Can you make a Monofilament Whip weapon focus?

Yes.

Very yes.

Yes, even an implanted one.

Although I believe it has to be enchanted before implantation.

You shouldn't, though. It's lame.

No, it's qute badass.

Not even a little bit badass.

whipping it out and striking a spirit or so in half with your outstretched finger is VERY MUCH badass . .

just to weigh in on the badass vs. not badass argument here:
The whip doesn't have the same romance as a sword, but it is pretty damn badass. Particularly in terms of concealability, and in game terms of a low str character like a petite girl being able to rend a man in half.

The monofilament whip has good stats and is a viable melee options for low-strength characters, and it can be enchanted. There is nothing not to like.

A critical glitch

If you plan on using a lot of either monowhips or explosives, I highly recommend the Guard power.

That's one nice thing about weapon-focus . . you get more dice for using it, so the probabilty of a critical glitch goes down accordingly . .

I've been wondering about this, actually. I'm not sure the answer is entirely intuitive.
It seems intuitive that you are at much less risk throwing 4 dice than 2 dice. With only 2 dice you need only one 1. Throwing 4 dice you need two 1s, but you have also increased your chances of getting 1s. Your need for 1s always remains at half your dice pool. Although you are increasing your chances to get a 1 with each dice thrown, there is still simply a 1/6 chance, independantly, for each die. It's not like you now have a 2/6 chance simply because you doubled your dice pool.

........
/confused

This is probably true. But as almost all gamers will agree. The higher your modifier/dice pool the better off you are. I believe it has something to do with gamer paranoia. Just like almost all Shadowrun players I've met must have their dice sitting on 6's when they aren't in use.

That's not the way probability works. To get two ones you have to have the event probability of 1/6 combined with an independent event with probability of 1/6. 1/6 times, the first die will come up 1. But, 1/6 of those times, the second die comes up 1. That ends up being a combined probability of 1/36.

Welcome to statistics. After taking this course you'll understand why you've never gotten a full house or royal flush in poker and why you keep losing money in the slots.

Also:
Having an even sized dice pool is more glitch prone than the odd sized dice pool smaller than it.

(Reason: Same number of 1s needed, 1 extra die to help make it happen).

Gambling: A tax on people who can't do math.

Hehe, indeed.

So what you're saying is that I can tweek the game not by munchkining my character, but by munchkining math. Oh happy day!

And it took you how long to figure this out? ^^

Maybe.

Notably though, your odds of getting more successes go up more than your odds of a glitch.

How many times have you gotten a critical glitch period? In something that your character is actually good at? That you didn't then negate by spending edge?

It's funny how everyone is always so quick to bring up the 'critical glitch damages you' but forget that critical glitches almost never happen, and when they do, they can be canceled, and when they can't, you still have armor and body, so it sucks but isn't instantly deadly.

I would say a critical glitch is as likley as a critical success.

The law of averages takes everyone from behind roughly at some point.

The one bad thing that I could say about a monofilament whip focus is that, if your character is astrally projecting, the damage code is IIRC reduced to that of a regular whip, which isn't that impressive.

That's because the material of the dice will flow with gravity! So by setting them 6s up causes the 1s to be weight increasing the odds of 6s being rolled and decreasing the odds of 1s!

I will be honest though.... I've considered using a monofilament whip on my character.... at 9 agility, a base dice pool of 8 isn't half bad.

Then again, I've joked with some of the players about getting my character a katana or monofilament sword to use, because there's something stupidly awesome about an opportunistic ranged combatant running about with a sword on him.

--



That's why when I gamble I play poker against other players where you can start bring things other than odds into the game!

I don't even remember what a critical success is.

That aside, the odds of a critical glitch are impossibly low once you get past about 6 dice. Sure, you might get one every... couple years or so, but that's about it.

On 6 dice the odds of getting the three 1s required is only 1 in 128, but then you also have to not get any hits, which means there is only somewhere around a 1 in 400 chance of getting a critical glitch on 6 dice, and the odds get longer from there. So yeah, even if my character was incompetent with the monofilament and only had 6 dice, I'd take 1 self hit in every 400 attacks for being able to use such an awesome weapon.

And that's good enough for me.

5 or more net hits.




From many, many years of playing That Other Game I never once rolled a critical hit on anything that mattered (I rolled two during a 26 month campaign: one on an undead and one on a mook that died even before damage was doubled; these being the only two critical hits ever made; though I had as single critical threat in the same campaign that didn't confirm).

I have, likewise, never* rolled a critical miss. I have rolled 1s on Initiative, Saving Throws, Skill/Attribute checks, and such (even some 20s in there too) but never on an attack roll.*

For this reason I have never acquired any weapon that did something special on crits.

*This is likely a slight exaggeration; I'm sure I have rolled 1s on attack rolls, but at a significantly lower rate than one would expect. Most, however, would have been minor in their effect resulting in little more than a standard miss.

A critical success is 4+ net hits on the test.

*Troll rolls obscene ammounts of dice on body roll to stage down 2D damage*
*GM looks on in astonishment* "That's a LOT of ones . . "

Mage rolls 26 dice to cast fireball (SR3).

My. That's a lot of 1s and not a single success.

</C.L.U.E.>

I actually saw that happen. Critical glitch on a drain resist for a Fireball. Set himself on fire like a Tibetan protestor.

Here's my bigger disappointment about monofilament whips. You can't take a specialization for them, so you'll always be down 2 dice that you could get on other weapons.

I have to say I don't play slots but I've had at least 3 royal flushes, at least 1 off the flop, and umpteen full houses.

You can in my game I bunched a few of the monofilerment weapons in to a group just like lasers work. So you get 3 skills for one and can get that +2

Best use for a F1 spirit and the Guard power ever.

And yeah, enchanted before implanted.

In SR4A by RAW you can make your own specializations.

This man has a lot of Edge.

Except that by RAW, the use of specializations with Exotic weapon skills do not make sense. The specialization is typically a group of similar weapons or in the case of melee weapons defensive skills. Exotic weapon skills are taken for a specific weapon, so you can't really give it a specialization for a weapon group. So the question becomes, what kind of specializations can you make up for use with a monofilament whip?

Called shots, Parry (Silly... but RAW)
Those are just the two off of the top of my head. I don't think you should be able to spec in exotic weapons... they're exotic. Training to use them is hard enough

Disarm?

People keep saying that defending/parrying/blocking with a monowhip is ridiculous conceptually. I just want to point out that sometimes defending yourself doesnt involve a direct block or parry of an enemies weapon. Sometimes it involves moving your weapon in a way that creates a threat to the enemies body should they pursue the attack. Recognizing this threat, the enemy backs off, and you've succeeded in your defense.

Well, for a weapon that is known to sometimes bites you back, the less you whip the thing around you better.

and about the MW as foci, shouldn't foci base thelesma be virgin, technologically unspoiled materials, and generally crafted by the mage himself if possible? just asking.

No, it just gets harder to enchant, if you don't adhere to these conservative ideas . .

No, it's just easier to enchant if it is. For mundane thelesma the rules specifically mention commlinks as an example. Anyway Monofilament whips aren't even that high tech. Making the monofilament wire is, but once you have it then what, a little motor and casing that can spool it safely?

Well, the wire itself is not a naturally occurring material, but instead fabricated in a highly industrialized location (can you say "background count"?) which makes it a "high tech material."

technically, a monowhip can be made from anything that you can get into 1 molecule thin sdtrands and strong enough