Nah, as i said, nobody but the inhabitants cares about what happens in the barrens . .

But to do that, you have to actually leave combat rounds behind for a bit, which is sort of a disappointment - SR combat can't (and never could) depict drawn out fights.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: A combat round should be 30 seconds long. At least. Perhaps it might be necessary to keep the short rounds for special sequences, akin to bullet time or the like.

With enhanced aiming abilities and enhanced speed, fights would be alot quicker than modern fights. I imagine fights like the gunfights in the matrix. Imagine the lobby scene... it lasted about 3 minutes in the movie, but was slow mo... so was probably closer to 12 seconds in real time. Two runners fighting a large HRT team would take maybe 4 rounds at the most to dispatch them
(or be dispatched by them), so its spot on.

I think in modern police gunfights, people on both sides:

1. Dont have smartlinks, so miss alot.
2. Dont have 14+ points of ballistic armor, so they take alot of cover
3. Sacrifice accuracy for cover
4. Dont have enhanced reflexes that make them 4x faster

A 40 second gunfight in modern times would be at most 9 or 10 seconds in SR, considering the above factors.

If you want to draw gunfights out, play characters without 4 init passes, who fight low powered opponents without 4 init passes. Then take prodigious amounts of cover and never spend edge on a shooting test. I think you will have fights that are more comparable to real ones.

But whats the fun of that!? Its the sixth world, lets get crazy on Cram, form fitting body armor and Breakdance gunFu moves!

Well..... Maybe not the Breakdance Gun-Fu Moves... I mean really, Breakdancing?

How demoralizing would it be to be shot by a guy doing the Electric Boogaloo?

Mark Whalberg proved this is the best SR gunfighting style in The Big Hit. Also, it validated that hand of God can be used to completely rewrite a death after the fact, which is why the rule appears in SR. And verified that it indeed is good runner etiquette to discuss masturbatory habits. Oh, and all hacking can really be boiled down to who has the most "Busta's" in their Trace Busta device.

Heh... Okay, You are now the proud owner of an internet cookie...

True enough - which is why I just want arbitrarily increase the time these fights take. Not because it makes sense, but for dramatic reasons.

And for the record, a real 40 second gunfight that is actually over in 40 seconds is a really brutal affair. Real "normal" gunfights last several minutes, if not hours, because, as you pointed out correctly, people don't tend to take quite as many risks as shadowrunners.



Adding tedium isn't the way to prove that the current way is better.

What I think should be done is this, and I've posted it before, too:

Increase a combat round to 30 seconds.
Divide by IPs as usually.
Increase scale of combat actions while decreasing accuracy - you don't fire one shot when you declare the Shoot-at-someone action, you actually fire several, but you still only roll once. You might simply just add one die per individual attack (shot or burst), or more generously, per round fired. In special occasions, you might still only shoot once, so you just take more time to aim, and get a few dice for aiming. Maybe there can be up- and downsides to both, ideally represented by a simple mechanic.

Increase time necessary for magic so that you still only cast once per complex action.

Non-combat actions still take the same absolute time they used to take - so that you can actually do a lot MORE non-combat actions while being shot at. For instance, you might now actually pick a lock while under fire. The entire point is to skew the system in favour of non-combat actions - movement, complex manipulations, even talking and actually communicating a strategy instead of doing that out of character. You can still kill the same number of people in the same number of rounds - or more, in fact - but while the gunbunnies are shooting, other characters can do some relevant non-combat stuff. Perhaps come up with interesting use of the environment, which they would never manage in a normal SR fight.

You mean your mages don't multi-overcast stunbolt by default?

Not sure what THEY are thinking....

Due to the fact that shadowrun is turn based it comes down to:
You shoot me in the face, I shoot you in the face and repeat.
If you do this in the real world, the fight would be over after a few moments with no survivers (if automated weapons were deployed).
(The ricochet alone would take care of that)

As a matte of fact, you may do the "Staying in cover" and "line of sight stuff" in Shadowrun too.
But you would need very good plans of the environment, so you are able to determin where your character is looking at any given moment.

One easy way to do that is streatching the combat rounds. So the test on firearms does not only mean shooting someone but everything to get a good shot at somebody.
But you would need a hole new set of rules...
Only changing the duration does not sound right. You end up with a runner beeing only able to fire his gun twice in half a minute....

The whole point of being wired up is to act so fast that the opposition has no time to react. Kind of defeats the purpose if you stretch the combat rounds to 30 seconds... Along with being a bit unrealistic (yeah, I know), since reaction times are already so low in the real world. What the OP seems to be looking for is less effective combats that tend to take longer. Changing the duration of the Combat rounds only benefits non-combat actions, WHICH SHOULD TAKE MUCH LONGER than those combat actions in the first place. I see no real need for that, honestly.

That's true. I agree that you would need a totally new mechanic for initiative/IP boosters, to retain their awesomeness.

But seriously, even games without wired combatants usually have combat rounds which are just WAY too short. I mean, why does a medieval fantasy game need 3 second combat rounds, or a high fantasy game 6 second rounds? Seriously? But that's off topic, so...

From personal experience, though, I'll tell you an anecdote which backs up my view:

Because you limit the everything on very simple actions!
One shot, one attack, one parade etc.

If you had lets say 30 sec combat turns, you would need to describe in one action how your character acted. Is he just spraying bullets in the direction of the enemey?
Is he waiting for them to reload to get a shot etc.
Etc.


@Brainpiercing7.62mm

Sorry, but thats just plain wrong. Fewer oppponents/fewer people shooting is always easyer to handle. The problem is, that most GM have a problem building them up, because the tend to make them to weak or to though. Of course it is much easyer to just send another wave.
But yes of course those fights will be over quite quick. Thats the system working. It is supposed to resolve a situation in few rolls.

If you want them to last longer, the players and the GM have to act acordingly. TAKE FREAKING COVER. Skip a turn in cover. Etc. etc.
I mean what should happen if two guy stand in front of each other and start shooting?

Which is perfectly feasable. And I already said you can do more combat actions in a longer turn, just with only one or at least few effects, and generally one roll.



I've had it so often that GMs build that ONE super-badguy, and they put a lot of effort into it, and then the players knock him out in one turn (or die). And then they come crying for house-rules, because even piss weak characters can nova in fights like that, and suddenly a GM wants to nerf the Warmage. Well, duh.

It's easier to handle, but that's about it. It's not dramatic, it's not fun (both for players or the GM, because there is no diverse tactical challenge, no necessity for various ability usage, etc.), it's just 4-5 guys beating down one guy very quickly, OR that one guy being untouchable. And GMs around me just keep making that mistake. And that's what I mean by "handling such fights poorly". They don't work in D&D, they don't work in SR, nor in any other system I know. Admittedly SR4 is better at this than SR3, because the damage system is less binary. However, you are already forced to make that one big guy either a mage or a vehicle, drone, or spirit. And the lattermost two suffer from the binary issue again: If you get through their immunities, then you have already done so much damage that they can't resist it anymore. An F7 spirit can resist whopping 14P attacks, but almost instantly dies from a 15P attack, because it can only soak 4-5P on average. (Or I might be wrong, and it has 21 dice to soak, but even so...)

A body 4 drone can resist 12P attacks, but is then probably heavily damaged by the 13P attack, because it can soak 5-6P on average.

So you go bigger, and the F8 spirit or the 16 body/16 armour light tank wipes the floor with the PCs. Well... duh.


The problems are always the same:
Balancing
Drama
Speed of resolution (as in, mostly too quickly)
Lack of tactical challenge (Is it my turn? Uh... I shoot the guy. Next.)

Most of these CAN be avoided, I admit I've used some gross over-simplifications, but that requires a lot of insight and possibly preparation - and even that is no guarantee.

As to voluntarily drawing out the fight? Well... you can do that, but that quite often doesn't improve things. In game terms, you need a reason to take cover, because for mechanical reasons it's probably much smarter to knock the enemy out quicker. So, for instance, you might take cover to select a different weapon, change your ammunition, or get a piece of equipment from a container, but during that time, mostly the others are still fighting, and making sure that your use of time might end up inefficient. Unless it's absolutely critical that you have that time of cover, you just wasted it. In reality, not getting killed is a pretty good reason to take cover. In a game, if it's already that binary, then hiding for a bit won't save you, because you haven't done anything to improve your tactical situation.

I firmly believe that for an interesting fight you need several different opponents, who make use of the environment to create an interesting tactical challenge, while not creating huge balance issues. And fights like this just take LONG. And during that time, the 1IP character (who was duly informed before he made his char) sits around for 30 minutes every turn while the others take their actions. And even though he said he was fine with that, he then went and did stupid things because he was bored.

And that's the real issue: You can't make a MEMORABLE boss fight without being either REALLY good at doing that, or making it a long drawn out affair.

But big fights have their own problems, mainly resulting from the tedium of slogging it out with multiple, individually insignifcant opponents. And the middle ground is very narrow - basically few, but indivdually fairly powerful opponents. And you are now stuck in a bad game world.

But with rules that gave these 1IP or otherwise non-combat characters stuff to do while the others fight, things might be better. That's my whole idea.

Ah, I think I understand what it is about now.

The thing is, fight against one single opponent in a game where offance is superior to defance are over quite fast.
There is no way around it.
So yes, if you are looking for a fight lasting according to the rules you need several bad guys. Simply because one side will need to take losses. (Since offence is superior.)

To get the fight team against evil overloard, you need to stay out of combat time and resolve it by dice assisted narration.

I don't really consider that a weakness of the system. If you want end-of-level boss fights, play a video game. One single opponent usually should get pulverized if he takes on an entire crew of runners by himself.

That's not it, I want manageable memorable fights that don't take forever. Which is something the system doesn't excel at.

@Brainpiercing7.62mm
Those take a lot of skill on part of the GM in any kind of game, because you need to predict what your players are going to do, you need to scale the opposition according to the players and make them hit near death without killing them. That is kind of a stun to pull, if you are not cheating. (Adjusting rolls or values while playing)

The problem is, the game tends to create what Dumpshock calls "glass cannons", so combat tends to be quick, lethal, and, if the players are smart enough, very tactically-oriented.

That's another thing about challenge levels - the game expects, and rewards, lateral thinking. In D&D, you kill the guard beast, because that's how you get experience points. In Shadowrun, finding another, less-used entrance that lets you bypass the guard beast altogether is just as good, or better.

One would think that it should be possible to use some probabilities...

And then, predicting ability use isn't appropriate, you shouldn't have to think about HOW your players will win, just take into account abilities they have and specifically taylor the numbers.

However, with few bad guys, this is hard to balance, and with many bad guys it will take forever. (And it can also end up with bad guys who are overall too weak, because the strength in numbers card only really happens at about 4:1, with 1 or 2 IP enemies.)

In the last big fight with my group, I put them up against a prime runner team which I decided I wouldn't play quite to their fullest, and a corporate double-cross including one big meanie, the J's bodyguard, and several grunts. Actually it was a three-way, because the corpsec guys were going to always target the winning side.

However, I had underestimated our tech guys's explosives capabilities (detonating a detpack with detcord and a taser for pinpoint and instant targetting), and hence, he basically blew up the other runners in one blast. And the rest was just magicrun, becasue now our mage had no magical opposition left. And while the fight took two whole evenings (about 3 hours each), it wasn't nearly as memorable (from my perspective) as I had hoped - I only managed to seriously injure one of the PCs. I think the players still liked it, but it just overall took too long.

Why are your combats between 12-18(? You mentioned three teams.) People taking 6 hours to complete? For a single encounter? Seems pretty excessive to me.

Individually every one of us could have saved some time for each IP. Well...

The first evening had some preparations, initial considerations, tactics, etc., and the second evening actually finished off rather early, but still. YES, excessive, but it should be possible to do stuff like that.

I've found that some force 2-4 possession/inhabitation spirits (bugs, shedim, etc.) backed by a single force 4-7 makes for an interesting "boss fight" Especially since you can tailor the tankiness of the opposition by saying that some of them were posessed corpsec and have armor, or every third one is an orc or a troll.

You can also "cheat" pretty easily to tailor the situation for maximum drama by adjusting the force or the equipment of individual targets (only before they're engaged by the pcs!) based on PC performance vs. the previous targets.

I found that the stacking of armor (even generic armored clothing) and low-moderate ItNW let me get away with using far fewer opponents than I normally would, without going all glass-cannon on the PC's.

But ovbviously there has to be a point to this. You can't just get insect spirits out of nowhere for every campaign. I would agree that generally it's better to improve defenses rather than putting a glass cannon on the field. And what you are mentioning is already 8 bad guys, which is pretty much the scale we were on.

On the contrary, I did it with 3 (4 really, but the first one got blown away first action, after which I adjusted.) I apologize for being clear. Some spirits of force 2-4 (in this case three of them, two of which were actually in the fight), and one "boss".

I realize that it isn't a perfect fit, and is certainly unsuitable for many campaigns. I just wanted to give a counterexample to show that you can do a solid boss fight with only a few opponents. Honestly, the fight would have gone fairly similarly had the boss been alone. Harder to scale for drama, but nearly as drawn out and deadly.

It is possible. We have run through 6-12 opponents (our team is 5-6 regular characters, so 10 to 18 combatants on scene) in less than an hour or so, dependant upon who and what was going on. A lot of it is on the players, though. If the players/GM are completely unused to the system, or have yet to gain competence/mastery with the combat rules, then things can bog down considerably.

In all fairness, most shadowrun gunfights happen in serious CQB range...which is usually about as lethal as it sounds. Guys shooting assault rifles down a barren alley standing 5-30m from each other are going to die in a hurry. As are people shooting across a room.

If it seems like fights are to clinically precise, go with the time honored tribute to reality: don't put a marker on the map so to speak, just say "there's bullets coming from that building yonder. Yes, you absolutely can try to identify the source more precisely...but you went full defense, so not this IP. I feel I should inform you that said building is 100m away, has a lot of potential firing points, and you are standing in the open. No you can't tell if they are aiming at you specifically or not. No, you can't see how mnay dice they will roll before deciding on full defense- I'm just going to tell you bullets are coming in somewhat uncomfortably close at the moment...why yes, hosing the building down WILL make them make the same decision"

Rule One: Cover is good! Find cover!

Rule Two: If you can't find cover, find concealment. If they can't see you, they can't shoot you.
Rule Two, Provision A: Some firearms don't provide any kind of cover, just concealment, find the thickest, toughest concealment you can find!

Rule Three: If you can't find concealment, be somewhere else. Fast.

Back to discussing move-by-wire...

What do you think happens when a security scanner identifies a runner's 'ware as deltaware move-by-wire 3 with an expert system?

Say a security mage has a uses a spell to take over the runner's body, has him march into a holding area, strip off all his clothes and stuff, then step into a nice, secure stockade. Then he releases him and explains that having move by wire is illegal and it is now going to be surgically removed at his expense...

He whips out this Fake Bounty Hunter's License and Fake Quebec SIN and says, "I have it, how you say, legal? Oui. Legal."

What fake licence? He's nekkid!

If they have the tech to detect a specific cyberware piece then they have the tech to defeat your fake i.d.... or the magic to read your mind...

Move by wire is forbidden, not restricted. They tend to get uptight when they notice stuff like that and may not follow the rules. Or the GM is evil. >:)

Laws and regulations on specific items vary from country to country.

In Soviet Russia, Wire Moves You!

Just for clarification. I know were talking about MBW3 and yes, MBW3 is F. MBW 1 & 2 are just R. This isn't a disagreement, it's just clarification.

Exactly. When you have an official bounty on really big, mean, nasty things (Although they took Dragons off the list for some, strange reason. Something about people being eaten and ketchup factories being broken into.)... MBW sounds pretty restricted rather than forbidden.

My favorite interpretation of the Restricted Versus Forbidden debate is that Forbidden items EXIST, therefore SOMEBODY must be able to possess them. The licenses and SINs associated with such items are more carefully scrutinized, but fakes are, by definition, obtainable.

A HMG might be enough probable cause for Lone Star to cuff you and take you downtown for a full biometric analysis, but to simply declare a GM Fiat that possessing an F-Rated item is automatically an indictable offense makes a lot of the sixth world unworkable. Otherwise, LS would be shutting down Ares assembly plants left right and center. Ares can produce F-Rated items, therefore F-Rated objects are legal for SOMEBODY to own. You just need the paperwork (or cyberwork) to say that you're one of them.

Got curious so I went looking.

"What do you think happens when a security scanner identifies a runner's 'ware as deltaware move-by-wire 3 with an expert system?"

Looking at pg 262 of SR4A, that is one incredible scanner. It has a threshold of 5+ just to find the deltaware and it needs even more hits to determine the grade. A license for MBW 2 strikes me as a very believable con because after a bit of work with the scanner, they might see what they were expecting to see from the license IF the scanner was good enough to even see it in the first place and the deltaware MBW 3 is even in it's database. Even if the machine sends up a delta MBW3 alert, the guard is staring at a delta MBW 2 license. I'm not sure I want to hassle the man who has enough corporate pull for delta MBW 2+ and even if it's MBW3, making decisions about a man with delta MBW 3 is probably above his pay grade.

Good point. There's another thread around here detailing social roles, but it's worth mentioning the intimidation factor security clearance provides.

Speaking personally, if somebody provided me with incontrovertible evidence of being a federal security agent (pick your favorite branch, it really doesn't matter), I'd hesitate to call down thunder on them. Those reverberations can shatter windows for miles, if I haven't mixed my metaphors too much.

Zaranthan, they're legal for militaries (and equivalents). It's like driving down the street in a tank with full armament: yes, people recognize it as a real thing that exists… and as something that *you* can't possibly have legally.

Some of the legalities make absolutely no sense. For instance, bone lacing is F, but bone density augmentation, you don't even need a permit for.

So, you need the paperwork proving that you're a paramilitary agent on official federal business. The paperwork isn't nonexistent, it's just really rare and hard to copy.

Definitely, Glyph. Who knows what they were thinking.

That's true. But there's a level of 'really rare' that rounds to zero. And you can still get and use F items, bearing in mind the risk. Everyone does it.

Unless you're in London, England and the cannon has been deactivated. I'm not joking.Bone Lacing is likely a military- or security-grade augmentation, whereas bone density "augmentation" could be used to restore bones after severe trauma, and have legitimate civilian uses.

That said, one of the characters I write for got his Titanium Bone Lacing though health insurance and rabid attack lawyers that insisted that it be carried out as stringently as possible. He had a 160-year old building made of hardened brick and steel fall on him, after having a bomb go off and erase his face.

The cannon is kind of the point, though.

I feel like any civilian reason for Density applies to Lacing. There's just no reason for those wonky ratings.

There's also strange laws that don't make any sense in real life as well.

For instance, it's harder to get a license to sell Airsoft in Canada than it is to sell firearms. And the license to sell Airsoft also allows the store in question to store weapons-grade nuclear material.

EDIT: I know this because my FLGS/Army Surplus Store (Now with Nepalese Kukris) also sells Airsoft, and it took years to get the license for it.

Well, schneikes. That pretty much justifies my street sam's panther cannon whole-cloth, now <HuckFinn>das'n it?</HuckFinn>

Stupid laws abound IRL, so why not in Shadowrun?

"Bioware is green, while Bone Lacing is a Industrial Process, and thus should be regulated harder."

I agree that it's realistically stupid, but that's no comfort. We expect out fantasy world to be a little better, even in a dystopia.

I recently started playing a character whose highest Knowledge Skill was Augmentation Legislation. I expect our futuristic dystopia to be sufficiently wacky to allow my character to game the system!

Maybe you do. I've been scarred by the stupid through years of tech support.

I can't help but feel that humanity will continue to be anything but illogical about laws, even if they're "More than human" in more ways than one.