Man, I sure hope I'm reading this crap wrong. The damage to passengers from ramming seems WAY over the top. I'm going to give a scenario using the rules that way I understand it. If I'm wrong please correct me.

From what I'm seeing, ramming happens anytime someone wants to drive their vehicle into someone else's, be it a head-on collision, a sideswipe or ramming into the rear of the vehicle, correct? Even it is ramming into the side the damage is insane.
.....
Scenario:

A team of runners hijack a bus (a Vista from the Arsenal book). The team is slowly rolling at 30 meters a turn due to traffic (I think this is about 22 mph, btw). They are running from a rival shadowrunner team in a GMC Hermes van. The Hermes van rams into the bus. This isn't a head-on collision, just a hard slam into the side while driving parallel. If this situation isn't a ram (let me know!) then assume that the Hermes is t-boning the bus.
The ram is successful, moving onto damage.

Stats:
Hermes Van - Rammer
Body 17
Armor 6
Speed 30 meters/round

Vista (Bus) - Rammee
Body 20
Armor 4
Speed 30 meters/round

Outcome:
The Vista bus, and everyone in it, must resist DV 17 (the Body of the Hermes).
The bus rolls 24 dice (Armor+Body). That's 6 auto successes. The bus takes 11 damage. It has 7 boxes left.

The soon to be dead guys in the bus roll their Body+ 1/2 Impact Armor + 4 (the bus's armor).
The troll enforcer, with a Body 9 + 3 from the Lined Coat & Natural Armor + 4 for the vehicle's armor, gets to roll 16 dice. He gets 4 hits and take 13 boxes. He's out and bleeding to death.
The hacker, the mage and the face fare even worse; the hacker dies instantly and the others are bleeding to death.
All are knocked unconscious and when they crash into the car in front of them they are die instantly.

The Hermes, and everyone in it, must resist DV 10 (1/2 the body of the Vista bus).
The Hermes rolls 23 dice. 5 auto successes. The Hermes takes 5 damage. It has 12 boxes left.

The Street Sam rolls 12 dice and gets 3 successes. He takes 7 damage. 5 boxes to go.
The hacker rolls 11 dice and gets 2 successes. He takes 8 damage. 2 boxes to go.
.....

This can't be right. A 22 mph ram would never do this damage. Never ever. We had a truck with a snow plow tbone a school bus last year. No casualties; one kid in the hospital with a broken limb. Hell, my friend drove us into guard rail at around 20 mph (ice on the corner turn) and we dented the car. Oh, and no casualties (or airbag deployment, come to think of it... I shouldn't have bought that car).

?

Oh, and if this is how ramming works, then most bikes act like bumper cars when they collide with similar models at 60 meters per turn and below (the Body and Armor of many bikes are equal and since the damage doesn't exceed the armor, no damage). Of course, the drivers aren't getting away so easily. Ares Roadmasters work the same way (Body and Armor 16) so enjoy slamming them together at 40mph over and over again; remote control recommended.

And the Nissan Doberman (Body 3 / Armor 6) can collide at full speed (75meters per round) taking no damage.

Yeah, ramming is brutal. I've been running it that for ramming, the vehicle soakes, then the passagers soak any leftover damage, but that is a house rule.
.
Also, in shadowrun, a broken limb is like 7 boxes of damage, and a failed edge test.


Table: Collision Direction
Colliding Vehicle’s Target
Multiplier
A stationary object x 1
A moving vehicle, striking head-on or 45 degrees from head-on x 2
A moving vehicle, striking perpendicular x 1
A moving vehicle, striking from the rear or 45 degrees from the rear x 1/2
A vehicle being sideswiped x 1/4

I use the same houserule.

Where did the Collision Direction Table come from? Is that in an errata I missed or more houserule? If houserule, consider it stolen.

That is the D20 Modern ramming damage modifier table. I played in a Death Race-inspired Modern game once, and the ramming rules there actually worked REALLY well.

EDIT: You can find the D20 Modern rules HERE. The Vehicle Movement and Combat rules are all contained in a single text file about halfway down the list. You'd have to do some pretty heavy modifications to fit them into Shadowrun wholesale, but the Collision Direction Table works pretty well. A sideswipe won't really hurt anybody; the main use we found for it in the Death Race game was to force Piloting checks on the driver of the other car, which would work perfectly in Shadowrun too. When we really wanted to take out another car, we'd Nitro burst in front of it, do a 180, and hit 'em dead on. Pretty much always made for spectacular wrecks (the ram-car was very, very heavily armored on the front end, but even it could only do one, maaaaaaybe two dead-on rams per race due to the massive amounts of damage).

It's really late so I didn't get the chance to analyze the rules but thanks for turning me in that direction.

@ Ayeohx

RAW doesn't always (rarely?) makes sense. I would houserule it and move on with life. However, YMMV.

The ramming and collision rules are particularly poorly written parts of RAW.

err, the damage is based on the ramming vehicle, so the people inside the hermes is looking at 9 boxes of damage, not 10...

not much of a diff tho

looking at the damage table, i suspect the issue to be the harsh jumps in damage as one go from half body (halved again for the ramming party) to body when going from 20 to 21 in speed. and again at 60 to 61, and 200 to 201...

a more fine grained approach could probably help.

Meh. D20 Modern only uses "alley speed", "street speed", "highway speed", or "all-out", which is just as large-grained.

What it does instead, though, (and this is the part that'd be difficult to translate to SR mechanics) is to base the size of the damage die (d2, d4, d8, or d12) on the fastest speed of the two colliding objects, and the number of dice (0 - 20 over about 8 or so different steps) on the smaller of the two colliding objects. What this does is prevent a semi colliding with a trash can from annihilating itself.

Then you modify the result by the angle of collision (the previously cited Collision Direction table). Assuming the passengers are all inside the vehicle, and the vehicle is totally enclosed (a typical car, van, SUV, bus, etc, rather than a bike or open-topped jeep), the passengers only take at most 1/4 the damage that the vehicle does. A guy riding a bike is gonna be flattened, though, because he takes full damage.

A typical head-on highway collision between two sedans (both moving at highway speed, both Huge objects) will deal 12d8 x2 (average 108) damage to both cars, totally destroying them (typical sedans have 34 hit points) and dealing 27 average damage to their occupants, which will likely kill any normal person outright (typical civilians have 4 hit points and die at -10 hit points).

By contrast, an SUV sideswiping a bus as they both move at alley speed will deal 12d2 damage x1/4 (average 4.5) damage to both vehicles, doing no appreciable damage (all cars have at least hardness of 5, reducing all damage they take from most sources by 5) to either the vehicles or the passengers (who may take 1 point of damage if any; D20 rounds down).


Those scenarios seem much more realistic to me, and certainly played pretty realistically, compared to the SR4 rules.

heh, i actually have the d20 modern books, but its been a while since i have opened them.

btw, i popped open SR3 to have a look at how it did the ramming thing.

the only funny thing is that its speed equals damage chart looks like the SR4 (same steps) except for the older damage codes used (L/M/S/D).

also, the speed used is the difference between the vehicles...

someone over-simplified the rules on this thing it would seem.

and the damage to passengers basically echos the house rule suggested in this thread. the damage resisted by passengers is the damage of the crash after its been staged by the vehicle.

So the passengers only take damage if the vehicle is destroyed? Or is damage just factored of the boxes of damage that the vehicle actually takes?

And why do passengers take damage in ram situations but not when vehicles are driven head first into walls at 200MPH?!?!?! (I don't have enough question and exclaimation marks to truely convey how confused & pissed I am right now.) This seems terribly ass-backwards.

My group is trying to play SR4A RAW with as few houserules as possible. There have been some questionable rules that we have glossed over and learned to accept but this is completely busted. And Arsenal's passenger safety crap is just a joke. Why didn't this get addressed in SR4A?

Not enough people use the vehicle combat rules. Just doesnt happen much in the average game, and thus it takes awhile for people to notice the brokennation.

the book says that one should treat a crash as if the vehicle rammed itself.

to me that sounds like a indirect way of saying that both vehicle and passengers should take damage, as with other ramming events.

hmm, i keep reading and re-reading the "damage and passengers" bit, and i cant help wanting to apply vehicle armor to the passengers in case of a ramming.

the whole thing comes down to the last bit about resisting damage equally, and how that relates to the other bits.

thing is that i cant say that the line about resisting equally precludes considering it an attack on the passengers, and therefor giving them the benefit of the vehicle armor, as the part just before.

its like the last part is simply repeating the first part, unless the use of "equally" is supposed to indicate that the kinds of attacks listed are not within the definition of an attack giving in the part just before. but if so it would have been much easier to write something like "these kinds of attacks do not grant the benefits listed above".

then there is the bit about people resisting damage with half impact, from the ramming section. but that can just apply to pedestrians and other "soft" targets.

solution:
substract lower speed from higher speed, use difference as basis for damage.
ramming vehicle has to be faster than rammed vehicle.

reason:
if they are both driving at the same speed, there is no ramming happening.
kinda like train cars are not ramming each other, even though they are both moving.
that is because they are NOT moving in relativity to each other.

should work for the vehicle in front suddenly hitting the brakes also.

sound good so far?
would take care off things like troll samurai keeling over while in an armored van that is being rammed by a
sportscar which is relatively not moving or moving relatively slow when compared to the rammed vehicle.

No. The vehicle takes damage, then soaks, then damage is applied. This number (the amount of boxes inflicted) is then given to the passengers.

That doesn't completely make sense. (Yeah, I know SR4 <> making sense - so sue me) Assume you standing in a really heavily armored box. Say made of meter thick armor plate. And this box is moving at 150 MPH when it crashes into a giant pile of sand and comes to a complete and thorough stop in about 2 feet, but the only damage is that the paint is scraped.

When your body flies (at 150 MPH) into the meter thick of armor plate that makes out the front wall of the box does it really matter that the box was not damaged?

You're assuming someone is loose inside the box and not strapped down and protected by an air bag.

Unless of course, they are parallel to each other in two lanes going the same speed... it is still resolved as a ramming as he sideswipes the vehicle, hoping to cause an accident with a stationary or slower going vehicle as you are forced into another lane, over a sidewalk, etc.

you could make the same assumption about the street samurai who is hanging out the window shooting his automatic weapon at the opposition when the vehicle crashes at high rates of speed into the wall that was unavoidable... Is he strapped in?

I really think that he is not going to get up from that, how about you?

see my statement, that the vehicle trying to ram has to go faster.
if you are going at the same speed and pulling over, compared to a vehicle that's going straight ahead, you are still not going to ram it with your full speed.
compare to switching lane when trying to pass another car on the road. le's say you are both at the very same height when you start to pull over, let us assume the vehicles are on lane 1 and 4 and the lanes 2 and 3 in the middle are empty. when you arrive at lane 4 from 1 while pulling over at the exact same speed the other vehicle is driving at, you are most likely not head to head, but your front bumper would be about where the doors are. if you are unlucky, you completely miss. this is because the / takes more time, as the distance you have to cover is bigger than |. and you are not doing a 90° turn either, so no, you do NOT get to ram another vehicle right beside you with your full ahead speed either. physics would like to have a word with that.

Sure. There isn't any such note in the BBB. And if you got situational and equipment mods that would be fine.

Never said you were doing a 90 degree ram (or heck, even a 45 degree ram)... Still slamming your vehicle from the side with another vehicle going the same speed is considered ramming (of a sort)... There is no speed differential, BUT I can make you perform a crash test against the oncomming car parked against the curb, which is where your speed differential will come into play and cause the damage to both the vehicle and the occupants... This scenario would happen a LOT more often than t-boning a car during a car chase... Happens all the time in action movies... it is a staple of the genre.

Maybe not so in everyday traffic if statistics have anything to say about it though, so i can at least see your POV.

even though you have made my approach more complicated, i somehow still think mine is easier and better for gameplay than with the different multiplicators . .
more ramming, more graduzall building up damage. not 2 crashes and both cars are dead o.O

Sweet (?), thanks Hob, I missed that. So everyone that got knocked unconscious in my example are now smears after the crash.

And you're right, I think that the armor should help the passengers (less likely to crumple around them). I added it in my example above but I'm thinking that I may have factored it incorrectly, if doing so was legal at all.

@Stahlseele
Yeah, that's the way I'm probably going to play it; those are modified SR3 rules right? But the speed isn't the only issue, it's the way the DV is derived from the Body of the attacking vehicle also. And the passenger damage is poorly handled. People don't usually explode from 30mph collisions.

dunno if they are, i managed to get around the whole vehicular combat system in SR3 ^^

Correction:
I thought you were right but according to pg 103 of Arsenal passengers are not injured if their vehicle crashes or is destroyed. The GM has the option of saying characters without airbags and/or seatbelts take damage. So, if you have a choice of slamming into that van or the wall, choose the wall.

am . . am i the only one who thinks that that is NOT right? O.o

I'm with ya, this is bunk. We need these rules fixed, hopefully soon. Tough to play RAW with vehicle combat.

When determining the damage level, use the relative speed. So it's either 0, running parallel, 30 for T Boning, or 60 for head on.

Agreed...

nope, try arsenal for that

ah yes, i forgot about arsenal. i have yet to fully memorize the "important" bits of the sourcebooks.

as i think about it, it seems they wanted the vehicle combat rules to be fast, without to much maths depending on the actions of the driver.

hell, they seem tuned towards there being two vehicles, max (a runner van followed by a cop car maybe?).

as such, they have opted for using numbers right in front of the players, as they are written on paper.

with that, and the new walk/run stats for all vehicles, it seems that they approached the rigger as being more a drone keeper then a getaway driver, with the drones mixing it up in the normal battle.

all in all, the text bit before the vehicle list in arsenal could probably have been expanded to 10 times its size and still not give a, to some, acceptable set of vehicle chase rules.

in total, SR4 is tilted much more towards ease of use vs realism then maybe even the earlier editions where (especially when grabbing some of the optional rules from the rigger books).

ease of use? yes i decide to play ben hur with the star in true cinenatic fashion, a quick glance at those handy numbers...and now I can spend the rest of the day rolling up a new character

With any luck, the powers that be are going to be taking a look at this thread, so if you have more observations on Ramming post 'em up.

Armored vehicles striking people don't get damaged. Ok, you might get some cosmetic damage, but it isn't going to break. And it's kind of rare to see an unarmored vehicle in SR.

Of course, in SR the windows are just as tough as the bumpers, so you won't even star the windshield when you run down granny.

And in my book, ease of use trumps realism almost always...

Oh! New ramming rules!

"If a vehicle rams another vehicle, all passengers die!" There. Done away with all the math.

That certainly fixes things doesn't it...

Well, it's certainly the effect as a result of the current rules, but without all the math.

I like the idea that the vehicle soaks the damage, and then the players resist the damage the vehicle actualy recieves, then chalk it up to seatbelts and airbags.

hoda spirit at 61 m/turn = 8p, rolls 14 dice, knocks it to 4p, car takes the brunt of it leaving a fair amount of damage for the passengers, who are strapped in, and luckily are wearing lined coats and such . makes sense neh?

how about a dodge scoot? maxspeed(60) = 2p, rolls 6 dice, knocks it to 0p, I'd probably have the driver roll a pilot test to see if he's thrown from the bike and taking falling damage... feesible

ares roadmaster at 61 mpt. = 16p, rolls 32 dice, kicks it down to 6p, feels like a heavy pistol round to the chest, hope you got a vest on. also, if you were hanging out the window? 16p = splat

this doesn't fix everything, but I think it makes it playable, same goes for grenades through cars(vs grenade through walls, I mean they should be comperable yea?)

. . you know, now that you wrote it out like that, i think i actually understand how this is supposed to work O.o
and it does sound much more feasible too ^^