Hi Folks,

Following the release of Street Magic one of my players has now created an adept character with both Killing Hands and Elemental Strike (in his case electricity damage SR4 P154).

We are having difficulty establishing the correct process for defending against this attack.

Assuming his opponent has some unarmed skill, there is a legitimate opportunity to block or dodge.

Should the attack hit home, there is the question of what happens with the two types of damage inflicted (physical from the Killing hands followed by the electrical damage from the elemental effect).

At the risk of waffling I will try to suggest an example;

Marc attacks Steven with his KH+EE, he has unarmed combat 5 (specialised in martial arts for +2) and an agility of 5.
Steven decides to block the attack with his unarmed combat 4 (specialised in martial arts for +2) and an agility of 5.

Marc scores 5 hits
Steven scores 3 hits

Steven fails to block the attack.

Does Steven have to resist the physical damage first resisting with body and armour rating and then go on to resist the electrical effect with his body and willpower plus half his armour value - or is the whole attack that Marc has produced reduced to a shock glove style 'touch' attack which would give him a further +2 to hit?

Any help welcomed...

.M.

Elemental strike replace the killing hands damage code.

Elemental Strike modifies Killing Hands by adding elemental effects, it does not add or modify damage.

In other words, Steven resists Mark's (STR/2)+2P (the +2 being from the net hits) using body and half impact armor and suffers electricity secondary effects (electronics damaged, ect.)

Hate to necro a thread, but I'd love some extra clarification here in the case of the Blast effect. Blast effect is defined as adding {force_of_spell} to the damage for purposes of defining knock down. In the case of a physical adept power, what replaces {force_of_spell}? This question holds for other adept powers that utilize a spell-like effect as well.

Is it Magic rating? If so, that seems somewhat excessive! You get a fairly typical (for a PC) phys. ad. with a MR of 6, assume they're doing 7P with Killing Hands activated, and it's considered as 13 damage for the purposes of knockdown? That means pretty much everyone you run into is going to drop like a bowling pin, Trolls included.


Or maybe I'm missing some ruling in Street Magic somewhere that tells you how to convert spell-like effect ratings into phys. adept numbers?

...Is it really? You're hitting a guy with a hurricane wind that's as powerful as the base damage code of a Remington 990. The 7P alone will threaten to knock down most elves and humans even if that number is from before their chance to stage it down. I mean, yes, it's a really good power, but to really get full use out of it, you need to have made a heavy investment in raw melee power to begin with, and even then you're mostly just gaining the ability to knock down big guys in addition to other characters. I'd say in this case the melee adept has paid his points and earned his perk. It's an easy way to knock people down, sure, but so is a taser or a full burst with gel rounds, and you can use those from a distance without blowing a full point of magic.

That is pretty much the point of Blast. If it weren't effective it wouldn't be worth the investment.

Fair enough, it just wasn't entirely clear to me exactly what the conversion from spell-effect force to phys ad "force" was. Is that the generally-accepted conversion? Spell-effect Force = Phys Ad. Magic Rating?

not to add more crap to the elemental hands debate, but the 1/2 armor thing that seems generally accepted wigs me a bit. penetrating strike add1 ap and costs .25 magic per point max 3. elemental strike give 1/2 ap and has additional effects for .5 magic. yeah it has to be activated instead of always being on but it doe snot seem balanced to me.

in the interests of full disclosure i am Boomtown in counterveils game. a lowly street sam surrounded by physical adpets and mages. okay we have a combat medic too but he wears lederhosen so he does not count.

This is a good question. I would not say Magic Rating, instead I would use the DV. Yes, I know its double dipping. Yes, I know it would favor high strength.

But, I honestly don't know what we are supposed to use. F U Q it perhaps?

also heck it could be worse it could be electricity or something with an even nastier side effect, so it probably isn't too bad. Main reason I'd avoid it is, I think it gets to be a pain to adjudicate knockdowns etc every time some dude attacks. then again 99.99% of the time this guy will just kill them with the first strike so knockdown is sort of a needless after effect. But hey so does my street sam at least after my cyberarm.

oh hai guize

The Elem. Strike specific applicability to our game might become moot since I'm having the phys. ad. remove it (he had it applied to his weapon, my bad hearing didn't catch him warning me that it was unarmed only, bah I suck, etc.)

However: Yeah, I'm still not entirely clear on how to convert spell force into "adept force", so perhaps I will throw it to the F U Q.

Actually, I agree with you completely. It says that it enhances killing hands with an elemental effect. It does not turn the killing hands into elemental damage, so the halving of impact armor would NOT apply. You get the secondary effect (increased knockdown, glare, setting someone clothing on fire, etc.), which is plenty for 0.50 points.

By the way, for purposes of determining the effect's effective "Force", I agree with the posters who think it should be the Magic rating. That makes the most sense in the absence of an official clarification.

Well, technically, you already have to figure out if an attack causes knockdown, in this case the attacker just gets a bonus.

As a side note I wouldn't call going first every time + highest raw damage potential in game (with the right equipment) "lowly", but hey that's me












_{also doesn't help that i have a hankering for technology over magic ssssssssssssshhhhhhhh}

Yep, quite true and it has been my failing not to enforce this. I quite like the rule too as it mimics being "stunned" to some effect, forcing the knock-down-ee to spend some portion of their IP getting up.

I have actually been surprised by this. We haven't had many full mage types around much until recently and he is playing the occult investigator archetype so as of now no AoE spells. With everyone having the same initiative passes under your house rules i expected to fall behind more. With a combat mage I think I would fall behind but so far I'm hanging in there. Weirdly enough I think your no bioware yet since its 2050 rule helped a lot. I only spent a little bit on resources so i had tons left for edge and skills. And edge is just awesome.

That isn't quite true. A multi-initiate troll unarmed combat adept has the highest raw damage potential in the game. With the right powers at sufficiently high levels he can punch tanks to death. And that's just for a single attack. If you start considering maximum damage per combat turn, the Pokemage exceeds him by far. The maximum spirit stable is 16+1, assuming that you're using a max CHA SURGEd elf and a bold magician can potentially have all 17 attack at once. Of course, the Drone Rigger exceeds this greatly; if you permit comlink chaining and command scripting, there is really no upper limit to the number of drones that a rigger can bring to bear against a target.

Of course, it is fairly difficult for a magician for a magician or an adept to become incredibly powerful, due to the high karma costs. Any idiot can grab a rocket launcher and blow something up without making a huge investment.
Of course, mages also count as any idiot and the smart ones will notice that firearms don't cause drain.

They also draw less of a "KILL HIM FIRST!" response from people.

Hehe maybe I should have been clearer. He has the highest raw damage potential (given the right equipment) in *my* game, *currently*

Thankfully I don't have power gamers in my midst. Well, maybe some with tendencies, but I vary the opposition and environment enough that most people learn that awesome quote from Major Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell):

"It's simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death."

Split the crew up, put them in (but not force them into) uncomfortable situations, take away weapons, etc. On the flip side of that equation I also don't power creep my NPCs, so players find that dropping all their karma into one skill so they can throw over 20 dice is overkill, and they're better off spreading their skill set. I like using day-to-day NPCs from the base rulebook and from the contacts and adventures supplement that came with the GM screen, so dice pools in the 12 to 16 range are plenty good enough.