No. There was no Grounding in SR3. Period.

His friend is probably just mis-remembering attacking an active focus from the astral.

Holy crap, Mäx. Did it really cost that much in like SR3? I remember dikoting everything, and nothing about prices like that. :/

No idea how much the process cost, but Dikote, itself, cost about 10k per litre if i remember correctly.

And there was some basic surface area coverage amount. Unless there were some other rules for that, it didn't amount to *that* much. I guess the SR3-style DV scores made a bigger difference than +1DV/-2AP as well.

DIKOTE™ cost 1k¥/100cm^2, and in classic Shadowrun style gave no guidance for how to figure out surface area of stuff for it to be applied to, but basically unless someone was willing to do the hard work to figure it out properly players could argue pretty easily for most weapons to be quite inexpensive. Armor or vehicles, not so much.

~J

Ah, he did mention the highest figure was for a troll, which I failed to notice.

I ruled that a lot of stuff would not survive the process itself. IIRC, the fluff described very high temps involved.

Yeah, Dikote is a kind of Metal that needs to be molten down and applied to whatever it is supposed to coat under vaccuum and when it hardens, it becomes a kind of diamantine coating.

Yes, if you have paid any attention, you have figured it out by now.

That only helps, though: if only the ceramic ballistic plates can be dikoted, that cuts down the area like crazy! Hehe.

Seriously, it only ever made sense for blades, and nothing else.

Armor simply got +1/1 applied to it.
Vehicles got +1/1 hardened Armor and +1 Barrier Rating.
BLADED WEAPONS(yes, this means anything with a sharp edge, not just Weapons working under the Edged Weapons Skill) got +1 Power and +1 Damage applied to them.
So an Axe went from STR(S) to STR+1(D) for Example. And you could still combine it, somehow, with Monomolecular Edge and Lasers, if i remember these things correctly. .

@Grounding:
Wonder how normal Animals would react to suddenly being dual natured . .
Make a Targets Pet dual natured.
"Here Fido, come on Fido, Heel Fido! Why are you burning me Fido?"

Yeah... we need dikote bone lacing. To go with the dikote cyberspurs. And of course regeneration to go with it all.

Problem being, that no, your bones are not replaced by something else, they are woven through with fibres of different materials . .
So yes, the Weapon-X Operation Delta Clinic Variant would, most certainly with an automatic deadly wound, be the only Option . . .
Now, DERMAL PLATING on the Other Hand . . THAT you can Dikote just fine i think. And then get it built into you. Same for Cyber-Limbs.

Which honestly would be fine by itself. It's just the issue of a magic universal add-on that's the problem, I think.

Dermal Plating and Cyber Limbs would likely be hellaciously expensive to put it on.

Then not on the Limbs themselves.
But on the Cyber-Limb-Armor you can tack onto the Limbs!

Still gonna be expensive, given the surface area.

That's why I limit it to my cyberhands and cyberfeet!

A hand is only about what 300-500 cm^2... a foot maybe twice that!

16/16 armor for only 8 slots :P, and a for roughly the same essence as a single point of dermal plate. Toss on a dermal plate as well for 20/20 :). (haha, Michael Jackson and his diamond glove can suck it)

*shrugs*
no such thing as a free meal for real, no such thing as free armor in SR . .

I have no idea what it cost in SR3, those numbers are based on the current rules.

Oh, I was confused. I wasn't reading this new spinoff book as 'the current rules', so I thought you were talking about the way things were when dikote existed.

Cant really figure out how you got that idea, when i made multiple references to SR4 specific rule thinks.

No dikote in SR4, and 2050 is not SR4. The whole thread is about old rules from old versions. It's not too hard to figure out, then. I'm sorry for confusing you with my apology for being confused.

What, the thread is about the rules in 2050, witch sure as heck is SR4.

Nope, it's some weird spinoff. I just said that. When I said I was confused?

I hereby suggest quoting from that book as "SR50". It may be SR4-based, but it has different rules.

For one thing, the Decker rules are back!

Fixed that for ya, CanRay. ^_~

That's actually kind of what my question is. Since a lot of the mechanics are clearly SR4A-compatible to begin with and the entire thing is based on SR4A mechanically, is it a separate ruleset or a book of variant rules?

As far as i understand it's ment to be a book of variant rules for running a game set in a different time period.

It's definitely a rules variant book. You need SR4A to play. Honestly, (minus all of the editing issues) it's a pretty good book. Not my favorite, but it's right up there.

And it seems very cool. I was just saying that it's a different thing. Dikote may well be crazy expensive in SR50 (heh), but it seemed pretty reasonable for the power in SR3.

Meh. It was always expensive. It's just that most of the stuff most people put it on wasn't that big. I don't think I ever saw it used on armor for example.

That's in part because the only effect that screams "want!" is for bladed weapons—+1 Power isn't nothing, nor is +1/+1 armor, but they're both in an entirely different league from +1 Power/+1 DL.

~J

Some proofreaders felt the same way. But at least we made sure it was downgraded.

That is downgraded????
Alright. I'll just ignore it on my table, as usual ^^

Of course it was.
The main Edge it gave to Bladed Weapons can't be replicated using the SR4 System. So they probably only gave it a bit more AP, instead of massively more Damage.

Actually they couldn't do it that easily. First of all, hermetics had to spend cash to summon and bind elementals at their circle. Shamans only had the one spirit and had to be on location. Neither could summon while projecting.

I realize that. I just don't want to see the not downgraded version ^^
On the other hand: Now I really want to.

+1 damage/-2 AP

Really not that overpowering. It isn't like halving hardness or whatever it used to do 20 something years ago.

20 years ago, it gave power plus one and damage plus one, which made resisting it harder.
And instead of having to deal damage versus twice barrier rating you had to deal damage versus normal barrier rating.
Those two, usually, never happend in one go anyway . .

One higher damage type is the equivalent of two hits on the attack roll, to put things in perspective. Power is a bit harder to quantify with regards to SR4 rules, but extra damage probably doesn't do a bad job of it. So +1 damage/-6 AP in SR4 terms.

Well the section on grounding is small compared to the full page of text that was dedicated to it in SR2. Kinda helps that SR4 has the elemental stuff more in line tho, as SR2 had some of it in combat and some of it manipulations with no real rhyme or reason behind why.

Right, but in SR4, everyone can summon while projecting (and in SR50, people who can summon can summon while projecting). So grounding is not, in comparison with astral summoning, all that bad.

Er ... unless I misremember, one higher damage stage (L -> M -> S -> D) is a different number of additional boxes of damage depending on the step: 2, 3, or 4 respectively. So the bump for a knife would be only two additional SR4 hits, but the bump for a combat axe is four SR4 hits.

There are a number of difficulties involved in directly comparing; in SR3 each of those required precisely two successes on the soak test to stage back down, and of course the boxes were a guaranteed fraction of the total damage track, just to name two issues.

~J

Hm ... fair point. +1 Karma.

My brain just started calculating the exact conversion factor, but then I told it to stop it. =i)

Speaking of CanRay, couple of questions for the understanding of Deckers and Decks now. It is stated that stats cannot be changed on Decks except Memory, which can be doubled. Is this indicating that the Memory stat can be upgraded to double (i.e. Fuchi Cyber-4 can go from 4 to 8 ). If so, it also then indicates that Storage can also be doubled, which leads to confusion as to which "memory" is really able to be doubled. Compounded the Decker Archetype somehow has 500 storage on the Fuchi Cyber-4 (which has standard storage of 100)?

Apart from that, excellently written section! Whole book really, I'm loving the trip back down memory lane since my 1st and 2nd ed books fell apart years and years ago.

edit to get rid of smiley face.

Incorrect. Only storage can be doubled.

Memory is fixed (and way too low for the way it operates).

Also notably absent are price and availability information for any of this! (and nothing listed for upgrades at all).

Hmm, if that's the case then the Decker archetype is even worse, since she's got a cyberdeck that can't even run her attack utility... rating 6 and memory 4...

Looking at it, memory is way too low for how it operates I agree.