So I'm thumbing through 4e and noticed clubs are physical, which is weird cus I could swear its stun. So I crack open 2e and its stun, so I move on to 3e which is also stun. WTF, why are clubs now physical?

Did you also consider the somewhat more radical change in that a physical attack with DV less than armor = stun?

alright, here's a thought experiment for you. i emphasise thought experiment, because it would be extremely unwise to actually perform this experiment for real.

pretend for a moment that you (plain, ordinary you) are standing somewhere with, say, 10 feet or more on all sides of you. 5 feet from you is another ordinary person, holding a baseball bat.

now, pretend that person hits you with said baseball bat as hard as they can. particularly imagine that said baseball bat is not one of those hollow aluminum ones, but rather a solid wood baseball bat. kinda like a club, really. you go ahead and try and tell me that it isn't going to break bones, and cause major damage. that's not the same effect as getting by a fist. not even remotely.

it was changed because that's how real life works. when people hit you with a hard, blunt, heavy object as hard as they can, the result is physical damage.

in shadowrun terms: consider that the average person is dealing, say, 4 damage with a club (3 strength = 2 damage, and a club can add 2 damage). they get 1 attack per turn, probably get only 1 net hit if they hit you (untrained, you probably have a slight edge with your dodge dice pool over their attack dicepool), and you'll probably soak 1 point of damage, leaving it at 4 damage after your damage resist test. so, in 3 turns (9 seconds) where this average attacker has exceptional success in hitting you with this club, your life would be in danger if this were shadowrun. (2 boxes overflow). more likely, it's taken at least 5 tries to get 3 solid attacks on you (you have a larger DP, remember, and he needs a net hit, tie means he didn't damage you). so we're looking at 15 seconds of this ordinary guy beating you with a baseball bat as hard as they can with intent to hurt you. personally, i don't consider it unrealistic in the slightest that after 15 seconds of beating with a baseball bat you will be in danger of death. i would find it *extremely* improbable that you were merely a bit bruised up and able to completely recover within a day, maybe 2.

and when you make it something like a hammer or a mace or a steel pipe, it just gets even more absurd.

4th has a few odd quirks that could be more realistic. but the change for clubs to do physical damage? that ain't one of them.

Sure I'll tell you that when I was 8 an angry 12 year old cracked me in the head with a wooden bat. I went out cold, my skull held up fine though. I had many trips to the ER over the years but so far the only time I broke a bone was tripping over a dog I broke my foot (falling off a 20 ft building onto concrete didn't do it either). I was only walking and it was a small little yip dog, I just took a bad step... So I can easily see that it might break bone, but honestly I think it should do a little of both. Blunt damage can be worse than a gun shot wound but it can also be far less dangerous. Just depends on where you get hit and the amount of force.

@ Method, yeah I had thought of that I just didn't know if that was the line of thinking the devs had.

Amen.

You've obviously never had a bone broken by a fist before. It hurts!

Given a choice between a skilled fighter and his fists, and Joe Average with a baseball bat, I'll take my chances with Joe Average.

Muahahaha....i was about to say "they still exist, go dancing" but i think that wouldn´t be the requested answer.^^ SR4 is quite strange acc. stun damage. There is hardly anything left that does stun-damage, one exception is the cudgel....i won´t comment this.

There is no such thing as stun damage in real life. Fists break bones. Tasers can kill you. There are no "non-lethal weapons", there are just "less-lethal weapons".
So the arbitrary binary distinction of "harmless stun" and "harmful physical" damage is just that: an arbitrary distinction.

"Realistically" every weapon should do both in varying ratios, which is more complex and doesn't necessarily make the game any better, so SR instead assigns each damaging thing one of two distinct damage types and is done with it.

Saying that a club should do stun instead of physical isn't all that useful, because both damage types are "realistically" wrong anyway.

This, and only this. A lot of concessions are made in the name of general playability, and this is one of them.

In-game, there may come a time wherein knocking folks out (for capture, later interrogation or mercy) is the right thing to do, so it helps that there are methods for doing so. In reality, knocking people out without lasting damage is always a toss-up, especially with blunt force.

It's certainly *more* likely if you use a stick than a sword, but smashing a mook in the head with a hammer will probably kill him before knocking him out.

In other news, being very stubborn seldom makes you more resistant to tasers, as a certain Floridian student well knows, but that's not as playable.