So, the other day, I had re-discovered a used copy of Kenson's "Born To Run" I'd gotten a while back from a used book store but didn't read. I had gotten to the part where the protagonist shoots a shaman in the back of a truck and then feels slightly bad about it afterwards. It got me thinking about all the SR3 games I used to be involved with where one or more player characters was supposedly a pacifist of some kind, and would be stuffed to the gills with tasers and gel rounds and bo staffs, and would typically be just as combat effective as the non-pacifists, if not more so.

That's surely not realistic, but there were a few key reasons for this:
*Physical damage goes away faster than stun damage for all intents and purposes since it's possible to repair it during the course of a run using magic or a medkit.
*Impact armor is usually lower than Ballistic, but at the same time it's usually possible to create Stun-generating attacks that have really high Power ratings, so the net effect is lower armor ratings used to resist Stun.
*Stun damage hampers you just as much as Physical damage does.
*Once you've taken a Deadly stun, you're out for a long, long time. As far as tactical scenarios go, it's pretty much exactly the same as if you had a Deadly physical wound. Compare this to reality where if some boxer beat the poo out of you and knocked you out, you might only be out for a few seconds or a few minutes.

Thinking about it further, if you were to try and implement more "realistic" rules for people getting tased, beat up, and shot with less-lethal rounds, there would be a number of additional things you'd have to consider, all of which would harm the efficacy of less-lethal attacks:
*Probably, ballistic armor should help more than it does against lots of non-lethal attacks. I would think that realistically a level 4 vest with a ceramic plate would pretty much stop any taser cold, since the hooks would need to penetrate to have an effect.
*Less lethal attacks' effectiveness would probably drop off much more sharply if the attack was not perfectly placed. For example if you fired a taser at someone but the hooks landed in his left arm instead of center mass you wouldn't expect the person being hit to be incapacitated. If you punched someone hard in the shoulder instead of in the nose, the effect of your punch would be tremendously diminished.
*Less lethal attacks would have a certain chance of simply not working as expected even if perfectly delivered. If an expert boxer punched you in the nose, you wouldn't be totally surprised if one day when he did that he knocked you out, and another day he didn't, just because of small variables in body position, mental preparedness, and physical health. It wouldn't really be possible to predict ahead of time whether, upon putting some pepper spray in someone's face, whether he would be blinded, blinded and "stopped", or unaffected for all intents and purposes. On the other hand if someone shot you in the face with a small handgun, your not being incapacitated would be the astronomically small exception to the rule.
*Less lethal attacks can move slowly. A bullet flies faster than taser hooks. Who would show up to a wild west style cowboy quick draw duel with a taser in his holster?
*Finally, lethal weapons should probably also cause Stun when they do hit. For example if I bash you over the head with a longsword, there is clearly going to be lethal damage in terms of cutting and possible fracturing or cracking of your skull. That being said there is ALSO going to be blunt trauma and brusing, just like if I bashed you over the head with a night stick, which under SR rules is considered Stun damage. Likewise if I shoot you in the vest with a rifle, we would expect bruising to occur which would be similar to bruising caused by a good punch or kick.

So the bottom line is that weaponry that is truly less-lethal basically should be less reliable in terms of putting people down than lethal weaponry. That would be more realistic and it would also make running around with less lethal munitions more of a meaningful role playing choice than if Stun damage is uber.

Also, stuff that causes physical damage should also cause stun damage if it involves any significant amount of kinetic energy.

In SR4, stun damage can be healed just like physical damage can, but still takes much less time to "heal". So physical damage is worse than stun damage, which personally, I think it how it should be.



I think this has already been implemented, since most armor has ballistic and impact ratings. Remember that SR4 (like previous editions) uses an abstract armor system. Successfully hitting someone wearing an armored vest, using a taser, is likelier to represent the target being hit on a non-armored part of the body.


There is already the roll of the dice itself to determine the effectiveness of the attack. If you wanted to represent stun attacks being more difficult to pull off, you could give them a threshold of 1 or 2 (in other words, you need 2 or 3 net hits to successfully attack).


Actually, people have been known to keep going after taking even lethal wounds. But again, that is what the dice roll is there to represent. If you think there needs to be more, the threshold rule above would "fix" this, too.


I'm not convinced that the difference in speed would really be noticeable in combat. Would you also introduce AD&D-style weapon speed ratings for things like an elf with a rapier against a troll with a polearm? Plus, rules gimping tasers would just make everyone switch to stick-n-shock ammo instead.


In the same way, "stun" attacks like being hit with a rubber bullet can cause physical damage. The divide between stun and physical damage is a big simplification for ease of gameplay, and house rules to fix it would probably get fairly involved. Note that currently in the rules, physical attacks can wind up doing stun damage, instead, if they are not higher than the armor rating. And stun attacks can wind up doing physical damage, after they fill up a target's stun track.


The threshold rule is about the only one you really need for that, but keep in mind that if stun damage stops being practical, players will be far less prone to use it.


And again, being hit by a rubber bullet or a club should cause physical damage. I usually try not to mess with the core mechanics of the game. I'm sure some people will be able to suggest some house rules. Just be sure to playtest them first, because changing how damage works can have a profound effect on the workable tactics and lethality level of the game.

Lots of historical evidence of people continuing to fight before their body gets the message, "Hey, Bob! YOU'RE DEAD! FALL DOWN!!!" from lethal wounds.

A lot of stun weapons (Even IRL) is aimed at interrupting even that ability to function (Tasers are a good example. If your muscles can't even control themselves, how do they keep moving on muscle memory after the brain has left the building?).

The major difference between Stun and Physical damage in Shadowrun is that Stun Damage Tracks tend to be smaller than the Physical Damage Track, as it's based off of Willpower.

In RL, current tasers are stated to be effective through up to 2 inches of material per dart. They don't need contact with the individuals skin at all.

Of course they fire 2 darts that complete an arc, so, as always RL comparisons aren't going to always make sense rules wise.

Another good reason to have rubber fetishwear.

...then there's chem warfare.

My decker Violet was pretty much responsible for the GM outfitting the bad guys in"hard" armour after a while because of her innocent and charming personality backed by a SuperSquirt filled with either a Narco10 or Gamma-S + DMSO cocktail. Early on in the campaign, she was taking more bad guys "down" then the adept was.

My Fallen Angel was another as she had the looks, charm, and seductive nature, along with the "Kiss of Death" (chem gland bio implant).

And, finally, there's good, old fashioned blunt force trauma.

Broken legs are hard to stand on, broken arms are hard to shoot with.

...and a broken head makes s lot of things more difficult.

The only thing concerning called shots to limbs in 4th ed, is that unless you're a troll of and/or throw all your Edge into the attack, it is rather difficult to cause enough net DV to incapacitate.

...unless the rules have changed since I last played in 4th ed.

Unarmed combat can be extremely effective, but you have to really specialize in it to be good at it. Someone with a high Strength, the martial arts quality taken three times for +3 DV, and some bone lacing (or bone density augmentation) can hit very hard, and adepts can add the critical strike power to the mix. Shadowrun has never had a hit location system (although you can use a called shot to do +4 DV for a -4 dice pool penalty), but someone optimized for unarmed combat will be able to take most enemies out with one good hit.

Tasers should not work with the normal damage mechanism. What they do is turn off your voluntary muscles and hurt like hell. A minute later you are fine. In fact, a few seconds later a motivated attacker is good to go. For example, this video. You might have some puncture wounds, but wounds too minor to count in SR.

An impermeable electrically insulating layer OR a very good conductor can shield you from effects.


AFAIK, tasers either work or their don't work, there is no in-between case.


A cop generally won't use a less-than-leathal weapon on someone with a knife etc unless there is another cop with a real gun, preferably a shotgun, there to back him up. This is because less-than-lethal weapons are less reliable. But all hand-held weapons are unreliable at immediately stopping determined people. SR has too predictable damage, and it's too closely linked to who is attacking. A single .22LR bullet can kill you dead even when fired by a small child or your 90 year old grandmother. The bullet don't care shot it hits or who shot it. People also get shot 3 times, kill the three guys shooting at him and don't notice that they were shot until someone points out the blood.


To quote Wyatt Earp:
"The most important lesson I learned from those proficient gunfighters was the the winner of a gunplay usually was the man who took his time. The second was that, if I hoped to live long on the frontier, I would shun flashy trick-shooting -- grandstand play -- as I would poison."

"When I say that I learned to take my time in a gunfight, I do not wish to be misunderstood, for the time to be taken was only that split fraction of a second that means the difference between deadly accuracy with a sixgun and a miss. It is hard to make this clear to a man who has never been in a gunfight. Perhaps I can best describe such time taking as going into action with the greatest speed of which a man's muscles are capable, but mentally unflustered by an urge to hurry or the need for complicated nervous and muscular actions which trick-shooting involves. Mentally deliberate, but muscularly faster than thought, is what I mean."


Probably. But is this really important?


yup. But there are deeper issues than that in the combat system.

Glyph, do you count someone with a shock hand as "unarmed"? If you don't then I am doubly glad my combat medic mage has a shock hand because his strength sucks.

Yeah, it's treated as unarmed, and you can even specialize in cyber-implant combat for it. It is a good option for a low-Strength character who needs a comparatively cheap, but still effective, option for close combat.

I always liked the knockdown effect you got form using gel-rounds in sr3. Imagine getting knocked off your feet each time you get shot

What I don't really like is the totally separate Stun and Physical tracks: 7S+5P is only a -3 pain penalty, but 12S is enough to put almost any character to sleep. It makes it "better" to take some Physical damage instead of only Stun damage. (Better: because you don't go unconscious.)

On the other hand, I like that less-lethal attacks are quite competitive with lethal attacks against most enemies in SR. It makes it doable to play such a non-killer warrior character without sacrificing so much power as to become stupid and irrelevant.

You still have issues - the No Witnesses vs. Family Out For Revenge debate we've had many times. But that's nice for roleplaying.

Maybe there ought to be some rule however, that protects you from squirt/needle/taser guns to a degree, if you've replaced most of your body with cyberlimbs. I never liked that needleguns bypass that 30 armor on a cyberlimb monster quite so easily.

Some of your comments seem to be with stun damage scaling the same as physical damage. SR1 had variable scaling, so a punch might scale up or down with 1 success, while a handgun would take 3 successes. However, that sort of sucked in that it added a lot of complexity. I wouldn't mind seeing most stun weapons toned down in regards to their damage code (and possibly including the special effects kzt mentioned above). Right now, a guy with a knife is less scary than a guy with a fist in SR, and that sort of sucks.

I don't see the armor issue you see. I assume SR tasers are far more advanced than our current ones. A guy in combat armor still has nothing to fear from some dude hitting him with fists (assuming no adepts or groups of attackers).

In regards to damage, I could see rewriting it so healing reduces some boxes of damage, then converts some from physical to stun. Tracking two separate damage types for each attack is tedious and may result in other problems elsewhere. My fix sort of handwaves it by saying 'yes, the stun was always there, but it was included as part of the physical damage'. (The downside being that it may not help with penalties - convert one moderate wound to 1 stun, 1 physical.)

Some other fixes ... yeah, the time to wake up should be better defined and be shorter. By default, for most characters it's somewhere between 4 and 8 hours, and there's no apparent way to wake someone up from it. Stims should be effective for longer as well. I've never seen someone use a stim slap patch seriously because the penalties outweigh the benefits.