Actually, Leather jacket in 4th ed gives 2/2 armor.

Nonetheless, remember that someone with any kind of dermal armor or orthoskin resists flechette, gel etc. ALOT better. With the errata, with lvl 1 you have basically 6 armor vs flechette (modified)!

Even despite this, saying that 1 armor is nothing amounts to saying that body 5 and body 6 is the same. It's not, every die counts.

A sammie with armor jacket, helmet and lvl 3 dermal armor has 12 ballistic rating, which means just about any shot is converted to stun. You still go down, but you heal in matter of hours instead of days, and you don't risk death unless your team loses the fight.

That said I would always go for wired reflexes and muscle toner/augmentation before purchasing orthoskin or dermal armor.

Ayup.

That's like saying "Well, a smartlink is only 2 dice. Not worth it. And a reflex recorder is only 1. Not worth it. Muscle toner? Only 2. Ignore."

It's not the be all end all.

But it's a difference. Heck, the difference between body 3, armor 0 and body 3 armor 2?

The odds of getting 2 or more hits with 5 dice is 54%. With 3 is 22%.

So you're 30% more likely to get 2 or more hits, which is a good bit.

But who knows what they feed the cows that they make that leather out of.

Add to that the Troll's natural armour and then 2 points of mystic armour for being an adept and you're laughing.

Ironically it seems that in shadowrun the more dice you allready have in your dice pool, the more valuble each die becomes. With a small dice pool an extra die or two increases your chance of succeeding by a small amount, with a large dice pool each die increases the chance you will critically succeed.

Or a manabolt

I do the GM shudder, now.

Seeing that the average height of a troll (based IMO on the average body & strength) is 2.5 meters this one, with body 9 and probably considerable strength too will most likely end up being a lot bigger.

I'm just wondering... Where in the world will this bulging troll find enough room to do his, bullet dodging back flips?

Oh that score a DM points saying Trolls are to big and talll to make dodge rolls.
Thats WORSE then any cheep munchkin build a PC can come up with.
Try something simpler.

Like Synthacardium adds its bonnus to all athletics tests NOT all athletics skills so it doesn't apply to dodging.

Or perhaps the modified skill rating can't exceed the base skill rating x1.5. Thus you with a gymnastics of 1 you can't benefit from Synthacardium rating 3.

I didn't say there were too big and tall to make dodge rolls. I said I'd like to see them try bullet dodging back flips in close quarters. Of course they still can use the skill but I will give modifiers when I feel like there is little space to dodge. And I'm not racist, I'll do the same thing for the rest of meta-humanity, its just that dwarves are so much less likely to find themselves in places were they have difficulty dodging.

And it isn't WORSE, its more realistic. Plus trolls have enough Body to more compensate for being the ones that dodge with a negative DP modifier when they get trapped.

So the Synthacardium doesn't help dodging. I'm not sure about the implications of "add Gymnastics skill to their dice pool" but back on topic...

If you feel Dermal Plating is too weak you might reuse a spin-off of the SR3 layering armor rule.
Multiply the Dermal Plating Ballistic and Impact Armor Rating by 2. Then apply the layering armor rule when ever the character uses additional armor.

Rating 3 Dermal would get a character 6/6
while the same character wearing a Armor Jacket (8/6) would get the regular 11/9 armor ratings.
It takes away some realism and might make Dermal Plating too powerful, though...

Trolls pay extra for that extra body, in terms of metatype points, and suffer some serious drawbacks already.

Besides, as soon as you tell me that you're going to give penalties for size for that, I explain that my troll works with martial artists. When bullets begin flying, he drops flat to the ground quickly, and then springs back up. If people fire at him on the ground, he jumps and twists. He doesn't take up any more space than he normally does. Alternatively, the magic in his system has made him just flat out denser, and his muscles are extremely ropy and wiry and toned, not big. His high body represents a tremendously healthy lifestyle.

There are no size mods in SR. Because otherwise, people take a penalty to shoot dwarves (they're smaller - harder to hit, right?), get big bonuses to shoot trolls (bigger target!), trolls get a bonus to smash doors above their strength (they're big, right?), etc.

The fact that trolls have problems dodging in small spaces is represented by the fact that they have a lower max Agi cap. That's all it needs to be represented by, or you get in to far far too many issues.

Don't forget that that's carrying additional weight, not their own body weight, and that there's some logic in there--i.e. the whole body weight/limb size ratio or, more famously "Why a giant ant/beetle/spider/etc would simply collapse and snap their limbs off because of their own weight."

but your point on trolls being the "weakest" metatype has a point from a certain POV--in terms of a body mass/lifting capacity ratio, they certainly have the lowest, while dwarfs would have the highest. However, that being said, the argument is rather pointless, because the differences in the ratios, while there, are quite pointless in normal usage, because the troll is *so* much larger than a dwarf that the effect gets swallowed by the comparative differences in their body weight.

Or, to put that last bit simply, yes, pound for pound, a dwarf can lift and carry more than a troll. But your average troll could pick up and carry that dwarf *and* his full payload without a problem.

That's also because of their exoskeleton which doesn't scale well.

By lifting I mean Pull-ups. And I think its weird to assume everyone can do those...
And even so, I think its totally weird that one troll couldn't lift another. Anyway, my point was that some rules that are in the book should be changed while others that are not in the book should be added to make for a more realistic system without complicating it much.

There are rules for driving in enclosed space but there should also be for gymnastic dodging and trolls should be able to lift way more that they do now.

No no no no... you said it wrong.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

INCONCEIVABLE!

I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using.

As for dermal armour, I always saw it as a thickened skin. It was never a really uber-durable armour in my eyes. It was more like a toughening, rather than a real honest-to-god armour system.

I agree to disagree. If a troll was fighting in a vent I'd ask how the hell he got there in the first place and would give a hefty DP mod on dodge. If on the other hand he was fighting in small (human) sized room I'd probably give him -2 DP mod.

@Denicalis: It says Dermal Plating, that at least sounds more rigid than the rating it gives. With the rules I posted earlier in this thread you could make it more useful when weaker types of armor are worn while keeping it the same for stronger armor. Although it is extra rules again...

And yet this sounds similar to Orthoskin which has the same effect for less essence...