Chrysalis
Sep 27 2009, 07:53 PM
There are poisons in RL that make Shadowrun poisons look like non-alcoholic beer. Not only the kind that kill immediately, but also ones that will put you in a wheel chair for the rest of your life, most re undetectable as well.
How do you model exotic poisons in Shadowrun?
AndyZ
Sep 27 2009, 08:02 PM
I strongly suggest against having stuff that actually cripples PCs beyond healable damage. Consider whether you'd want to keep playing in a game after the GM decides that your character would be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his/her life. I once had an ST for a modern style game tell me after I'd been shot up and rescued that my character was shot in the brain and that he was stuck in a coma for the rest of his life. Needless to say, I didn't make another character.
If it's seriously what you want to do, I might suggest a poison that drains an attribute, perhaps Agility. If it would drain Agility below 1, Agility remains at 1 but the victim is paralyzed. Alternatively, the Trance drug on page 77 of Arsenal may give you something similar to what you want.
Penta
Sep 27 2009, 08:27 PM
Have to agree with AndyZ. I just wouldn't do it.
More to the point, I'm not sure those superexotic poisons should really be available.
One of the reasons the CIA went positively apeshit in the 1970s when Congress told them to destroy their assassination tools was because that included incredibly rare, incredibly exotic poisons. (Cobra venom extract was one, I recall.) They were very difficult and very expensive to get, and basically impossible to synthesize.
In short: To get your hands on one of these should be like nuclear weapons or the like - it takes megacorp/government-level resources and talents, in very esoteric fields. And you have to keep it secret the whole time.
kzt
Sep 27 2009, 08:52 PM
And to make it undetectable you have to expect to to be working against something a billion times more sensitive and running with enormously more computing power than current. Your dealing with crime labs that can not just fully sequence your DNA in an hour, it can produce an accurate picture of what you'd look like at the same time.
Chrysalis
Sep 27 2009, 09:02 PM
Now you just need Gil Grissom on the line.
Karoline
Sep 27 2009, 11:02 PM
I think the problem is that a 'dose' of anything is highly abstracted. Take arsenic for example. It takes something like .15g of the stuff to be lethal to a person who eats it, yet the book talks about how people are generally fed it slowly over a length of time until it is deadly. One dose could easily be as little as half a gram (To give really really high chance that even a troll would die eatting it) and have a damage rating of "Your dead."
I'm sure the same goes for alot of the other poisons/toxins/chemicals that appear in SR. The game wouldn't be much fun if everything simply had a damage value of "Your dead." like it really should. Heck, even guns aren't nearly as deadly as they should be. Sure, you can survive getting hit by a small gun without any kind of armor, but it is going to be a -serious- injury, not 'oh, slap a bandage on it and I'll be fine' like it is in SR.
I suppose my point is that the entire game has been toned down in how deadly it is, so your supertoxins exist, they've just been toned down like everything else. If you want a more realistic level of danger in the game, just double the DV/Power of everything and it'll be about right.
LurkerOutThere
Sep 27 2009, 11:18 PM
It's a casualty of making the game playable, bullets are in my experience somewhat more lethal in the the real world then thye are in the setting as well, but one shot your insta-dead tends to be less then fun in games with no respawn and no resurrection.
Starmage21
Sep 28 2009, 12:10 AM
QUOTE (LurkerOutThere @ Sep 27 2009, 06:18 PM)

It's a casualty of making the game playable, bullets are in my experience somewhat more lethal in the the real world then thye are in the setting as well, but one shot your insta-dead tends to be less then fun in games with no respawn and no resurrection.
Yeah, bullets are LETHAL when they hit. Nothing like watching seasoned soldiers and cops empty entire clips and hit nothing but air and dirt.
TheOOB
Sep 28 2009, 04:21 AM
QUOTE (LurkerOutThere @ Sep 27 2009, 07:18 PM)

It's a casualty of making the game playable, bullets are in my experience somewhat more lethal in the the real world then thye are in the setting as well, but one shot your insta-dead tends to be less then fun in games with no respawn and no resurrection.
Umm, you realize there are few locations you can shot someone where you get "one shot insta-dead", and only one location where you can be sure that they won't be able to shoot back before they die(base of the neck on the spinal column.
Fact is, it usually takes about 3 bullets to kill someone immediately unless you get luckly and hit something vital. Even headshots tend not to be immediately deadly unless the bullet bounces around in there. Shadowrun is actually fairly realistic in that reguard, save for the fact that there are cirtually never injury complications(bleeding out, infection, ect).
As for poison, yes it was weakened for game balance. Nothing sucks more then taking a drink and your GM telling you "You Die". I think the worst poison(that isn't really expensive with an insane availability) is narcojet which deals 10S damage. One dose won't knock out most people, but two will take out most anyone, as will a capsule round filled with the stuff.
Method
Sep 28 2009, 04:41 AM
Not all super leathal toxins are exotic and hard to come by. Botulinum toxin (aka Botox) for example is actually one of the most lethal substances known to man with an LD50 well below our current detection limits (dependant on route of administration). But I generally agree with what others have said- it's mostly a playability thing. Plus kzt is right- with SR technology a medkit can detect most toxins and administer a magic antivenom (apparently made from unbelievium) in a matter of seconds.
TheOOB
Sep 28 2009, 06:31 AM
And you can always handwave things, like
In 2021, the ORO corporation created a new strain of bacteria that fed on botulism toxins in a well publicized humanitarian effort. Within five years, scientists estimated all traces of the disease to be eradicated from the earth. Similar efforts where performed aginest Arsenic, Anthrax, and Brown Recluse Spiders.
kzt
Sep 28 2009, 07:17 AM
QUOTE (TheOOB @ Sep 27 2009, 10:21 PM)

Umm, you realize there are few locations you can shot someone where you get "one shot insta-dead", and only one location where you can be sure that they won't be able to shoot back before they die(base of the neck on the spinal column.
Fact is, it usually takes about 3 bullets to kill someone immediately unless you get luckly and hit something vital. Even headshots tend not to be immediately deadly unless the bullet bounces around in there. Shadowrun is actually fairly realistic in that reguard, save for the fact that there are cirtually never injury complications(bleeding out, infection, ect).
Depends.
But in general, all pistols really suck at stopping people trying to kill you, SMGs suck less because you can shoot them a lot and hit more due to the stock, rifles suck a lot less than pistols, and shotguns (in the right situation) suck only about as much as rifles.
Once you leave hand held weapons and move to .50cal HMGs they don't suck, people tend to predictably fall down and stop fighting when hit. 25mm cannon shells and above don't suck at all: they typically instantly convert people into disassembled corpses.
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