STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE! ^^

In cyberpunk, that dude is dead. D E A D.

That was my interpretation of the rules for CP2020 too...

- J.

I still don't get it. Is the way cyberpunk does it a good thing? What I mean is, in your scenario above, should the victim have a chance to live or not?

If what you are saying is that a good system, given your scenario, the poor victim should not have a chance to live, then what I am saying is why even bother rolling.

In shadowrun, that person will be taking at least 8 physical twice, without any worn armor to help soak up the damage. Sure if he's got bone lacing and orthoskin a helmet and he's a troll he'll live through it. If you did that to any of the 5 PCs in my game, non of them would live.

This makes sense to me. If in Cyberpunk that same troll would be D E A D then I think cyberpunk got it wrong.

I LOVE the fact that there's a word for that.

LOL, are you implying that such a system would be the FATAL of cyberpunk?

The problem here is that you're not describing an execution on a helpless target, you're describing a difficult shot at a squirming opponent. If the rolls don't come up, you may have got a head-graze instead of a direct hit. This happens in reality, where head shots aren't automatically lethal. By all means, give bonuses to the attack roll and damage value, but you're just describing a lucky dodge on the part of the target. Even in Palladium, there's a chance that the guy might survive a shot when he's still able to move. I'm not familiar with CP2020, but I suspect that the rules you cite only apply to a helpless target, which you didn't have.

I am not saying that he shouldn't have a chance, that is what the opposed roll is for. I am just saying that point blank shots in Shadowrun, especially point blank head shots should be more lethal. Besides that, 8 boxes of damage is nothing in shadow run. A 4+ body could survive that, add ANY cyber and it's easy. Add a non human and cyber and those head shots are no worse that a dart thrown by a child. A colt manhunter is a huge ass ox dropper. In shadowrun it only drops stuffed toy oxen. BTW, in my example. no where did I mention that target A had a helmet on, nor did I say he was a troll. In Cyberpunk, that same head shot to a person with skinweave, skull armour and a helmet would have gotten up and fed the handgun to Person D.

You add burst fire to SMG's and any other weapon that can burst, and damage is very respectable. handguns that are semiauto don't even kill regular non combat trained people, not even head shots.

That's all for me guys. This thread has outlived it's purpose. I have a game to write. Players did some good stuff, and no good deed goes unpunished in Shadowrun

Average trained dude:
3 stat, 3 skill

Other dude: helpless, no defense roll. I don't see why we can't use the "Defender Unaware of Attack" rules, since one of the options is "attacker is behind him." Seems like it would apply to "not being able to respond."

Predator/Manhunter: 5P base

+1 for laser sight
+1 for aiming (half skill max, round down)
+2 for point blank shot
-4 for called shot for damage: +4 damage (9P)

Now, since we are going "realism:"
Hollow Points: +1 damage

Still at a dice pool of 6, so average of 2 hits.

12P.
Average dude has 3 body, no armor.
11P.

Sounds pretty dead to me. Still takes a bit to bleed out, but if you want insta-kill, double tap him. Or roll better; you're only getting average successes, after all. Hell, use Edge for style; maybe the GM will give it back to you because you weren't munchining, you were using the Edge for RP purposes.

We are German, it's what we do ^^

My take

1. Most bullets wounds are not instantly lethal including in the head.

2. Called shot gives options determined by the GM and player in collaboration. See part 4 where other effects besides damage may apply. I think death falls into this range. I would allow bypass of armor and in this case +4DV. Even light pistols start with 8DV.

2. There are optional rules in agumentation to deal with critical wounds. Page 121. This rules give several options.
Heavy Damage
Any time a character takes a large amount of damage at one
time (7 or more boxes of either Physical or Stun damage from a
single attack), the character makes an immediate Edge (1) Test. If
the test fails, something is seriously wrong with the character and
will not heal without medical or magical assistance. (Alternately,
damage of this sort may be automatic with any wound that inflicts
7+ boxes at once).

3. Large PC such as trolls may have thick enough skulls to still keep moving. I talked to several people who saw an Alligator get shot by a .38 and the bullet didn't even go far enough into its skull. They popped the bullet out with a knife. This was only a 7 or 8 foot gator. The same may happen with a troll.

4. A player can use edge to survive. This shouldn't mean the player has to reroll his character, but it also doesn't mean that he instantly jumps up and runs away. There should be a balance where the player is removed from the game temporarily until he fully recovers.

I've started to study German longsword through a local ARMA group. The vocabulary is a big part of the fun.

Yes. Although 4th is much better in many ways, the separation of damage into power and lethality opened up a lot of depth and it's one of the things I mourned when we lost it.

That aside, I've been looking at the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space game (Hey, I grew up in Britain. Of course I watch Doctor Who). It's a really quick and simple system and you know what? It's combat-damage rules are more realistic than Shadowrun. You roll to hit and the target rolls to dodge. If you win you hit and if you hit, you do the appropriate amount of damage for your weapon, possibly scaled by the degree of success. If there's a particular place that is natural to be hit, then that's where you hit. Otherwise, roll on the chart for a hit location. Damage comes directly off an appropriate attribute which could be Strength for a torso shot, but perhaps Co-ordination or Awareness for a blow to the head. You reduce damage by the amount of armour. So if you're wearing a leather jacket and you get hit in the back, you can take a point off the damage (leather jackets aren't great armour). But unless you're wearing the jacket on your head for some reason (you bannana!), then it's not going to help you there. Even this brief description makes it sound more complicated than it is given that the combat rules are entirely the same system as everything else in the game. The point is that running that system, although it seems rules light, it actually gives more believable outcomes than Shadowrun without invoking GM fiat. If you get hit in the leg with a baseball bat and you're wearing a chainmail shirt, then the chainmail shirt doesn't help you and the damage affects one of the leg-based attributes, not your awareness for example. In Shadowrun, the chainmail shirt would protect your shins when they're struck and the resulting damage would affect your ability to speak French (for example). And it does all that with thirty times as many rules. The response to this from some would be that the Doctor Who game achieves this by relying on vagueness and GM whims. But my point is that it actually doesn't. It covers situations, it just does so in a very efficient manner. This isn't a criticism of the Shadowrun 4th rules. They are simply different and have different consequences. For example, it's fairly impossible to really build up your character in Doctor Who on the grounds that neither a couch potato nor an elite soldier are going to find any difference when it comes to bluffing a cyberman army into invading the wrong dimension. Still, it's worth considering seeing as the subject of this thread is games that get it "dead on". Doctor Who does without invoking GM fiat or whims.