Does anyone else think that the way SR4 RAW handles HMHVV is completely bonkers? Especially HMHVV III, which is described as super infectious with no known means to control or slow down. Seriously, a disease like that would rapidly lead to something out of a George Romero movie (Dawn of the Dead).

I did the math, starting with a single Ghoul. Each ghoul infects on other person every month. Want to guess how long it took to get to the point it is over 10 times the current population of the Earth? 36 months.

To make matters even crazier, instead of treating beings with the disease as monsters (like all previous versions of SR), their giving them rights! I’m sorry, but giving creatures that EAT humans *AND* are viral hazards on a level that would make a worldwide outbreak of Ebola a welcome change makes no sense to me.

There is no way to control their infectious nature, which would mean the only way to protect non-infected from them is to wipe them out. And I just can’t picture ghouls making a good little corp drone. Since they are a direct threat to a corporation’s ability to sustain their trained manpower, the only sane response from a corporation would be to eradicate them. To do anything else is suicide.

I don’t understand how HMHVV infected have not drawn the same reaction as Insect Spirits under RAW. Heck, the HMHVV is actually far worse than Insect Spirits since it is far easier to spread. Want to create a few hundred thousand Ghouls? Pull a run on a food production corporations farm vats and spike them with Ghoul blood. Kind of goes back to a Vampire game I played in where I spiked a Coke bottling plant vat with a point of my characters blood.

So, does anyone else agree with me on this? Anyone else totally house rule the way HMHVV is treated in their game?

People have already talked about using crop dusters and "Ghoul Puree" and spraying it over population centers.

Sup Draco, long time no argue.

That little spray everything down with puree ghoul bit is just another example. I'm still trying to figure out why that ghoul nation hasn't been nuked already.

I think a fair chunk of the population would, assuming 3 body, manage to resist the disease. But only just.

Well, as to why they haven't been slated for extermination, it's most likely because they're sentient. It's all well and good to just blow away any zombie you're likely to see in a Romero movie, because they're all just shambling bags of brain-lusting meat.

Now, if a zombie turned to you and started a debate about the finer points of Plato's Allegory of the Cave...you might be a bit more hesitant to open fire (or maybe not, some people just have this irrational fear of zombies...).

Anyway, I find it far more likely that (given the sociopolitical climate of the 6th world) having a conveniant way to dispose of bodies is just far too large an asset to be destroyed.


My 2 .



~R~

Because there is nothing to nuke. It isn't like the Ghouls have one place they are all set up. It's kinda like why modern day you have so much trouble with terrorists and such. There is no real target to attack.


Unfortunately no. The ghoul strain is virtually impossible to resist. You need to get 8 hits on a body test, and if you don't get it the first time, you only have to get more hits each time thanks to the way it works. Even a troll with antibiotics isn't likely to be able to resist it (Except for the fact that trolls are immune to it)

I don't see the average 3 body resisting the disease. Considering it is Power 8 for type III, with a penetration of -6, and requires a minimum of 10 tests, the average human is pretty much toast considering that you never recover from what it has done to you already. You might make it through the first exposure, but that second one that hits you the day after you recovered will pretty much do you in.

My numbers at each ghoul transforms one other person into a ghoul per month was to allow for three exposures per new ghoul.

Considering that they want to eat me and any exposure to them is pretty much a sure bet that I come down with the disease I'm taking a flame thrower to that a...

In fairness, ghouls don't want to eat you until you're dead. There are far more than enough corpses in the world for a ghoul to get by without going on a murdering spree, especially considering the small amount of flesh they actually need to survive. Assuming a ghoul is a threat to you is nothing less than bigotry. Yeah, it's common in the Sixth World (and the real world) so it wouldn't stand out, but that's still what it is.

That said, I do think the disease is rather too infectious to not be widespread than it is under RAW. There should be a lot more ghouls by the 2070s... or at least quarantine zones for them.

My biggest problem isn't them eating me (since as you said, they don't need a lot) but the fact that they are so super infectious that any contact at all pretty much makes it a done deal that I'm going to be a ghoul as well. Want to see your players go crazy? Expose them to a ghoul and use the RAW infection rules. When half the players change (and the Sammy dies) see how much they scream. The RAW is just insane. The only way to contain it is a reaction ah la Space Marines in 40k.

Burn the Ghoul! Kill the Cannibal! Purge the Unclean!

Right. No one uses the Ghoul RAW.

Doesn't that seem a little... strange to you? The fact that no one uses the RAW. If you play in a missions game, guess what. Have to use the RAW. Want to have fun at a big tournament? Pop in a ghoul! So much for all those peoples Mission characters.

Ghouls themselves may take efforts not to spread the disease, and to restrain those who would. Knowing that they need the flesh of the dead to survive, the smarter among them would realize that if their population grows past a very small minority, they would quickly be forced to resort to cannibalism. Knowing this, they act to contain their less intelligent brethren.

As for nuking the ghoul nation... sure, try it. And watch every ghoul on earth infect as many people as he can. Every ghoul has a weapon NASTIER than a nuke - his own blood, piss, and feces. You don't mess with a group like that. Best just to downplay how dangerous they are (to avoid public panic, and use of ghouls as bio-weapons by other groups) and try to bring them into the mainstream (so they have something to loose if they DO try to unleash ghoul-pacolypse).

They are already cannibalistic according to the fluff, so I really don't think it is that. I think it is a simple case of whoever wrote up the HMHVV entry forgot to actually read through the rules for diseases and accidentally made it impossibly powerful. Actually, I think it is in fact impossible to resist.

Edit: With the possible exception of having access to exceedingly powerful magic.

*shrug* It's not that strange. It's the rules equivalent of a typo. I guess, if you played Missions, it might be an issue. Still, I feel like sanity always wins.

Ok, your the government (or a mega corp... heh, same difference). Are you going to let someone with uncurable Ebola be able to move around within your country? Because letting one ghoul do that is actually many times worse. You don't have to kill them per say, but they do all need to be rounded up and stuck in a quarantine. Something around the level of a class 5 biohazard containment facility.

Even if they are granted citizenship, just claim self defense for shooting them. Due to how infectious they are, they are pretty much considered to assault anyone with a deadly weapon just by going near them.

I totally need to do a run where there is an extremely large "package", to be delivered in something like a dump/garbage truck. Instructions are to drive it to "x" location, put it in park, set it to dump its content, and run like hell.

"x"= ghoul haunt, for purposes of this equation. Yay, flesh eating math!

N (anything, it doesn't matter if N is Novacoke, Ninja, or NERPS) is always inferior to N+Flesh Eating.



~R~

Just one thing. The Penetration of -6 just applies for any special stuff you add to the resistance test, not your BOD value.
A person with BOD 3 taking a cocktail medicine of rating 6 will just roll 3 dice, a person with BOD 3 taking only the immune system into account also rolls 3 dice.

The chance of not having any succes in a single test is 29%.
Also, you only become a ghoul if you fail 10 resistance tests. Of course, if the Power of the disease is still to high after the tenth obligatory test, you might be turned into a ghoul. Also, there are always lucky people (Edge) who can get through this. It is not an impossible to resist disease.
In this case, VITAS-3 is much more dangerous IMO (faster acting and the vector).
Now, I agree that all the HMHVV the vector should be injection instead of contact, this would make it even less dangerous.

I would like to point out that, as has already been said in this thread, most ghouls and many of the rest of the Infected are in fact actual people. Not monsters per se, just people who have been twisted into predators by a soul-breaking viral-induced lifestyle. They are certainly not evil, a statement whose borders you are currently rather close to.

Furthermore, here's a reason to give ghouls at least some semblance of rights above animals to be killed: the only things in the Sixth World that are truly evil, the shedim. A body eaten cannot be possessed, and most intelligent ghouls with even a shred of humanity left would probably be quite willing to help stave off the shedim threat by eating free food (so to speak).

What happened to Dzoo-Noo-Qua and Fomorians? Both are HMHVV-infected trolls from 1st through 3rd editions.

The mistake is trying to reconcile the various rules and fluff details from the books. Don't bother.

We know it's a mess. The book says this: "It’s difficult calling HMHVV a plague sometimes, at least in the modern sense of the word. It’s a remarkably rare disease, certainly nowhere near as widespread as AIDS at the end of the 20th century or VITAS earlier in this one."

And, right after that, this: "Since 2011, HMHVV has Infected, worldwide, hundreds of thousands of individuals from six sapient species; that number rises into the tens of millions when you count ghouls. Countless more have died at the hands of the victims of the disease, which turns even the gentlest of souls into ruthless, predatory killers."

So… those are contradictory, broadly speaking, and we haven't even gotten into the actual infection mechanics. *shrug* The pieces don't fit, and I can see how that could bother some players. The trick is to ignore it, choose the working version, and continue.

I do think some people go overboard. This: "HMHVV III is the most virulent form of the virus, and it can be spread with a bite, a scratch, even a mere touch if you’re unlucky enough to have an open wound." It's not skin-contact vector. At most, it's 'broken skin', which really *is* 'Injection', despite the misnomer. ("Diseases spread by injection must be injected into the target’s bloodstream or alternately through an open wound.") Again, this is just a 'typo', and it's simple enough to change it.

--
Erik Baird, those are both Infected in SR4 already, so they're immune.

Brazilian_Shinobi, what *are* the odds of surviving the disease (not becoming a ghoul)? After all, the Power adds and adds for 10 tests, and you have to get it to zero before failing 10 total. The numbers don't look great. As in, you must have Body 8+, and/or tons of Edge and real luck, or incredible countermagic? To even expect to beat it, you need Body in the 20s, right?

(There might be a 'trick' method, if the Critical Success rule from this thread <http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=33684> works: fight the disease for 9 tests, building up as many as 72 Power, and then get '80 hits' on the final test by burning Edge? Honestly, I'd just let a character Hand of God to avoid becoming an Infected.)

It's perfectly fine for HMHVV III to be nigh-unbeatable, as long as it's not also spread everywhere instantly (and it's not: despite all the hand-wringing about sweat and spit and 'just being near', we know that it's really an Injection vector).

Ghoul rights have been canon since years before 4th Ed. Uh yes, they eat dead people. In a world of underage meat puppets, blood sports and dead gutterpunks which nobody cares about (not even public waste collection, because there is none in the barrens), that is of course a TOTALLY horrible thing to do


The writers responsible for it have repeatedly stated that giving MMMVV a contact vector was a misunderstanding, it's supposed to be injection. And with injection, it becomes about as infectious as HIV

Just make it injection only. Easy fix, problem solved. It makes sense to me to have it that virulent if it's only spreadable by injection.
On a side note, kreiiger strain hmhvv (ghoul juice) reduces logic by one. Animalistic ghouls are former people who had 1 logic, caveman types used to have 2, and the ones who enter debates and pursue human rights are the ones who had 3+. Most ghoul hunters in my games are themselves ghouls of the latter categories. It makes sense - they're immune, it reduces demand on the food supply, and fewer ghouls acting like animals could lead to a better public opinion of the race.

Yeah, it's ben mentioned a few times. But you don't need to worry about Ghouls so much – the Loup Garou have torn them apart a long time ago.

Of course, that was back in the day where it was pretty easy for Joe Average to not become a ghould even when bitten instead of automatically becoming one, when the disease ran three months instead of 10 days, and where it was medically treatable in the first month, instead of there being no treatment, just immuno-boosts through implanty, magic and nanites.

And it's not just the rules that have ben retconned – the history was, too.

?

if The Ghoul Strain of HMMVV was that nasty, no one would survive the first part of the Dawn of the Artifacts modules. As it was with the African strain of the Ghoul virus, the players pretty much had to deal with "I Am Legend" style of assault with two ghoul shamans (my group is magic heavy) and 1 Ghoul physad which gave them nightmares plus a rush of a lof of regular ghouls....luckily they had lots of crash bang grenades and other noisemakers, plus the locally stamped MG-3 knockoff on the top of the slaver 'technical' they had...liberated. but even then it was like every bade zuvumbie nightmare for them.

The players do not want to go anywhere near Lagos again if they can avoid it

COnsidering someone who doesn't fail any of the first 10 tests with BOD and no additional help? 0.0004%

Might have something to do with the demographics of that african nation being better educated, better trained, better equipped, and 1 in 3 ghuls being magically active. oh and trained in non lethal takedown. what army in they right mind wants to face that? unless it's from the 2072 version of a B-52 Stratofortress dropping MOABS?

,,In Runners Companion pg 77. BORN INFECTED.
"Characters that are born infected are not carriers and cannot pass the virus the others, thoght.."

So you use drones with fuzzy logic in autistic mode, with FAEs.

Kulls would be a good choice, with some Nimrods to cover them.

But if the infected is a Sinner, he could get to the hospital and get +10 bonus dice due to the Level 10 bonus of a facility, and THAT friggin RAW.

Augumented, page 127, a facility is equivalent as Level 10 Medkit.

and in Antivirals section states that into any medkits there are doses of antivirals with a rating equal to the medikit.

Therefore, when you get to the hospital and yell ` A FRAKKING GHOUL JUST BIT ME!", they might place you on a bed and give you daily shots of potent antivirals

You are now resisting HMVIII at +2 bonus!

It is still a though fight, but with a little luck (edge), most people with BOD 3 might get better rather quickly.

And if you are still ghoulish after the treatment, well, you are already in a contained corporate owned facility. THEN they might shoot you.

On the sheet, will be read "dead due to virulent infection."

it won't be too far from the truth anyway.

Just, sadly, RAW states that antivirals don't work against HMHVV, at all. The penetration just circumvents protection gear.

And of course, unless you get 8 dice total on your resistance check, you automatically fail. The only option by RAW is either to get O-Cells (not excluded) or just do nothing, then burn Edge on the last test, then get Cellular Repair to restore the 0.9 Essence Loss.

Also, it is hard to create a good statistical scenario to work through this, because, when you fail, the power increases and it might take even more tests to diminish the power.

So, for instance, if a subject will need 20 rolls to finally reduce the power to 0, without failing at most 9 times, the subject has a 96% chance of surviving (losing between 0.9 and 0.0 of Essence).

It is hard, but my point is just that it's nearly impossible. You have to *regularly* get 7-8+ hits, you pay for every missed Power later, and you can't rely on Edge for all 10 tests.

How are you getting 8 hits with 5 dice, 10 times in a row?

Never mind...
I forgot that the power accumulates for the next roll and on and on...
Sorry about that
Yeah, I'll have to calculate this thing again. It is more complicated than I thought.

Personally, I think I'd allow the 'spend Edge + burn Edge for a Critical Success (Threshold+4 hits)' trickery on the 10th Disease Resistance test. At that point, they've already lost 0.9 Essence anyway, and (unless you make a very kind reading about resetting the count), they'll go Ghoul the very next time they're exposed and fail even 1 test.

Why not? I reckon that you cannot afford to burn Edge for all 10 tests, but I do not see why can you not be able to use Edge for those tests.

… Because it's 10 tests, and you don't have 10 Edge.

Only if you do not refresh Edge between those 10 rolls.

Yes. Because that would be ridiculous, it's only 10 days. I suppose it's theoretically possible to refresh Edge daily, or to cut that 10 days into a bunch of sessions and refresh then, but then there's no drawback at all.

*shrug*. Anyway, it doesn't change the point. You need about 8 hits every time, so (Body+Edge) has to be huge. Troll Mr. Lucky has a tiny chance. It's not my disease, I'm just saying that it *is* incredibly hard to resist, as the fluff says.

I disagree that it would be ridiculous; I agree that in this way, there's no drawback at all.

So, what you basically need here is to get 80 hits over 10 tests with only your body as a DP. That means that all humans, elves, and dwarves automatically fail before we even pick up dice. An ork with maxed body (9) has a 0.000000020684% chance of making those required hits. A troll meanwhile has a whopping 0.000001319821% chance of rolling as much as needed. Those odds are slightly high because I didn't factor in the possibility that they'd get more hits than needed on one of the earlier tests, but I think that 2 in every 10 billion Orks infected (with a body of 9) managing to resist the disease is low enough as is, given that that is more orks than have been born at this point AFAIK.

Now, lets take trolls, since they have a 'better' chance, and pretend that said troll has 6 edge and uses it on those last 6 tests. Now a troll with 10 body and 6 edge has an amazing 0.049505160432% chance of recovery, which is almost 1 in every 2000 cases, but of course a troll with that much body is actually fairly rare, and with that much edge is even rarer.

So yeah, I stand by my earlier statement that the disease is impossible to resist, even though there is a very minimal chance. Even if you happen to have max rating O-cells and they work (which is perhaps debatable, but I don't really care either way) you're still looking at long odds unless you're a top notch troll.

If you have rating 8 O-Cells, you don't need to roll at all.

HMHVV III's Penetration 6 certainly counts against them. So you *could* get as many as +3 from max O-Cells, if you had them.

Nope. O-Cells are not affected by Penetration. If there would be a shield generator that directly substracts DV from attacks, it would also not be affected by AP.

Of course, a nano vital monitor increases the rating O-Cells by 1 per Augmentation Errata.

Psh. Just because each rating of O-Cell is worth 3+ dice doesn't mean you should give them even more power.

Yeah, O-cell is nice, but it goes down by a rating each time you catch anything, which means that if you touch ghoul stuff more than 3-4 times you're going to catch it strongly enough to be in trouble.

I guess that could provide some of the necessary balance. Clawed 3 times? O-Cells are now 6. Still, the fluff goes on and on about how science can't deal with the magi-virus of HMHVV. I feel like the least the GM should do is us the Penetration that's already listed against what is clearly a 'defense'.

It's not even a stretch, RAW-wise. Here's the rule: "Similar to Armor Penetration for weapons, a disease or pathogen’s Penetration rating affects the rating of any protective system used to defend against it, including pharmaceuticals." See? It affects the *rating* of the O-Cells.

So, O-Cells 9 reduces the Power to 5 (which is a *huge* bonus against HMHVV III).

Uh, nope – that's only for Nantidote. O-Cells don't degrade that way.

Or why it doesn't affect it, since O-Cells are not "used" in the "defense" against diseases similiar to weapons – things that provide dice to the resistance rolls are. O-Cells reduce the Power of the disease directly.

Also, there is no "need" to "balance" them, since diseases are irrelevant to direct conflict, to a degree they are usually ignored.