What effects get transmitted? Is it just the kinetic energy of the punch, or is it the punch itself? For example:

If you're wearing Hardliners, do you do normal unarmed damage code or Hardliner damage code?

If you're wearing shock gloves... same question, plus do the Electricity damage secondary effects (resist with half impact armor, stun) work at a distance?

The strike is pure concussive force, so a big no-no on the shock gloves(it can't even use the elemental strike adept power for that matter).

The power also mentions that it must be a normal unarmed strike, doing such things as ignoring reach modifiers and such. So another words, it ignores pretty much any modifiers except the mentioned killing hands power.

And weapon foci, I should hope. What if the hardliner gloves are a weapon focus? Do you just add the focus dice, or does it act like astral combat and turn all the weapon's attacks into magical force?

[Edit]: Post 100!

distance strike and kiling hands allready does that.
you basically can kill spirits and other astral things in your magic radius.
you don't actually need a weapon focus to hurt such beings.

Weapon foci also add bonus dice to your attacks. And if you have weapon focus gloves and they work with distance strike, why do you need killing hands?

Except that distance strike requires a normal unarmed attack, and an unarmed attack with a weapon of any kind is not normal. Look, if being a troll and having a naturally long arm can't give you a bonus to it, then neither can a weapon.

You might be able to pull of a distance strike focus, but a weapon focus wouldn't work because you aren't hitting with the weapon, you are hitting with a concussive force that happens to use your unarmed skill for it's dice pool and deals damage equal to an unarmed strike+killing hands.

there's no ranged magic weapons, simple as that.
and with improved attribute and improved skill, an adept with distance strike and killing hands in effect becomes an weapon focus of his own right . .
with astral perception for all intents and purposes and with an theoretically unlimited killing radius . .

I hate Distance Strike.

who doesn't?
oh, yeah, those pests that use it <.<

What's the problem with distance strike? Yes, it's powerful. But it's still a complex action maneuver. Clobbering one person at a time is tactically worthless unless you're facing a small number of opponents. It can't force anyone to keep their heads down like covering fire, it can't blast a bunch of people at once like a grenade or area spell. It just clobbers one person, waits, does that again...

The one problem I can see is that it really ruins the day of a GM whose plot culminates with "OMG now here comes the big bad guy final climax battle!!!!" But those kinds of encounters have always been fucked in Shadowrun. One single badguy is never a challenge to a powerful team unless you make them mathematically incinvicble, like something with 40 hardened armor against every weapon the runners have. I've always heard about disappointing climaxes where one full auto burst took out the uber ninja, a single round of sniper fire (from the mage!) killed a dragon... The distance striker does the same thing a mage would do: make the "omg force 12 spirit" into a pitiful nothing, because it has 0 armor against the attack. The way to negate this is to challenge runners with frightening tactical situations. Instead of making the run culminate in fighting one powerful thing, make it actually dangerous, like a dozen well trained parapmilitary troops with drone support, where the runners have to be smart (or fast at running away) to survive and they'll never blast their way out of it by distance striking (or troll-bowing, or pistol-adept-shooting) one guy at a time.

granted, in SR3 it was only really bad, when you had a Troll Adept . .
the really bad thing about this is, that it is only unarmed combat for the adept.
everyone else does not get to use his unarmed, because he is usually out of range to fight back . .
so maximum is dodge and armor, but no actual active defense . .

I was right with you till the above line. In 1992, I could spin some decent baddies.

As for Distance strike, I think Larme is right. Only think as our phys ed died running at a drone and never got to expand his list of powers in that direction.

Thank you everyone for the clarifications. You've been very helpful

Oh my god, that's so cheesy! Someone can attack at range, and the enemy's only defensive option is to full defense or be stuck with reaction. It's like if someone invented some kind of really unfair tube made of metal which fired smaller chunks of metal that were difficult to avoid... Oh wait...

What I'm saying, sarcasm aside, is that distance strike just makes an Adept's attacks into a gun. It can be a very powerful gun, what with stacking on troll strength, killing hands, etc. And it has the distinct advantage of being quieter than a gun, and more concealable. But is disadvantages compared to firearms are multitude. Shorter range, complex action instead of simple, no rapid fire, no special ammo types, no smartlink bonus... Distance strike is a quiet, short-ranged cannon with a very low rate of fire. It might seem unfair that someone can fight unarmed without letting the enemy take their full unarmed defense bonuses. But if that's unfair, then so is shooting someone's face with a shotgun, because that's all distance strike really does. For that matter, if distance strike is unfair, then combat magic is mega super unfair because mundanes can't even full defense against it!

In a world where a cyberarmed samurai can cap you in the jewels with 22 pistol dice (twice per turn!) it's hard to get excited about something as inoffensive as distance strike. The only real place where it upsets game balance is spirits, because it really can wipe the floor with them. But spirits are awesome enough as it is, and I think it's perfectly fair for them to have some kryptonite. (in fact, isn't the idea of a distance-striking spirit hunter cool? purging them with his ki and all that. sweet! )

It can be nasty, but 2 power points is pretty steep for an adept power, you can get another initiative pass for that.

Actually, in SR3 it was only really bad when you combined it with Killing Hands and Delay Damage II. You could walk into the mall, kill 250 while shopping, and walk out without anyone being the wiser because they don't die until several hours after you left.

What makes it so potentially cheesy is how high unarmed damage can get. Between strength boosters, bone lacing or augmentation, martial arts, and critical strike, you wind up with something nearly as nasty as the trollbow, only much more concealable. And unlike regular melee combat, your offensive dice pool will be much higher than your opponent's dice pool.

Really? Tell that to our group's GM who put us up against a tribe of native americans with magic bows.

I'll repeat:

Magic. Bows.

In. Shadowrun.

Can't believe the team voted down my plan to wipe them out. They only did it because the GM said we'd get a karma penalty for committing genocide...

Wait, your GM cheated (by changing the rules), and then threatened you with a metagame penalty for doing what Shadowrunners do best?

Who says there are no ranged magical weapons? What's to stop someone from making orichalcum arrows, or simply having an adept attune to a quiver of arrows as a weapon focus?

Failing that, couldn't you just have a dagger or boomerang weapon focus and throw it?

Doesn't work. Weapon Foci must maintain contact with the (Bonded) wielder's Aura. In other words, no ranged Weapon Foci.

And thus got my teamates to act completely out of character and rewarded them for it? (one of them hunts hobos in his downtime)

In a word, yes.

Everybody else got 4 karma for the mission, I got 3 for suggesting we kill them all as an expedient and practical solution--I didn't want any survivors using those magic bows on us.



To be fair, he's throwing in elements from GURPS now or somesuch--talked the rest of the team into that "Run in other dimensions" crap I'd been saying hell no to. Since we were in an alternate universe at the time, the rules could have worked differently. Also, you can get magical ranged weapons by having a possession-tradition mage bind spirits into them.

Fear the dual-natured possesed Thor-Shot!

To be fair, he made no such disclaimer in his post, and I was responding with the canon stance on the matter.

As to your last remark, Spirit-Bound weapons are not Weapon Foci.

Ah, but they are magic weapons--just not weapon-foci. (To paraphrase the FAQ )

[edit]Oh, I should clarify: The "he" in the last line of my previous post is our GM, not Fortune. I wasn't meaning to imply that Fortune was throwing in GURPS rules, our GM has us retrieving researchers from a quantum-physics experiment gone wrong so another system is being plugged in for the dimension-hops--thus the magic bows may have been as non-SR as the Mass Cannon we picked up in the post-nuclear dimension. (10P damage, AP = All, 8 shots unless we can figure out how to duplicate the power source. )[/edit]

Attune (item) doesn't make the weapon magical, it simply attunes you to the item.

Yes, you can have a throwing weapon foci. But as soon as the foci leaves your hand, it switches off. So not so useful.

And he said magic bow. If he had said magic arrow, I would have gone with it. I just couldn't think of any spells that would be useful to have permanently on a bow.

(Disclaimer: all of the above is off the top of my head.)

It still would provide it's bonus dice on the test, though. Given the Karma und Nuyen costs however vs. the risk of losing it... stick with them WF bow/pistol: It doesn't leave your hand, still provides bonus dice and you can use it to club spirits - the projectiles will never be magical anyway.

But I made no comment about the existence or viability of 'magic weapons', ranged or otherwise. I quite specifically limited my comment to the rules concerning Weapon Foci. My post was in direct response to your friend JonathanC's comment ...

No, it wouldn't. The Focus is only active (and therefore providing its bonus) while connected to the bonded person's Aura. It shuts down immediately upon parting with that Aura.

There are no ranged Weapon Foci in Shadowrun. There never has been, throughout all the editions.

But Dunkelzahn will pay out to anyone who can fix that.

I still don't understand why Dunkelberry's Will didn't pay out to the inventors of Stick-n-Shock.

QFT. The changeover to the new edition has been far from seamless.

as for the quiver . .
why can't you make that a weapon focus either? . .
'cause you're:
a) shooting with a bow, ?
b) shooting the Arrows instead of the quiver?
c) because weapon foci are built relative to reach?

oh and for those looking at the rules for advantages, i would allow thrown weapon foci . .
now think about how much karma and money goes into those.
as the cost is decided by range, now let's see . . i don't have the exact numbers in my head but if a reach1 weapon focus costs 10k nuyen, and the reach of your thrown weapon is a multiple of your characters strength . . then they get expansive fast . . you really wanna pay that much for a weapon that you can probably only use once ever? fine by me . .

d) a weapon focus works because it contains orichalcum, which acts as both a conductor and an amplifier for your personal magic. In other words, whatever's hitting the other guy has to connect the two of you with orichalcum alloy (remember, it alloys easily with iron).

[Edit]: Higher-Reach weapon foci are more expensive because they contain more orichalcum. It's actually a function of how big the weapon is physically. I read something once about orichalcum "threads" running along the edge of the blade and into the handle, where it comes in contact with your hand; that's probably how it's done, since a weapon made entirely of orichalcum alloy would be ludicrously expensive.

On a side note, I could make an argument based on that saying weapon foci don't work if you're wearing gloves O.o

as long as contact with the aura is maintained, it works.
and the aura goes some millimeters to centimeters out of your skin . .
but you still do not attack with the quiver, but with the bow, and you shoot arrows, not the quiver from the bow, so it won't work . .
you have to make the attack with the weapon focus itself, not with something else while in contact with the weapon focus . .

For the same reason that narcojet didn't get it. Stick 'n Shock is less lethal, not non-lethal. In the heat of battle it is pretty easy to kill a guy with stun overflow.

Good point

Like I said before, super high damage only matters because it fucks over the GM's single uber-badguy. If you're a GM who relies on a single enemy challenging runners though, then you're probably in trouble anyway. This is a world where people can get a hold of a hundred kilos of C-10, modify their grenade launcher to fire full auto, mount autocannons on their vans... No single enemy is safe against the kind of destruction that shadowrunners can marshal if they really want to. And if the shadowrunners have high level friends, the possibilities are endless, like gunships with burst-fire missile launchers and gatling laser cannons and other ridiculousness.

That's why way to challenge shadowrunners is with tactics. And that's why killing hands suck. Against a dangerous tactical situation, one distance-strike per turn is almost useless. If you're facing 6 commandos, taking down one per phase with a super distance strike is not going to save you from being chunked all over the wall. You need tactical weapons like suppressing fire, grenades, illusions... The only time distance strike is truly worthwhile is when you have a face-to-face, non tactical battle with just a few foes/targets that aren't super-charged on dodge or gymnastics.

hmm . . if an adept uses a cyberarm, especially in 4th ed, with an built in grapple-cannon in the form of his hand being shot out and tailing an wire behind itself to retract it . .
can you use killing hands with that arm over the length of the cable? O.o

No - the rules for melee still apply, so it is perfectly possible to split you dicepool to attack multiple enemies.

Add in surprise and you'll have people splattered all over the place with just the swing of a hand.

That's a point, but not a terribly strong one. Splitting dice is a huge disadvantage, you can only hit multiple people if each one of them is pretty weak and doesn't full defense. Even if you had 20 dice, splitting and hitting two people would be problematic if they were prime-runner level or above. And even then, two shots is not much better than one, tactics wise (especially at the short range of distance strike), so my point holds.



Surprise is insta-death in SR4. That's true whether you have distance strike, a silenced gun, or just about anything. So it doesn't really support the argument that distance strike is good, distance strike is as good as anything in surprise. In fact, it's actually inefficient because it delivers so much more power than you need. Two power points for the ability to chunk people when you surprise them is a rip-off when you could do it with a silenced gun at a fraction of the points cost.

@WeaverMount: Sorry, I should have been more clear. That's based on information in (official) novels iirc, but it makes the most sense of any theory of how weapon foci work in my opinion. I'm aware that the novels often break RAW.

In earlier editions, the inclusion of an amount of Orichalcum in the enchanting process was a requirement for the creation of Weapon Foci. Adding more tended to give better/easier results. I don't recall seeing anything specific on this requirement in SR4 though.

so, anyone mind answering me if the rocket punch with killing hands and elemental effect would be possible?
quite a way to get around the magic meters problem . .

It depends on how you see it as working. If it works like I said, with the orichalcum acting as a conductor for your aura, it should work... that would be FUN

Mundane people can notice a concealed gun and thus won't be surprised when you draw, but can't notice the Distance Strike power.

Of course, if you can surprise your enemies and have enough DV to kill them with one net hit, it's suddently much more interesting to split your dicepool and take all of them out silently in a single action - as opposed to two at most with a silenced gun...

the grapple gun was, by the way, the closest we ever got to a ranged weapon focus . .
another quick question: electrical elemental effect, does that use your unarmed power, or a fixed number?
if fixed numer, replace by using shock-hand addon for example . . if unarmed damage, forget about shock hand *g*
oh, and it's nowhere NEAR impossible to pick up silenced gunshots, as they only substract . . what? 2 dice? from the pool . .

Also true, but of limited applicability. I think lots of people interpret surprise too liberally. It applies when the enemy is unaware of you as a threat, not just when they fail to anticipate the means of your attack. So in a combat situation where they're already trying to kill you, surprise is a non-factor. And weapon concealability doesn't matter either in a stealth situation where they don't even know you're there-- if you are concealed, then so is your weapon. And as for taking out a bunch of people silently, I think a spell is a lot more efficient. A mana ball takes down 3 people or 3 dozen people with equal ease, the only disadvantage being a few rounds spent erasing your signature and drain, which is easily compensated. Regardless, there's no denying that distance strike is a great tool for stealth assassination, but that only accounts for a small slice of shadowrunning.

I'm not really trying to say that distance strike is useless, only that a) it's much more limited than other options, and b) it's very expensive for what it does. I see it as more of a fluff choice than an actual tool for combat optimization, which is why I disagree with those who think it's cheesy. That's who I've been arguing against from the start-- if you agree with me that distance strike isn't broken, then we fundamentally agree with each other.

Shrug. I don't necessarily think the Power is cheesy. I just intensely dislike the whole idea of the Power.

Orichalcum makes crafting any foci easier, but it isn't required for any focus unless your GM deems that the formula for that focus requires it. You must use the components specified in the formula, one more reason to take arcana and make the formula yourself.