Due to the inability to search the forums for "gel" anything, the SR4A pdf says that gel ammo does -1 (stun) DV with +2 AP (vs. Impact).

Did the book go to print like that? It seems a rather big change from SR4 where gel did +2 DV, +2 AP.

Yea, looks the same in both of my books as well, and really, it makes sense, to me. If you're using Gel rounds, you're really trying to NOT kill someone, so less damage makes sense.

On the other hand, they are now worse than SnS by a significant margin.

6(s) is better than -1 DV (stun). Oh, and you get the electrical effects. Oh, and half armor.

They changed it in one of the SR4 prints. For better or for worse, just use SnS for (nearly) everything.

What is it now? Is there any errata online?

Just hope there's no reason that the person has health issues that electrical discharges can cause problems with.

"Well how the frag was I supposed to know he had a ten-year old cyberheart??? The damn Type-O hearts are in the bargain bin at the General Hospital!"

I actually made a decent house ruling on that: SnS can only be bought for a shotgun (treated as slug ammo) due to size issues. My thinking is that it's a giant electro-conductive gel round with the miniaturized guts of a taser in it. The capacitive technology of the 2070s isn't advanced enough to put the guts of a taser into a smaller round, so gel rounds become the next best thing.

So, pretty much the Taser XREP.




-k

My GM is being rather anal about using the SR4A rules as they exist in the PDF, which is annoying, because I know some of them (like the OR table) are wrong.

I think I'm going to buy a physical book, just to have the RIGHT rules.

What's wrong with the OR table in the SR4A pdf? [edit: If your copy has the values 1, 2, 4, 6+ (rather than 1, 2, 3, 5+), the latest SR4A pdf has fixed that].

Wow, nice find, K! And we have 60 years to miniaturize it to 9mm!

Also the PDF Bow rules are out of date.

In what respect? If you mean it has a strength cap of 12 (rather than and a damage cap of rating x 1.5 (rather than the lower of bow/arrow rating), then that's been fixed in the latest pdf as well. Was there something else wrong with bows?

No, they nerfed bows TWICE.
One in PDF 4a, one in print.

Strength max of 8, arrows have a rating.(which is really dumb)

Bingo. Realistically, I could see it being possible to invent super-capacitive materials in the next 60 years that would allow it to be possible to have one of those in a 9mm form factor, but I don't like the idea of a hand gun doing such retarded amounts of damage. Plus, it has the added benefit of allowing the adept with skills at poisons to use his skills to subdue the target(s) when they can't sneak a shotgun past security.

I have been unable to locate said updated PDF.

Depends on what gun you use them in, from a BArret they do 8S AP -2 impact, witch is pretty nice.

But the change isn't thaat big to SR4A, for example the first print of Arsenal tables lists them as -(stun) +2 impact, as does the Corebook errata version 1,8.
Don't know why they decided to change it to -1 for the Anniversary edition, it's not even listed in the Changes Document(not that that is anything new)

Go to where you purchased your PDF and download a new copy.

The PDF was updated before the book went to print.


Edit: The three significant changes are:

• Bow ratings have a maximum of 8.
• Object Resistance of drones/etc is 5+
• Net Hits increasing Direct spell drain is optional (apparently they didn't want to redo the layout of the book to remove it entirely).

Yes, I know it was. Which is why I have to keep pointing it out to my GM.

Anyway, I'll see if I can get an up to date PDF.

Edit:
Success. Gel ammo is still -1(s), +2 AP, which I agree with, but at least my group has the current book now.

8S AP -2 impact is nice, but that's as good or worse than literally any BF SnS firearm. Same DV, better AP (even with nonconductity on nearly any target you're actually worried about not being able to take down). More importantly, the electrical damage check always at least leaves a possibly stacking -2 to all rolls debuff and once in a blue moon takes a guy out of the fight right then. If you can't two shot your target (which might be the case the 8S range), debuffs are good.

On gel rounds, I suspect the writers fairly realized that without careful stacking, your impact armor is going to be less than your ballistics. In a lot of cases going from AP 0 ballistics to AP +2 impact is not a meaningful change. So they wanted to have a "cost" to go to non-lethal measures. As for why SnS is still around then, there's some sort of blind spot writers seem to have.

Minding that you have commlinks working pretty much any amount of time on one charge, and brick-shaped LAVs capable of flight and bearing heavy weaponry without stabilization issues, I'd say Shadowrun tech is very far down the line of pressing a lot of energy into small amounts of space.
So I just warn my players that if they use SnS, the opposition will do that, too.

That's such an unpleasant metagame reaction, though. It's better to actually fix it, make them something that's a conditionally-useful, balanced tradeoff. Make them even more expensive, weaker, (sure, maybe shotgun-only), etc.

comparing anything to SnS ammo is not fair. SnS ammo is the best ammo in the game. It's stupidly over powered. It's so overpowered it's probably one of the very first things a GM bans. Or stealth bans,by having all his guys have non-conductive on their armor.

Honestly, it makes sense. If SnS worked so perfectly, and is perfectly accessible, NPCs would use as much as players. If this happens, then everyone would get non-conductive upgrades on their armor.

And so they do. Any armored opponent in my games is about 90% likely to have rating 6 nonconductivity. Its not metagaming, it is just common sense. If for a cheap price (and it is really cheap) you can save yourself from getting pwned by all the Stick And Shock ammo running around. Its like when kevlar was invented, people started wearing it. If everyone is going to be shooting bullets, everyone expecting to get in a gun fight wears kevlar. Now if everyone brings SnS to a fight, everyone else is going to have rating 6 non-con.

If every player can do it for low cost and availability, and every player DOES, then it makes sense that everyone would think that way.

Also, in our game, we have houseruled that SnS ammo does damage based on your weapon.

So a Heavy Pistol is 5S(e) instead of 6S(e), and a light pistol is only 4S(e). However Shotguns are a nice 7S(e). If you have a larger projectile, it should be able to pack more punch. If you have a smaller projectile, it should pack less punch. Just makes sense to me...

I love the sort of reasoning you use in this post, and use it myself. If something happens because of the rules, characters will notice this outcome eventually and adjust accordingly, based only on in-character observation and rational thought.

But if everyone brings SnS to a fight, who is 'everyone else'? Why wouldn't the ones with non-conductive armor be the same as the ones who bring the electric bullets? They'd be the ones knowing to expect it, after all, and if that's everyone, there's not many people left to wear the armor.

Agreed, Damien Knight, and that's what everyone has said in the past. The thing is, even in that world, the runners are more likely to have Noncon than NPCs. Some NPCs aren't equipped like that, because they're not corpsec, shadowrunners, etc. So it's a net advantage *still* to the runners. And now everyone's wasting resources on the arms race. That's exactly what I'm on about, and why fixing it is just better.

Well, given that a 12ga shotshell is anywhere from a dollar to three dollars a shell, and the Taser XREP is about 160 dollars a shell, raising the cost of SnS rounds isn't a bad way to explain why people aren't using them everywhere.

Say, instead of 80¥ per box of 10, 500¥ or even 1000¥ per box.

At that point they are within reach for those who really want it, but expensive enough that people will seriously have to think hard on whether they wanna actually use the expensive ammo.

Might as well raise the cost of APDS and mebbe exploding ammo while you're at it. Those are really underpriced anyhow.



-k

To me the escalation seems simple.

Defense forces (cops, guards, etc)
1) Wear the nonconductive FFBA.
2) Get the additional "clip" option and a smartgun.
3) Use the Stick-n-shock ammo "clip" first. If you get a few non-combatants with the S-n-S, then they can take a nap for awhile and stay out of things.
4) Anyone left standing deserves the most lethal ammo your employer will let you carry.

Intelligent bystanders will wear armor that protects vs death by ganger/shadowrunner/etc. Getting stunned is survivable and Tri-D has taught them that the penalty for wearing non-conductivity is death by superior firepower. Shows teach them that cops full auto the block with S-n-S to clear out the bystanders and then kill anyone left standing.

Kinda OT, but since you asked...

Arrow ratings make a bit of sense because stronger bows need stronger arrows. This is usually called the "spine weight" of an arrow. A higher spine weight arrow can be fired in a lower weight (draw strength) bow, but good archers will notice a performance difference. Lower spine weight arrows shot from a higher strength bow can break from the force imparted to the arrow from the bowstring, catastrophically if the difference is high enough. Ideally, the arrow weight should match the bow strength. As a GM, I'd probably handwave it unless a guy with a 120+lb bow was trying to use arrows for a 25lb kid's bow. (Bows are rated by the amount of force needed to draw the string.)

Commlinks never have to be charged? Where do you get that idea? Sorry, but it's a frankly silly idea to assume that just because none of the fiction mentions runners charging their links and the rules don't mention runtime between charges that they never have to be charged. Just like you don't roleplay your character eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner and brushing his teeth after every meal, you won't RP plugging in your commlink at night. It's just assumed that you do certain things like that. And if you can show me a single "brick-shaped LAV capable of flight" that uses anything resembling capacitance to fly, and I'll concede the point.

As far as having my NPCs use SnS because my PCs do? Doesn't happen. Corpsec uses gel rounds because handguns are easier to carry (see my houserule from before) or magical stuns and everyone else uses regular old bullets. What does an Ancient care about taking you alive if you're trying to jack his bike?

edited for spelling

… All the LAV's fly. Cuz they're LAVs. What are you talking about?

Yera, I was responding to Fatum's post politely saying his logic is faulty. I was telling him to find me a LAV in the books that actually uses some form of super-science technology powered by electrical fields (anti-grav, whatever) to fly. If he can, I'll admit that commlinks never need to be charged and let my players have bullet-sized SnS rounds. I'm pretty sure that neither of you actually know what a LAV is though, based on your posts. LAV stands for Light Assault Vehicle (here's a wikipedia link of an example) and I couldn't find a single vehicle classified as a LAV in a shadowrun book that actually flies. The two LAVs I did find are in MilSpecTech on pages 7 and 8 (the LAV-98 "Devil Rat and LAV-103 "Striker'), both of which are tracked vehicles. Perhaps you guys are thinking of T-birds? Although those use vectored thrust engines IIRC, but I could be wrong on that.

Going back to the original topic though, I already said it's probably possible to make bullet-sized SnS rounds in the next 60 years in reality. I decided that in my game world it wasn't possible to get them for anything other than shotguns in order to keep things from escalating into the arms race the other posters have described. My players were okay with that knowing that I hold myself to the same rules I hold them to. I personally don't like to use SnS with my NPCs though, because either they're using smaller weapons (which contain gel rounds) or they're using lethal ammo because they don't care about killing people.

Honestly, the LAVs *do* need handwavium. They're ridiculous, specifically for the reason that they're flying bricks using vec-thrust. LAV is 'low altitude vehicle', and always has been. So… your face doesn't actually know what an LAV is.

Reading back, I do now see that your argument did say something about capacitance (and now you mention anti-grav), so I misunderstood you. I think that's not a reasonable reframing of the argument, though. He didn't say capacitance (nor anti-grav), he said 'storing energy in a small space'. I don't like agreeing with Fatum any more than the next guy, but the point is handwavium exists, and comms *effectively* don't need charging. Just like every device has effectively infinite storage capacity.

I'm thrilled to relegate SnS to shotguns, as one of several house-rule methods of fixing it. I just wanted to help you with your own misunderstanding.

Then you weren't looking very hard, there are many of them in the books(Hint, look at the aircraft section), but i guess the problem is that you don't know what a LAV is, the acronym stands for "Low Altitude Vehicle".

Ah, my apologies. There was a definite miscommunication there. I've never seen them called LAVs in fluff, always T-Birds or called by the model name/nickname. I was using LAV in the traditional sense, so it's easy to see where my confusion came in. The comment about capacitance (and by extension, anti-grav) was that I thought he was saying that skimmers flew by using inductance to generate a counter-gravity force for flight as a justification for making tiny taser bullets due to extreme advances in electrical science. I had never seen these mythical "anti-grav tanks" in shadowrun and the argument of "they don't say commlinks need to be charged so commlinks must not need to be charged" were being used for a logic leap I didn't want to make. Plus, although we hand wave charging commlinks; it doesn't mean we can't turn a critical glitch into a commlink powering down at just the wrong second because the hacker charged the wrong 'link the night before. It's just another tool in my GM toolkit. (And for the record the player didn't even think twice about it.)

And I totally concede that vectored thrust can only do so much for things like flying breadboxes, which is why I've downplayed the role of things like that in my game. I try and base my games in a setting that has had more of the money funneled towards figuring out magic and the matrix, the two new "frontiers" in research, rather than massively improving on what we already thought was amazing tech (I loves me my helicopters in place of vec-thrust). I think of it much like modern cars: Rather than figuring out how to make more efficient engines to make them go faster and father, we figured out how to make the cars lighter and more streamlined instead. We still get better gas mileage, but only because the engines have less work to do, instead of being better at it. And honestly, my players like it that way. We're mostly adepts, mages, and matrix users. Our face is a borderline Luddite and the gun bunny is the only one with cyber. Technology (in the industrial sense) is cool to them, but what they really want is magic and the matrix, so I give it to them.

i guess the sns appeal comes from the double whammy of fixed damage annd shorter stun track. I wonder if the shorter stun track was a late change to the original SR4 release...

Eh. I'm willing to believe that in 60 years they may have been able to develop super batteries capable of powering a bullet sized taser.

One of the biggest barriers to technological development in today's world is batteries. Quite simply, our current batteries suck. They're inefficient, have horrible capacity, and all round are holding a lot of stuff back.

Shadowrun assumes that we've solved the energy storage problem, and for most purposes batteries running out are handwaved away as unimportant. Perhaps a AAA battery can now power a music players for months or years by 2070. The rules don't say, but they don't have to. It's part of the background. About the only time batteries should even come up in SR play is on really high drain devices like lasers, or perhaps on a critical glitch when the GM is feeling amused.



-k

well, SR electronics are mostly optical so the heat loss and related cooling overhead is mostly gone.

Okay, so after a bit more digging, I found something classified as a LAV that flies. On page 11 of the MilSpecTech book it says: "The Lobo has served as Aztlan’s and UCAS’ scout LAV for the
past decade, proving that the light t-bird is capable of handling a multitude of different threats while providing timely intelligence to a theater commander." Further reading into the fluff, however, it seems like they are describing as a light assault vehicle though. Is the term Low Altitude Vehicle a carry-over from an older edition? I've only played/read mostly SR4 stuff, so maybe that's it?

Yeah, t-bird is a slang term for VSTOL low altitude vehicles in shadowrun and has been for at least an edition. Probably much longer but my history doesn't really go back farther than 3rd so...

Anyway, it's probably worth remembering that technically the LAV family are all AFVs derived from the MOWAG Piranha. Acronyms get around and it's probably not safe to assume that LAV will be one of the few that sticks around given that it's not actually a general term.

You might be able to cure him of that by using a bow.
*depending on how old your pdf is.

Have you shecked the Arsenals aircraft section at all?
There's even table marked LAV there, just a hint

Even with everyone has non-conductivity 6 on their armor, SnS is still the way to go. If their armor rating is 12 or higher, it's a wash. If they don't have at least 12 armor, they're going down either way from a single shot or a double tap anyways. Also, since unless you're using Softweave, ballistic will be 2 points higher than impact the vast majority of cases. This is because most armor has +2 ballistic than impact and if you're doing careful armor selection, you have a full suit of FFBA at which point your armor is B: Bodyx2+3 and I:Bodyx2+1. In practice, SnS is actually -1/2AP -1 due to this effect. This doesn't go into the electrical effect of SnS which is a -2 to all physical actions which is nice as just a side beanie. This isn't also getting into the more subtle stuff like stun tracks being shorter than physical tracks in many cases.

However I'm come to learn to the love the SnS. While it does mess up firearm balance, it's one of the best answers mundanes have against spirits. A force 6 spirit doesn't have to worry too much about a guy with a Ex-Ex AR baring called shots or good rolls, but he's got to care about the SnS using guy. In fact, a called shot SnS using SMG user can hurt force 10 spirits if he hits. Only a APDS using Barrett 121 sniper can boast that.

In War! they introduces a spell that simply recharges electronics, which suggests that Commlink charges dont last for years.

At the risk of beating a zombie horse in war they introduce a lot of foolish things.

and YAY yet another spell from War that breaks the very fabric of the Magical Laws of Shadowrun!

Hooray!

That's a typo. It's supposed to remove the charge from all electronics, rendering them useless.

<- runs from Lurker.

That's a bug, not a feature, Hida Tsuzua. It's sad that the way to deal with (overpowered) spirits is (overpowered) taser ammo.

Well, the TASER weapons in Shadowrun make perfect sense.

the 6S(e) weapon has a range of 20m, and 4 shots.
the 8S(e) weapon has a range of 10m, and 2 shots, and wires connecting the trodes from the weapon.

Those are perfectly balanced weapons. The problem is that SnS is stupidly overpowered because you can put it into a rifle with 1Km range or a pistol with 30 bullets.

Ah, yup, there it is. I am well and truly corrected. Although, in my defense, it is kinda hard to miss a table two lines tall in Arsenal. Just sayin'. ^_^