Okay, last night I was running a session, and my newest two players (a brother-sister team of hacker-riggers) were out driving around... and due to the ashfall from the eruption of Mount Ranier, I had them roll a pilot test. They critically gliched, so I ruled they slid out and crashed.

We'll come back to that story in a second.

The ramming rules make decent sense (page 160), overall. If you have a Suzuki Mirage (body 6, max speed 150) and a GMC Stepvan (body 16, max speed 90), the ramming makes sense.

If the Bulldog rams the bike at speed 90, the Bulldog takes 16 DV, the bike 32 DV. This is sensible. If the bike rams the GMC at the same speed, the bike takes 6 DV, the GMC takes 12 DV.

Now, the passengers of the vehicles take that damage as well, which is the problem I have with these rules. The rammed vehicle's passengers take the same damage as the vehicle (damage and passengers, page 162). So the GMC ramming the bike kills the rider, that's not outside the boundaries of belief. If the bike rams the Bulldog, the passengers probably won't die, as they do get the armor of the bulldog to help resist the damage (the rider on the bike only got 2 armor to help reduce 32 DV, not enough to make a difference).

Here's where I need some help. I can't quite wrap my head around the rule of crashing, on page 162. In this case, you treat the crashing vehicle as if it rammed itself. In the first example, my runners were going at speed 30 in the bulldog van. And when they crashed, they had to resist 16 DV with body+half-impact+vehicle armor. But they're resisting SIXTEEN DV for that crash.

The suzuki rider, on the other hand, could crash going 90 and then only face 12 DV, resisted with body+half-impact+armor. In that case, it's feasible the biker could get 3 or so hits and survive.

So why is it more dangerous to crash in a BIGGER vehicle? If the GMC driver and the Suziki driver crash at the exact same speed (speed 30), the biker takes 6 DV and the gmc driver takes 16 DV!

Tell me I missed something, here.

time to hit the search?

im sure this have come up before...

edit:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=11873

Y'know, I did search for a variety of terms, and came up with nothing. I bow to your superior search-fu.

Time for me to upgrade that browse program, I guess.

That thread had a lot of ideas, and I think the answer was there, the runners IN the vehicle take the damage the vehicle takes, so if the vehicle is hit with 16 DV but only TAKES 8 DV, then the runners resist the damage the vehicle takes, 8 DV.

That's right.

your own body? A totally arbitrary eyeballed DV similar to fall damage?

With the RAW, the latest craze in Seattle is driving a Dodge scoot at max speed straight into a wall.

(Speed 60, damage taken is vehicle body, which is 4 boxes. So anyone can survive said impact. If my math is right 60 meters every 3 seconds, so 1,200 meters a minute, so 72,000 meters an hour, that's 72kmh, so that's almost 45 miles an hour. A person with body one can do it roughly twice and crawl away. WeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenBAM!)

This replaces the older edition craze about playing with/swallowing/juggling live grenades.

Meh, that doesn't bug me that much. It's a scooter, and it's really not going that fast. I'm not sure I need people dying from scooter collisions.

Actually I think the best example of a Shadowrun craze was jumping off a 3 story building, brushing yourself off and doing it again. The falling damage rules in SR1 were so whacked out that a BOD 1 human could do it all day and never die except on a fluke. Trolls could practically drop out of airplanes without parachutes without taking damage.

Alright first off you could argue in RAW that characters don't take any damage in a crash as much as you can argue full ramming damage. The reason is the rules on types of things that can damage passengers don't include crashing. In this interpritation crashing is a seperate thing that simply reuses the ramming table.

Based on what happens the GM then assigns damage to the players as they would for any damaging situation where the rules don't give an actual damage code.

If the players are wearing seatbelts or some kind of harness (especially if airbags are involved) and the vehicle is not destroyed in the crash there should be no damage as shadowrun tracks it. Since people tend to walk away from stuff like that. Just apply the disoriented effect, and tell them they're sore in the morning.

If restraints aren't involved or people are thrown free(typical for a motorcycle) I would use falling damage.

If I did my math right shadowrun falling damage converts from distance to meters per turn to be

damage=1/300*(Vperturn)^2 if you round g to 10 m/s^2 and liniarize at 20 meter falls or higher.

if the vehicle is destroyed I would throw any overflow damage the vehicle suffered onto the passengers because now the vehicle is crumpling up on them.

In Rigger3, seatbelts reduced the damage done to the participant by 6?

I think though it would be probably more interesting to say that wearing a seat belt reduces the damage from P to S, so that they'd almost be guaranteed to live. Since the damage track of S+P is about double from what would be just the physical track alone.

Actually yeah while the above stuff just uses SR4 logic and frees things up for the GM. When dealing with vehicles (pretty much in any way) just going back to 3rd ed may be your best bet.

The crash rules in 4th edition kinda make sense, a large vehicle with lots of mass hitting something is going to cause greater damage than a smaller object at the same speed.

The RAW on crashing says 'as if the vehicle rammed itself', which leads to the Dodge Scoot scenario above. And if someone lost control on a scooter at 45 mph, I could easily see 4 boxes of damage (road rash, etc) being somewhat realistic damage.

Once advanced vehicle options come out, then your crashcage rules (+6 dice for resist tests, etc) will come into play. And since the Bulldog (used in my earliest example) will have more CF or capacity or what-have-you than the Suzuki Mirage, then large vehicles taking more damage from crashes will be balanced by their ability to provide more passenger protection.

Now I wonder what I would use if a vehicle slammed into say, a building. Use the structure rating, or the armor rating? If our scooter driving thrillseeker really did run into a glass window, then you'd probably use the body of the vehicle as the DV. But if Suicidal Steve decides to bodytag the local Stuffershack (structural material, armor rating 12, structural rating 11) the measly 4DV the scooter would normally take in a crash isn't reasonable but an 11DV result makes more sense... he just drove into a fragging BUILDING at 45 MPH. Result: one totalled scooter, one very injured (if not dead) driver. The GMC ramming the building has a higher body (sixteen) and more armor (eight), so there's a chance the building would lose (if the GMC rammed it, trying to cause a hole) or the GMC would take some damage (if the GMC crashed into it).

On the face of it, the rules seem a little awkward, but now they're not only making sense, they seem pretty realistic. Now if they only listed the modifier to a barrier's armor rating versus vehicles.