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Zenyen
Given the small space necessary and the deadliness of the weapon, I would think a compartmentalized monofilament fingertip whip would be a great idea. However, I cannot find it in any of the books. Is it listed anywhere?
de4dmeta1
QUOTE ("SR4 @ p. 334/[SR4A, p. 342")
The fingertip compartment is a very popular storage device for a
monofilament whip (p. 305/p. 315), with the fingertip acting as control weight.
Extending a monofilament whip from a fingertip compartment takes
one Simple Action, while retracting it requires one Complex Action.

Same text in both books, apart from the page reference.

Get a fingertip compartment implanted. Anchor a monowhip inside it. Learn to not die when using said whip.
As far as I can tell, there is no extra cost in either Essence or Nuyen.
Zenyen
Great! Thank you.
The Jake
Anyone here know of anyone that has used a monofilament whip? I'd love to hear stories both positive and negative....

- J.
Zenyen
I've used it with 21 dice. Needless to say, I can cut people apart easily and have never glitched with it.
Anythingforenoughnuyen
I had a character with a Fingertip Mono-Whip. He was an Adept and his Mono-whip was a weapon focus. It turned out to be an impressive way to have a melee character without making a massive investment in strength.

AFE nuyen.gif
Zenyen
QUOTE (Anythingforenoughnuyen @ May 28 2009, 11:28 PM) *
I had a character with a Fingertip Mono-Whip. He was an Adept and his Mono-whip was a weapon focus. It turned out to be an impressive way to have a melee character without making a massive investment in strength.

AFE nuyen.gif


How does that work? I just looked up Weapon Foci but it's sort of confusing. I can add Force dice to my melee attacks but how much force can I buy with karma points? Does it work with physical adepts or you do have to be a mystical adept?
Stahlseele
Weapon Focus does work with Physical Adepts. For all other kinds of Focus you need to be a Mystial Adept as far as i remember.
also, Whips are linked to quickness/agility, not to strength. So no need for massive Strength-Investments. Best part of that Thing?
You can cut up Spirits as if they were People too ^^
Psikerlord
hmmm yeah... would be pretty cool for roleplaying descriptions, too
Zenyen
QUOTE (Stahlseele @ May 29 2009, 02:50 AM) *
Weapon Focus does work with Physical Adepts. For all other kinds of Focus you need to be a Mystial Adept as far as i remember.
also, Whips are linked to quickness/agility, not to strength. So no need for massive Strength-Investments. Best part of that Thing?
You can cut up Spirits as if they were People too ^^


If I'm an adept but my Magic is reduced to 0 due to implants, can I still use Weapon Foci? Or is it rendered useless?
Dragnar
If your magic ever gets reduced to 0, you become mundane and aren't an adept any more, so you can't use any foci.
HappyDaze
QUOTE
Whips are linked to quickness/agility, not to strength. So no need for massive Strength-Investments.

I've rarely seen any melee weapons in SR4 that absolutely require a massive investment in Strength. Strength is ineffecient as a damage boost - and almost totally ineffective for anything else. Generally anything that boosts your attack dice pool is better than a bit of Strength, and there are a Martial Arts Qualities that can get a bit of damage up cheaper than Strength. Sure, if you later want to increase Strength up because you've run out of more effective boosts, that's an option too.
Kingboy
QUOTE (de4dmeta1 @ May 29 2009, 01:09 AM) *
Get a fingertip compartment implanted. Anchor a monowhip inside it. Learn to not die when using said whip.


And this is why I might consider a monofilament garrotte implanted in such a way for an assasin/infitrator, but I just can't bring myself to use the whip. I know it's effective according to the rules, but the idea is still just to dumb for me...
Chibu
*sigh*

First of all... whatever the rules say, monofil whips shouldn't do jack to a spirit. it doesn't even make sense. Also, monowhip weapon focus? Seems like it should cost extra since the enchanting would be really hard.

And yes, according to the rules, it's pretty hard to kill yourself with a monowhip (in any edition), so no one really ever does.

They are really cool flavor for a character... until they've been used more than twice. Then they just get old. Let's see... stories... Oh right. So, a couple of our characters were turned into werewolves (long story, I've posted it elsewhere around here i think), my character and two others. The two others went out of control and started attacking everyone (in our group... we were in an empty alley at the time). The Sammy and myself vs 2 wolves. The Sammy had a monowhip. He started cutting the other two in half with it... But since they have (had?) regeneration, it was decided that a monowhip should havbe exactly... no effect on them. It creates a tiny, very clean cut which would be simple for a regenerating character to heal.

After that there was a fight on top of a moving limo, and pedestrians thrown at a rotodrone. it was awesome.
de4dmeta1
Last SR game I played in, we had a Troll sam who wielded twin monowhips. He actually did manage to hit himself once, but didn't take much damage from it - though he did stop dual-wielding, or even using them that frequently. After he almost lopped his cyberarms off, he preferred to go Bionic Commando on people - grapple arms with shock hands can be quite useful for downing fleeing targets. He only broke out the molocules for big combats, and then only for hard targets.
Larme
QUOTE (de4dmeta1 @ May 29 2009, 10:24 AM) *
Last SR game I played in, we had a Troll sam who wielded twin monowhips. He actually did manage to hit himself once, but didn't take much damage from it - though he did stop dual-wielding, or even using them that frequently. After he almost lopped his cyberarms off, he preferred to go Bionic Commando on people - grapple arms with shock hands can be quite useful for downing fleeing targets. He only broke out the molocules for big combats, and then only for hard targets.


Ach, when will people learn that dual wielding is pointless in Shadowrun? Unless you're going with the Two Weapon Style maneuver, though you can't with monowhips because they're too long. You can attack multiple targets with just one melee weapon by splitting your dice pool, the second one does literally nothing...
Stahlseele
But it DOES look cool!
General Grivious style.
Dikotana
Attack with one, and hold the other in a cool pose. You're better off.

The monofilament whip rules make sense. Whips are hard to use and dangerous if you're terrible, but once you're skilled you really shouldn't have any risk of hurting yourself. The glitch rules mostly cover someone incompetent trying to be badass and ending up in a hospital.

As for spirits, using a weapon against them just generally doesn't make sense. Don't worry, it's not supposed to; that's why weapons generally don't work so well. If you have a mystic focus, though, you're not really attacking with a weapon. Your attacking with your own spiritual force (or other thaumobabble), and your experience with the weapon just happens to give you additional damaging focus.
Zenyen
BTW, the idea came about because I wanted a extremely covert attack that is a supplement to my ranged specialty since I can't make ceramic guns from the get-go and even then they might get found out on a thorough pat-through.
Stahlseele
Great, now i want to make an adept with an monowhip weapon focus in one of his fingers . .
Tanegar
QUOTE (Chibu @ May 29 2009, 08:59 AM) *
He started cutting the other two in half with it... But since they have (had?) regeneration, it was decided that a monowhip should havbe exactly... no effect on them. It creates a tiny, very clean cut which would be simple for a regenerating character to heal.

Unless you're talking about a Wolverine level of regeneration where they're healing the wound as the whip moves through their bodies (not really familiar with the werewolf rules, so maybe they do regenerate that fast), they're going to be cut in half before the regeneration has a chance to do anything useful.
Stahlseele
In SR3 Regeneration meant:"you have a success in this test, ALL DAMAGE is healed next round. Yes, that means you go from Overflow Damage(ripped of limbs and crushed skulls and missing organs and the such) to up and around in 3 seconds flat. If you make the test. And did not get hit with your allergen.
Larme
QUOTE (Tanegar @ May 29 2009, 05:02 PM) *
Unless you're talking about a Wolverine level of regeneration where they're healing the wound as the whip moves through their bodies (not really familiar with the werewolf rules, so maybe they do regenerate that fast), they're going to be cut in half before the regeneration has a chance to do anything useful.


They don't heal that fast, there's a chance that they could even biff their regeneration roll and heal nothing at all at the end of each turn. That was clearly a house rule they made up. I can see a whip hurting a regenerating creature easily, based on the fact that they don't always regenerate right away, they could bleed really badly if the shock to their system messed up their regeneration (i.e. they biffed the regeneration roll, or the wound did more damage than they could realistically heal in one turn).

As for spirits, they are not ethereal. Though their bodies resist normal attacks, it does hurt them to have pieces removed. When you slice off a part of a spirit with a monowhip, I imagine that the sliced parts would go poof as soon as they become disconnected from the spirit's main body. Spirits are solid, tangible masses of ectoplasm. Even if they look like fire, water, or air, they are NOT. You can't slice air in half with a monofilament, because it's a gas and not subject to being cut. An air spirit, on the other hand, is a solid (though perhaps a weird, magical, amorphous solid) and can be cut up, blown up, and shot up, even though it innately resists most attacks.
tsuyoshikentsu
So question. Since the whip's damage is fixed and uses an Exotic Weapon skill, what would a build using it look like?
HappyDaze
QUOTE
So question. Since the whip's damage is fixed and uses an Exotic Weapon skill, what would a build using it look like?

Pretty much just like any other melee build except that Strength could drop a point or two and you'll need the Exotic Weapon skill for the whip. Other than that, it doesn't really require any special tricks in the build.
tsuyoshikentsu
Right, but what I'm saying is that STR looks pretty useless altogether on a fixed-damage weapon and that a lot of the qualities and things normally picked (Martial Arts, for example) don't work for an Exotic skill. I'm saying, what do you replace that with?
Stahlseele
Edge. 2 meters of it.
HappyDaze
QUOTE
Right, but what I'm saying is that STR looks pretty useless altogether on a fixed-damage weapon and that a lot of the qualities and things normally picked (Martial Arts, for example) don't work for an Exotic skill. I'm saying, what do you replace that with?

Your character doesn't go through childhood with a monwhip in his hand - there's no real reason that his Strength has to be tanked at all. As for Martial Arts, is the monowhip going to be the sole avenue of attack? I wouldn't make the character that way, and some of the MA qualities are nice for rounding out the character's other h-t-h options. Even Darth Maul still threw kicks while weiding his double-lightsaber...
tsuyoshikentsu
Well yeah, I'd not waste more points on melee somewhere else. Mechanically, he'd have to have a STR of about 12 to equal his current damage on another weapon (assuming a 1:1 AP to D conversion) and he's not going to have anywhere near that.
Dumori
Well GM permiting you could get a plus 1DV to a mono whip. By tweaking that +1 to exotic melee weapons thing. plus there are a fre bonuses that are usefull for any one runnign in to combat.
Zenyen
QUOTE (Dumori @ May 31 2009, 08:44 AM) *
Well GM permiting you could get a plus 1DV to a mono whip. By tweaking that +1 to exotic melee weapons thing. plus there are a fre bonuses that are usefull for any one runnign in to combat.


How do you get +1 DV to monowhip? And what +1 exotic melee weapon thing?
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