It was requested, so here is an updated version of "What Would Samurai Do?" Taking three moderately augmented examples of 2070 metahumanity (including a troll), and using more or less typical rolls without Edge use, we can see just what they're really capable of. Everything is drawn to scale. The only thing that isn't 100% RAW are the lifting results because the lifting rules in SR4 are useless. I've used my own extrapolations for that.

Link is here:

What Would Samurai Do? II

The fight results were worked out by a friend who wrote a program to automatically calculate the outcomes of Shadowrun fights. Three-thousand run throughs of each fight were computed!

If you want to print the full thing out at A3, there's a link to a larger, print resolution image on my site.

Comments?

K.

I actually bust out laughing when I saw the car jumping picture. Gotta love trogs.

Nicely done, mate!

The 4:1 figure is interesting - it makes sense, but it's useful from a mission-design perspective.

I tried to restrain myself and it came out as some sort of cough/giggle hybrid. My co-workers must think I am insane.


Great stuff. Might have to print out a couple of copies and pass them around

Yay, the Khadim delivers again ^^

You forgot to label the dragon.

Of course, I want to see those same challenges as done by a strength 40 flying reptile (assuming he didn't just fly).

Solid work as always!
I know a friendly trog player who needs to see this.

Augmented Troll: Can standing jump on a car, but might as well just flip the thing over.

Hah! Top notch stuff.

Wow! People love the car-flipper.

Thank you for all the comments. I'm really glad people like it. @Draco18's: You're right - I did forget to label the dragon. My bad. She's called Susan, FYI.

I don't know if there's much more to add to the picture. I did think about doing something where the characters are being shot - a Stand There and Take It example. I thought given the abstract nature of the Shadowrun damage rules though, it wouldn't work quite as well as the other examples.

Here's a question - how many people play augmented attributes for what they're worth in the game? The original WWSD came about when I realised neither I nor my players had really considered just how that level of ability would affect your life. I know since doing this, it's livened up my game a little. When I run a Samurai character now, I'm always keeping in mind that a first floor window is actually a viable exit for example.

Incidentally, back on the dragon: Whilst I could scale the Hell Hound accurately (1m tall at shoulder) and even get the Thunderbird about right (3m wingspan), dragons are a little fiddlier due to lack of a real one to draw on. What I did was find a dragon that looked reasonably inline with a Western dragon in Shadowrun and guestimate its 30m wingspan. I think I'm not far off. If anything, it's slightly small, though that's balanced because I picture Shadowrun wyrms being a bit more slender in build than this one. Even so, looking at the size of the thing makes you realise how huge they are.

Awesome stuff. I agree, it seems like in shadowrun games lots of times it is normal to have that agility 7, its just some dice to add to your roll. I loved your first one, and i love this one as well.

Very true. Easy to forget how superhuman even a 7 in a stat is, despite how common it is among runners. Someone with seven strength beats world weightlifting records with minimal effort. The other stats are a little harder to visualize, but 7 agility is basically able to compete in the Olympic gymnastics, 7 reaction is "My spidy sense is tingling."

I do.
In SR3 maxed out Strength, Quickness and Body MEANT something in a Troll.
I can cleave vehicles in half, i can throw people farther than my heavy pistol shoots, i can use my Arrows as Anti Air Projectiles.
I can take shotgun blasts to the chests and laugh about them, i can knock out dragons with a punch.

I may have just found a new desktop

This sir, is being printed and passed around at my SR session tonight. Great work!

Its interesting to me that the 3 builds (including the troll) seem to be equal in an unarmed brawl.

And I like the dwarf (or child) in the trolls lifting pic.

Great work, as usual Khadim.

That was what I first thought, I was very surprised and thought I was reading it wrong.
Is this 100% correct Knasser? Samurai doesn't seem as uber as they should be in knife or brawling compared to
the other characters?

Yeah, seems odd. Did the troll brawling take into account the troll's natural reach and armor? He should be doing on average 3 extra boxes of damage, should be getting an extra 1/3rd of a hit, and should be soaking 2 extra boxes of damage. Actually, I'm surprised that unarmed gangsters can even injure a troll without a dozen or so of them. Str 4 is a base of 2 damage. With body 13 and 1 point of armor, the troll should be soaking almost 5 boxes of damage on average. Their Agility 3 + unarmed 2 + friends in melee (max 3 isn't it?) 3 = 8 dice to fight against the troll's 5 + 4 + reach 1= 10 dice to defend, and the gangers need on average 4 net hits to injure the troll... Yeah, I'm thinking you really do need about a dozen average gangers to take down the troll sammy. Maybe the friend didn't program the program properly. I might try whipping something up.

Edit: And yes, I'm taking into consideration the diminishing defense pool. It'd take about 4 gangers for the 4th to even have a chance to hit the troll, and it would take 11 to get the 11th to have an average of almost 3 net hits against the troll, which still isn't enough to do enough damage that the troll can't soak it. I think the troll can actually take a virtually infinite number of unarmed gangsters on.

Okay, so, looked over the rules a bit to make sure that I wasn't missing anything obvious, and yeah, the troll has a good change to take on absurd numbers of opponents.

Troll:
Str: 13
Agility: 5
Body: 13
Reaction: 5
IP: 2
Armor: 1
Unarmed skill: 4

Ganger:
Str: 4
Agility: 3
Body: 3
Reaction: 3
IP: 1
Armor: 0
Unarmed Skill: 2

The gangers will roll (At best) Agi 3 + Unarmed 2 + FIM 4 - reach 1 = 8 dice to attack, and the troll will be rolling Rea 5 + Unarmed 4 = 9 dice to defend. So, on average the first one will miss entirely, the second and third are more likely to miss than hit, and only by the fourth ganger, when troll is down to rolling 6 dice, do the ganger have a decent chance to even hit (Remember, defender wins ties). So, 4th ganger has one net hit on the troll. With strength of 4, the base damage is 2 with a +1 from a net hit. The troll can buy the 3 hits to soak that damage, so no worries there. Gangers 5 and 6 are in similar situations, and not till ganger 7 is there a good chance of 2 net hits, which brings damage up to 4. No, with 13 body and 1 point of armor, a soak pool of 14, the troll can't quite buy the hits, but getting 4 hits on 14 dice is fairly easy, so he will usually be able to soak it all up. From about the 8th ganger on though you start having a chance of actually doing a box of damage if troll gets unlucky and ganger gets lucky and then troll gets unlucky a second time. Once you get that 3rd box of damage, things start getting a bit difficult thanks to wound modifiers, but you basically need about 8+ gangers to really have a hope of ever getting there, even ignoring the fact that the gangers will loose two people per combat turn (Sammy has 9 dice to attack and ganger has 5 dice to defend, average 1 net hit, base strength 13 means base damage 7 + 1 from hit is 8 damage, possibly physical with bone lacing, which also might add a point or two of damage into the equation. Might not quite drop the ganger, but it'll likely make him rethink attacking the troll.

So yeah, think the chart needs to be changed to show the troll taking on at least 8 gangers. I might write up a program to see how often a troll sammy wins against 8, 9, 10 and various other numbers of gangers, and perhaps how damaged he is after the effort.

Edit: Oh, forgot to soak for the ganger, average 1 box less damage, so 7 points not taking into account any kind of bone lacing. Still the sort of thing that might get the ganger to go sit down for a bit.

There is that little cluster of three apparently-unrelated ganger icons off to the right of that graphic. Maybe a formating error and these are supposed to be in the trolls pile o' dead (making his total 7 to others' 4)?

You have to remember Karoline, knasser did put in that the gangers do have basic cyber/bio. Consider that Wired Reflexes 1 costs "only" 11,000 ... that might make the fight a little more fair.

Still, a troll could take 4, easy, even with that cyber.

It would be nice to know what budget knasser was thinking about when he said "basic cyber/bioware"

I loved the first one, and this one is even better! Thanks a lot!
Though, I'd love to also have the normal human and normal troll for comparison purposes.

Also look at the > before the gangers on each image. This could mean that 4 was the min that hurt the troll a few times in his testing of 3000 fights. XD

Nice update Khadim, thanks

Which, when put to paper, gives the wrong impression. Because Round 1 the four dudes scratch* the Troll. The troll punches one of them down to a -2 penalty. Round 2 they scratch the troll again, but the troll outright kills a dude. There are now three guys who can not scratch a troll. Rounds 3-6, Troll wipes the floor with the remaining dudes. Round 7 Janitor wipes the floor.

*By which I mean he needs to make a damage resistance roll).

note that the first human has 3 IPs, the cyberlimb human and the troll have 2 IPs.

additionally, the troll has agi 4(5) while the other two have agi5(7).

this could account for the first human doing well, i would think.

I like It very much
Thumbs Up

HokaHey
medicineman

In the Sam vs Ganger fight, I think the Troll sam forgot to pick up one of the gangers to use as a club, wasnt it Arsenal that had rules for meta-human bodies as weapons?

FIrstly, thank you for all the positive comments. Particularly like the bit about setting it as a desktop. It's comments like that which make it all worth doing.

Now regarding the fights. Unfortunately we made a mistake in the program, so the short answer is that my results are wrong. The longer answer is that the corrections here aren't right either, though.

Firstly I'd better clear up what the situations actually are. For a start, the bit about gangers having basic cyber / bio was a cut and paste error from the samurai stat box. The gangers don't have any implants - they're just brawny, but otherwise unaugmented humans. The two fight scenarios are a knife fight where both sides are wearing armoured jackets and wielding ordinary knives, and a bare-fisted brawl where neither side has armour or weapons (other than that built in for the Troll and Mr. Cyberlimbs). Selection of the target of each attack roll, is basically just picking whichever target is most damaged, so there is some intelligence built in at least. Originally, I had the sides equipped differently and people wore armour for the fist fight. I decided to pick some more balanced scenarios, though. The aim, as with all the non-fight examples, wasn't to see what the limits of ability were, but just to see what outcomes you could reasonably expect to see. So whilst any of those characters could quite obviously beat larger numbers of enemies with luck or Edge, what the results show is what they might be willing to attempt if they need to, but aren't forced to. The whole exercise is "What would Samurai do?"

Right, all that cleared up, how did we actually calculate this? Well what I didn't do is what a lot of posters here have done and start saying "a ganger averages 3P damage, the troll averages 5 soak, so no damage" or variants thereof. The reason I didn't take this approach is because averages can't be used like this in a situation where there are boundary conditions and repeated trials. For example, suppose a ganger attacking has five dice, plus four from Friends in Combat (it's capped at four, btw, not three), then on average those nine dice will get three hits. If you have four such gangers do this, the chance of them all getting three hits is very low. For example, with five gangers, it's a 47% chance that one of them will get five+ hits. Looking at things from the average on a per attack basis doesn't account for repeated trials. It's similar to how people look at the Matrix rules and think a semi-decent hacker can waltz through standard level security, neglecting that by the time they're on their fourth Rating 3 node, the odds are they're going to have triggered an alert. So when that ganger gets his five hits, is it going to be at the start of the phase when the troll is at his best, or will it be at the end of the phase when the troll is at -4 for all the attacks he's dodge? And what if a good roll or a bad roll of the troll coincides with a good roll of the ganger?

I can do this sort of probability mathematics to some extent (look up binomial distribution for anyone who wants to know about probabilities over repeated trials), but this scenario was getting very complex. You had more than two axis of interacting probabilities with the basis of those probabilties changing from trial to trial (due to damage, fatalities, position of the attack in the sequence of attacks). So I called in outside help. I got my friend to write me a computer program which actually ran through simulated combats for whatever combatants I entered. It does me a thousand trials of any combat and tells me how many were won by each side (or how many draws, more on that in a bit). Other than the bug we had, which was down to me not explaining the Friends in Combat rules properly (we counted it for both sides by mistake), this works wonderfully. It obviously can't account for clever tricks or maneuvers, but it will watch two sides pummel each other whilst accounting for decreasing defence pools, friends in combat, wound penalties, etc. and then tell you the results.

What we discovered was interesting. Firstly, the notion that the troll can face down any number of gangers without a scratch is very wrong. The program doesn't cap the number of people that can attack at once which we'd need to do if we got into high numbers, but we never actually made it beyond seven gangers and I'm willing to overlook it for this scenario - we can just about allow seven gangers to attack at once. When you have that number of people rolling dice, you get outlying results. There are bound to be high-rolling gangers and when there are, the troll (or the samurai or the "tin man") might roll their average soak, or they might roll high or low. Also, the Friends in Combat makes a big difference. I'm not sure people realise, but it applies to all your melee combat rolls so not only are the gangers getting bonus when they attack the troll, but they're getting bonuses when trying to block the troll attacking them - which makes sense. That draws out combat even further and gives them even more chances to score wounds. Armour makes a significant difference with low-power weaponry such as unarmed combat. We had a cut-off limit of 40 rounds built into the program and with armour jackets on the gangers and low-power weaponry / unarmed, we saw the number of fights "going the distance" jump from the rare one or two in a thousand, to fifty or sixty. Despite "Human 2.0" having a whole extra IP over both of the others, "Tin Man" and Troll were both able to take on more opponents than he was due to their inherent armour and / or higher Body. Bio is fine if you want a cool character, but if you have the money, nothing compares to decent cyberlimbs for giving a character staying power.

Now I'm updating the WWSD picture and it should be up in a few minutes after I've posted this (note, I'm going to change it to a PDF as I realised I can't track downloads of image files, but I'll leave the image version up there for those that want it), but in the meantime, these are the results of our tests for the three samurai we tested:

• H2 can reliably beat 4 gangers when all identically armed with knives and armour jackets. H2 can reliably beat 4 gangers when both sides fighting unarmed and unarmoured.
  
• TM can reasonably beat six gangers when all identically armed with knives and armour jackets. TM can reliably beat 6 gangers when both sides fighting unarmed and unarmoured.
  
• Troll can reasonably beat eight gangers when all identically armed with knives and armour jackets. Troll can reliably beat 6 gangers when both sides fighting unarmed and unarmoured.

Note how the troll is the only one where wearing armour affects the number he can beat. Basically, without it, he drops back down to a comparable level to the others. With it, he's just very hard to hurt.

Anyway, I hope that clears things up a bit. Sincere apologies for the lack of clarity and for the initial mistake in the results (my fault). What strikes me as being quite impressive is that the Shadowrun rules actually seem to give fairly reasonable results for all this (barring the lifting which I had to adjust). Our highly trained and super-fast samurai takes down four guys with knives - dangerous, but sort of fits what we might think is possible. Our troll friend requires six pretty big guys (Strength 4) to actually bring him down. Highly trained people with muscle implants can roughly match today's best runners. The distance jump is pushing believability slightly, but the only thing that is absurd is the climbing one. And that's not so much absurd because someone with those abilities couldn't move very quickly up a surface (though in this case they're moving like monkeys) but that most people would spend several of those seconds just looking for the next hand-hold. Still, on the whole, I like what came out of this. I only wish their were some way I could capture augmented agility and reactions - like "the thing with the knives" in Aliens.

Okay - comments?

K.

That's more like it.

I don't think anyone figured that a troll could really take an "infinite number" of gangers, but we did know he could take more than 4 without question.

Also, I'd like a page quote on Friends in Combat providing a defensive bonus.

Yep. The troll looked off to me as well (particularly as I've had it happen in game), but I fell prey to the classic error of believing what reason told me was the case rather than what my experience showed it was.

The defensive bonus for Friends in Combat nearly slipped past me also, but I'm pretty sure that it's correct.



The melee modifiers table referenced includes "Friends in Combat". Friends in Combat itself references only "a dice pool modifier". RAW is definitely that it applies to the normal melee opposed rolls unless there's some explicit contradiction somewhere else in the book which seems very unlikely. To be honest, it makes sense to me from a realism point of view and I see no problem with it in terms of balance or effect. In fact, I see it as a positive.

EDIT: The new versions are up. I decided not to bother putting them in a PDF. It would be nice to know how many people had downloaded it, but it's more useful to people as an image, so I'll go with that.

K.

WWSD for real against 4 gangers? Whip out the Ingram White Knight and go to town, obviously.

Thanks on the "Friends in Melee" clarification. I didn't doubt you, just wanted to see some rules as I'm AFB.

Original post references a "_small" image, which is the old one.

New link

My only other thought is that we only see H2 jumping from one building to another, but no depictions of TM or AT performing a long jump.

Nice Work!

So glad to see you back.

Thanks

Thanks for the link. I've updated the original post now. The new one is a small one, the old one is now a large one and the small one should have been deleted.

H2 jumps the same as TM and Troll, so I didn't bother putting them in as it would have just cluttered the image. I would have added this if I could have thought of a way. Maybe I should do some explanatory text bubbles instead of the summaries at the bottom. That way I could fit the megalodon in too.

Barring any other problems though, I'll probably leave it as is because I have a few other Shadowrun pieces lined up and better to move on than to keep chiselling away at one piece.

Peace and be cool,

K.

Isn't jump based on strength, though?

Nope, Agility, which is a little inconsistent with Running, but that's the book. Also, the maximum distance is capped by Agility x Something depending on type of jump.

Thats great! Now you just need to add an adept... j/k!

@Knasser
If you don't Mind
I would like to link that in German Forums

HokaHey
medicineman

By all means! Please do! The more coverage I get, the better. The only thing I ask is that hosting stays on my site because a bit part of the reason I do this is because I like to see the downloads. Also, it's better for people anyway, because then they become aware of other things on my site that they might be interested in.

K.

Wait . . what? O.o
Khadim, please don't think i am stupid, but i don't undertstand how the troll can reliably take on more people with armor and knives on both sides than without @.@

It basically works because in the examples I used, the difference in the armour was greater than the difference in the weapons. In the brawl scenario, it was a group of people beating each other senseless in a bar-style environment. Nobody was packing, nobody wore armour. In this scenario, the troll could be taken down by a concentrated beating from six people. How well the gangers fared against the troll depended as much on their ability to evade him and their reliance on their friends in melee, as it did on their ability to take a hit. In the knife fight example, everyone gets the 8/6 armour jacket. Now this makes a difference to the gangers because they can soak a bit more of the troll's damage output. But it amounts to a couple less boxes typically. The troll is dishing out 8P damage or more, so they're still bleeding. Now the troll putting on his armour jacket goes from 1/1 armour to 9/7 armour. That's again 2 hits extra he'll likely get on a soak roll, but the gangers are dishing out around 3P or more and the troll already has a Body of 13 (for damage resistance purposes). The gangers are already having trouble damaging him and this makes drawing blood even less likely. The chance of rolling less than three hits on 14 dice is only about 1 in 10. But give the troll armour and the chance of rolling less than three hits on 20 dice is a mere 1 in 100.

Basically, against the troll, the gangers are relying on lucky rolls - average results just wont cut it for them. Armour changes the situation from the gangers needing "fairly lucky" to "really lucky". Whereas to the troll, it changes the situation to sometimes needing hit a ganger a third time instead of just twice.

This concept has been one of my favorites to try to point out when running games...

it's very hard sometimes to get people to think within their characters limitations and not their own... sometimes just as hard for the dm to see things in character limitations and not their own ... *finger wag

however, the physical to me is the easiest to gauge and comprehend... the one that really interests me is sensory data.. can you imagine what your life would be like with simple, well equipped cyber eyes and ears...

how much more detail could you pick out from a typical scene, able to actually SEE CLEARLY a logo or tatoo the size of a nickel from the other side of a room...

how far away would you be able to pick up on details you can normally only see now if within say 20'... like I can see the year and month names on the calendar on the other side of the room I'm in... can you imagine being able to absolutely read that calendar, tiny ass date numbers and written notes, from where I'm sitting, and imagine with cybereye modifications how far away you'd be able to read it from

how about hearing... in a normal day I can hear heavy footsteps and loud voices in the apartment above me... on a particularly quiet night I can make out most of the words in a average to loud conversation held directly above me... now imagine life with cyberears... if this is me normal, I could very likely hear every whisper from the floor above and below, possibly able to make out most of a conversation from 2 floors away and that's being conservative I would think.

has anyone done a study like this physical one except on perceptions? I think that would have much more far reaching implications to a game, and much more interesting to me.

on a similar note, just with those 2 mods, some basic cyber eyes and ears... think of how common place they are in the setting... and now remembering how much they modify, rethink your standards for what it takes to sneak past a wageslave with cyberears...

Interesting point! There have been studies of the perceptions of animals that far exceed our own. Maybe something like that could be transposed to cyberware.

One thing that you may not have considered in the fight scenarios is that, with an IP advantage, any of the Samurai could spend their first action on full dodge and reliably eat up hits before body even got involved, then only attack on the second pass.

That makes H2 considerably deadlier in this situation.

You're absolutely right that these are frequently overlooked and that the implications are pretty big. I personally do try to include this sort of information in a game and I use it in my Shadowrun fiction as well. If you read "Perfect Run" on my site, there's an example of someone using a Select Audio function.

But I didn't see a worthwhile method of representing these sorts of differences from unaugmented senses in a picture so didn't do so. I'm open to suggestions, though.

K.

I did a quick couple google searches and found it harder than expected to find something along the lines of "average human hearing" with examples... so this may be something you'd simply have to take the time to test out yourself... things like you and a friend spreading apart and talking in a normal voice until you couldn't make out what the other was saying, even if you still heard noise... then keep moving until you stop hearing a normal voice all together... then the same thing for a yell

I think anyone in an apartment building could provide ample experience to draw some conclusions about that situation...

similar setups for vision, how far to recognize a company logo on letterhead ( you'd have to use a logo the person was unfamiliar with so that the brain didn't pick up and fill in what the eye couldn't actually see) how far away can you easily read a letter, then how far away can you strain to read it if it's sitting on a table or wall..

then as you did with your physical examples, provide a baseline average human, and stage 1, 2, and 3 upgrades to each... sticking simply with magnification

as I keep writing this I keep coming up with ideas for how to experiment with things like select sound filter upgrades and thermal vision... hmmm... maybe I could pull off these experiments monday and draw up a diagram as above that night....