The situation:
2 characters (with similar Armor) against a group of thugs.

The results:
Character 1 was "lucky" and all the attacks against him had a damage <= to his armor. He quickly fell unconsciuos.
Caharcter 2 was "unlucky" and something like half of the attacks against him had a damage <= to his armor. He killed the goons ending badly stunned and badly injured.

Mmm... who was the true lucky one?

Any ideas on how to negate this "effect"?

Stimpatches, pain editors, etc. It is rather annoying though =/

The problem with the mechanics ideas I am coming up with is.....they all make armor too good (I think it is already over the top good).

One possible way of doing it is this:
Have Physical Damage also do stun damage.

You take 2 boxes of physical, you fill up your physical and stun monitors by 2.
if you already had 6 boxes of stun damage, now you're at 8/2

Stun's easier to get rid of than physical; Mooncrow said it.

Ah, sabs, the WOD solution. I feel like SR is deadly enough already, but go ahead and playtest at your table. Fun's the only real concern.

It's not terribly unrealistic. IF you're already bruised up and drained physically, you can withstand much less physical pain.

It's not even outside the realms of Shadowrun, as Stun can overflow into physical already. So there is a correlation between stun and physical damage.

I was thinking about something like this:
1) when you take physical damage, you take the same amount of stun damage
2) you apply only the worst modifier from the physical damage track / stun damage track
3) when your stun damage is greater than your maximum damage track, the extra damage is not converted in physical damage
4) you die (from shock) if your extra stun damage is greater than your Willpower + Body (beyond your normal maximum stun damage track)

I personally don't think this game mechanism needs fixing. First of all, considering the damage modifiers Character 2 must have had towards the end, I'd say he's dang lucky to have survived at all. Apart from that, Character 1 will have recovered after a good nights sleep, Character 2 will carry a good few filled boxes around with him for the rest of the scenario, even after treatment. So Char 1 was quicker to lose consciousness, I don't think that's unrealistic. Impact damage to the head or certain organs is indeed more likely to result in unconsciousness than most flesh wounds. Heck, you can lose whole limbs and you'll probably still be conscious, but one blow to the liver and you're down.


Stimpatches and pain editors prevent damage modifiers, but they don't prevent unconsciousness, which is the issue here.

Pain editors do prevent unconsciousness.

They are both a blessing and a curse for that reason. Its like like many people enjoy finishing a fight to discover their favorite arm and kidney are both missing.

Well, there's no reason they wouldn't be wearing bio-fabric underwear to be instantly informed of all injuries.

Ya, nano-bio comps or the like, but without such measures, you can quickly lose track of how bad a mess you are.

Allow people to voluntarily lower their armor before rolling resistance. That way they can drop it down below the amount of damage they expect to take, if they want to take physical damage.
Hey, if the shooter can make a called shot to ignore your armor, is it so unreasonable to say you can "take a called hit" to do the same?

That, or just say that that taking damage less than armor means you MAY take (some or all) of the damage on your stun track instead of the physical track- your choice where it goes. No reason it should be so binary (either all stun, or all physical).

The second option makes the pain editor a fair bit less useful, though its still the best way to deal with attacks that ALWAYS do stun damage (stunbolt, stick and shock, toxins).

Well, that should happen quite often, with or without pain editor. It always starts to hurt after you see the wound...

Yes, it's totally unreasonable to take a 'Called Hit' for the purpose of gaming Condition tracks. My personal favorite was the piece-meal armor suit that eject bits as your stun filled; madness.

Well, I (usually) hate to post negativity w/o offering much in the way of solution, but the real problem is having 2 tracks with one arbitrarily knocking you out. Let's face it, typically someone is KO'd due to increasingly severe damage that *doesn't* heal in a matter of hours.

I mean sure, you get clocked in the face and knocked down, and the rules cover that...wound penalties and a check to even get back on your feet.

I think SR would have been better served with a longer monitor track (maybe 8+1/2WP+1/2BODY), but a check for unconsciousness once a certain amount of damage is sustained. And further checks at certain intervals and/or when more trauma is inflicted. The SR system is woefully inadequate at allowing a severely wounded person to literally die on their feet. Oh yes, the cyber/magic out there have some niches to do it, but folks have been fighting till their dying breath since rock vs. club. On the other side, sometimes folks get taken out rather "easily" whether its cinematic or just reality.

In a game where you have around 9-11 hp, allocating damage to both tracks is a bad idea IMO. Since we're stuck with the system as is, a lot of armor has the curious effect of KOing someone with less armor taking damage to both tracks, but having more armor also reduces how many boxes you're taking in the 1st place. After that, all you have is fickle dice that create weird cases like the OP's, but that's something we've probably all seen happen in SR.

It is a step between being perfectly mobile with 1 hp left and a system where critical hits can randomly knock you out, do organ damage, or outright kill you instantly. Balancing reality and simplicity, I think it is a fairly good system. It also matches the degree to which SR conforms to reality. Some systems are more fantasy and some try to be a bit more realistic.

No more unreasonable than it is to have a karma pool. Shadowrun isn't strictly a simulation; its got elements that only work by rule-of-cool. Getting beaten / shot to hamburger inside your armor before you pass out (IE, filling as many boxes on both tracks as you can by "gaming" them) makes sense by rule of cool. It is, after all, a game...

IMO, one underlying problem with the Shadowrun combat system is that dealing damage is more granular while sustaining/tracking damage is very abstract and on occasion you will ecounter some oddities. Personally I'd like to see the two balanced a little more by making dealing damage a little more abstract and sustaining/tracking damage a little more granular, but I'm sure that I'm probably in the minority there.

I'm leaning toward playtesting Sabs way with the modification that the strun track is as long as the stun track plus the body track.
For silliness, I'm going to go with a physical track of 12 and a stun track of 10 with two characters, Lucky taking all stun damage, Unlucky alternating stun and regular to simulate the original post example with 4 damage per hit. (feel free to replace your own numbers)

Lucky
Physical (12)33
Stun (10)1111222233

Unlucky
Physical (12)2222444455
Stun (10)1111333355

Sabs method with stun increase.

Lucky
Physical (12)66
Stun (10/22)1111222233 3344445555 66

Unucky
Physical (12)2222444466 6666
Stun (10)1111222233 3344445555 66

It's interesting to realize that when the characters stun track is gone under the Sabs system, it can get brutal quickly, since an physical hit is essentially applied twice, once as physical and once as stun overflow. Shock is a killer under this system. Getting low on Stun and having a bunch of physical damage means one needs to run away or end this fight now.

Note that in the original run, Lucky is down quick, and I don't buy the "Character 1 will have recovered after a good nights sleep". Character 1 is completely helpless in with opposition standing. Waking up is no longer within his control. If he wakes up, it might be with fishes around his concrete boots wearing body.

In the changed scenario Lucky and unlucky have identical stun tracks, The difference is Lucky is unconscious with minor injuries and unlucky is leaving in a body bag.

Side effects:
1) Combat is likely to be a bit longer.
2) Stick and Shock faces a longer track while simply outright killing someone may be a lot quicker.
3) More Body now means you can take more Stun damage.

I won't be too bothered about side effect 3), but I dislike 1), and 2) is game breaking. Besides, I still don't see the necessity to house-rule this. Whether it's realistic or just cinematic (which is good enough for me), I've never seen a movie where someone fell unconscious from a gun shot wound (except one to the head, but that's more like the full physical Condition Monitor unconsciousness).


In the original run, Character 1 WILL recover after a good nights sleep, because Char 2 saved his ass. Of course, falling unconscious at the hands of an enemy isn't nice, but it certainly doesn't necessarily mean death, and let's face it, the group usually manages to pull any KO'ed PCs out.


Whoops. Maybe I should read rules before posting them.

Here's an idea: maybe physical damage should have stronger damage modifiers than stun damage to make it less attractive. Or damage is halved, rounded up, when physical damage becomes stun damage due to armour. In any case, I wouldn't mess around with damage mechanics too much, it has to be game breaking.

See, I just feel like munchkin-y numeric manipulation is *not* cool. YMMV, do what's fun for your table.

This presumes that following what is written in the rulebook results in some sort of platonic ideal of non-"munchkin-y" simulation of "reality". What I'm proposing is simply giving players a bit of narrative control over how damage affects them- namely, allowing them to actually suffer "worse" results than the rules would indicate, if they think it would benefit them. Both are numeric manipulations- after all, its a game, with numbers- so why not pick the one that gives results that work best for game play?

But What I don't like is that the Stun monitor is just 8+(willpower/2)
that means that the body 3 willpower 6 elf, can take more stun damage than the body 8 willpower 2 troll.

As for it getting brutal quickly.
I did a mock fight between a Gun Mage with ~17 dice to hit, vs my Troll Sam with an 8 body, and 18 points of armor and 28 some odd dice of soak.
Using Regular ammo, that Gun Mage knocks my Troll unconcious in 3-4 IP.
And that's if he doesn't split his dicepool and only does 2 short burts a round (one per gun)
Conversly my Troll Needs 3 IP's to kill him to kill him (and only if I use full auto wide bursts to negate his freaking 16 dice of reaction (20 some odd of dodge)

Care to share with the class how your gun-mage has 16 reaction?

I don't think that's the assumption I'm making. What I'm saying is there's not much fluff or 'cool' in letting someone (somehow) 'choose' to let a bullet avoid their armor, *for the purpose* of avoiding a numeric anomaly in the rules. It just screams metagaming; it's not a decision a character would make, but instead a player. They *shouldn't* have more control because "they think it would benefit them."

And removing the armor conversion effect?
The type of the attack would be fixed and determined by the attacker... (not exactly a "solution", but a mitigation of the "effect")

You could fiddle with armor a bit to make it more consistent in effect, but I've given myself headaches trying to find a balance in that.

Alternately I pondered the idea of not having stun damage roll into physical damage, perhaps not until the stun track is doubled in overflow, instead representing how much longer you remain unconscious, but it hasn't been playtested, so i have no idea if its even worth trying.