I want to make low-level opposition threatening to powerful PCs and I'm looking for suitable tactics / methods to do this.

I thought it would be a fun project to tax the imaginations of the Dumpshock community to see how many ways we can come up with to do this. I'm afraid that I seem to be reaching a creative block on this. My reasoning is a desire to keep a dangerous and feel to the setting in the face of indestructible trolls, super-fast samurai, etc.

For example:

1. Molotov cocktails: Whilst their 5P of damage is not particularly scary to the classic giant troll, note that Molotov cocktails will also ignite / trigger combustible items carried. They are also cheap. Outfit gangers with Molotovs and target any character that has a habit of loading themselves down with grenades, explosives and Ex-Ex ammo.

Realistic, but a threat to even very tough PCs,

Similarly:

2. Use speeding vehicles as battering ram with which to run down PCs. Cars and vans are readily available to Lonestar and other security forces. At speed, a vehicle can do considerable damage to a PC.

3. Environmental Hazard: Light fires in enclosed spaces, depriving PCs of oxygen, causing smoke inhalation, fire damage. Should ideally be combined with some sort of trap to keep the PCs in the area, such as jamming beams or furniture under door handles. Very suitable for gangers on their home turf with lots of dilapidated buildings at their disposal.

4. Fake retreats: Have a fleeing target lead PCs past other opposition who are concealed so that they can emerge and attack from all sides. This works best if there is a particular reason to want to stop the fleeing person or with bloodthirsty must-kill-everything parties.

5. Use trip wires or concealed holes to bring down PCs and follow with multiple melee attackers before they can get up.

That's all I can think of for now. Can anyone think of number 6 ? Anything that low-level oppositions can do to make them dangerous again is the general idea.

Ambush, explosives, chemicals/drugs, sheer numbers.....

You burn tyres and it creates black smoke not only will it give you cancer in 20 years it will also create dense enough smoke thermographics won't work.

Smoke+lots of shooting+built up area+boobie traps= very dead PCs

You entice the player characters to run into a room and close the door behind them. Pass a few grenades from through the sallyport or pour pitch into the room and set it on fire. You can also use a flamewthrower if the PCs knock.

All characters in melee gain a +1 from each team mate. Best way to utilize is this is by having 15 of them. Even your combat adept is going to be hard pressed when a lowly ganger with a melee skill of 8 suddenly gains +4 from all his other gangers.

Contact explosive grenades on poles (also known as bombadiers) worked up until the 19th century and should work now.

Kill spaces with 50 caliber machinegun emplacements. Kill spaces are marked out long alleyways where the only way out is by going past a machinegun, nothing to hide behind. Also known as turkey shoots.


Bayonet charges.

P.S. Use your characters advantages against them. So they have a lot of guns and superior firepower, so let them fire away like it is 4th of July. Once they run low on ammo now you can actually start firing back.

If you can boobie trap their car fine. If the car is blown up boobie trap it anyway. You can also disable it by a hundred and one ways. The best one is a rubberband around a grenade, pull the pin and place it in the gas tank. As the gasoline eats away at the rubber band the grenade explodes. Of course most modern cars have a kevlar reinforcement, but this is 2070 and lawsuits are a thing of the past.

Doesn't the friends in melee bonus cap out at +4? Still a nice bonus for your gangers, though.

I've had great success with the "hit them with the car" technique that knasser mentions above. Don't forget, too, that the car will keep going if they shoot the driver. And, let them roll edge to see if the driver's foot collapses on the pedal and actually accelerates the car toward them!

Use (trid) phantasm to make them think they're caught between two groups of gangers and they may end up shooting at the non-corporeal foes.

Drop things on them from out of windows. Even household objects (e.g., a toaster or microwave) will do some pretty nasty things to a person it hits after falling four stories. Plus, checking the vertical axis during a firefight is not generally performed (I'd require a dedicated Observe in Detail with 2 or 3 hits to say someone glances up) so people shooting at them from above is pretty effective, too. Might require an ambush, though.

Tripod braced full auto weapons can be fun. Not too common on the streets, but not outside the realm of possibility if we go from gangers to a more organized criminal or full on criminal organizations.

Reinforcements can ruin anyone's day, especially if they come from an unexpected direction.

Innocent bystanders can provide distractions, collateral damage, and cover (hostages) which may make a more moral team flinch and a less moral team somewhat notorious.

And, of course: overcast stunball

Don't forget tunnels, the well-concealed sort that a grown man will have trouble crawling through. Proper use of hidden tunnels and secret passages will effectively mimic teleportation from the POV of the PCs in terrain that the opposition knows well or controls. Don't forget to Make use of Home Ground when applicable, as well.

Don't forget concentrated fire, each attack between defender's actions reduce their dice pool by 1.

Say 3 gangers, one with an SMG and the others have light pistols, are attacking 1 runner. The gangers have 1 pass and the runner has 3 IP.

The initiative goes Runner, SMG ganner, Pistol Ganger 1, Pistol Ganger 2, Runner, Runner for all passes of the Combat Turn. The gangers can all attack twice as soon as their initiative comes up, or you can adust for full effect. Say the runner is at medium range, has a reaction of 8 and dodge of 4, and goes on full defense for his first IP. The gangers all have 6 dice pools to attack, SMG has 3 point recoil comp, pistols 1 point.

With everything out in the open, parenthesis will give attackers then defender's dice to avoid:
SMG - Short Wide Burst (5 vs 12)
SMG - Short Wide Burst (3 vs 11)
Pistol 1 - Semi Auto (5 vs 12)
Pistol 1 - Semi Auto (5 vs 11)
Pistol 2 - Semi Auto (5 vs 10)
Pistol 2 - Semi Auto (5 vs 9)

Not likely to hit like that, but if the SMG ganger delays until the pistols fire and takes aim with his first simple action, it goes:
Pistol 1 - Semi Auto (5 vs 14)
Pistol 1 - Semi Auto (5 vs 13)
Pistol 2 - Semi Auto (5 vs 12)
Pistol 2 - Semi Auto (5 vs 11)
SMG - Take Aim
SMG - Short Wide Burst (6 vs 8) You get decent chance to damage

You can make that 7 vs 8 by giving the ganger Tracer rounds. Make it a long wide burst after taking aim and it's 4 vs 5 dice (6 vs 5 with tracer rounds).

Of course this is all out in the open, without cover modifiers.

In melee, don't forget that in addition to "friends in melee" you can get "superior position" modifiers (attacking from high ground or from behind). The -1 per attack defended applies as well for avoiding it.

Wow. Some good stuff there already. My particular favourites are the burning tires (because it's so incredibly low resource and just downright nasty - I'll be using that), the dropping objects from great heights (I'm thinking baths, toilets and sinks here, though the odd sofa might be good) and the tunnels.

The tunnels might be hard to work into most scenarios, but you could certainly simulate it with just a refuse / debris filled derelict building. Alternately, it might work really well in any environment that has restricted space and small opponents, e.g. dwarves.

@Damaleon: That's a useful point about the ordering of the attackers.

Distributed duties - the heavy hitters can be slow, because the task of the other team members is to take down the runners defense pools. Being larger they get better DR, defending the heavy weapons. There is no reason not to hide behind full cover until your time comes.

@Damaleon: The penalty for subsequent attacks is counted for the defender, so the defense dp does not refresh until the next IP of the defender.

I used to be a big fan of car accidents, back in SR2 and 3, when they were a dramatic way to plunge everyone into chaos. In SR4, evidently all the safety features developed over the last 80 years were done away with and the same crashes are lethal, so it's not a device I can throw around anymore.

But if you want to kill all the PCs, pretty much any jackass with a garbage truck will do a great job of it, especially if you can catch them while the rigger has hopped out of the van to go take a leak and get another Slurpee.

There's always the all perceptive and foreknowledged mystic adept.

"Everything is as I have foreseen."

How do you keep a dangerous feel to the setting when the PC and player already knows what you as the GM are planning to do? The only thing that nobody knows is how the dice will turn out.

Molotov cocktails can be more a problem than an asset for the NPCs carrying them. They are, after all, bottles full of gasoline with fuel soaked rags sticking out of the top. Glitches, critical glitches, and the PCs aiming at the cocktails can make the opposition less dangerous very quickly, not more.

Narcojet is fun. Inexpensive, available, and quite a surprise on a shuriken, knife, or sword.

Tasers are cheap, extremely effective, and could easily be acquired for a ganger.

One issue with the tire trick is that I've been reading up that petroleum-based tire products are on the outs. They're making better and stronger tires with other materials now and there's no guarantee that the future ones will burn black or really at all.

Bad assumption to make. There's nothing stating that any of the explosives PCs carry are ignited by heat. Some may use impact, some may use electrical charges.

IEDs are great little tricks, ammonium nitrate fertilizer and some sort of fuel are still freely available in SR after all. Small explosives and booby traps can be another fun one that I'll use in my next game as I've been slacking in that department lately.

The best way is to mix everything up. Yeah, they can handle gangers with chains and pistols coming at them in a frontal assault. But can they handle gangers with chains and pistols, and a ganger sniper, and other gangers behind cover tossing tear gas, and another group of gangers from behind throwing grenades...and...and...

Most GMs get their grunts punkslapped because they play them like punks that deserve to get slapped down. Just keep in mind that while the NPCs have a job to do, they're not overly excited about getting dead. By simply having them use cover, not stepping out like mannequins without cover fires and "SHOOT HERE!" signs, and giving them even a little of brains you'll really up the ante for your PCs.

Exactly. Ammo blowing off in a magazine isn't even close to as dangerous as ammo being fired correctly from a firearm. In fact, the FBI was walking around in the wake of the Waco fire without any worries while ammo was still cooking off now and again.

Military explosives are incredibly stable. You can stomp on them, shoot them, light them on fire, stomp on and/or shoot them while they're on fire, and they won't detonate. Once you get into mil-spec explosives they unilaterally require a HE detonation in contact with them (like a blasting cap) to get them to explode. This allows for better safety and exponentially easier transportation.

Well if it's sealed plastique, perhaps not. But the rules state that if set on fire, items make a resistance test based on barrier ratings, x2 if not particularly flammable. I went so far as to look up how grenades work and timed grenades (opposed to impact-triggered grenades) seem to be triggered by an internal chemical reaction that generates heat. So I figured being coated in burning liquid could trigger a grenade. I took the barrier rating for frag grenades to be a "reinforced material" from the SR4,BBB. The next one up from that was concrete and so far as I know, grenades are designed to blow apart so I went with it. And with your impact triggered explosives, again they actually seem to be triggered by heat generated by a chemical reaction started by the impact mixing the reactive chemicals. As for the incenidary arrows...

Anyway, already tried this one and the troll managed to dodge. Got a fright though when he realised what the consequences would have been. He has since decided not to walk around with ten-plus grenades, and a big bundle of explosive and incendiary arrows, so that's a result even if I didn't manage to blow him up.

Keep 'em coming if anyone's got any more, this is useful stuff.

I'm also a sucker for plain ol' tactics like using cover, numbers, Home Ground. I also vote for things like tazers(for gangers), or SnS(for low-level guards). First, they do Stun damage, so you won't be killing the PCs outright, which i try to avoid unless they do really, really, dumb things(oh, I have them use real ammo, too. Don't get me wrong. PCs CAN die in my campaigns. I just don't outwardly TRY to do so, it's not a GM vs. PC game.) Second, stun damage meters are smaller, and electric can do a nice job of bypassing armor(there is nonconductivity...and you know? If they get tazed and their stuff stolen or something once, it might make them invest in it. I really don't mind my PCs playing smart, too.) Stun batons are nice, as well.

Using things like Jazz and burning Edge to get extra passes helps.

Also, I use ''morale'' in some ways. If the gangers/guards start to get wiped, they will probably pull back, and get reinforcements. If the PCs don't persue, they might well come back with a lot MORE reinforcements and the PCs would have expended some resources dealing with the first bunch. Again, a lot of these people aren't suicidal, and they'll try to stack the odds in their favor.

And of course, I have my own little opinion which I have a feeling a lot of people won't agree with, but that is I believe there SHOULD be opposition that makes the PCs feel powerful, as a skilled shadowrunner is, IMO, a bit higher on the food chain than a common ganger or grunt. There should also be opposition that makes the PCs feel that they AREN'T, however, the HIGHEST on the food chain.

If every single gang the PCs end up fighting are as well-armed and well-coordinated as the SAS, then IMO, it loses a little something. Again, others might not agree. I AM all for trying to make the low level guys at least a bit more threatening, but trying to turn them into the Special Forces might be going a bit too far. (Not saying you're trying to do that. In fact, a lot of these tactics are just fine. But I've seen instances in the past where a bunch of teenage squatter gangers would be using tactics that you'd find in the Art of War or something.)

Positioning is the king of tactics. When you go after gang bangers, or corp boys, or whatever, in THEIR home territory you should expect trouble. Simple expedients like murder holes, booby traps and the like are massive equalizers. Chasing people in dark areas you better have low light AND be observant, or you've got problems. Simply putting oil or caltrops on the floor in an area that the gangers know to keep to the side of the room in, when it's dark, is a massive plus and it doesn't show up on Thermo either.

A bunch of Squatters in the Puyallup Barrens (Tarislar) gave one of my better Runner teams nightmares when they had to go in and find guy X and take him alive. Finally in an unusually brutal move for them, they started capping hostages to get the squatters to turn the guy over, simply because even the team tank was at 4 or five boxes of damage and everyone else was worse off and they hadn't even ever set eyes on the guy they were after yet. Masses with booby traps and molotv cocktails, which were nastier in third than they are in fourth and terrain that they knew and the Runners didn't meant a real lesson was learned for the Runners who went in much lighter than usual because "What are a bunch of squatters going to do to stop US?".


Isshia

on the topic of ammo going of from fire, as always i think the mythbusters did a test on that by dumping anything from 9mm to .50 into a campfire.

as for the topic itself, i dont see anyone talking about freeze foam yet.

a couple of grenade of rating 6 should make for a surprise

or maybe some similar rating adhesives?

I used it recently on my group. The next step could have been suppressive fire into the foam, but they were willing to talk at that point. Throw it on the teams mage to break LOS to anything.

Hand grenades in SR are frighteningly inexpensive and easy to get (I've had to make house rules to prevent PCs from starting the game with hundreds of them). Two gangers spending Edge to get extra passes and flinging HE grenades as fast as ever they can will ruin any evening out.

And Edge is cheap, too - there's no reason gangers shouldn't have it. Build a ganger template with Edge 6 and your PCs will grow to hate you.

One of the ways you can buy Edge 6 is with a big fat drug addiction, preferably to something that gives them extra IPs, or makes them immune to pain, or both.

This is 100% win. It's incredibly common in just about every game/system I've ever played that mooks are played up as well, mooks. In some systems, they're even supposed to be ridiculously easy to kill (SW, Feng Shui). But in Shadowrun, as lethal as combat is (should be, at least IMO), the best way to keep the playing field even is to just field your NPCs as though they had some common sense. They don't just stand at the end of the hallway shooting back until shot, they don't just sit behind the same crate for three rounds waiting for a grenade to land, etc.

I will second (third?) this too. I used defencesive architecture and simple tactics to turn mooks into a serious threat. On occasion the party get to big for their britches and think they can ingore the mooks. Then the third rate gang boss has his gang nearly hand them the one way ticket to the afterlife. Five to one odds with a little brains balances the scales a lot.

Depends. SR3 Regenerating Immune to Normal Weapon Mage gets ambushed by 10 gang bangers with SMGs. Mage is last (wo)man standing, with not a scratch. The trick is to know when you can truly ignore the mooks.


They sit behind the same crate for 3 rounds because to do otherwise would mean standing in the hallway shooting back until shot. And if you do run the NPCs by the numbers, you would realise some of them are stupid and don't have common sense. Why? Take a look at their stats - Let's see gangers... OK, we were talking Street Gang, Professional Rating 1, blah, blah... Ah, here we are: Intuition 2, Logic 2. Sure, let's take a look at the Lieutanant then... Int 3 and Log 2, not much better. Stupid is as stupid does, people. Dumbasses should not exhibit smart behavior. Heck, smart people sometimes act stupidly (call it a Critical Glitch).

Also remember that it is fairly easy to turn a home with some half-assed furniture into a poor-man's fortress.
Lets say I'm a ganger who lives in a run-down multi-story apartment building with my chummers and we know that drek is going down. Well, the very first thing I'd do is pry open the elevator doors and take a cutting torch to the cable, just to limit their options for coming up. The second thing I'd do is have my guys push sofas and chairs out of apartments and into the stairs, so that the runners will have to climb over them to get by, making them sitting ducks to a firing squad that will be shooting through holes that I've drilled into the stairwell walls. And, just for shits and giggles, I'll put grenades with tripwires in those pieces of furniture; that'll either slow them down or kill a bunch of them.

Finally, of course, I soak the carpet of my top-floor apartment with gasoline, put cutting charges on various load-bearing structures, tie a stealth rappelling line to my balcony, and wait. If the mofos actually make it into my inner sanctum, I light it up, jump, and knock it down. By this time, all of my boys are out, because I told them of the plan and they knew to get out as soon as the runners reached their level. So they're in there, on fire, running around like crazy trying to put themselves out, probably, and a building falls down on them. They're deader than dead, chummers. If my boys take them out before then, I can always just get a new carpet.

Sure, you can, if you are smart enough to think of that, which as a ganger you should not be smart enough to do so.

I'd say you need about 2 hits (Average difficulty) to think of that using say... with the appropriate Knowledge Skills. So unless you have Security Design(Improvised) or some such, instead of Local Area Knowledge or Gang Turf, you are defaulting. With Logic 2, defaulting gives you 1 dice. Good luck getting that 1 hit, much less the 2nd.

I'd say putting furniture in the way wouldn't require a check. And if they had a working elevator, they'd be unlikely to break it just to inconvenience some runners. Probably hit the emergency stop on it maybe, but not cut the cable.

As far as jury rigged tripwire grenade traps? yeah, what toturi said.

Jury rigged grenade traps should be less an issue of being able to think of it and more an issue of making a successful demolitions roll so you don't blow yourself to kingdom come when installing them.

or simply pry the doors open.

unless the building is fairly recent, i dont think the elevator will be of the kind where the hacker can go in remotely and override...

I would imagine growing up in the barrens of The Emerald City would give you a few survival skills not usually associated with a someone of similar stats. I know some ummm..horticulturalists who are damn good at booby traps. I wouldn't call them even slightly trained in demolitions or what ever but they keep their crops safe from scavengers and porcine intruders. and I definitely wouldn't call them smart. most of the time they act as if they could barely tie their shoes. just a couple of good ol' redneck weed farmers.

A resident of the Barrens over the age of 10 would have the survial skills, the proof being that they were still sucking air. just my opinion really, so take it for what its worth.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Demolitions skills covers, well, demolitions. We're talking the surgical application of incendiaries and/or explosives to take down structures with maximum overall effect with the minimal amount of explosives and/or incendiaries. This also covers the skillset required so that the trained Demolitions skill user knows exactly where to place their device to stop damn near anything from aircraft to aircraft carriers, again, with the minimal amount of explosives and/or incendiaries. Add in safety rules and how to actually set up the firing series correctly for various high-end explosives detonation (which I will not go into detail on) and you get an idea of what Demolitions skill actually does (or what it really should be doing).

Grenade in a can tied to a tripwire doesn't require a Demolitions roll, people.

Note my emphasis. The characters you pointed out have certain skills. Skills that are not in the write up for Grunts.

Point Taken,Compadre.

However, as a GM, I try to keep my NPC's "flexible. not all grunts are created equal.

for instance. lets say I take the Holloweener ganger from the BBB (Pg.275) and drop the clubs skill and add demolitions at 1 and then specialize in booby traps(+2). . with his logic of 2+1for skill+2 for the spec=5 dice to get the two hits.

He defiantly ain't going be building a thermonuclear warhead in shop class. odds are, the way I roll dice, he still is going to probably blow himself up.

I know with my players,that if I don't mix the NPC's up and keep it challenging, the team will walk all over them. The team is tough, and has a strong sense of tactics. they are seasoned characters and the players have more years RPing than any of us want to admit.

anyhoo, my point I was making is that gangers,even Mooks, logically, could have slight variations in the stats and skills that can make them a stronger threat and keep the players sweating.

And as any GM knows, the more they sweat, the sweeter the rush when they finally survive another day in the shadows.

I turn all my gangers into 10-16 years olds on various different types of drugs. And yes I also have technicals driving around in flat bed trucks. They aren't the gangers they're the warlords.

Every building is someone's home so I use the old adage "You don't shit where you eat". It means that the club house is not booby trapped, but there ware weapons caches not to mention chokepoints, thick walls, thin walls. Walls you can shoot through. And it's an apartment block inhabited by people. Not all of them are armed. Kids to grandparents. Some doors are solid steel, others flimsy. The problem is finding out where the gangers keep their club house as the whole building is under their protection.

If I want random encounters to stroke my players with there is thirty years of D&D to pick from.

Logic of 2 is not stupid. It's a low-average. Furthermore, as others have pointed out, anyone growing up in the Barrens will have seen how to do such things. The first person to create a pulley system was probably an extremely smart person. All those people who copied him or her need not be. Same with making a put trap when hunting, a trip wire or sticking a sharp rock on the end of a stick and throwing it at someone.There's nothing intellectually difficult about throwing furniture over the stairway to create difficult terrain. Especially if you saw your mother do it when you were a kid.

And as to the meaning of average, it is exactly that. In any group of six people, there is going to be someone not so smart as the average, and someone smarter than the average. One of my NPCs is a smart troll ganger who earned the nickname 'Siege' because he built a trebuchet to bombard another gang's territory with. The information was there once he got on the Matrix, so he just found suitable materials around the barrens and tried it. The point is that any group will have someone able to direct others to do smart things. The effective intelligence of a small group with low friction amongst themselves is higher than the average intelligence of that group.

On a slight tangent (it's not worth its own thread), does everyone else apply the Friends In Combat modifier to defence as well as attack rolls? I made a mistake last week I think, in that I only applied it as a bonus dice pool to attack rolls, but reading the passage in the book, it sounds like it applies to both attack and defence dice pools. It's been a while since I GM'd, and it's taking me a couple of sessions to get back into it.

K.

The first person may have been a smart person to think up such things. But the second and third person should at least have some minor skill to be able to copy it which is why the Threshold to use an existing tactic isn't Hard or Extreme but Average. Sure if you wish you can have 1 smart ganger to think up the tactic but can he convince the others to try it? Does he have the Leadership and Charisma to do it? An average member of a goon squad or a ganger has 1 to 2 Logic/Intuition. In a group of 5 people, to get an average of 2, you need 4 guys with 1 and 1 guy with 6. Even if the 1 smart guy can think up the tactic(which he probably can), can the other dumb guys understand or just ape him well enough to do execute the tactic(logic 1 with no skill is zero dice, not even possible enough for 1 hit)? For a goon squad, it is impossible, because the minute you get 1 smart guy, the average swings up to over 1 and the minimum for any Attribute is 1 which is what they are already.

Toturi, this has been established many times on Dumpshock, but the way you play Shadowrun is so far removed from the way most people play it, that in some ways it is actually a different game. And that's not because other people don't play with RAW, it's because you determine people's decisions based on dice roll, rather than choose what to roll based on their decisions. I still recall your defence of runners who strip naked, paint themselves orange and scream whilst making a stealth check. As I recall if they rolled well, reality adjusted so that the decor was orange and alarms were going off that blended with their screaming.

If a group of six gangers are trapped by people trying to kill them and one comes up with a way to protect themselves, then no Charisma + Leadership roll is needed in my game (or most people's) to make them adopt the idea. They are looking for a way to survive and someone offers one - their decision is based on role-playing. Not a dice roll. Your logic is screwy anyway. You don't see that the average ganger has a Logic of 2 and then extrapolate from this that a group of five must consist of four with Logic 1 and one with Logic 6. (Incidentally, why not just have an array of 1,2,2,2,3 which gives the same average and is more believable?)

And there is, to my recollection, no relevant skill for throwing furniture down stairs. To say that anyone trying to do such a thing must therefore default and cannot think of such a thing if they have Logic 1, or be smart enough to do so if instructed by another, is insane.

I have no problem with the way you play Toturi. But it is far removed from the normal ways of doing things that most of the rest of us consider normal.

There is no roll needed to walk down a hall. But when you are walking down a hallway in a secure facility, don't your GM make you roll the appropriate Stealth skills as well? Pulling a trigger is a very simple task, but when you are trying to shoot someone, don't your GM make you roll the dice?

Hence when you are throwing the furniture down the stairs to create an obstacle or in such a way it impedes movement, in effect creating a defensive structure, why won't you need to make a roll?

Stupid guy: Hey, Jimmy, I toss the furniture down the stairs like you told me to.

Smart guy: But... but where's all the furniture?

Stupid guy: It was blocking my way, so I pushed it all the way down and tossed it all away.

The reason why I did 1, 1, 1, 1, 6 is because I thought that thinking up the defensive setup was an Average difficulty. So even if Mr 6 defaulted, he could possibly still get 2 hits. Sure, Mr 3 can get the 2 successes, but he isn't going to be able to do it often.



They are looking for a way to survive and someone offers one - their decision is based on roleplaying, so how will they roleplay?

1) According to the players' own intellect and intuition?

2) According to the characters' intellects and intuitions?

Roll the Leadership dice. Roll it high, it sounds like a good plan. Roll low, sounds like a fucked up plan. If a plan sounds fucked up to your character (but not you), would your character go along with it? And it is my logic that is screwy?

I have no problem with the way you play knasser. But the way I see you play the game, you can replace your character's own weaknesses where you are strong. If your GM lets you get away with such metagaming, then fine. I suppose it would be ok if both sides metagame the same way.

Things I've Learned from this thread

1) I'm a genius on par with Einstein and Hawking; I know this because I was miraculously able to think of putting furniture on stairs to slow someone down, a feat that only an Einstonian-level-intellect could accomplish.

2) You don't need to make a demolitions check to make tripmines with grenades, but you do need to make a Logic test to know that it is possible, no matter how many trid shows you watch. Again, I'm a genius.

3)Logic 1 represents a mental deficit well beyond the I Am Sam level and entering into Freddy Got Fingered territory.

That's a ridiculous level of special there. Not only is he apparently autistic for not getting that the smart guy wanted that furniture to stay where he put it but he's incredibly impulsive or very clumsy (can't climb over the furniture, or hates it getting in the way).

Or for that extra bit of fun why not wait until /after/ they're in the elevator before cutting the cables?

It would require a little more knowledge, but wrapping a section of the cable near the elevator in some explosives and rigging it with a sensor which triggers at certian altitudes works nicely.

(Of course regardless of when it's cut you'd still need to guard the elevator shaft, because they almost always feature access ladders for maintenance. Which can also be rigged with traps for added amusement, maybe contact glues or coating the ladder in oil.)

And all of this requires in our example of the group of six gangers, the guy whose suggestion it is issues instructions and then closes his eyes and hides until everything is done.

Sorry Toturi. Your insistence on a group of gangers having a mathematical average of 2 in logic amongst the group, that any one of the gangers must make a Charisma + Leadership roll to get others to use a suggestion and that Logic of 1 corresponds to being too stupid to know how to move furniture onto the stairs when told to... these are things that don't apply to my game. I respect how you play, but it's not how anyone else I've ever heard plays. I think the suggestion of creating barriers to the attackers with common furniture was a good one and I'll probably use it.

Well, I'm quite glad that I spared you the ol' tripwire cans trick as a simple alarm system or the false step into a board of nails treatment. Your poor little mind might very well have gone esplodie all over your monitor from the sheer expansiveness of these concepts!

Here's one. Nail up and barricade all the street level doors. All movement into and out of buildings is through the third storey windows. Ground and the second floor are booby trapped. Around all third level windows have their floors removed. The elevator shafts have one inch steel welded on them. In a danger situation the elevator wells work as an escape route through the basement of the building. If the elevator wells are taken over then furniture is dropped down the well shafts.

Ooooooh. I'm using that!

Caltrops are always fun things to drop if you're creating a kill zone in the street. Watch with glee as the Sammie carrying a half ton of guns steps on a pointy spike and it goes right through their foot because of the sheer force each step has.

Bath tubs filled with acid, water puddles with live wires in them and/or live wires hooked directly up to door handles or perhaps a metal door.

Edit
And nitroglycerin is cheap and simple enough to make for your average chemist (and what self respecting gang doesn't know one?). It can also explode due to physical shock. A bottle or two of that behind (or balanced on top of) a door will make runners think twice about smashing it down and storming in.

For corp guards, stick-and-shock is even better.

And you stand a good chance of blowing all your arms off if you sneeze. While making it is cheap, stabilizing it isn't, and you can't transport the stuff unless it's stable.

1) Genius only if you did not have some understanding of Security Design or its relatives (from what I see on the boards here, I would think that most posters would have at least Sec Design 1 or 2 so no default penalty).

2) I never said you didn't need to make that demolitions check. But if you had passed the Sec Design test, you might already know it is possible.

3) Logic 1 and no skill is quite possible to get into that Fred territory you mentioned (he automatically rolls no die for the test!)

heh, the action thriller version of the home alone series?