Hi guys. Im new to shadowrun and have been using 4.0 edition. Im looking to play the food fight adventure included in the quick start book. I have my head round the basics after reading the full rulebook, but am having trouble getting my head round the initiave phase and general combat machanics.

Do i have to ask my players to roll initiave every round?

As i understand it combat in shadowrun works using opposed test (rather than ac and other stat checks in d&d), but how do i fit weapons into this? And how do i calulate damage?

Are there any extra rules involved in mage or hacker combat? (Ie spells or a hacker trying to disable cybereyes or other cyberware)

In fact combat in general is a confusing minefeild, so any help on areas i have not covered would be a great help.

Any examples and explinations would be greatly appreciated.

And as my curiousity is peeked: what is dumpshock?

Initiative: Not every round. Every Combat Turn. keep in mind each player may be able to go more than once each combat turn - up to 4 times at higher power levels. (you can simplify this by buying hits if you must)

Combat: Combat has a few steps
ROLL TO HIT! Generally agility + skill + bonuses like smartlinks. Count the # of successes.
Defender rolls to NOT be hit! Typically this is just Reaction(only!) against guns(they are deadly for a reason), and reaction+Unarmed/dodge/weaponskill(choose one!) in melee. They MAY spend actions to go on full defense to get more dice. Each Success on the defense REDUCES the number of successes the ATTACKER gets. If there are 0 successes left, the attack has been dodged. if there is at least one, the attacker hits. The number of successes greatly matter, because they increase your damage. A well-aimed attack with 5 hits/successes will do +5 damage later!
Now you roll for Armor and to RESIST the damage. The BASIC damage is dependent on your gun(typically 4-6P) and ammo, in melee usually STRENGTH / 2 + Something(knifes are +1). Each hit on the attack raises the damage by one. The defender rolls Body+armor to resist physical damage, and if damage is not GREATER than their armor, then the physical damage is reduced to Stun (thick body armor keeps bullets from doing mortal damage), AND each success on the Resistance test reduces the damage you take by 1.
Keep in mind that there is both Impact and Ballistic armor and you have two different values for each.

Example: John shoots sally, rolls dice, gets 3 hits. He is using a light pistol for 4 physical damage. Sally rolls to defend, getting 1 hits. The net hits john has is 2(3-1), so his damage is 6(4+2). Unfortunately, sally is a big nasty troll in full body armor, and between her huge Body score and massive Ballistic armor, she rolls 6 successes, and take no damage even through she was hit. Maybe john should bring some armor piercing ammo next time!

Mage combat: Yes. Worry about that later
Matrix combat: Yes. Worry about that WAY later. The matrix is the most confusing ruleset of them all.

Damage is fairly simple : it the attacker scores more successes on his attack roll than the defender on his defense roll, each net sucess (attcker's successes minus defender's sucesses) add 1 to the damage. This will get you the attack's initial damage.

Then the defender tries to soak that damage (body+armor roll), every sucesses reduces the damage by one. Any unsoaked damage is then applied to the condition monitor.

Magical damage usually ignores armor, elemental damage spells are affected by it.

edited : corrected my mixing up between the odds (on average 3 dices to soak 1 damage) and the soaking rules

There's one thing about armor, though: if you deal less damage than Armor rating, the whole damage becomes Stun (normally) or isn't even counted (hardened armor: drones, vehicles, spirits vs. nonmagical damage).

With "less" meaning "equal or less".

Bye
Thanee

Shadowrun has Combat Turns, consisting of one or more Initiative Passes (IPs). Players roll Initiative at the beginning of each Combat Turn, if a character has more than one IP (via magic or implants) he keeps the Initiative Score for all his IPs in this turn.


Sure, those are covered in the magic and matrix chapters


If a hacker gets kicked from the matrix without having the time to properly log off, he takes damage and feels dizzy for a couple of minutes. Might for example happen to a hacker who has been detected while intruding a system and the system terminates his connection, or because someone simply pulls the plug while the hacker is online.

I keep a few crib sheets with me whenever I GM that summarize the major rules that get used the most at my table. The combat, magic, and matrix sheets are my own edits of someone else's sheets that was posted here a long time back.

SR Crib Sheets

Ummmm... What? Each Success reduces the damage by 1, not each 3 successes.

Yeah, he probably mixed that up with the average chance to get one hit for every 3 dice you roll.

Oh, and "successes" is a synonym for "hits", which is how they are called in 4th edition.

Bye
Thanee

Thanks for all your help guys.

I put this into play with the Food Fight 4.0 in the quick start guide and it went very well. We had a few hicups but we made it. There were only 2 players so I had to add the bounty hunter as an NPC.

Im not sure if I got the health right though.

http://www.shadowrun4.com/wp-content/uploa...art%20Rules.pdf - quick start rules.

The conditions monitors are the characters health yes?

And the hacker has 10 HPs before he is dying?

Im just unsure how well I interpreted it as when Stooby walked up to the hacker in one hit he was able to take 10HPs off. I realised I used I shouldnt have added the agility to the attackers rating and re-rolled, but the damage was still 7HP, leaving the hacker with only 3HP before he s dying.

Did I do that right?

Again thanks for all your help and the example given.

Well, you do not have "hit points" (even though you could probably see them as such). It's more like wound levels.

10-11 is a normal range for max. Doesn't get much higher than that (even super tough trolls have like 15).

There are some implants, which help mitigrate damage by removing the amount you take (i.e. Platelet Factories bioware), but not much.

And yes, the combat system is rather deadly. This is not high fantasy, where you hit someone ten times, and he is still going. One salvo from a submachine gun or an assault rifle rips through normal folk, just like it should be. Even well-armored toughguys won't laugh about full automatic fire from competent combatants (though they will shrug off pistol shots from more normal folk). Cover and Full Defense options are there for a reason.

Bye
Thanee

When someone shoots at you, though, you get to roll Reaction, and you subtract your hits from theirs. If they don't get more hits than you, it misses altogether. After they hit you, you then roll Body plus your armor rating (in other words, someone with Body of 4 and an armored jacket with8 points of ballistic armor would roll 12 dice), with each hit reducing the damage by 1 point. Did the hacker get to roll his Reaction (5 dice)? Did he get to roll his Body plus his armor vest's rating (4 + 6 = 10 dice)? It is a deadly game, so one-shot takedowns are possible, but people get a dodge roll, then a damage soaking roll.