sunglasses. And this stick of gum."

Honestly? Is it such an issue another set of poorly-thought-out "official" weights needs to be in the book, taking up space, causing a smaller type to be necessary, cluttering the tables up, and irritating us with it's laughable values?

If you feel it's all that necessary, why not just go in on your book, and scribble in some estimates, then pretend they were there when you bought it? You've got the weights you want, the rest of us don't have to worry about it, the devs don't have to waste time coming up with arbitrary numbers, everyone's happy.

Great. Now Shadowrun needs a fuckton of dice AND a metric-capable scale.

Yeah. I wonder how long it'll take for this thread to reach the ten-page mark without actually accomplishing anything.