Or you want to change how you do skill dp's.

instead of stat+skill, you make it:
skill+stat(max skill rank*2)

So if you have a stat of 6 but a skill rank of 1, you can only use 2 dice from your stat.

But it's seriously lacking in a couple of examples.
How do you default
How is having 1 skill rank better than just defaulting.

I guess you could say that for defaulting you only get to roll 1 die+edge
So if you have 1 skill rank, you get to roll 3 dice + edge (if you have a stat of 2+)

of course, as soon as you have a 3 skill it mostly stops mattering.
1 skill 6 agility: 3 dice
3 skill 6 agility: 9 dice
6 skill 6 agility: 12 dice
6 skill 3 agility: 9 dice

it also effectively blocks people at 12 stats. If you manage to raise your agility to >12 you get no benefit from it, unless you get a 7 skill.

Not sure how I feel about it.

Well... looking at these examples I think we're better off just leaving things as they are. After all, we know that only adepts will be doing huge melee damage, and those will need high Agi as well, and don't really need high Str.

So... while I also miss my 14D polearm troll from SR3 (with a puny 10Str after Adrenaline Burst, mind you), I can live with not getting there anymore.

Also: A vibro-blade sword is +3/-2AP, IIRC, so a Str4 character can reach 6P, -2 AP, which is better than an assault rifle before bursting. Considering Impact armour is often lower, the only thing really unbalancing this is the double defence pool in melee.

Mind you, I disagree that firearms are supposed to be better by default: The katana-swinging sammie is a staple image from early SR, the same as cyber melee weapons. Somehow they just forgot to make melee good enough in SR4.

But with high Agi, a character is generally good at many things, including melee with only a few more points invested, so IMHO that's all good. Any sammy can pick up a knife and be fairly deadly with it. So to make melee better just reduce the melee dodge pool. Make it Rea only for dodging (w/o full dodge), and Agi+Skill or Rea+Skill for defence.

Don't forget the people with Bone Density Augmentation 4 either.

Or wrestlers or people who depend on shock weaponry. Subduing someone prevents movement and allows you to threaten your Strength in stun (as opposed to half strength plus a base total) and once the lock is achieved it's pretty tough for smaller metatypes to get loose unless they are also trained in Unarmed Combat.



I don't think they did. It's pretty much impossible to look at these rules and say "We have achieved parity with firearms!", so unless you think the devs are pants-on-head-incompetent I think it's fair to assume that having a big ol' expensive weapon that goes BANG and can be taken away in a search is intended to have a lot more raw killing power than a telescoping baton or an electrified cyberhand.

Ammunition.

EX-Ex makes an assault rifle 7P -2AP while APDS makes it 6P -5AP.

--



Like the ~180,000 Barret I want to get for my sharpshooter?

Yep. I would like to throw in the caveat that they may not have intended for the gap to be quite as wide as it currently is, but I do think a gap of some sort between guns and melee was intended.

There's three major flaws that stack against melee.

#1 - Complex actions to make attacks versus the simple for ranged.
#2 - Inability to stack damage as high or as quickly as firearms.
#3 - The fact that your opposition will be pinging away at you as you approach.

#2 can never really be overcome, but the Initiative Pass system helps ease the problem with #1 and #3.

You also have the issue of basing your combat efficacy on all the physicals stats due to the aforementioned problems. You need agility to hit, you need strength to up your damage, and you need a good blend of body and reaction to overcome problem #3. A shooter can completely ignore strength and you can make arguments that they don't need reaction or body making them require only one physical stat.

Well, IRL hand-to-hand combat is not very effective when facing firearms, so being somewhat short-changed in game unless you go for a very dedicated, specialist character build is not exactly shocking...

Even then, you're still rather shortchanged vs. equal karma opposition. Critical Strike and Martial Arts are nice, but the "ceiling" on what you can get out of guns isn't so low as to allow melee artists to easily start surpassing sharpshooters. And as a purely practical matter, I worry more about having a "high enough" damage code than I worry about having a damage code that is as high as possible. Tweaked cyberadepts can get to some pretty ridiculous damage codes, but what good is being able to punch out a Citymaster if you can't survive long enough or run fast enough to get close to it anyway?

Is that really a bad thing?

I mean Japanese Samurai found out the hard way in 1890's that Katana + horse < Machine gun nest.

I agree fully, however I believe there is a certain love affair with the cyberpunk samurai and bringing melee combat as potential main combat form. I can accept this and that some people would want to play a melee build. I do not have a problem with bringing melee up a bit but I don't think melee was ever intended to supersede firearms in lethality. However, I do have a problem with nerfing one of the aspects that makes melee a functional part of Shadowrun (namely capping Initiative Passes). I think it is way overlooked how important IPs are to melee street samurai. A street samurai will never, and probably should never, come close to touching the lethality of a shooter with equivalent counts of IPs.

I don't think so. I just want to be very clear here that the power of melee (bp for bp, karma for karma, anyway) is far enough behind in Shadowrun that you shouldn't expect to Bruce Lee people as efficiently as a gun bunny can Rambo people-- the exceptions are so high up the karma curve that they fall under exception that proves the rule territory. The rules simply don't appear to support that kind of power in melee coming cheaply, and frankly, I find the argument that "Well, they are called Street SAMURAI" to be a fairly weak one. People like to point out book covers and pull out things like the old "Magic vs. Tech" chestnuts from time to time, but for the most part I think people tend to subconsciously cherry pick the themes they like the most about any given setting and ascribe them more importance than the books themselves ever seem to assign. The power of melee has fluctuated from edition to edition, but whether Street Samurai carry swords because it's an affectation or because they're genuinely as dangerous as a SMG isn't something that's really addressed by the fluff directly. When looking at specific examples it pays to remember that Shadowrun is a setting that multiple people have written for over the years and not everyone gives it the same spin or even agrees with eachother as to where it should go.

Also-not to digress the thread any futher--melee has it's advantages:

It is generally quieter.
It is generally easier to go around carrying (some exceptions like the troll with a claymore) melee weapons.
Unarmed combat means you can't be disiarmed.
Doesn't require ammo.

Down side is that you have to get close. Not easy in the age of firearms. But not impossible, remember Rorke's Drift with the Zulu. In that battle preceeding it the Zulu's wiped out a 2,000 man british force (Battle of Isandlwana).

My point is-there are advantages and disadvantages to both and sometime's one is a better choice than the other.

Back on topic of IP's it is much fairer than old system of the gun bunny mowing down everyone before the can act. Also it is not supposed to be a fair fight, this is SHADOWRUN afterall. If you want a fair fight, you're playing the wrong game.

PS: note that 1 IP foot sloggers can still cap a a runner with a heavy pistol (the mook's group edge has its uses).

I say yes it is.

This isn't a game of charging machine gun nests, this is a game of back alleys and office corridors. This is where melee actually can work especially in the fiction. Range is still an issue and it is an advantage and that alone should have been the advantage guns had. Range+damage+simple action vs complex+easier to get off is a bit much.

well, I think that the -3 for opponent is in melee isn't actually enough of a modifier.

Point Blank should be +2 it's easy to shoot someone from point blank who is only trying to dodge. Your chances of surviving a gun shot attack go up significantly the farther away from the shooter you are.

But if the person you're trying to shoot is actually in 'melee' range and actively attacking you with a martial art that actually has maneuvers aimed at dealing with guns. That +2 isn't really there anymore.

But it has to be someone trained.
Perhaps I would rule that if you're in melee range of someone trying to shoot you you can use melee defense.
reaction+melee skill+(dodge).

So yes, the guy gets agility+skill+2 for trying to shoot you, but you have reaction+melee skill+dodge (on full defense) to try and avoid.

I would also get rid of the dodge double dip for defending against melee.
to defend against melee it's ... reaction+melee/unarmed regularly, and that +dodge in full defense.

If you don't have a melee skill then it's reaction-1 (for defaulting) and reaction-1+dodge in full defense.

Well, I'm usually the GM, so it really depends on what people want. I'm ambivalent on the issue issue right up until I have a couple guys at the table who seem to want to run Jack Burton and Zatoichi. My players are usually fine with the current status quo, but if people want to shake things up and change the emphasis I'm willing to roll with it.

I think that's already in the book, isn't it?

No. The best possible pool for dodging ranged attacks is Reaction + Dodge when you are on full defense.

Melee: Reaction + (Dodge or Melee Skill or Gymnastics)
Melee Full Defense: Reaction + (Dodge or Melee Skill or Gymnastics) + Dodge
Ranged: Reaction
Ranged Full Defense: Reaction + (Dodge or Gymnastics)

Uhm, perhaps it is one of those house-rules we use since the dawn of time that the line between rules and house-rules become fuzzy.

There's a TV series SAS Survival Secrets that has a cool scene of a melee technique to disarm an incautious pistolero. I think it's in episode 2.

Actually, you can only use gymnastics for full defense, whether it is melee or ranged.
So Melee should be Reaction + (Dodge or Melee Skill).
You also can use Full Parry for Melee Full Defense: Reaction + (Melee Skill x 2).

Effective melee characters may be expensive, but they can definitely do a lot of damage. And even though it may be a niche role, they usually only need one ranged skill of 4, with a specialization, to be within breathing distance of the gun dude. Also, things like muscle toner, multiple IPs, and durability-enhancing 'ware such as orthoskin can be just as useful in ranged combat, too.

Now we are back to agility being too powerful.

Someone spoke about getting 4 IP making you a one trick pony, I think the inference was that you do it on char build?

I think getting 4ip via cyber at build is a poor way to go. It gives you a lot of early power at the expense of long term growth.

The BP system encourages spending to max out stats and skills, and then picking up cyber upgrades and low level skills as you go along.

My hyper specialist is going to grab all the skills our generalist has got quite a lot earlier than the generalist will be able to raise a specialisation to anything near the level I built to.

I rather like it. Your troll skydivers (skill + body) would be the only folks who regularly take a stat used with a skill past 12. And you actually CAN raise a skill above 6, if you are an adept- they can go to 9, right?
One drawback is it potentially makes extra dice from non-attribute sources comparatively more of an influence (or more worth seeking, at least for folks with limited skill) when really, those are (IMO) a bigger problem for balance. Somebody with pistols 1, a specialization for the model of gun they have, a smartlink, a tac-net, and an analyze device spell should NOT out shoot a trained marksman who is using inferior equipment. (Or maybe they should, depending on how you like your sci-fi.)

Which is accounted for in the alleyways and office corridors scenarios you bring up. When Encounter range is 1-3 meters (Actually as much as 7 meters), either combat mode is an acceptable choice.

After playing several melee builds over the years, in all the various editions of Shadowrun, I would say that Melee is still a viable recourse. Unfortunately, Melee characters will take a beating from ranged fire if the encounter range is anything other than immediate. When you have to close as a melee specialist (unless it is a matter of only 10-20 meters or so), you may find that the ranged specialists have already taken care of the opposition. Which is at it should be.

For people who want skills to matter more, I think the simple optional rule from the book is best (limit hits to skill x 2, with defaulting limited to one hit).

That works fairly well for the low range of skills, but 4+ it does very little. I'm rarely going to get 8 hits for most skills without a 6ish skill anyway since I am going to need every day point to get a big enough pool to pull that off.

I thought the point of such house rules was to limit the effectiveness of the low skill/high Attribute & dice pool mods characters. So I don't think it matters if it doesn't limit high skills that much. Although you are right if I misread the intention, and they wanted to limit character effectiveness across the board.

I think he means: Yes, it limits someone with high mods/attribute, but it doesn't really help someone with high skill.

Personally I prefer the way (I think) SR3 did it, where attribute determined how easy it was to train the skill, and skill was what really mattered.

Yes to both. Though I may have misunderstood what the person wanted out of their house rules as well. Anyways while yes it will stop a person's effectiveness form having a high attribute and low skill it will not reward someone with a high skill. Both of which I think are important if you want skills to matter.

And yes I agree I prefer how 3rd edition did it in regards to skills and attributes.

I joke, as my group's resident ranged specialist, that combat will last a number of initiative passes no greater than the number of mooks present divided by two.

Which does have some merit, as Ranged Combat is often much more deadly than melee combat, but if the Melee Combatant can get up close, he can be just as deadly...

Deadly? Maybe. Just as deadly? God no.

Half as deadly? Almost

This sounds like a challenge coming on. Make a melee combatant who is as deadly as a typical ranged combatant.

It's really apples and oranges. You can make a melee character who can have sky high damage codes for melee combat, while remaining hard to hit and harder to damage by other melee combatants. But that goes out the window when people are shooting at you from the windows.

Melee is a niche role, although it can come up more often in the close quarters that shadowrunners often deal with. But while stealth and/or being able to close the distance quickly can make melee more useful, every melee build should still have at least one decent ranged skill.

Generally, I would boil the best melee options down to:
1) Unarmed combat, which can reach extremely high damage codes.
2) Weapons, typically edged, with the two weapon fighting style for superior defense.
3) A monowhip, not as good as the first two if you are talking dedicated specialists, but the best bang for the buck for someone not optimized for melee, but wanting something to cover it.

I will add that adepts, with either weapon foci or killing hands, will have a huge edge against spirits and other types with immunity to weapons.

To bring it back to the topic of initiative passes, the big difference for a melee specialist in SR4, as opposed to SR3, is that initiative passes matter again. In SR3, melee combat was an opposed test, where the attacker could take damage. In SR4, initiative passes determine how many chances to inflict damage you get, and there is the full defence option to consider as well. So melee characters have one more thing they need, in order to be effective. The positive side, which I mentioned earlier, is that many of these things raise overall effectiveness in combat, not just melee.

Usually Glyph is exactly correct about everything, but he forgot to mention the AZ-150 stun baton and melee hardened pistol/SMG variant for option #2. Clubs still covers both, and that setup lets you shoot and parry with the pistol/SMG (naturally, not at the same time,) and attack anyone in melee range with a weapon with a base 7S(e) -halfAP damage code.

It's a great option for an Agile attacker who may not have much invested in strength. Hell, two stun bats is usually better than two katanas or what-have-you.

MA quality Damaging Disarm + Disarm maneuver + Two-weapon Style maneuver + MA quality Club DV+1 + Off-hand Training (clubs) maneuver
It's 16BP, but you'll kick some ass, and save the BP you'd otherwise need for strength.

Damnit! Now I want to play a physad dual-wielding stun batons. No, scratch that: a sexy Scarlett Johannsen lookalike elf physad dual-wielding stun batons while wearing a black leather catsuit.

With a custom Martial Arts advantage to cover Distracted by the Sexy. Character's Charisma as a dice pool penalty to opponents in melee, perhaps?

Remember: TVTropes Will Ruin Your Life. Surf responsibly.

It's a joke bedded in truth. I will usually one shot any mook unless it does really good on it's damage resistance roll which requires that they have armored jacket quality ballistic armor o 4 body. So pretty much I figure the number of mooks divided by 2 is the number of initiative passes it would take me to either kill or severely wound all of them. Add in everyone else on the team and it's certain to be a number of passes less than that. If combat ran longer than that value, then something probably went very wrong.

I had talked with my groups GM at length about this. We have an understanding, I think....

The problem is that most of our mook opposition has been stuff that I will kill in a single shot between sheer damage and armor penetration the only time this isn't the case is rare mook that got really lucky on his body roll to resist damage. To make the mooks we face a challenge for me to kill would require amping them up to the point that it would be a lot harder for the two melee and gun-fu to avoid getting beaten to snot over and over. The only other option would be to stack up penalties, but it would be very difficult to find penalties that I cannot mitigate or penalties that would affect me and not the other characters. Combine that with the "melee attacks are complex actions" issue means that the only solution to bring the other characters up to my level of output is to find a way to cause me to take half the actions I do. This is one reason I'm content at sitting at 3 IP when everyone else is at 4IP.

So I play my character in ways that make that difference not so apparent knowing that if I need to I can amp up my ability.

Some examples:
Even though my initiative is good enough to be on par with one of the melee and always beat the mooks, I tend to prefer to delay and take my actions last on the pass. This lets me interrupt a mook's action before he takes it so I play as a defensive asset to the team. Many times I will outright avoid killing the target. Last run we were on had some government mooks chasing us (they were in cars we were in a plane). I play my character as having an aversion to outright killing people just doing their job, if it's a legal job, so I chose to instead shoot out tires or disarm the mooks shooting at us (yes disarm by shooting their gun, it's another of my favorite tactics). Sue me. I have the dice pools to do trick shots like that and have them be effective.

I do find it humorous that my character is averse to going off mission to do good, but is averse to killing people needlessly while the character that wants to go off mission to do good has no problem with judiciously slaughtering everyone in his path that has a gun.

--



I'm not sure how to make that possible without heavily house ruling melee. You still have to get over the complex action hurdle so you're already at a 2:1 action deficit for attacks. You have to start with a base damage that is about twice what the ranged combatant is pulling.

Sure you could tweak the scenario to start favoring the melee combatant. Amping up the armor on the target by a significant amount will penalize the ranged combatant faster than the melee combatant, but in an average scenario? Anything more than a 4 body armored jacket mook (8/6) would be pushing the situation towards specialized.

We had an Unarmed Adept in the team that used the Multiple Targets rule (SR4 p 148: split dice pool between opponents and they must be within 1m of each other) to quickly plow through enemy ranks. Killing Hands/Critical Strike 6, Unarmed Combat 6 meant he generally dropped everything he touched.

Of course, he got shot down by guards with assault rifles at some point.

That's why I didn't actually take up the challenge.

"As deadly as a gunbunny" is probably impossible.

Deadly enough, and fast or tough enough to be useful besides the gunbunny, now that's a worthwhile challenge. Bonus points if the main selling point isn't "My Killing Hands make me more useful against spirits than the gunbunny."

I'm better at clean silent takedowns than the gunbunny?

Eh, that's generally a pretty impractical niche though. Killing Hands/Foci just isn't really all that good since spirits are very hard to hit targets for melee characters unless the GM really softballs things and makes the Spirits charge everything in order to Engulf. First off is the defense pool problem-- Spirits have 2 passes by default and all types have a Reaction score bonus as well as Dodge/Unarmed Combat skill equal to their Force, so Force 5s are going to be throwing around 17+ dice to avoid getting hit on Full Defense and 12+ dice when just standing around. That's not untouchable, of course, but at the very least you're not going to have as many net hits as a gunfighter will at the same range. Second is sheer movement. Spirits are generally as fast or faster than player characters, so you better break out the cyberskates or something. Third is the worst blow: Powers. Between Fear, Flight, Binding and Movement it's fair to say that Spirits typically have the tools to keep someone from getting right in their face if they need to, so breaking out some stick and shock will still be the way to go most of the time.

I think the only viable environment for a close combat fighter will be indoors anyway, where surprise and touch range are just one Free Action away.

Maybe if you're fighting in a closet. Fear is really pretty rough for melee guys considering that any time they waste running away is time and distance they need to spend on closing again when they snap out of it.

You know the main difference between the gun bunnies and pizza slicer effectiveness is tactical. The level of cover, range of the engagement, are both aware of each other...and probably a host of other factors I am missing (speed of the pizza slicer vs range of the engement for example).

Though, if juding in just terms of max damage output per IP, firearms are superior (based on the fact that most firearms are SA or BF capable).

What is the typical environment in which SR fights take place? How big is it? How many combat turns does it take to get in melee reach of enemies? If the answer is more than 1, then melee characters are useless. If most fights take place in offices or suchlike without long lines of fire, melee characters may be useful.

But I suppose the big question is: what can be done with close combat that firearms can't do as well?

Subdue an opponent.

Edit: Crap. I forgot about SnS. Subdue an opponent without knocking them out.

Yeah, good point. The best you can achieve with firearms would be narcoject or SnS, which doesn't help if you want to interrogate right away.

I think the thing needed to make melee useful in a more general sense though, is to allow parrying of firearms at very close ranges like melee attacks (i.e. with Reaction+Close Combat and optional Full Defense). So that in CQC, the guy with actual CQC skills is at an advantage.