So I'm toying with the idea of giving the options for making things more painful a whirl. The +2 DV across the board, that sort of thing, Dodge only on their Action Phase, that sort of stuff. I'm just wondering if anybody has used any of them, and in what combinations, and how they worked out.

Thanks!

The rules I'm using in my current campaign:
- No FFBA
- No soak roll: the armor substracts half its rating to the attack DV, AP is applied. (So a 4 armor hit by a 1AP weapon will absorb 4/2-1=1 DV)
- Max Armor without encumbrance is strength+body instead of body*2.
- Armor degradation: armor have a condition monitor equal to their rating and lose one point when the DV is equal or superior to their rating (and two points if its twice the rating and so on).
- Stun and Physical condition monitors are 8+willpower and 8+body.
- There are rules for losing limbs/critical injuries.

The idea is that the characters are less likely to completely soak attacks (but they can withstand a bit more) and even the toughest troll wearing a full body armor will eventually go down under heavy fire.
But so far my PC have avoided combat so we still haven't used them much.

Probably going to use the option rule for healing physical damage. Off the top of my head it requires that you include wound modifiers on the body roll to heal physical damage.

Getting almost killed should take more than 3 days sleeping on the couch.

I use an armor degredation rule that decreases the armor rating of body armor by 1 for each attack. Other than that I keep it at RAW.

Cool, thanks again. I'm toying with the idea of losing the soak roll, too, just because it's one less roll to worry about.

I think I would apply the AP before I divided by 2. Instead of after. That makes APDS way too good.

FFBA 6/4 4P -2AP damage.

6-2 = 4, 4/2 = 2 so he reduces damage by 2.

Basically it means that 4 points of AP is all you need to defeat every armor ever, as you ignore armor up to 8, then your gun is doing a minimum of 5 damage base, pushing armor up to 18 before that gun even needs to worry about not doing damage.

Not to mention that body armor (8/6ish) will basically lose a point of protection every time the guy wearing it gets shot (a 5P gun only needs 3 hits to reduce that armor by 1).

20 armor vehicle vs -4 AP

20/2=10-4=6

A tank would only have 6 points of damage reduction against a gun with -4ap.

20-4=16/2=8 It's not a huge difference. But.

You can get to 7 damage with a hand gun. Hell, you can get to that amount with a hold-out pistol (base damage: 4P; just need 3 net hits on 16+ dice).

Getting 9 is a tad trickier. You'd need 4 hits with most (non-explosive) weapons.

Also, it doesn't account for hardened armor or "vehicles are immune to stun's I can't believe its not hardened armor."

Yes I'm agreeing with you

I'm not sure I like the armor/2 thing.
Oh well.

Never said I was disagreeing.

Yes it makes AP ammo very interesting against armored opponent... Which isn't that absurd to me. The high availability and price make it a special ammunition anyway. My houserules consider that armor tech lost the battle against ammunition tech.
Good point regarding tanks, though. I was thinking about personal armor and not vehicle armor. I'll think about it. Thank you.

The problem is that the game doesn't differentiate between vehicle and personal armor.

Actually it does. With vehicle armor if the DV of the attack (unmodified by BF/FA) <= Vehicle Armor (modified by AP) then the attack bounces off, no resistance roll needed. It doesn't do that with personal armor.

-D

Actually what it says is that attacks less than the DV do stun, and that vehicles do not take stun damage which results in the same effect has Hardened Armor (which can come in personal armor form), but is not actually Hardened Armor.

and it's possible to get a troll with as much armor as a tank
Which just seems weird.

In my campaign, some time ago, I used the gritty rules (I use 4th, not 4A).

This means: Maximum successes from /any/ skill roll is 2xskill. This means that a character with firearms 6 can accomplish maximum 12 successes. Ever. It applies to dodge too. If edge is mixed to the roll this limit collapses. It also makes those skilled better than those with a natural talent, characters will be more focused towards having good pools and building their skills, rather than the pools themselves.

Rating 6 is topnotch. Almost absolute topnotch. This is true for bad guys (corpers, etc). 4 and 3 are good and 2-3 are the usual average. This means that characters with a Firewall are as protected as a delicate (but not essential) Ares server. Tacnets are /scarce/, etc. This doesn't mean the campaign was street level, just that high availability was enforced not only with numbers, but with roleplaying. This helps players feel they are good with a skill at 4 or 3. It makes them more balanced instead of overspeacialists since they have enough dice. Thise with a 6 really excel. Then they get what they paid for in BP.

I used to the maximum the autosuccess rule: 4 dice, mean 1 success. It was enforced almost as mandatory roll for extended rolls where there is no good reason (this is GM fiat, the players never com,plained so I used it to effect. Groups may differ), or the character mixes edge on the roll in that case he can roll.
It was also used for spells and conjurations made during the preparation for the run. This made the lower spirits very popular, and the higehr force ones summoned only in emergencies and with edge involved in the summoning. It made them /special/ in a very nice sense (players even named a few and developed relationship with those spirits that had a lot of services)

First aid and healing rolls were modified by the physical damage modifier.

I would describe the wounds clearly. Even a a meager 1P, it hurts, it bleeds, its messy and disgusting and bothersome. Make sure the -1 is not only a mechanics problem, but something the player enjoys to roleplay.

On the other hand the bad guys would drop and scream for surrender and mercy when they only had 3P wounds. No one wants to be shot, and since they aren't trianed doctors with diagnostics equipment they don't know if they are dying. This made fights interesting because instead of dead bodies the guards would turn tail and run and ask for TONS of reinforcements. These would come late, but the tension the players often felt was much more interesting than the wounds they came out with... They were paranoid to linger in a firefight, and mooks would actually try to do just that (Tons of suppressive fire and trying not to face directly the shadowrunners -better fighters than them- but stalling them for the HTR Teams, for example, or the police to arrive).

But I digress, I think the main rules were the first ones I posted, and they worked nicely.

I went with +3 to all damage codes. Have had several near deaths of players. I do like the idea that body tests are affected by wound mod's.

A few things:
1) 6 in a skill limiting you to 12 successes isn't that big of a deal (even if you're throwing edge, you're still unlikely to even GET 12 successes)
2) How do you apply that to attribute-only tests? Is the guy with 9 reaction, 1 Dodge limited to 2 hits when defending against a ranged attack for which he did not declare dodge? What if he does declare dodge?
3) What about 0 skill (defaulting)?

I fffffffffffficking love these rules!

BUT, what about laser weapons?

What's the problem with laser weapons?

They as well as quite a few other thinks have AP-half.
So do they just half the armors rating again?

I find the idea of capping hits at Skill * 2 interesting. It puts a stop to ridiculous bonus-mongering or Attributes Uber Alles. But defaulting makes it tricky.. maybe the limit goes no lower than 1-2? It does kinda solve the Emotitoy/Empathy Software exploit.

Also, I'd still allow people to use FFBA, just not stack effects with other worn armor. It's nice for inconspicuous protection.

I'd allow FFBA to stack, but not at 1/2 rating.

You mean just let it count for its full value for Encumbrance purposes? That seems reasonable.

See above post:



Particularly point #1. A 6 skill character isn't going to be effected by the cap at all.

Not really, the pornomancer has 10 skill after all, on avarage you won't get 20 successes with 50 dice.
And if you end up getting 20+ successes, the fact that you only get to count 20 of those isn't much of a problem.

How do you get to 10 skill?

Aptitude to get to 7 and then 3 levels of improved ability power = skill 10

Even so, with the normal max of 6, you'd need 36 dice to on-average roll the 12 hits before the cap matters.

All the skill*2 cap does is hurt the people with low skill ratings, and does nothing to those people with 4 or more ranks.

what about limiting modifiers to skill

or limiting net hits to stat

or both.

It seems to me like any GM interested in instituting a bevy of house rules aimed towards a gritty, low-key, realistic, campaign, is going to just have a conversation with anyone making a hojillion-die-pool Pornomancer and ask them not to, in order to keep with the spirit of the campaign.

Sometimes all it takes is a little mutual agreement between friends -- and the folks we game with are our friends, right? -- instead of nitpicking over house rules and stuff.

So how would one deal with a borged character (ok, they are gimped anyway) or someone with Dermal Sheat 3 and Titanium Bonelacing - the latter would give a base armor of 3/4 in the nude. Armor degration wouldn't work there.

Not to mention fully borged with LOTS of armor plating.

Indeed. The rules work fairly well for the gross majority of characters that are going to come onto the table, and since they aren't computer programs making them we can chat with the player and steer them away from the one-trick dice cascades.

Or, The Jopp, what if degradation *did* work then? Ouch!

Just more of a money sink and necessity of a high-quality street doc contact.

The point was that limit of hits to skill*2 isn't really anykind of limit for most characters out there, pretty much only one who it hits are those characters that thought to pick few complementary skills that are linked to their main attribute at 1 nd my fun build of 30+ dice face with no social skills what so ever.

The Skill/Hit-cap depends on what your intention is. If it's a pure balance issue (to limit DPs), then we've heard why it doesn't really do that. If, however, it's a 'flavor' issue (someone with Skill 1 can't reasonably benefit from +12 DP-mods), then it does that, and someone at Skill 6 is skilled enough to make use of any bonuses/circumstances.

I don't think it's a perfect (or even great) implementation, but I can understand the ideal of balancing the usefulness of tools and positive circumstances, against the reasonability of a beginner performing at the level of a master.

I think you have a skewed idea of "most characters out there," given how dismissively small you think the population is of characters that have a few complementary skills.

most of my charactesr have 3,4 and occasional 5's in their skills.
And usually they don't buy that 6th point for a long time.

There are -- or at least there probably should be -- plenty of PCs and especially NPCs with a bunch of 2-3 skill ratings. Given the prevalence of attribute boosts, die pool modifiers, etc, etc, it seems like the total die pool could easily overwhelm a skill rating of that size. I could see the house rule coming up pretty often, personally.

Not with dedicated PCs and their specialties, no...but with everything else.

Nothing there about stun damage.

-D

P.S.
I never bothered to spend money again on new books that should have just been corrected by errata for free.

I prefer that route because I often care more about the end result than how people get there. For example, Gymnastics, Synthacardium and Improved Ability can add up to some pretty gnarly defense pools, but that doesn't really worry me too much if some combination of those abilities is on say, a 3 Reaction Face who doesn't even have any extra passes without combat drugs anyway.

Anyway, I'd take a long hard look at nerfing the First Aid rules if you want a more lethal game, particularly if you're running any sort of variant campaign where characters could feasibly just pull back and come back later if they get too banged up. Luckily that's often not a great option in your standard "We've got a time table, people," game.

Yeah, that. I'm biased against low-skill characters with huge dice pools.

I've houseruled that cyberlimb armor works just like the other cyberlimb attributes (so there's no magical bullets-magnet cyberfeet).
And for Dermal Sheat and Bonelacing, just like the Armor spell or Mystic Armor power, they are indeed a good way to have a useful non-degrading armor, but you can't get too high at chargen and there's still APDS ammo to take care of such high armor ("ok guys, load for borg").

Doesn't that mage cyberlimb armor pretty useless? It costs twice as much as cyberlimb body upgrade.

It makes it totally useless, but i assume thats what he wants, to nerf cyberlimbs out of excistance.
You need 2 limbs with 3 armor to get one point of armor, four for 2(or 3 with 4 armor each) and four limbs with 4 armor and one with 2 to get a pathetic 3 armor.

I didn't want to nerf cyberlimbs, I just wanted to nerf cyberlimbs' armor. Sure, it makes cyberlimbs less appealing but they can still have their use (and with 3 out of 5 players having at least a cyberarm, I guess my players agree, or care more about style than substance).

There's a far easier way to fix that problem:

"A cyberlimb may only take 1 armor upgrade maximum."

Partial limbs may not get the upgrade at all.