No, it's just not the ideal solution. Better balance in the rules themselves is better than the GM fixing everything. You might as well say, 'everyone gets so worked up about fixing the rules, as if house rules are some taboo'. Fixing the rules is more fun, too; 'play nice' and 'not in this game' are kind of conversation-stoppers, while good rules are a puzzle.

I hate to butt into the discussion like this, but that Robocop stuff is BS. In the scene his HAND is first shot off by a heavy machinegun (probably with APDS ammo), then he is shot with the equivalent of Stick and Shock (lol). After this he is hoisted into the air with an electromagnet, put on a table, and then smashed to peices with a effing sledgehammer... used by a fairly normal strong NPC. All of this would easily be shrugged off by Mr. 32 armor Tank in SR.

Robocop is not indestructible, he just seems to to normal thugs using light pistols, shotguns and SMGs.

If you're going to claim that something is appropriate within a genre, you're responsible for giving an example of why. Period.

Motoko is not indestructible. Bullets rarely even hit her in the first place. Robocop spends most of his time being shot at with handguns and crappy sub-machineguns. When larger guns are used against him, it clearly has greater effect. Also, he is obviously wearing hardened armor. It is also worth pointing out that a person with armored cyberlimbs would not necessarily be deficient in agility, and could, through other bonuses (smartlink, tacnet, etc.) get their pool up to something respectable.



Yes, why put the person who obviously *enjoys* social interaction into situations that require social interaction? Force the guy who said he wanted to play a gunbunny into that position instead!

I'm sorry, but this isn't good writing OR good gaming. Mixing it up on occasion is fun, but when you're relying on that technique as your only method of challenging the players because their characters are mechanically broken, nobody is going to be having much fun. If I'm throwing the gunbunny into a tense negotiation, I want it to be because the guy on the other end of the table is so important to his backstory (or current story) that he *insists* on talking to the guy on his own, rather than shoehorning him into a position that he doesn't find interesting just because it's the only way to create the possibility of failure.




The problem with countering cheese with more cheese is that players with sensibly-built characters get hurt in the process. If the only way to challenge our Tanky Dwarf friend is to toss F10 Manaballs at him, what happens to those poor saps standing next to him? Why do they all have to suffer?


Motoko isn't really viable in Shadowrun. Full-body cyborgs in Shadowrun are mostly just disturbed children in mechanical bodies. The fluff makes the existence of a fully-functional personality (Motoko comes off as far more human in the manga, IMO) in a full 'borg unlikely.

Again, you guys are throwing around "shrugged off" as if this is all consequence-free.

Damage in 4e is automatic. Start with a hefty chunk and add to it. Defense is start with 0 add to it.

Who. Cares. If. He. Stages. It. Down. To. Stun. Damage.

It doesn't matter. He has put himself in a position where staging it down to stun is the preferable scenario because he has a half dozen more boxes on his physical damage track.

So 30 something armor. Can expect to soak 10 from that assuming he has all of his Armor dice. Couple more soaked from Body (we never got in to specifics, and due to capacity it's easier to say "couple more" than worry about specifics because how much body is crammed in tweaks with how effective the character will be with str and agi).

So if you're a GM who is letting someone run around with a gigantic monstrosity and can't think of a way to reliably throw 10-16 damage at him to nickle and dime his stun track down, then you have officially bitten off more than you can chew (also you're not being very creative. The combinations of crap that can do damage in that range is mind boggling).

I talk about table balance a lot. It is much more an affront to the game that this 30 armor monstrosity is running around with Bod 2 Armor 4 teammates than it is for him to exist in the first place.



Eh, I just think it is futile.

The rules weren't written well. You can't go 10 pages without stumbling in to something odd or vague or contradictory. There's nothing we can do to change that. Tables will make the changes that suit their game and I have always thought it silly that a bunch of us internet nerds getting high and mighty about rules interpretations were anywhere near important enough to override the RAW (as ridiculous as it may be) or to attempt to force our collective psyche on to some
table of gamers we have nothing to do with.


Yeah I'd sort of hinted at that earlier in the post. Full Cyborg doesn't fit for her and an AI I think is the best way to ape her character, if you were to attempt it at all.

You talk as though the Tank is just going to sit there waiting for this dude to chuck magic cards at him. Throwing Adept Guy isn't bulletproof. Who's going to last longer when trading damage? My money is on the guy with 24 armor. Even if the tank is armed with normal guns and no exotic ammo, an Ares Alpha could easily get up to a base of...what? 9P or so? just using Burst. I have a player in my game right now you can just snap off full-auto fire on a whim, so that'd get us up to about 15P base without any special ammo.

Elemental Strike (Sound) is ridiculous cheese; countering cheese with cheese just leads to more problems long-term. You end up in an arms race where the only viable combat characters are hyper-specialists, and that's just silly.

Why would you take this, specifically, out of what I said?

I sense some reading comprehension problems. Was this not clear that it was a "mix-it-up occasionally" thing?



So I think we've come to why you have issues with RAW. It's a comprehension thing.




Where are you in this conversation? A character with 30 Armor is at the table and you're talking about Escalating Force? Force IS Escalated. The characters ARE hyper specialized. The Player and GM both agreed on the baseline of all of this when the character was created and then allowed. This game starts at weird and only gets weirder.

You act as though he won't have ANY defense roll at all. Cover bonus, reaction roll, firing from inside a vehicle (you lose -2 dice in exchange for adding all of the vehicle's armor to your's)....there are a ton of ways to jack those dice up. They're there because the game designers thought the average character would have an armor of like 8-10.

Also, what's this about a gigantic monstrosity? We aren't adding Body to this guy, we're adding Armor. Armored cyberlimbs aren't bigger than regular ones; Capacity is used by things that go *inside* the limb.

AIs are even worse; they can't jump into a drone unless you pay for the Quality that says you started out as a Pilot program that gained sentience, which doesn't jive with Motoko at all, fluff-wise. GITS is really more of a Transhumanist story than a Cyberpunk one, if you think about it.

Soaking 10 or more damage automatically IS essentially immunity to normal weapons. I'm sure he can soak twice that on a lucky roll, with good (Troll) body, or using Edge. Normal enemies can't reliably dish out more than that, heck even starting runners might be hard pressed to, unless well optimized. Now 16 damage? Reliably? I think we are playing different games. In order to get this you need stuff like heavy machineguns, sniper rifles with APDS, assault cannons and similar high-duty stuff. And even this can be soaked potentially. AP rockets? Nah, can't hit him anyway, and soaking 16P with -2 AP is not hard for this guy. When missiles meant for use against vehicles can hardly hurt (never mind kill) a character like that, something is WRONG.


I must admit in my game and my groups we use a house rule that allow halving the stun damage from attacks that fails to penetrate (after soak, round up). This makes having insane levels of armor even more unbalanced.

Personal armor could be capped at 20 easily - including milspec, cyberware, cyberlimbs and magic. That still an awesome tank, especially coupled with 7-11 Body, dermal sheath or lacing, and the one that auto-soaks 1 damage.

But… there is something we can do about the bad rules. We can have house rules discussions. I didn't realize we were talking about 'overriding the RAW' or being 'high and mighty' or 'trying to force people' to do anything. I thought we were discussion various house rules, their pros and cons, sharing best practices, etc. That's what I was doing, anyway. (Personal, I ignore the RAW whenever it's bad, so maybe that's 'overriding'?)

If they're so good at "what they're good at" that the only way for you to challenge them is to make them do something else, then what is the point of them being good at X? You've given up on trying to challenge them in their chosen specialty, so any time the ONE THING they've made it clear they LIKE DOING comes up, they get to sleepwalk through the scenario. I'm all for letting players be "good" at what they're good at; that isn't the same as letting them be effectively invincible at what they're good at.




...wait, what? We're talking about two approaches to this problem: One is to just say "to hell with it, I'll throw some bullshit at them occasionally" and let them do this ridiculous armor stacking. I'm suggesting that you prevent this from happening in the first place by making some common-sense clarifications to a part of the rules that don't seem to have been written very clearly. And now you're assuming that it's all good because the character was cleared by the GM? When did this happen, in our scenario where I'm advocating for a ruling that prevents this from happening in the first place?

No, you're advocating a ruleset that disallows a character from taking two Cyberarms and armoring one up as a "shield arm" and tossing sensors and weapons into the other as a "sword arm" while retaining the 4 armor from the armored limb.

How about a character who armors up only the left limbs and torso, as this is the side he leads with in his fighting stance.


See, my rules say this stuff is OK. They can have their Armor and their fancy character Fluff. Everyone is happy.

Your rules say "no, average it you dick!" Fortunately your ruling is dumb doesn't need to exist anywhere but your table, if that's what gets you off.

There isn't any need for the rule, or any fiddling with RAW, because it is solely concerned with preventing edge-cases while screwing over Joe AverageRunner and characters who want a reasonable amount of armor for fluffy reasons.

What I was really saying, is that RAW allows it. That's step 1. Step 2 is a GM allowing it. If conditions 1 and 2 are met then who are you to care? It doesn't need any more rules than currently exist.



For the record, I am definitely more likely to allow a character to throw on a bunch of Cyber Armor (armor with consequence in the form of Essence and Capacity costs) than I am to let FFBA slide (armor which gives double its encumbrance worth in consequence free armor while also allowing extra capacity for armor modifications, eg. nonconductivity).

As far as I know this whole thing started with him interpreting RAW incorrectly. I told him it was stupid and it got us here eventually.

I don't have any problems with RAW, I don't have any problem with House Rules... so long as they can be printed on a single page. A single page is something that everyone can have distributed to them easily and it isn't too much to bog down gameplay.

Now what I do have issue with is RANW (rules as not-written), these are gaping holes in the rules where the entire system sort of falls on its ass. There are a lot in this system in particular.

No, I'm not; I guess you missed that post. The precise wording that I used was to average the cyberlimb ARMOR of each limb. If a limb doesn't have the armor enhancement, then it wouldn't be part of the equation. So you could have your shield arm and your sensor/weapon arm.


Assuming that his limbs with armor have the same amount of armor, he's in the clear.



Your rules also say that any combat character who isn't rocking at least one limb is a fucking moron. Hell, even two limbs, at a measly 1.6 essence (compare to the cost of, say, dermal sheathe) is good for 4/4 at chargen, and 8/8 with upgrades. Your rules create a ridiculous arms race where conventional weapons might as well not exist, because nobody you're firing them at would be affected by them. The only people worth putting in combat with "your rules" are other, equally ridiculous hyper-specialists.

Your rules also say that a buck-naked cyborg running around slapping Lone Star cops with his junk is more difficult to injure with bullets than, say, the fully-clothed, armored policemen that he is turkey-slapping.


Oh dear, not capacity loss! I mean, you could use that precious capacity for...what, exactly, that is as good as 8/8 armor for 1.6 essence (assuming Alphaware; with Betaware it's even less).

Also, allowing armor mods on FFBA is beyond retarded; it counts for half encumbrance because it's very thin and flexible. Once you start throwing fire-retardant materials and whatever else on there, you've defeated the purpose. Besides, who would bother doing that when you can just put that shit on the outer armor you're wearing?

Oh, ok. So if it is 4 and 0 he keeps 4 armor. If it is 4 and 1 (leftover space) then he has... wait a minute...

Who's rules are stupid?




NEWSFLASH: All rules lead to min-maxing. Period. Same with yours, just because your rules don't lead to as high of an extreme doesn't make them any less stupid.

Table culture leads to escalation. The Rules themselves don't. Why does it bother you so much that super cyborgs could exist at some table somewhere when they don't exist in your game.

The rules as written are fine. People are big boys and can play the game any way they see fit. Individual GMs do have the power to police their own tables, and they do.

Your's, because they're fucking unplayable. The chances of someone having a really good reason to have 4 on one limb and 1 on another (besides trying to break the 4/4 limit that the rule enforces) are exceedingly low. If anything, my rule simply saves them the money they would have spent armoring another limb. If all you want is armor on your left side, put 4 armor on an arm and you're done.

The only solution to the problems posed by your interpretation of the rules is to either beg your player not to buy so much armor, or be a total asshole and force the entire team to fight F10 Spirits every game because you're too fucking stupid to be sensible about the rules.

If this was about what "makes sense" in the context of the game, then why is Cyberlimb Joe running around with his balls flapping in the air better armored than the fully-armored cops chasing him? The vast majority of his body is completely uncovered by armor. But beccause he put some really thick plates on his arms and legs, you can empty a fucking full clip into him and he laughs it off. What sense does it make that the rules assume that ALL of your bullets automatically go to the HARDEST PART OF HIM TO HIT (his extremities)?


Min-maxing in and of itself is not a problem. Excessive min-maxing is the problem, and it can easily be avoided with sensible rules.


Why does it bother YOU so much that I'm less retarded than you are about cyberlimb armor rules? You're not in my game, so my ruling doesn't directly affect you, yet here you are still whining about it.

Human

Obvious Left Cyberarm (the shield arm) 15 capacity (4 remaining)
Customized Agility 6
Customized Body 6
Customized Strength 6
Enhanced Body 3
Armor 4
(4 capacity remaining)

Obvious Right Cyberarm (weapon arm) 15 capacity
Customized Agility 6
Customized Body 6
Customized Strength 6
Enhanced Body 3
Enhanced Agility 3
Enhanced Strength 3
Spur
(3 capacity remaining) Hmm... room for 1 armor.



Because YOUR "house rules" (initially pointed out as the "clear intention of RAW") impose on perfectly reasonable characters to shut down monstrosities.

MY lack-of-house-rules let perfectly reasonable characters be reasonable, and the GM does the imposing.

If you want "sensible rules," you're playing the wrong system. SR4 got off to a rocky start and every supplement since then has progressively made the rules anything but sensible.

You talk about this min-max arms race but it is entirely unavoidable. Trust me, I played a lot of DnD 3.5. See every rule book that came out would introduce a couple new things and that was it, that was THE way to build a Fighter (for example). Next set of rules or errata fixed it, changed things, added more. Now this is THE way to build a Fighter.

The ONLY way to avoid it is to build perfectly balanced characters, include them in the book and remove character creation entirely. Guess what? Even that is impossible and only half of them would end up being played since that is "the ideal shadowrunning team."

Would you expect your country to completely outlaw dogs because a single dog attacked someone? Why would you screw with perfectly clear rules which are sensible as long as the table in question is sensible.

In fact if there is anything I could say about Shadowrun is that its rules could very well be written so vaguely on purpose. They know damn well that people play Pink Mohawk, they know damn well people play Mirror Shades, and they know damn well that people play so many variations in between that they couldn't possibly cater to it all.

Yeah, I will say that as much as we debate about the "rightness" of this or that rule, in actual play many of these edge cases just aren't a huge problem because that is what we have GMs for. To adjust and adapt.

Even in the many Missions games I've been in, which are a lot more RAW than most home games, I've never seen it become a huge problem.

That doesn't mean we can't reasonably debate improving the rules, though.



-k

So? Just because you have room for something doesn't mean you have to buy it, and there are other things you can buy to take that last 3 capacity. Are you really losing your shit over 1 armor?



It'd be nice if you could provide some proof....or did you think that the half-example you listed above was sufficient? How is the loss of 1 armor "imposing"? It's hardly shutting down the character concept.


It's not a lack of house rules if the GM shuts down a perfectly "rules viable" concept. If it's rules-legal, and by your estimation it is, then it has the right to be played. As soon as the GM intervenes, we're dealing with House Rules. So you're really just arguing between my ruling, which is based on an objective standard, and your ruling, which is basically "if you buy me a sammich and/or blow me, maybe I'll let you have 16/16 armor butt naked"

You're a moron, your argument is entirely without merit, and you don't even have an internally consistent use of language in your post (that is, you claim to be advocating no house rules, when in fact you're advocating pure house rules).

What right would someone have in an officially-recorded Missions game to tell you that you can't have 16/16 armor in the nude, if the rulebook says that you can? Without a framework to keep things within sensible boundaries, you're just begging for people to abuse the rules, and if you just want to lean on GM fiat to solve all of your problems, then why the hell are you playing with a rule system anyway? You might as well be LARPing or doing some shitty diceless game.

Er, no, you see high armor folks in Missions all the time.

So far the GMs I have run across adapt to that. They adjust the game to compensate. Whether it be by throwing "different" challenges to the high-armor folks besides merely shooting more, or just ensuring that the lower DP folks don't feel left out. Varies by table.

Which is my point. Having a living breathing GM to adjust the situation is probably the single biggest help to problem rules.




-k

JohnC, you're the only person I've discussed anything with on Dumpshock that had to resort to a fairly constant use of ad hominem.

The rules are fine. It has nothing to do with GM Fiat. It has to do with a group of people coming together, deciding on a relative power-level the game should take place at, and then running said game to maximum enjoyment of all parties involved. You know, like adults.

You suggest that if there is any flex in the rules that there could be enough immorality among a group of players where sexual favors are exchanged for power. If sexual favors are being thrown around for power in a table top roleplaying game, I think we're pretty much past what the rules say and in to the territory of "He can shoot armor ignoring laser beams from his eyes because he doesn't use teeth" so what does it matter?

I've never been for or against house rules, merely mentioned that what started as your interpretation of RAW was wrong, and that your house rule is unnecessary because there are plenty of ways to control the power level of your own players without worrying about a hose rule here. On the contrary I mentioned, a few times, where house rules are necessary and even mentioned a few I use.

Finally you're not even educated enough about the rules or your own little crusade against them to realize that it would be 22/22 armor, not 16/16.

But this all goes back to the fact that you're way too worked up to bother reading either what the rules say or the entirety of what anyone in this thread has said. So I'm pretty well done with you.

You can either stop this little tirade, or continue ranting into the night waiting on someone to come along and finally agree with you.

I'm sure that anyone who has spent more time playing Shadowrun than complaining about it in internet rage-fests would agree that it isn't an issue.

Do you not read your own posts very often? Also, moron, John isn't actually short for Jonathan, it's a completely different name.


Your suggestion was that GMs should merely disallow any character with excessively high armor, without actually using any sort of consistent rule in doing so. While this isn't a *good* house rule, it certainly counts as a house rule.


It was an exaggeration for effect; I also implied that you'd allow players to bribe you with food, but I notice that you take no issue with that...


Then why have you spent half a day whining about how nobody should be using house rules with regards to armor stacking?


When did you provide evidence of this? The rules are very murky on how cyberlimb armor works, and whether it stacks with itself. In all other cases (stacking the bonuses from dermal plating with the bonuses from worn armor, for example) the armor is layered on top of other armor; in this case, you're suggesting (without rules to clearly back your argument) that putting some armor on your extremities (the most difficult areas to hit on a moving target) make it harder to hit the target.


Actually, most of the suggestions in this thread sucked. I'm the one who pointed out that Sound spells and Elemental Strike: Sound make the build useless. But then, Sound attacks make all armor useless; I don't know why sonic weapons are more common in the game.


4 limbs with 4 armor each, stacking in the way that you suggest, would be 16/16. Nice try, though.


I'm not the only person in this thread who has stated that you're full of shit; I'm just not as nice about saying it.

As far as the 22/22, I think Chainsaw is probably counting a cybertorso and cyberskull.

Can we please cut out the personal attacks on either side?





-k

@JohnathanC
TJ had a very valid point about obvious cyberlimbs being, well, obvious. You shrugged it off by saying such a character could wrap up and hide their cyberarms of doom under armour. If that's the way you want to play it, that's fine, but please remember this is you complaining about how bad armoured cyberarms are and then allowing them to be hidden away with ease, not anybody else.

The character will face difficulties and prejudice anywhere there is a cyberware scanner, or an assensing mage who won't require many hits to see the essence holes in both arms. They will have to wear fairly thick full-length armour and heavy duty gloves at all times to disguise their obvious cyberarms (so no hob-nobbing at social occasions if the GM wants to throw that scenario at you, in fact you'd be screwed anywhere where fairly heavy armour was not de rigeur), and might from a roleplaying perspective feel a bit of a freak. Police and CorpSec would be treating him as suspicious pretty much wherever he went (for the heavy armour and gloves if nothing else). On top of that, there won't be too many people wandering around town with double arm replacements, so your guy would be fairly easy to find by someone who had a mind to look for him.

As stated by others, Availability is this double-armed cyberarmour junkie's enemy at CharGen, and especially if he goes alphaware (for your 1.6 total essence figure), it will take him quite a time in-game to gain the money to upgrade armour to 4 in each arm. Restricted Gear (1/arm) would cost him 10BP of his 35 possible for +ve Qualities if he did it that way.

Finally, as others have said, there is what you can do with RAW in CharGen, and there is what your GM will allow at your table. If you as the GM don't want to have to roll out the big guns all the time to challenge Cyber-armoured Tank'o'Doom, tell your player that you'd prefer him to make a more low-key character. Problem solved.

If he's counting the torso and skull, then he's a goddamned idiot because I was pretty clear that I was only referring to someone with four limbs. The whole point is that you don't even have to try that hard to wind up with a ridiculous amount of armor using cyberlimbs. Even two Alphaware limbs can net you 8/8 while you're butt naked (which, again, I pointed out earlier).


So Karma, perhaps you can explain how "cyberpunk" it is for some naked homeless guy with two cyberarms to be better armored than the police officers dispatched to get him to stop rubbing his junk on people (again, just an example scenario)?

There is nothing in the rules or the fluff to suggest that armored obvious cyberlimbs look any different from regular obvious cyberlimbs, and the description of obvious cyberlimbs does not state that they are enormous; they're simply "obviously artificial". So they're the size of regular arms, but made of metal. It's not that big of a deal. You're not going to be refused entry to a dive bar downtown because you've got obvious cyberlimbs.


Cyberlimbs are pretty commonplace in Shadowrun; there are several ongoing wars around the world, so the influx of veterans with lost limbs is likely to be pretty high. I seriously doubt that people are going to faint at the sight of a dude with two cyberarms. Scanners will pick up the limbs, but with a license/fake license, you're not likely to get that much trouble over it. And who cares about assensing mages? If you're going someplace where they can afford to pay an honest-to-god mage to be a goddamn doorman, then yeah, bullet-proof McIronballs probably doesn't belong there. He's waiting in the van to pop out if the Face gets himself in trouble.


This is pretty common for combat-oriented characters, but it doesn't have to be. Am I really the only person who has read Arsenal? You can cover yourself pretty well in heaily-armored business attire, formal attire, and even Steampunk outfits. Fashion options aren't really an issue here. More than likely, our tanky friend has no business in that swanky nightclub because he's got an Etiquette pool in the single digits.


Because if there's one thing Shadowrun has, it's a lot of locations where heavy armor is not commonplace. I mean, it's not like the most classic locations in canon are gang-infested Barrens, bug-infested feral cities, and underground free cities filled with orks. Oh, wait....


If I was corpsec, I'd be more worried about the guy who reads as magically active, or his buddy over there with the Wired Reflexes, but sure. Anyone with obvious cyber is going to be suspicious. But why is this guy trying to chill out in a corp lobby? If he's running across CorpSec or Police, he's probably already emptied a clip in their general direction.


See the above note regarding military veterans (seriously, do you have any idea how many amputees there are after 10 years in Iraq/Afghanistan?). Also, in a world where having two cyberlimbs makes you effectively bulletproof, I imagine double arm replacements would be fairly popular. A society in which tearing out your eyeballs to replace them with cybernetic/bio-modded improvements is something you do during an afternoon at the mall, and plugging your BRAIN into a public computer network is mundane, chopping off your arms doesn't seem all that crazy.


Depends on the average payout per run, really. But let's assume that he sticks with Availability 12, he's still leaving chargen with 4/4 armor for 1.6 essence, which is a helluva deal. And it only gets better once he gets some cash.


This solution is no different from simply declaring a house rule. In fact, it IS a house rule. It's just an incredibly petty, subjective one.

Again with the personal attacks. It is, in fact, possibe to hold a discussion without resorting to insults. Attack the subject, not the speaker. Please. If nothing else, it distracts from your actual arguments, making them weaker.

The problem is, yes, additive cyberarmor is a bit powerful, but averaging makes cyberarmor not worth the resources.

I probably would just houserule a maximum armor bonus that can be added to a character's primary armor, myself. It's a lot simpler than averaging a bunch of stuff.

Even if you have a 50+/50+ armor combat monster, however, there are plenty of ways to deal with it as a GM. The most obvious is to simply throw challenges at the character that don't always involve resisting damage. In a worse case scenario, simply talking to the player to see if he'll curb his behavior may work, if it's way out of line with the power level of the game you're running.




Well, if nothing else, 'ordinary' police officers are mostly treated as cannon fodder in many cyberpunk stories. Them getting outclasses by what sounds like a significant character in the story isn't particularly un-cyberpunk, at least.

A naked homeless guy with armored cyberarms isn't going to be just some random bum in this genre. He's likely going to have some backstory explaining the combat grade augmentation, and probably is going to have other skills and abilities to match. If not a primary character, at least a character of significance.

Also remember, a key trope of cyberpunk is that augmented folks are simply better.

Faster, stronger, smarter, able to shrug off damage that should have killed ordinary folks ten times over.

They pay for that physical superiority with a loss of humanity. And often a never-ending vicious cycle of further augmentation to keep up with their peers - which causes even further loss of humanity.

So a couple of cops get reports of some homeless dude sexually assaulting passerby in a park. When they get there, it turns out he's some cyber-psycho freak that shrugs off bullets from their handguns. They're outclassed. They're probably going to die. It's going to take a high threat response team to deal with the situation. And to stay true to cyberpunk themes, probably nobody is going home happy at the end of the incident, if they survive at all.




-k

Again, that's Robocop, not Cyberpunk in general.


Crazed, invulnerable military veteran in ongoing feces rampage downtown. Film at 11. Police unable to bring him down.



Better, yes. More durable than a car? Not so much.



I'm beginning to think that most of you guys are using the old Cyberforce comic book series (and/or any comic featuring Cable) as your sole resource for what qualifies as "Cyberpunk". Seriously, what books are you reading?




There are no longer mechanics for an actual loss of humanity. Loss of essence, yes, but it doesn't actually affect your ability to relate to people from a game mechanics perspective. That ended with Third edition.



Well, I imagine the homeless guy is going home happy after he murders those cops and runs off into the night. It's not like there's a rule saying he has to sit still and wait for the big boys to arrive.

I'll just conclude with this:

Most cyberpunk books don't feature the cybered out psycho as the main character. Most of the time, the main characters are actually pretty lightly augmented, and even then it's usually communications or mental improvements.

When a cybered combat bunny shows up, the other characters in the story often treat them as monsters. And not without reason. Either they're unstoppable opposition or they're the scary dude/dudette secondary character that serves as the team muscle. Either way, they usually don't show a lot of empathy and get portrayed as walking weapons. When they get into full on fights, there tends to be a lot of property destruction. More than a few end up dying extremely violent deaths as the opposition's backup finally arrives with heavy weaponry.

Meanwhile the main characters are usually taking advantage of the commotion to get something else done, or sometimes as cover to flee.

Really, cyberware in the genre tends to show up either as kinda minor improvements to a character, or full on zero essence murder machines. Not a lot of in between, which fits it's story parallel as an addictive drug.

Heck, most cyberpunk stories don't feature a cyber monster at all. Seriously, even Molly Millions has mostly just reflex augments and hand spurs. Cyberfreaks with multiple replaced limbs are a rarity, except sometimes as background flavor.

But when they do show up, it's often going to be accompanied by property values decreasing.

The question is, can it be cyberpunk to have a modded out character with more implanted armor than a street cop, or even a car?

Sure. Depends on how it's written.

The cyberfreak combat monster is usually the unstoppable force. It takes either overwhelming opposition or some clever trick to defeat them. They really don't show up that often though.



-k

*grin*

Well, my example had the 'cybermonster' with attributes of 3 so a well placed shock glove, stunbolt or just have a troll wrestle him had stopped him.

Wars have mostly gone out of fashion in favor of small-scale engagements between highly troops right out of Discovery Channel's newest gear porn. That means if your attire screams "military", you do stand out.

Fixed to 4 points for each arm and 4 points for the cyber torso.



Yes I did!-Fixed.

Don't forget the pornomancer seducing him, and then poisoning him either.....

In all honesty, at a certain point yes the rediculousness of the armor is outweighed by cost (nuyen and opportunnity), availability, and concealability. So barring the gm lets it happen, it probably won't.

Here's an idea - take a guy wearing nothing but an armored vest insteads of the cyberarm dude. Why should he be more armored than a guy in armored clothing and a helmet? Or how about a guy in a helmet, forearm guards and shin guards? If he's tied to a wall and your're punching him he'll withstand more damage than the guy in armor clothing.

It's an abstract system, and all armor applies to the entire body because of that. Only way to 'fix' that is to introduce hit locations and adjust armor accordingly. The 'problem' doesn't lie with cyberlimb armor (your version has the same problems, just lessened, and introduces new ones: I spend extra money on armor and my overall rating ... goes down: having a leg with 8 pts armor suddenly protect less because you added an arm with 4 pts makes even less sense than the current system: why is the naked homeless guy with one cyberarm(armor 8 ) better armored than the one with two of different armor ratings(8 and 2=5)?

What game are you playing? There are multiple hotspots around the world supporting a fairly ridiculous number of mercenary armies and corporate troops. Are you playing some *other* game that is also, coincidentally, called Shadowrun?

Why would anyone buy two different armor ratings if the ratings were averaged? The benefit is that you can put all of your armor in one limb and use the capacity of your other limbs for other things. Why is this so hard to understand? It's actually simpler and cheaper for the player, and hard-caps cyberlimb armor at 4/4. Not that big of a deal.

His point is that it's a natural response to a desire to aquire more armor to decide to armor more of the body. Doing so has no benefit when armor is averaged. Your rule is counter-intuitve.

Actually, even if we don't average the armor, we're not adding more armor to the body. you can armor the parts of your body LEAST LIKELY to be hit with bullets and you're effectively as bulletproof (or more so) than a fully armored person.

The rules are already counter-intuitive; there's nothing to be done about that. I'm just suggesting that hey, maybe it'd be nice if the rules were at least balanced.

You also run into the I have 1 piece at four, but when I add another at 2 the value drops to 3 even though you technically added more armor.

If you're going to be bothered by this, why not start bitching about the fact that wearing a Secure Jacket over your Armored clothing doesn't give you additional armor?

Because Adding more CyberArmor ADDS MORE ARMOR... Layering A Vest Under a jacket only gives you the better rating. THAT is what everyone is telling you. Your Option is highly counter-intuitive.

I wish I could make you understand how stupid that statement is. Your complaint, essentially, is that my suggested rule adjustment is different from the existing rule.

Adding more cyberlimb armor, with this rule, *does not* add more armor, just like laying a vest under a jacket does not add more armor. If my rule is counter-intuitive, then again: why aren't you crying into your cheerios over armor layering? Isn't that counter-intuitive too? I can just hear it now: "SOB! Why can't I have 50 armor from wearing all of the armor at once?! WHYYYYYYYYYYY"

If you'd prefer that the wording state that the player simply takes the highest cyberlimb armor value, fine; the effect is the same: putting more armor on a limb does nothing for you, so either way you're wasting money. I suggested averaging only because it was consistent with how other cyberlimb enhancements, such as Agility and Body, worked.

Except it's not consistent, because then you got mad when someone was confused about treating it exactly like cyberlimb attributes. Averaging across just the cyberlimbs is a whole different (and weird) beast.

The thing is, that is metagaming. The homeless guy running around slapping police isn't thinking - "hey, I have to find a second-hand arm with the exact same armor on it, otherwise I can't soak a shot from an ares predator anymore!" He's thinking - "cool, more armor."

Regular armor only using the highest rating still 'makes sense' in-game, because for character's in the world it is consistent. If there are circumstances where the armor suddenly becomes less protective when you add more armor, that's not consistent, and very weird from an in-game point of view:
"Hey Klaus, look here! I was testing this new line of cyberware armor, and check what happens! When both Arms have Ares MoronicIV, a bullet can't penetrate. If only one arm as Ares MoronicIV, it still can't penetrate- but watch this - I put on Spinrad NoRadIII on the other arm, and suddenly the bullet goes through!"
"Klaus, you're a genius - I'll tell you what we'll do - we'll develop a gun that shoots a small armor plate that attaches to non-armored arms - that way we can suddenly make all those crazy one-armed homeless cyberfreaks not be bulletproof anymore!"
"LoneStar will sure win back the contract now!"



I would definately prefer that only the highest counts, just as for 'regular' armor. That avoids the issue of how adding armor can result in a lower rating.

Either that, or revert back to the averaging rules from SR3 - add together the armor of all arms, all legs, torso and head, and average the result.

In case it wasn't clear: Because your rule makes adding armor the same as removing armor. No existing rule does that.

It is not stupid. The fact that you are arguing from an Edge case is the issue here, as others have stated, time and again. Why can't YOU understand that? I understand what you are trying to do here, but your methods are horrible in execution, as others have ALSO stated time and again.

See, the issue with your rant above is that many people do not have an issue with Armor layering. No One wants 50 Armor, and your arguments to the contrary just ring hollow. I have never, ever seen such a build, either at normal gaming tables, nor at conventions (when I choose to go). Can a Full-Borg Conversion Sport 22 points of Integral, stacking armor? Sure. Can he then put on other armor on top of that? Why do you have so many complaints agianst that. As some have indicated, it is a trope of the Cyberpunk Genre. Maybe not as a Protagonist, but it is there. This allows that to happen. Excessive Armor is not all that hard to deal with, as others have also mentioned.

Rather than throwing insults at others, why do you not consider what others have suggested and just cap the limits directly (through either Capacity Increases, Cost/Availability Increases, or the Further limiting of Armor (from 4 to 2, for example)), rather than implementing a wonky "Averaging" mechanic? Instead of debating the actual merits of the ideas generated, all you can do is throw insults at others for daring to debate with you. Do you not wonder why so many others have issues with you?

Build decisions are made by players, not characters. If we're going by the character, then the homeless naked cyborg has no idea what his armor value is in the first place, so he'd have no way of knowing if he had more armor or not. Hell, he'd probably be confused in the first place about why every fucking bullet ever fired at him is magically attracted to his arms.

Metagaming or not, it just doesn't make sense to average armor across just cyberlimbs. There's no-averaging, and there's all-limbs-averaging. Averaging just cyberlimbs is based on… what? Why does adding another limb to someone with one armored limb lower the overall armor?

I'm not arguing an edge case here - I've set aside Mr. Tank, the 24+/24+ armored cyber dwarf. Now we're talking about Ballsack Joe, the naked guy who spent a measley 1.6 essence to get two armored cyberarms and is now running around with 8/8 armor at all times.

Please, please explain to my why it is "intuitive and sensible" that every bullet fired at this asshole goes directly to his arms (which would, realistically, be one of the less likely locations)?

This isn't TV Tropes; you can tell, because I'm not a drooling retard who compares everything to Naruto episodes. If you want to call something a trope, you need to give examples. Nobody has given an example, Protagonist or otherwise, of a guy who looks fairly normal (just some metal arms and legs, but normal-sized) who bounces tank rounds like it's no big deal. Unless you're going to start claiming that Cyborg from Teen Titans counts as a seminal figure of the Cyberpunk genre, you're full of crap, here.



Ah, yes. We'll just remove bullets from the game and have every enemy load up on adepts with Elemental Strike (Sound). What's more fucking cyberpunk than that? I'm sure the rest of the players won't mind the sudden change in tone. If players buy too much armor, making armor COMPLETELY useless is obviously the right call to make. How silly of me. Imposing sensible limits instead of going batshit crazy with nerfing is what Commies do, right?

Hit locations is simply a separate issue. If covering a whole limb isn't good enough fluff for you, you'll just need to deal with it… or add a whole system of hit locations/probability.