So....
I made a post awhile back about how ridiculous my families SR team is. It's pretty fun, but very over the top ridiculous. A co-worker of mine is going to be joining the table. In the spirit of maintaining the ridiculousness, he wants to create a Pixie Sniper.

Not a sniper that shoots pixies, though that would also be entertaining.

I said "YES!" to the concept because it made me laugh. And the group is already so ridiculous, why not?

I made him take Meta-human customization & Weight Reduction mods on his sniper rifle. He also removed the trigger. Presumably the pixie just has to hold the thing and point it accurately to fire it.

His str and bod are 2.

Now, the question:
when attempting to fire the sniper rifle from flight, what should the - dicepool modifier be? I'm already thinking i'll double the recoil, and make the recoil knock him back. I didn't find anything regarding firing the sniper rifle from a standing position, which in my mind should incur a penalty. Any input on this would be appreciated.

There are movement penalties in the combat modifiers tables, so those should apply for flying. I seem to recall there being a chance for knockdown from recoil. In Arsenal?

What about the projectile fired from a weapon sized for pixies? Should the bullet have a reduced damage rating because of size?

Well... per rules a Bod 1, Str 1 gnome (or something) can dish out with a minigun without any recoilcompensation on full auto, while running with just 17 dice penalty. So he just needs 18 to be able to hit something *g*.

But maybe sometimes one should let logic govern a few things. (Yeah i know.. no logic allowed).

First of all: WHY can a pixie fly with gear? I needed to discuss with my pixie player about that too. Why do they have such a high strength-allowance? 3 Unaugmentd is too high, in my opinion. They are like what, 45cm high? 4 Kilogram heavy normaly. And build to fly? (Yeah i know they half-use magic apparently). They should be glad if you let them carry 1 or 2 kg.

But ah well: Fitted sniper for a pixie... sure why not... it's not like those buggers aren't the best in everything already, now you can have them concealed in the sky, ready to make unmagical, untraceable attacks... sigh... (Yeah i am a bit frustrated at them... really, who wrote their stats up?)

So, basically, he wants to play something the rigger can build for less than 5k nuyen? O.o

You can have drone at 5k which has -8 to perception, handling+2, Response(+Handling) of 8, astral sight for clearer shots and skilllevels like a metahuman character and a base speed of 50?

Just double any recoil to represent that th pixie does not have a steady firing platform.

Even if the pixie levitated the gun the recoil would push the gun in the opposite direction.

His dicepool will be right around 22 with the sniper rifle. He'll have a chameleon suit. The rifle also has chameleon coating. Yeah, he'll be damn near impossible to spot even when he's firing.

I wont feel bad about giving him a hefty - dicepool modifier for shooting while flying. I just need a reasonable number and a good rational for it.

I like altering the damages based on having weapons sized for the user. A heavy pistol for a troll should be cranking out 12.5mm or 14mm ammo, not standard pistol ammo.

As an alternative, you could change the lifting rules to be based on a % of the lifter's mass, rather than based off of flat numbers.

How much?
A Propperly trained human can lift 1.5 times his own weight i think.

Let's just looks at things about SIZE.

A pixie is about 45cm high.

A hand crossbow is the size of a SMG for them.

A sports rifle is twice their size. A Barret would be a piece of artillery for him.

I would force him to use gunnery when handling something of that size.

Not to mention...how much weight does a sniper rifle have...

Human standart... maybe double his weight *g*. If he takes one of the military anti-material rifles... maybe triple to quadruple?

He did take meta-human customization & weight reduction on the sniper rifle, also trigger removal and some other mods like personalized grip.

Weight reduction actually doubles the price of the gun. The other mods are rather cheap. He actually took muscle aug 2, so his str is 4. higher than an average human.

Logically, it's really not possible to miniaturize a .50 caliber sniper rifle down to pixie size, but he took all the right mods to come as close as possible, at least not without suffering horrific, shoulder breaking, recoil.

Could someone please point me to the section that describes the mass (or if you must, weight) of Pixies. So far all I have is that they're short and fragile (low body). For all I know, they have the same mass as a troll.

Now I have an image of World War I reenactor Pixies on a bolt-action, single-shot .50 Rifle moving like artillery soldiers.

...

I think I need serious help.

Given that I don't know of a place where a troll's mass is listed, I suppose you're right.

The phrase "delicate physiology" kind of implies that they aren't very dense though.

No, they fly only with magic. Page 65, Runner's Companion, Pixies, first paragraph, last sentence.

EDIT: I think the best thing to do is ignore everything the developers say about height and weight. They really, really didn't have feasibility in mind when thinking about these things. Trolls are supposed to be 8.2 feet tall but weigh 661 pounds, but can weigh up to 771 pounds. That's really, really fat (or ridiculous slabs of muscle - Arnold the Governator only weighs 250 lbs [113 kg]. Trolls would be about 6x more muscular than him, and only about 2 feet taller). Naga are nearly 33 feet long with 0 reach. Pixies are 45 cm (1.4 feet) tall, which is about half that of a gnome, but they don't have the hitbox penalty of gnomes.

Pg 48. Runners Companion and PG 72 SR4A. Trolls "weigh" 300 kg. (Yeah, I get a twitch when I see grams and weigh...)

I was wondering if "dense, but brittle" might apply.

Hmmm. Pixies: Small magical creatures of living Osmium. That would explain the vanishing....

The weird thing is, they don't automatically get a magic attribute. Vampires, people with qualities like Astral sight, do. Pixies don't seem to. It seems like a strange thing to over-look. Perhaps they're assuming that all pixes are mages or adepts. That doesn't seem to be a requirement, though.

In France we say weigh and grams all the time

Trolls are 7'5" tall 660 pound monstrosities?

Also, a Pixie with a 4 str.. should be able to carry as much as a human with a 4 str. After all, Str is your overall strength stat. It includes leverage, sinking, etc.

Hm? All sapient critters get magic 1. Clearly stated so.

Well, back to the augmentation: You are giving the pixie deltaware? Highpowered game? You do know they can only get deltaware?

Also: if they fly purely with magic, why do they have wings? I always say: magic for the speed and takeoff. Wings for the maneuvres *g*

I don't see anywhere that it says they require delta-ware. I do see that it says they require a large amount of customization. But that's a vague fluff piece with no crunch to it.\

EDIT: I was wrong. You were right. They can only take deltaware.

Magic, page 84, Runner's Companion.

@ wings: I don't know. Logic would also dictate that if they entered enough BC to negate their Magic they would be unable to fly.

Or live

Vestigial

Well, you know, trolls can be really, really dense...

All Pixies start with a Magic Rating of 1..

Page 84 Runners Companion, under Magic
Every Sapient Critter begins the game with a Magic Rating of 1, which may be increased with BP or Karma as any other attribute.
If it's magic rating goes to 0 it loses all of its powers save Sapience (which shouldn't be a power, damn it) and Natural weapons (which also shouldn't be a power)

not sure how I missed this.

Magic is all about belief. The wings make it believable.

Keep clapping!

If magic is all about belief, then why does the bad dragon not go away if i refuse to believe in him? <.<

Because your non-belief is not strong enough, my son.

Because everyone else in the world believes in said dragon
Blame all the roleplayers and the chinese.

everybody blames roleplayers . . i'll go with the chinese, there's more to go around . .

I made a pixie awhile back that punched for around 20+P and did -half ap. I couldn't find the thread for you but I ended with a Str of 6. You can do a search for SuperSpeed the Hedgepixie. Whatever I did on that character would help your player get to or above that str4 he cant have since needs deltaware.

It's not just the muscle, it's the bone structure to support all of that weight. As the mass of a land mammal increases, so must its skeletal structure thicken. A troll not only is significantly larger than a normal human, they also very specifically have more bony deposits. Even a short, fat, out of shape troll would be much thicker than Arnold ever was. Do some reading on a lot of the record holders for the world's tallest men. A lot of them required braces and canes to walk and became confined to wheelchairs before dying young. That's because the human body's composition isn't meant to be that big. Thus, a troll would have to have a much more stout and robust skeletal structure to support all that weight and size. Of course, that increases their weight and size. Could probably debate the feasibility of trolls for a long time and get nowhere other than "it's a game, deal with it or don't have trolls in your universe", but their height/weight numbers aren't unrealistic because they are too heavy. They're unrealistic because they might be too light.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but bodybuilders do in fact have more bone mass than those of us who do not bodybuild, so that weight of his includes bone mass. Otherwise, apparently you do make a point, as Robert Wadlow, the tallest recorded human (officially, at least), was 8 foot 11 inches and weighted 485 lbs. He was at a comparable height to a troll, and if you tossed on an extra 200 lbs of muscle/bone mass, he wouldn't have needed the cane and leg braces to walk.

In one of the discussion about troll size, one comment pointed that throughout most species, the bones hav e roughly the same resistance for a given section. Which force large creature to devote more of their mass to bones.

Assuming a troll to be about 1,5 the height and twice the width of an human, it would give him about 6 times the mass - 2m50 and 350 kg (a bit under 10 feets and about 700 lbs) if we asume an human average of 1m70 and 60 kg (6 feets 8 inches and 120 lbs)

If his bones were built on the same proportions, that would be four times the section - it won't take much enlarging to reach the 'six times the section on human bones' ballpark.

Yeah, troll weights are fine. Mass grows with the cube of the height, and on top you have to add proportionally heavier bones and thicker limbs.

Pixies, if they're proportioned like humans and with the same density, they'd weight less than 3 pounds...

Interesting. the average weight of a human skeleton is around 9 kilograms which should put a troll skeleton at around 54 kilograms.

Pocket-Transportable O.o

You know some really really tall really really skinny average humans. Average man is something like 5'9" and 180lbs.

Manu is a bit off with his unit conversions - 1.70 m is more like 5'5" and 60 kg about 135 lbs.

I seem to remember you need minimum Body 8 Strength 8 for heavy weapons, or is that just for stuff larger than LMGs?

Also, uncompensated recoil for heavy weapons is doubled, making it a 28 dice penalty when just standing still. If he's got a 29+ dice pool then yeah he can hit stuff, but since he can't even pick it up it should take him a good few rounds to get the aiming right ...

Gunnery is vehicle-mounted weapons only. Heavy Weapons would make more sense.

Doh, yea, that's more sensible.

Ah sorry if the "minigun" was a bit misleading. You are right about heavy weapons=double recoil. I change my topic to high velocity assault rifle (Which use the same ammo, but magically have half the recoil *g*)... and only 12 bullets. Dang...

Or Well... let's just say the Pixie wears a gyrostabilisation-harness and the minigun is slightly recoil-modified. There, fixed it *g*.

High velocity assault rifle with drum modification
100 bullets for the win

Yeah. the life of a troll must be pretty miserable, actually. The book says they only live to be about 55 years. Most of the 8' plus humans lived to only be about 35-40 years old. While the book gives no reason as to why Orks only live to be 40 or so, surely Trolls are wracked with arthritis and other degenerative effects by the time they are in their forties. So even with their assumed more proportional skeletal mass, the toll on their bodies must be significant.

Would make an interesting NPC. An "elderly" troll in a giant motorized wheelchair.

I believe it was stated in earlier editions that the "short" average lifespan on orks (and even humans is rather low) is due to it being a worldwide average, and for orks, it also mentions most of them die violently but also their advanced metabolism and general living situations (i.e. squalor) account for the short lifespan as well.

Frustrating since they only appeared 51 years ago. As far as I can figure out, no one born a troll has been around long enough to see 55 years of age.