I'm a little confused as how the chemistry rules actually work. The best way to explain my confusion would be to use an example.

Let's say that I want to make morphine using a Chemistry Shop. It has a Threshold of 8, and a Chemistry Shop says that it produces 10 doses. Does this mean that after I complete the test, I get 8 doses of morphine, or do I get 80 doses of morphine? Or is it that the chemistry shop can produce 10 doses for 1 unit of ingredients for morphine? Then what about with chemistry kits? Do I produce 1 dose regardless of the threshold, because that would make very little sense with the way the rules are written?

Anyway, the point is, I'm wondering what the purpose of the Chemistry Tools Table is. The numbers seem ambiguously placed there and it isn't too well explained in either Arsenal or SR4A what its purpose is supposed to be.

Using Chemistry requires an Extended Test, and a threshold of 8 means you need to get 8 hits in order to finish the test because morphine is more difficult to make than simple opium extract.

Say the GM decides you need that morphine within 6 hours (which is when he plans to have Lone Star beat down your door), your interval is an hour, and you're working in a chemistry shop conveniently located in your team's safehouse.

The first hour you roll your Chemistry + Logic dice. 3 hits. Awesome. Off to a great start.

2nd hour, no hits. Absolute bulldrek, but you keep rolling.

3rd hour, 1 hit. Better.

4th hour, 4 hits. Wizard. You are done.

You've finished with 2 hours to spare, and you manage to create 10 doses of morphine to help the poor slots in the next room who barely walked away from the run with all their limbs attached. You get 10 doses because that's the amount you can produce in a shop with a single Extended Test. If you had used a chemistry kit instead, you'd produce only 1 dose. If you wanted more than 10 doses, you'd have to undertake another Extended Test, but odds are your safehouse will be raided before you can finish the second batch of morphine. So either you risk it and try to finish another batch with those 2 hours that are left (i.e. the GM only allows two rolls on your next Extended Test before the Star comes calling), or you cut your losses, get your chummers on their feet with some painkillers, patch 'em up with some chewing gum and duct tape, and get the frag out of Dodge before the morphine wears off.

Make sense?

The one problem is this line:


So for morphine, would one successful test in a shop produce 10 doses (which it says it does for a shop), or 8 doses (which goes by the hits)?

@ Joe Chummer :
The problem here is that the text in Arsenal is contradictory.
It doesn't give clear instructions on how many doses you produce, as it involves two guidelines for this at the same time :



See what Andinel is about?
At first, the text says that the number of doses depends on the hits on the test.
In the next sentence, it suddenly depends on the equipment used.

I had this discussion at the start of one of my games, and ended up getting in an argument with one of the players. Unpleasantness was had by all, and the rules are screwy enough that both of us could argue our point convincingly.

Here's the example he used:
= He had 50 kgs of precursor for rating 4 plastic explosive, purchased at the 10% price rather than the separate prices for explosives.
= He took 10 of those precursors through a chemistry shop, and made 100 kgs of rating 4 plastic explosive.
= He then took those 130 kgs of rating 4 plastic explosive and increased the rating to 100 kgs of rating 15 plastic explosive.

So, for those 10 precursor units (price 400 nuyen), he got 100 units of rating 15 plastic explosive (price 150,000 nuyen). Net profit, 149,600 nuyen. I, as GM, had (at this point) a cow.

I found an appropriate way to consolidate this is as follows (and I hope someone at catalyst will put in some of this as clarification):
1. The size of the tools determines the amount of doses you can make at one time. Basically, gives you a bigger bucket to make the stuff in and fancier stuff to make fancier stuff.
2. 1 unit of precursor = 1 unit of product. I don't care how fancy your shop is, if you have 5 lbs of saltpeter, 1 lb of sulfur and 1 lb of coal, you still can't make more than 7lbs of gunpowder no matter how hard you try or how good your mixers are.
3. One hit produces the number of doses given by the size of the toolkit. If you're mixing 1 dose in a little bucket or 10 doses in a big bucket, still takes the same amount of time.
4. Hits on top of that can increase the rating.

This set of guidelines is relatively easy to execute and limits some of the excesses of chemistry.

This still allows for some absurd profits - for instance, in the plastic explosive example, 400 nuyen in and 5000 nuyen in capital generate 14,600 nuyen profit. But even that changes the dynamic a bit. Plastic explosives is different, but if you take the example of wireless negating paint the example still holds (20 nuyen for 10 rating 1 precursor, generates 19,980 nuyen profit his way or 1980 nuyen my way.)

I also found that the "making explosives" table in Arsenal is a little screwy, since some of the precursors cost more than the finished product...

For things declared to be Compounds (see the Compounds section for a list of examples) you spend hits from your roll to create doses, or to increase the rating of the doses you create. This means thing like artificial skin, and C-squared.

For Drugs and Toxins reaching the threshold on the extended test just gives you the number of doses indicated in the table. For Explosives and other chemicals (i.e. reasonably pure quantities of an element, and simple compounds - which are not stated to be Drugs, Toxins, or Compounds) you generate the number of kilos given.

The rules don't concern the same things, so the statements are noncontradictory.

That is an excellently written example. I found myself wanting to hurry up with my morphine to help my moaning friends before the fragging cops knocked the door down. Awesome.

Okay that clarified a really confusing point. I was under the assumption that "compounds" referred to anything made with the Chemistry skill, i.e. compounds, drugs, and toxins were all one in the same.

So basically it breaks down to the fact that compounds can have ratings, but drugs and toxins do not...?

If they had put the drugs/toxins part in a completely different paragraph, it would've made more sense in the read-through that the two things are not in the same category even though the same skill is used to make them.

However, making compounds still requires an Extended Test with a given threshold, so does this still imply that the harder a compound is to create, the more of it you actually make upon completion (or the stronger it is, depending on how you spend your hits)? Say gunpowder has a threshold of 8. You roll your 8 hits and spend 4 of them to make 4 doses and spend the other 4 to raise the rating of all 4 doses to 2. But say you are making trinitrotoluene (TNT, a far more powerful explosive than normal black gunpowder), which has a threshold of, say, 16. You get your 16 hits, and you spend 4 of those hits to make 4 doses, and spend the remaining 12 hits to bump each dose up to rating 4. That is a LOT of bang. I would think the reverse would true, that the simpler a compound is to make, the more of it you can create with a single Extended Test at a much higher quality than you could for a more complex compound. How do you explain this?

no. if you need 16 hits to create X, then you create 1 of X. (or, if you were processing 10 batches at once, you make 10, etc). just like if you do an extended test to hack a system with a firewall of 4, and you get 4 hits, you only hack 1 node, not 4 nodes. that's just how a basic extended test functions.

Then explain this sentence from the "Using Chemistry" section in SR4: "Each hit can produce a single dose of the compound, or increase the Rating of the compound (where applicable) by 1."

If you need 16 hits to create a single rating 1 dose of Compound X, then how in the world do you increase the rating of said compound? If the test ends after you get 16 hits, where do these hits you need to increase the rating come from?

i explain it by saying that just like any other test with a threshold, you only count the hits after the threshold.

According to the rules on pg 64 or SR4A, on an Extended Test you keep rolling and counting hits until you reach (# of hits = threshold) or exceed (previous rolls' cumulative hits + current roll's hits > threshold) the threshold. Essentially, on the roll in which you first surpass the threshold, you stop rolling.

So basically what you're saying is this:

If your threshold is 8 and you have six hits thus far, on your next interval, you roll and score 3 hits. You now have 9 hits total, which exceeds the threshold by 1, so you have to stop rolling. Then, with your 1 net hit, you can decide whether you made 1 unit of rating 2 compound or 2 units of rating 1 compound.

I take this line of thought to mean that the quality/quantity of what you made rests solely on how many extra hits you score on your last roll before reaching the threshold. In other words, you stand to make a better/larger batch if you are only one hit away from completion before you roll. If you're 1 hit away from being done and you score 5 hits (an impressive number for the number of dice you rolled), that's 4 hits to put towards quantity/quality. However, if you're 4 hits away and you score 5 hits on your roll (again, an impressive roll), you only get 1 point to put towards quantity/quality. This method doesn't make sense, especially if you set out to make a rating 3 compound from the get go, and you only score 1 net hit after reaching the threshold. Then you're stuck with a rating 2 compound you can't do anything with. Also, say you're on a really tight deadline and you manage to get all eight hits you needed in only two hours (two rolls), but didn't get any net hits on your second roll; you only got enough to meet the threshold. Whipping up a unit of compound X in only two hours is an impressive feat by itself, yet you're somehow stuck with a single unit of rating 1 compound which doesn't correlate to how adeptly you pulled off the job.

I would also mention that the rules for Extended Tests do not say anything about "net" or "extra" hits. Until this discussion appeared, I was under the impression that hits above an beyond the threshold of an Extended Test were simply ignored since the test is over and the task is complete.

I take this back. I read through the "Using Chemistry" section for the twelfth time tonight and came to the conclusion that compounds, drugs, toxins, and other chemicals are all one-in-the-same for rules purposes.

Thus, the sentence where quantity and rating (of a "compound," i.e. any chemical compound) are based on hits and the sentence where the quantity (doses for "drugs/toxins" and kilograms for "explosives and other chemicals,") is based on the equipment used are once again at odds with each other.

I for one would really love an officially sanctioned explanation on how all of this chemistry drek actually works. Of all the rules I've read through, this is the only one that seems to have a dozen different interpretations.

There are a couple of questions going on here. I agree that the chemistry kit seems a bit ambiguous, but... All extended tests are done the same, and all simple tests are done the same.
If the text says "Target of 8" this means that you have an extended test. Every hour (or whatever the interval might be) roll your pool subtracting one die from your pool on successive tests. If on your final roll you get 10 extra successes they mean nothing. In the case of the given example, the extended test will be all or nothing, and will produce 10 doses.

A simple test on the other hand takes an amount of time to perform, and will be accomplished in one single roll. A simple test might have a threshold, any hits over and above this threshold will improve success. So if you have a threshold of 2, in a simple test to create a drug, each additional success over the threshold will improve the quality of the drug by 1. So if the Heroin has a quality level, and you roll 4 more than the threshold, the 10 doses will be 4 levels of quality higher.

So basically you need to look for the clues in the rules telling you which type of test you are making. Once you figure out the test type, you can reread the rules to try making sense of the ambiguous text.

i didn't say the chemistry rules made sense with their weird interaction between extended tests and regular tests. personally, i would assume you can continue beyond the threshold, but would limit the length of the extended test in some way (such as the reducing dicepool used for missions games).

also, i would only allow rating to be improved (in the case of drugs, rating 2 drugs would count as 2 doses of the drug, and could be cut, but would not actually be 2 doses per se)... i can't wrap my head around how you're supposed to get more stuff out than what you put in. that's just silly.

That makes a bit of sense, but on the other hand, there are no such thing as "simple tests." The only types of tests are Success Tests (A single roll with a hit threshold), Opposed Tests (one party's hits vs. another party's hits), and Extended Tests (you keep rolling until you either hit the threshold or run out of time).

The rules explicitly state that Chemistry is a "Chemistry + Logic ([chemical type] 1 hour) Extended Test." There is nothing in the rules about a single roll in regards to Chemistry (unless your GM does a "Quick Extended Test," which is still an Extended Test and still counts as one in terms of hits and thresholds), so the "each hit equals one dose or rating point" stuff is utter bulldrek in the context of an Extended Test.

Getting additional doses would be like whipping up a batch of cookies and realizing you have enough batter left over for 1 more cookie than the recipe was for. We've all done it; that's why the term "baker's dozen" exists. Essentially getting an extra dose from your test would mean you extracted more of the chemical substance from the raw materials than an average person would have or maybe because your poppies were actually "the good drek" and not the run of the mill stuff floating around.

in which case you would just have a purer drug. you could then cut it (i probably wouldn't even require a test) with something else and make it effectively 2 doses, but if you start off with X weight of raw materials, you typically aren't going to end up with X + 1 weight of product, no matter how hard you try. also, your examples about superior quality materials has nothing to do with skill, which is what the roll measures. it has to do with how much material you bought.

you can end up with a higher quality version of the product (and you may be able to get the same effect with half as much)... but it just flat out isn't going to weigh more than what you put into it.