So I was re-reading the section on edge in the BBB, specifically the section on Burning Edge, and I noticed this.



What is a critical success? I don't think I've every seen it defined or stated anywhere else.

Is it just an automatic success on what ever action you're doing? If so, do you just consider all the dice to be successes?

Four net successes over the threshold, I believe, is considered a critical success.

Postscript: I've also been told one can use it on an opposed test to ensure you get the upper hand - such as Body rolls to resist that high-caliber round that just punched through your center mass - without having to possibly HoG it.

"And you fail to stop the timer, the nuke goes off and you all die. Sorry guys."
"Wait, how much damage does it do?"
"I don't know... like 100 lets say."
"Okay, I'm going to roll to soak."
"What? You can't possibly... alright, if it makes you feel better, go ahead."
"And I'm going to spend edge to get an automatic critical success. I soak all the damage with 4 points to spare."
"....How much edge do you have?"
"3 left. Why?"
"4 more secondary explosions go off."

Well . . it worked for Banner . .

p65, SR4a

Ah, Got it, thanks guys.

This is my kind of mean, love it.

I guess by RAW you could use edge to get a critical success on an extended test, rushing the job, and finish the whole thing in one half interval?

"I research and build a zero point energy source and then integrate it into my new IronMan suit."
"That will take years."
"I rush the job and Edge it, granting a critical success."
"It's done in.....1.5 months...."

Yeah, it seems to be a worthless rule.

This would be a fantastic way to be a complete dick to my players and ensure I don't have any for the next game.

Thank you for your example.

"What? No. The character must be capable of carrying out the action—you can’t buy a critical success for something you have no hope of achieving."

Done.

I guess by RAW you could use edge to get a critical success on an extended test, rushing the job, and finish the whole thing in one half interval?

"I research and build a zero point energy source and then integrate it into my new IronMan suit."
"That will take years."
"I rush the job and Edge it, granting a critical success."
"It's done in.....1.5 months...."
*shakes hands with Tony Stark*
Nice to meet you, i see you've been busy!

100 Damage?
And since it's Blast it's only Stun?
How much Armor and Body?
40 armor and 20 Body?
How much extra dice for Damage Resistance?
10?
70 Dice in all for Damage Resistance?
That's still 30 Stun left. And it's Stun.
Let us be generous and say a Stun-Track of 10.
20 Physical Damage left over. If Damage goes from Stun to Physical.
and 20 Physical Damage does not sound all that bad anymore O.o

If you know your player has that many damage resistance dice, you don't throw 100S explosions at them to kill them.

Since when does a nuke do Stun damage?

I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be aggravated damage.

I'd agree. If I'm using a nuke, I'm aggrivated.

Yeah, but that's only the initial blast. It's the radiation that really gets ya

i'll concede the point about the radiation.
but not about the blast wave . . goes to show again how kinda silly these things are O.o

I'm not sure 100P is the right damage code for a nuclear blast
given that a nuclear blast instantly vaporizes organic matter in it's blast radius.

That may be so under real world circumstances, but the games rules state something a bit different ^^
Also, taking the Radiation Damage just for the opportunity to say:"Yeah, i took a nuke head on and i won" sounds worth it in my ears ^^

Don't forget the heat and the shrapnel, too. Serves this theoretical player right for trying such a stupid thing.

Good points, i am sure, but are there actually Rules for Heat based Damage somehwere? O.o
I can't remember <.<;, As for Shrapnell . . yeah, maybe from the rules point of view.
Else everything that could become shrapnell is basically immediately reduced to molecules.

Someone's been listening to Dr. Steel.

Well, the player DID just get nuked. Might as well try to burn all the edge you have to get away with it lol.

That, too, costs one point of Edge. Make sure you got a fridge with leaded paint at hand.

"So, you survive the flash, blast, heat, hypersonic winds, and radiation poisoning. But you burn all your edge.
"The rest of the party is dead, vaporized around you
"Ok, the rest of you wake up. You are laying in a row of beds in a simsense lab. Mr. Lucky is laying there hooked up to one of the machines, still undergoing simsense, with a smug look on his face. What do you all do. No, not you, Mr. Lucky- you are still in sismsense-land."

Sucks to burn edge on a dream, neh?

Good old SR3... even a nuke just did D damage .... And then you they already had the Trauma/Platelet thingy in SR3.

'Ok, you fail, the nuke goes of next to you, you all take 100D damage.'

'Uh, wait a sec, we're cutting off at D, right?'

'That, uh, ... yes, we are.'

'Alright, I get +3 to TNs for an S wound, but my pain resistance 4 reduces that to +2. Now I do first aid on myself, and I've got a medium wound after taking a nuke to the face. Oh, and my mods just vanished due to my pain resistance, so I go ahead, and....'
*facepalm*

Just to toot my own horn a little bit, but its about nukes!

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...c=30832&hl=

Well well well . . so one COULD withstand a Davy Crockett

I think you mean DN so with the Trauma Damper you take one box of Stun and 35 boxes of Physical.

(Though a Troll Phoenix Shaman could actually survive that by virtue of having more than 25 boxes of overflow.)

~J

I'm thinking of stats for one of those now. . .

Be a great novelty weapon for a campaign.

Be a great side-weapon for a Troll in a really Punk Cyber-Game o.O
*pats his davy crockett* this is my LITTLE Hammer.

modern bombs fission to less than a 100th of a percent inefficacy meaning little to no rads at all after a short time, lets say 3 months. EM fallout will kill all AC adapters and fry most transformers, causing places like nuclear power stations to lose containment. thats where your rads would come in. Unless we're using an old Cold War nuke.

Body of 20, armor of 40 and damage resistance of 10 are about the stats for a great dragon, which should be able to survive a nuke.

But there is no conceivable way a nuke does 100 damage.

TNT is a rating 4 explosive(Aresenal p.86) So 1 kilo of TNT does 4 DV(SR4a p. 325)
Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had the equivilant of 13-20* kilotons of TNT, or 13,000,000* kilos of the stuff at minimum.
Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki had about 21 kilotons worth of bang.
Let's not get into hydrogen bombs.

Which means the smallest estimate of the smallest nuke ever used does 4 x 3605(the square root of 13,000,000 rounded down) or

14,420 Damage!!!!

One must be about 4 and a half miles away(at -2 damage per meter away for area blasts) or behind 289 blast bunkers (structure + armor rating 50) or some combination there of to take 100 damage.

And it wouldn't be Stun either, it would be Radiation damage, which is treated as Physical damage(Street Magic p. 145)

Soak that.


*13 is a VERY conservative estimate of the explosion at Hiroshima, as is the calculation of 1 kiloton = 1,000,000 gram

I too love number crunch fu!

No, one couldn't.
Davey does, at lowest, 10 tons worth of TNT. Which is 400P damage, ignoring armor as per Radiation damage rules.

Sounds like another excellent way to make sure you don't have any players next week.

At any event, if something is theoretically possible, it can be done via burning Edge. Summoning a spirit with a force greater than 2x Magic is impossible, no matter how much Edge you burn. Survivng the drain, no matter how high, is theoretically possible on a lucky dice roll, so it's doable.

In what way is surviving arbitrarily high Drain 'theoretically possible'? Are you just including the fact that you could use Edge and roll forever… except for the fact that you're already using Edge to invoke that? Because using Edge twice on the same roll is *not* possible.

Where do you see the double use?

"I could spend Edge to make this roll possible, and therefore I choose to burn Edge instead to make it a sure thing."

If we're going by 'must be theoretically possible', it's *not* theoretically possible to get more hits than dice without spending Edge. Burning Edge isn't spending Edge, and you can't do both at once, if double use of Edge is impossible.

Epic fail. If the player didn't use the critical success for disarming the nuke in the first place he deserves dying. No mercy, sorry.

Ok, let's block this out.

Player: I burn Edge to get a critical success.

GM: Nope. You don't have enough dice to possibly get that many hits.

Player: If I use Edge, I could, maybe get enough.

GM: Nope. Then you've used up the one use of Edge per dice roll to make the near infinite number of hits possible. Can't burn another Edge point on the same roll.

Player: But ... but... where does it say that burning is the same player-action as spending? on page 79 of the SR4A manual, it says:

"No more than 1 point of Edge can be spent on any specific test or action at one
time. If you spent a point of Edge for extra dice and rolled a critical glitch
anyway, for example, you cannot use Edge to negate that critical glitch since you have
already applied Edge to that test."

That's all under Spending Edge, not under Burning Edge. Burning Edge is not about a dice roll, it's about "an action".

GM: wut?

This is where the GM's common sense and sense of balance have to come in, and tell the player where his idea should go. But it is not in the RAW that the player's ploy is illegal.

Elsewhere, I like Doc Byte's point.

It's the same action.

You're right. It may be that they're not incompatible, regardless of 'same action', though; I took that they were incompatible as a premise, not a fact. In that case, points based on the premise obviously aren't supported. I'm just poking the logic around, because this problem would never come up in reality. The GM would say, 'no, you're stupid'.

I agree.

Are you saying that it's not possible to spend edge on a test and then burn edge?

Because, the rules only say that you can't spend more than one point of edge on any test. They don't say that you can't spend and then burn.

Though, rule of 6 means that anything is theoretically possible so any threshold could be reached... A conundrum..

Hey, Saint, buddy. Check post #42, ff..

Hehe.

Well. Assuming that 'critical success' is a non-useless rule, is it okay if it means you can spend 1 Edge and then burn to achieve any number hits? If it's not okay, does simply ruling that burning Edge counts as spending Edge (no double allowed) fix it? The problem seems to be that the mechanic makes certain extreme things not 'impossible', while other (possibly much less extreme things) *are* 'impossible'.

I know that burning Edge is incredibly rare anyway, and every case is a special one, and the GM is basically hand-ruling each time, and I'm against-repeated-evidence optimistic enough to imagine that no player would try anything truly dumb, and that therefore none of this is really worth talking about… but this is just for the sake of argument.

Gm: "·Okay you survive the nuke. Everyone else roll new characters, we're starting a new campaign."

Player: "Can I bring radiation boy?".

Gm: "Nope. he becomes a legend and an NPC that won't show up."

Is it really that hard?

They're not incompatible. You could spend Edge on a soak test, fail, and then burn Edge on a Escape Certain Death, for example. You can also buy a critical success by RAW. It's not stupid, it's something you may have to do if your dice luck just doesn't come up. Personally, I don't understand why people are so against the PC's survivng death traps. That's what burning Edge is *for*, after all.

I've sometimes though about burning Edge as a means to get programming tasks done in reasonable time.

When you're looking at a three or six month interval test like programming an OS, Virus, or Tacsoft, then getting it done in a single test would be worth it, (if not a huge violation of RAI.)

It's easy enough to get a programming pool in the 20s so hitting a threshold like 24 for a rating 6 virus in a single try is quite possible. Is it worth the burn to save you 3-6 months of work? Plenty times, I'd say yes.

Hell, if you've only got 1 edge then each time you burn it is only 5 karma to buy it back.

Rush the job, programming environment and burn edge and you can have a killer virus in 6 weeks of work. Pretty awesome, IMO.