try looking up the decibel scale with examples

Regarding the knife fights, the text at the bottom left doesn't fit with the diagram at the top right.

Knasser can you please post the actual builds for each of the Sam's used in the example (including augmentations) please?

Can you also release some other fantastic stuff, as I always like your releases

personally i go with Ork 2.0 for my street sams. i would be interested in seeing an ork/dwarf WWSD chart. while not as tough as the troll, they both are tougher and stronger than the humans.

as for the knife fight- bone lacing/bone density would make the sam a lot more deadly in unarmed combat, possibly making a knife redundant. the sam would be better off with a shock glove in this case.

None of the scenarios are optimized, but rather presented in a fashion that you and I, in the real world can say "ok, taking out four dudes with your fist is bad ass because I'd be lucky to take 1 or 2" and the knife fight is along the lines of "that's stupidly deadly in the real world, I wouldn't do it" as we have some level of experience on how well normal people can perform in those situations.

Really? I didn't flesh out the builds that fully, I just picked numbers that I knew were achievable in a typical game without having to fiddle around too much. The tin man is the only one that I scratched some build details out over because I wanted to check that the cyberlimb costs (essence and ¥) weren't too exceptional. I could give you a quick list of augmentations to get those builds. All the information that was relevant to the stunts they were performing was (or should be) in the stat blocks.



Heh! Okay. I'll try and do some more. If you're interested, this is what I have in progress at the moment - a revised Matrix Examples document (the one up there is pre-Unwired and the only reason I haven't taken it down is because people keep emailing me for it if I do), a Shadowrun economy article, Dark King part II (it's been half-written for over a year, now) and another adventure, although the last is pertty early stages. Do people have any preference which I focus on? I've also done an encounter involving the Spikes (troll go-gang) hijacking a courier but that's based on someone else's idea so I have to track down their thread and ask them if they mind (I'm using it for my game in a couple of weeks).



Got it in one. It's not about pushing things to the maximum, it's about what is the impact of augmented attributes on our intuition about the world. We look out fo a first floor window and think 'not unless I had to', but the bone-laced samurai thinks "not going to hurt me".

K.

If you're interested in adding something random to your stats, I could pass you Sk8; he's not stellar in a fight, but he started out as an experiment in what pushing the stats could produce (and so might be interesting to see on your jumping/climbing/running charts). Being able to keep up with traffic on the freeway while on foot has been handy on occasion.

My current character is like a cat: 1st floor is fine, 2nd and 3rd floor will hurt,* but by the 4th he's ok again (woo! Fly speed! Only issue is having the standard action to transform)

*Cats falling out of a second floor window^ get broken bones, or so I've heard, because they tense up prior to reaching terminal velocity, at which point they relax again and can absorb the force of the fall.

^First = ground floor, 2nd = British 1st.

They all sound excellent! But if I were to choose one, I like the sound of the Matrix Examples document the most, any help to make my Matrix session content better for my players is always a godsend.

I do appreciate anything that is released either way, so please don't feel like I'm nudging you to release something (DO IT NOW ), just letting you know you have a fan

Cats falling out of windows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_righting_reflex
seems as if cats can survive a fall from 32nd story if they get treatment for their injuries.
now THAT is impressive.

Yep. Though reading the linked page there's some alternate theories. Though its hard to test the theory on what actually occurs that displays the reduced injuries above a 7 story fall (eg. death more often than injury) as no one wants to huck cats out windows to find out.

Which is kinda silly because we can use animals to test cosmetics and stuff (which can possibly injury/maim/kill them) but we can't throw cats out of a 7th floor window.
When did science become so ethical?

Never its just the publics reaction to it. As in I'm sure most people will be meh about animal testing for drugs that will save lives ect. But dropping cats from heights to see how they fall for that reason only I could see huge uproar.

The REAL question on my mind, however, is... What Would Samurai Do... For a Klondike Bar?

Would you...kill a man?

Is this a Klondlike bar thats not a soy version? If so I think a lot of sinless would do more than one killing.

</family guy quote>

Well Fat Samurai would probably do quite a lot for one.

But given that I'm British and have no idea what a Klondike Bar is, I'd have to say that most of my samurai probably wouldn't do much for one. How much damage do they do?

K.

Klondike Bars are delicious ice cream treats. About 3 inches square and an inch thick, vanilla ice cream covered in a chocolate shell. Of course, they come in other flavors too.

Oh right - a choc ice in Britain. What would a samurai do for one? Well if it's the one I have to endure as a PC in my game, probably murder half the city.

Well, a month later but I suppose I'll revive this thread. Since I'm finally back, I finally got around to writing a little combat simulator, seeing as how I thought the troll would be able to take so many more gangers. The number required was actually much smaller than I thought, but haven't had a chance to go through and make absolutely sure all my stuff is working as it should.

So, ran a hundred thousand trials and came back with an average of the gangers having to be 7.94215 in number before they could take down the troll (unarmed combat), which was actually alot lower than I was expecting. The +4 bonus from friends and melee, and the stacking penalty for multiple defenses in a round really start to hurt the troll, even with his 14 dice worth of soak. Just realized I didn't include wound penalties to the soak rolls, is that right? I don't remember off hand if wound penalties affect soak rolls or not (don't think they do).

Anyway, so troll can very safely take down a group of 6, and is highly in favor of taking down a group of 7, but 8 is about a 50/50 chance, and more than that is risky. Like I said, lower than I was expecting. I'll have to go back and double check it at some point to make sure I don't have something wonky going on.

Soaking damage isn't penalized by wounds.

Cool, than my simulator is (in theory) spot on except for one very minimal error which shouldn't contribute over much. I didn't have any of the gangers take wound penalties to their attack, because the troll always attacked the same one until it died (or was knocked out), and that injured ganger would always be the first to attack, and at that point the ganger shouldn't injure the troll anyway, so shouldn't be too big of a deal.

This is great. Gonna show that off to my group tomorrow. I like your SR site. Hope to have one of my own soon.


Not to derail the topic, but why do you say that? Can you recommend any fixes?

I would also like to know.

it's pretty simple. consider that a human today can lift a certain amount. a brief google search gives me 263 kg for the world record for 'clean and jerk' in weight lifting in the highest weight category (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_Olympic_weightlifting). the clean and jerk is an olympic event where you are essentially lifting a weight over your head (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_and_jerk)

the formula for lifting over your head is 5 kg per point of strength, plus 5 kg per hit on a str + bod test. the highest a human being can get without augmentation is 7 in an attribute, and for the sake of argument, we'll presume the person is allowed and has spent the BP to buy the exceptional attribute twice, giving a str and bod score of 7 (being a little generous, but it won't make a difference). this gives us 35 kg from the strength, and another 70 kg maximum from the test, or 105 kg total. if we wanted to be *really* generous, we could allow the human (lifty mcweightlifter) to invest in the lucky quality, and have an edge of 8. this could result in another 8 hits, or 40 kg. so we're up to 145 kg now. assuming all the dice rolled are hits (though admittedly, we haven't applied the rule of 6 for edge use).

so with a theoretically maxed-out human, we're very far below what the expected results of weight lifting should give. less than half, assuming the human rolls 22 hits on 22 exploding dice, which i think is being very generous. and again, this is the upper extremity of unaugmented human capability; you couldn't make an unaugmented human with those attributes in shadowrun.

so, there you have it. the rules are quite definitely off.

of course, since no gear has any weights listed anyways, this isn't likely to be a huge problem. but when your maxed out augmented troll (str and bod 12 (18) shall we say? assuming the same kind of benefits, plus augmentations, is going to be lifting a maximum of 270 kg without spending edge, and that's assuming we give him 2 exceptional attributes, 2 genetic treatments to increase his maximum strength and bod, and 6 points of str and bod augmentation (strength isn't so hard, but i have no idea where the bod augmentation comes from... perhaps he's also an initiated adept? maybe cyberlimbs?), we have someone who can barely lift more than the world record in weight lifting today. assuming the stars all align and he gets 36 hits on 36 dice... though again, we could throw edge into the mix (for 7 more dice). but really, the fact that you need to get a 9 foot tall, genetically augmented, exceptionally strong, fit, augmented troll before you can even have a small chance (some quick math gives me less than 1% to roll 5+ on all 36 dice) of performing at a similar level to modern humans should tell you that there's something screwy going on with the rules.

*cough* so what rule do you use then?

The 'lift off the ground' rule of 15kg per str point and then hits seems like it'd get you alot closer. That's 105 just for the 7 str, and then another 75 on average from hits on 7 bod and str, and we're looking at around 200 kilos. Still a bit shy of the world record, but we can assume the world record involved a larger than average number of hits and some burnt edge.

A human with lifting experience will also have and know a certain weight that is "do-able" for a certain type of lift. The fixed base value should be much higher, the variance via hits lower. It is IMO better to test for the proper application of force (Throwing test, balance test...), and to eyeball the limit based on strength (weight) and body(lift length).

Honestly, the clean and jerk is the sort of thing that makes me wish that there was a catch all athletics skill as opposed to an athletics skill group. It's a rather technical lift that requires knowing how to kick in as many muscle groups as possible and then lining up your body as straight as possible so that once the weight is up top and you've straightened out the worst is over. You're not really going anywhere with 260 kilos over your head, I can tell you that much. Still, I suppose its neither here nor there since you won't here me arguing any time soon that the rules aren't screwed up in this area.

agreed. i doubt you see very many people who can lift 105 kg one attempt as their maximum, followed by 150 kg as their max on their next attempt, only to discover on their third attempt that the max they can lift is 90 kg.

(edit: oh, and as far as "what method did knasser use to determine appropriate weights", i couldn't say for sure but at a guess he used some research to determine a current appropriate value for human maximum, factored in that the street sam was going to be stronger than that, and then factored in that the troll was going to be a whole crudload stronger than that, via the mk I eyeball technique.)

edit 2:



this still wouldn't fix the problem. it would, at best, add about 6-8 dice to the unaugmented human's roll (perhaps a bit more if we allow even more qualities to be chosen beyond our already large positive quality BP spending), which still won't get you anywhere near the appropriate amounts. although i will agree that something similar to the artisan skill would make a lot of sense as a physical skill (ie: this skill represents your ability at one form of physical activity, ranging from team sports to dancing to downhill skiing and beyond)

Now, I couldn't help but snicker out loud when the first thought that occurred to me was "Not to mention the diminishing attacker pool."

Troll swings, CRUNCH.
Ganger 1 (Eddie): "Hey Steve...two more like that and we're only going to get a 3 friend bonus in melee!"
Ganger 2 (Steve): "Just pray this is one of the fightsthat goes against the curve in our favor!"

*snicker* Yeah, made sure that the attackers get their DPs reduced as their numbers dropped. Of course I couldn't really simulate the point at which the gangers go "Oh no, he killed Kenny, run!"

You're dialog really wants me to make a comic in the vein of OOTS or Goblins.

That was awesome ^_^

I LOL'd

Just another thing about 4eSR that I like over "the other 4e"...the "monsters" in SR are real and would go "Dang...someone else can storm this Omaha beach...I'm outta here while the getting's good."

WWSD reminds me of an article that I think was in Dragon magazine maybe some 20 years ago. In it the author took about 5 or 6 different RPGs and tried to figure out how long it would take for two "man on the street" characters without any combat training to beat each other into unconsciousness. The 0-level D&D characters with straight "10"s took maybe 4-5 minutes to brain each other--but that's only because a combat round was an entire minute back in 2nd ed. The Shadowrun characters with "3"s across the board took about the same time as I recall--the difference being that it was 100+ rounds of combat. This would have been SR1 or 2, so with target numbers of 8 on three dice, they just couldn't hit each other...

I would suggest that base maximum weights are made a function of base attribute values. Normal lifting tasks get a strain DV based on overload that is resisted with a body+strength test. To make the lift itself you´d need to test body+strength vs. the strain DV. (Have to think about Edge effects.)

Sorry for the no-posting: been extremely busy, lately.

The problem with the RAW weight-lifting rules is less the amounts and more the wild swings in results. As far as I can guess, the writer thought that there should be a big game element to weight-lifting and felt compelled to make a maximum lift the result of maximum rolls, to the extent that average rolls gave you far less.

The first thing that I did was shift the bulk of the result into the fixed formula based on Body + Strength, leaving the dice roll component to account for a much lesser proportion of the result. People with a bit of weight-lifting experience have a reasonable idea of how much they can lift - it's not a complete surprise each time. That said, if you start spending Edge, you can bump it higher than you normally could this way, and that's how I want it to be.

The second decision I made was to keep the system based on Body + Strength, rather than just Strength + Strength. It seemed to add a little depth and additional detail to the game that way and it turned Strength into an attribute that wasn't solely about amount of muscle, but about how you use it (because a character with high Body but low Strength probably is pretty large but hasn't really trained their neuro-muscular ability much).

The final formula I used is in my House Rule document here

Anyway, the relevant part was this:


I'm not entirely happy with it - it was a slightly off-the-cuff fix. But I consider it far superior to the published rules. It's a shame as I don't like to make house rules generally , due to laziness. However, the principle is good. If it needs refinement, I think it's in fine-tuning the exact formula rather than shifting any of the result back on to variable dice results.

Hope this helps. I like the ganger dialogue, btw.

K.

I'm glad your results turned out similarly to mine. I'm not bad with probability mathmatics, though I'm in the enthusiastic amateur category rather than qualified mathematician. For working out who could fight what though, I turned to a friend (the guy who helped me with my site) who took a look at it, hummed a bit, and then said: "we're going to do this differently." And then we wrote a combat simulator together (I was in the management role. ). We did take account of wound penalties on both sides (not for soak rolls) and we ran about 10,000 fights for each test to get our averages. The aim was to see how many the character could fight and reasonably expect to win, and for that it worked quite well. The whole diagram is not about what could happen, but what such a character might attempt. Not "could I jump to that next building" but "should I try?" The fights are the same principle.

Option System

1) How much one can lift is partially based on both raw mass and muscle weight (represented by Body). Thus, [Body + Strength] x 10 kgs is used as one's base lift, the amount a character can lift without making a check. So an average human (3s in Bod and Str) could lift 60 kgs.
2) Each hit on a Strength + Body test adds 10 kg to the amount she can lift. A character choose to convert dice on this test to automatic hits (up to half the pool), but she takes one point of stun damage on the following turn for each "auto-hit" -- she draws on her inner reserves but ends up pulling a muscle or tiring herself out. So the above character could convert two of her six dice dice to auto-hits, allowing her to lift 80 kgs (60 + 20) and giving her four dice to roll to add to that.

This gives us 60 kg for an average human base lift, with the potential to exceed this amount considerably (especially with Edge and converting dice to hits) but not that much on average. This is generous (especially when compared to what the system offers now) but not too unrealistic, and it allows for the occasional truly cinematic feat of strength without throwing the baseline out of whack. Anyone see anything fundamentally wrong with this?

With an "I can always do this, but it kinda hurts" lift of 90 kg for 3S.

The only potential problem I see is that you're excessively high strength/body characters (ah la cyber troll) with 14 strength, 10 body can lift 240 kg base, 360 kg max auto-hits at the cost of 12 stun (taking 8 and a -2 to all future actions). The issue I see is when that stun damage takes effect: if its as the roll happens, they could be taking the -2 wound penalty to that roll, or it could happen after the fact (when they put the weight down again) whereby they can lift huge amounts and hold it indefinitely.

I beleive I read way back inth e giant wall of thread that you had the Troll's reach give him one more die in his DP for melee. Doesn't it work out better for him to subract 1 from each ganger? It reduces each of their maximum hits by one and since their dicepools are so small anyway, it should have a proportionally larger impact.

If they need on average 3 hits to get past the Trolls defense, this is much harder to acheive on their 7-9DP if you reduce that DP to 6-8.

I see no big issue with this. If he's willing to sacrifice so much for that extra push, go for it.


I said following turn; I should clarify. The lifter takes damage from lift auto-hits on the round after performing the feat of strength. So he operates at no penalty for that one round. If he has to continue taking damage to keep the thing aloft, then he can keep spending health on auto-hits. Hope his Doc Wagon contract is still good.

Then I give it a little-silver-dragon sticker of approval.

Hmm, that's a good point. I'll switch it to dropping opponent's attack instead of increasing own attack and see what happens. Unfortunately the computer I have the program on is currently in three different rooms (Woo moving!) so I won't be able to run the program before Wednesday most likely.

Cool, thanks.

RIIIIIIIISE

But seriously, anyone ever finish this up?