I'm looking for some good alternative rule ideas for lifting, as I am unhappy with the current ones.

Example by the book:
15 kg per str point, Strength and Body test hits add to that.

So a human with 6 strength, 6 body would at most lift 90 kg/200 lbs with no test, and at max, if all all his dice were hits on his test lift 270 kg/600 lbs. Not likely, but I am just throwing out the max end of things.

It just isn't enough, when you look up the current records are all in the 900 to 1000 lbs range for lifting.

I know I didn't break down all the different forms of lifting (overhead and whatnot) but the issues I have scale with them.

When I try and take the simple approach and adjust the lifting rules by dividing 1000 lbs by 6 (to represent the max unmodded human strength) it dosen't scale well in the low ends of strength....

Any ideas? Or existing house rules you guys already use?

http://www.knasser.me.uk/shadowrun/crunchy.html

Click the link 'Knasser's House Rules' for nice lifting rules. Rest of the website is worth checking out too, especially the racial diagram and the scale demonstrations of what a Street Samurai is capable of.

Heh, forgot to mention I had been there already

Knassers cool little diagram is what got me on this topic. I started to make my own for my current character, a troll with 13 strength, and, even using his rules it stops a good deal short of the current max for humans.

I hesitate to suggest it, but you haven't mistaken Kg for Llbs, have you? The rules I provided were:
30kg per point of strength overhead, plus 5kg per successs on Bod+Str
55kg per point of strenght straight lift, plus 10kg per success on Bod+Str

With a troll of 13 strength that's a base lift of 390kg or about 860lbs. Current Olympic world record for Clean and Jerk (an overhead lift, more or less) is much less at 263.5kg (580lbs). (The record is held by a very large Iranian, incidentally).

To put those figures in more visual terms, the troll can lift a Harley Davidson Fatboy over his head (whilst an average human rider is sitting on it). And that's without even trying. If we say that troll has Strength 8 (so that I can get a nice 1/3 average of seven hits), that brings the troll up to a terrifying 425kg or nearly 940lbs on an average roll. An edge roll would give an average of 455kg (over 1300lbs). I'd say the troll is very easily capable of picking up a very fat human and throwing them at you.

Does this resolve things, or is my maths still off?

Glad you like the site, though. I really need to re-do that "What Would Samurai Do" diagram with trolls sometime.

As it was said, so shall it be done.

The record for the 800lb and 1000lb lifting were done on work benches with well balanced weights and safety and all that. I would give huge circumstantial modifiers for warming up, then carefully maxing your weight out just once in a single power lift (Bench Press or squat or whatever, never do they pick the weight up off the ground)

The lifting done in SR is the bend over and pick up the back of the car kine, or snatch up a big ol'jagged chunk of rock, or grapple some guy who is 40% steel up into the air so you can get at the good fleashy parts to feast on. Nothing so cut and dry as squatting a balanced weight like the human records stand at. Just give professional weightlifters all kinda of circumstantial bonuses for good equipment/co-operative environment.


Does that help at all?

That's a really, really good point. I hadn't considered that.

I think Squinky has probably mistaken my figures for imperial rather than metric, however. My first aim in my house rules was to eliminate the absurd swing in results from attempt to attempt (people do not find they bench 100lbs on one rep and 160lbs on the next), but I did my best to get it as close as possible to real world figures. You're only going to get real super accuracy with a reference chart, rather than a formula due to the non-linear nature of the Attribute scales. (Someone with Strength 6 should not be a mere three times stronger than someone with Strength 2 or else we lose all connection to the real world).

Incidentally, because I like my motorbike example, I went to the trouble of finding a picture to really illustrate it. The Strength 13 troll has absolutely no problem whatsoever holding these two over his head and in all probability walking over to you and dropping them on you. That should be enough to keep any troll player happy in terms of showing off their strength.

Yikes! I got so into my number crunching I misread your stuff Knasser

That seems more doable, as long as I can throw fat people I am happy

Well that's what the Missile Mastery and Power Throw powers were created for. I think the visual image of a fat-person throwing troll is worth a thread all by itself. But remember, though a troll does it best, with Levitate to remove friction and gravity, anyone can join in the fun.

Hmm, I kinda agree with ScreaminDemon. The RAW rules for lifting are way too low, but maybe yours are a little too high (a Strength 2 character can lift 60Kg over his head without even a test? (I don't think I can lift my 40Kg CRT like this and I'm not utterly weak)

Maybe something like:
15kg per point of strength overhead, plus 5kg per success on Bod+Str
30kg per point of strength straight lift, plus 10kg per success on Bod+Str

I'm pretty much thinking out loud there, someone has reliable data to use as reference?

Well I'm strongly of the opinion that 2 is the average human attribute. 65Kg lifted overhead? It may be a little high, but no simple formula based system is going to be perfect because the scale is not linear. Your numbers now mean that the Strength 6, Body 5 individual (what I'd peg an Olympic weight lifter at) can lift 105 kg in a typical attempt. The current Olympic record is well over 200kg, however. You've pushed a small discrepancy at one end, into a large discrepancy at the other end, I'm afraid. What I basically did with mine was say the numbers at the bottom end are reasonably close and I'll assume that if people are being shot at they might perform better than they would normally, so I'll go with that.

Really, go with whatever works for you. The important thing is to avoid the ridiculous swings in outcome that the RAW system provides you.

Ho, you're right. I was too focused on the lower end of the spectrum...
I guess I'll keep your numbers, at least it allow for some Hollywood action (troll tossing small vehicles is always fun)

Something else to keep in mind is that the worlds record for the clean and jerk was 150kg in 1919. It went up around 1kg/year until the early 1950s. After that it went really crazy. Even if we consider 150kg to come from a str5 guy with little (1) training, and the modern record to be from a str7 skill7 guy, that's a 113kg difference in 8 dice. Certainly edge could muddy the waters, but I submit that 5kg/hit is way too low.

My source /edit

Thinking more about this, even if we assume some kind of undetectable drugs to push him past normal human maximum, that's only 3 more dice. 11dice * 5kg/hit =/= 113kg. /edit2

Bah! Plus 3 * however much you assign per strength point. Which could make 5 kg/hit ok again. /edit3rd and final

Linear lifting gets bullshit really fast. The difference between what a low end person can lift (25 kg) and what a high end person can lift (300 kg) is 12 times. The difference between what they can lift and what an elephant can lift (3000 kg) is another 10 times. Strength is a really exponential function, and handling it in any linear way makes unarmed combat get stupid fast. Elephants totally destroy stuff, but they can't do the 30 damage that a linear scale of lifting would necessarily assign them.

If you just let people lift half again as much every time you increase strength by 1, then you can lift 11 times as much at Stregth 7 as at Strength 1. And yes, that makes super-human Strength able to lift very large things. It's super human, it's supposed to lift very large things.

-Frank

I like this way of doing it

So, if I understand correctly, the chart would look something like this:

Lifting w/out test

1. 25 kg/55 lbs
2.38 kg/ 84 lbs
3. 56 kg/ 123 lbs (I can picture this, as I believe I would personally be in this range)
4. 84 kg/185 lbs
5. 126 kg/277 lbs
6. 190 kg/ 419 lbs
7. 285 kg/628 lbs (If you stop and think that this guy is the peak unmodded human, and assume he has a body 6 along with his strength of 7, 13 dice to roll and up it, with an average of 4 hits it is still only 850 lbs lifted. Close enough for me though.)

It starts getting pretty high from here, but then again it is in the metahuman/cyber/magic realm, and it should be in my mind.

I don't get it.
Where are those numbers coming from?

It is based off of my understanding of Franks ideas. I am simply starting out at the normal 25 kg for strength one and multiplying it by 1.5 instead of one, and then repeating. Not sure if that is exactly what he meant but it seems close to what he said.