In the book, it is written:

"Defender Has Defended Against Previous Attacks
If a character has defended against at least one other attack (melee or ranged) since his last action, apply a –1 cumulative modifier for each additional defense roll."

Does that apply to defensive actions taken only or does soaking without attempting to defend incur that penalty as well?

The question revolves around a hypothetical of a character built with a soak of 38 dice vs 100 police armed with assault rifles firing at once on the character (Assuming 3 Agility, 4 Automatics, and Smartlink).

"Defending" means the defense roll (Reaction vs gunfire, Reaction + Dodge vs melee, and the various Full Defense options). Those 100 cops will rapidly reduce Supertank's Defense pool to 0, at which point the remaining police autohit and only roll to find out how much they stage up the damage from their assault rifles.

Tanegar: has the right of it...

Effectively lets say he has a reaction of 10.

Each of the first 5 guards fires twice... and doesn't do any damage but eliminates all 10 of his reaction dice (10, 9, 8... 0).

With 38 soak dice... at 4:1 he'd autosoak 9 damage with two dice to spare for up to AP-2. (the rules for large die pools).

Now each of the 95 following fires 2 narrow bursts (+2 damage).

9 dice twice... at 6P +2DV... + net hits (3 average). Means he's soaking 11 damage per hit after this point. Each shot does 2 stun after armor. (you can roll this all off but with numbers this large he's bon). He quickly runs out of both stun and physical and lies dead in a matter of seconds.

If he insists on rolling... after he's out of dice.. have the cops start firing full narrow bursts (insteaad of short). -9 dice (+offsetting recoil comp). So lets say that leaves each cop with 4 dice. 1 net success plenty enough to hit. 6Damage +9 (full narrow burst) +1 net... soak 16 damage per shot, once per cop. (instead of soaking 11 damage twice per cop as above).

If you got sharpshooters rather than full auto... they can utilized called shot for damage +4 damage, -4 dice... as you an see soaking damage is not the panacea one might think!


Even with lots of armor... shadowrun is a deadly system. Big reason to follow the first rule... 'don't get hit!'

I thought the first rule was "Geek the mage first!"...



-D

Followed very closely by... never bet against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

So after the first 30 guards finish killing the underdressed overarmored obvious troll... they all switch to suppressing fire spray down the entire area with monstrous interlocking fields of fire to kill the invisible mage... because obviously why else would the other nutcaes stand there and take it. He must be mind controlled.

No one seems to be addressing the original question, at least how I read it...

If the troll just stood there and took the damage from a number of attacks without actually attempting to defend in any way, could they then take actual defensive action (like Dodging or Parrying) on the Nth attack and not suffer negative modifiers because they haven't actually previously attempted to defend themselves?

If so, I dunno about facing down 100 cops with assault rifles, but I can imagine a more realistic scenario in which it might be useful - the troll gets some punks angry and just stands there without moving while the punks try to clobber them with a couple of well placed punches, then after eating two or three knuckle sandwiches without so much as lifting a finger, the troll decides to actually Defend against the next swing with their full dice, maybe using choice martial arts maneuvers to sweeten the deal.

Useful tactic? Not all of the time, sure, but it could be in certain scenarios. If you can stage down the damage and avoid wound modifiers, you can keep the maximum dice pool for a counterattack or riposte ready to use until a critical moment. If three punks jump you one by one before you can act because you're last on the initiative list, you might want to let the first one beat on you long enough for the second to run up and join him, then let the second one beat on you long enough for the third one to run up and join them, and then perform a martial arts maneuver on your third defense (without negative modifiers for previous defenses, and thus maximum potential dice) to throw one of them into the other two, or maybe some other tactic that benefits from having all three of them in close range at the time of your counterattack, rather than countering them each one by one as they come into range.

~Umi

If there was an invisible mage around, I doubt they would be alive for the suppressive fire.

as has been said, short answer is "no."

The book also specifically mentions quite a few negatives that do not affect damage soak as well, so this is in keeping as well.

As to the original question... I would say that if the character is not defending at all, then the -1/defense would not apply. However I would also make the character make several composure tests to simply let 100 people shoot at him without flinching. The body's natural reaction to seeing oncoming danger is basic fight or flight, since it seems fight is out of the question, flight would be the natural reaction and that should include dodging incoming rounds, hence my thought on the composure tests.

-D

Well, with them using heavy pistols it would not actually be any kind of danger to him, right?

Your body doesn't know that, nor is tank armor your default state. Redman suit proved that to me, even if i knew that baton wasn't going to hurt me it was still hard just taking the beating for the first bit. Plus all you need is to roll very poorly and the other guy to roll very well.

That's what Edge is for though...

~Umi

There is no provision in the rules for not reacting to getting shot. So no you're not supposed to be able to ignore people firing at you. Not that I 100% disagree... there are times I would allow it (popguns firing at a heavily armored vehicle... but if one of those popguns isn't a popgun woe to them), while trying to avoid getting shot by another vehicle with a big gun. But at character scale... no I can't see any reason to allow it.


But since you insist we didn't address the OP's original question...

The reaction -wound penalty (+dodge if on full defense). Degrades by -1 per attack after the first until the pool is reduced to 0. This is RAW, there is no ignoring people shooting by RAW and not having it degrade. If you get shot a few times... then decide full defense is looking very good right now... you add the dodge to the mix but the -penalty for shots fired at you is still there and growing, it does not reset.

The armor + body is only affected by armor penetration (AP). You always roll the full body + impact, or body + ballistic as modified by AP.

There actually is provision in the rules for not reacting to getting shot - it's called Surprise.

So yes, while RAW doesn't explicitly state you can choose to not attempt to defend, it also doesn't say you must defend, and there is an existing scenario in which characters are ruled as being unable to defend. The operating logic seems to be that as defending is almost never a bad thing, you pretty much will want to defend every time you are capable of doing so, and that the likelihood of someone wanting to not defend is so low as to merit no ruling (or rather no wordcount in the sourcebook).

Also from a game system perspective, it's not like it's abuseable. The overwhelming majority of the time, choosing to not defend is going to leave you worse off than if you do defend, and in the very rare case in which you might have a reasonable tactical usage for not defending, you do so at the cost of risking increased damage in exchange for, at best, a few dice on a single roll.

Mostly I see this coming up in terms of melee combat, and less in terms of ranged combat, if ever. I can't imagine a situation in which it would be preferable in any way to not try to dodge bullets - you can't exactly perform a defense based counterattack against ranged weapons, now can you?

And if the whole "flinching" aspect of not defending is gonna be pressed, I say simply have them roll a composure test.

~Umi

High Force Water Spirit vs 10 Bust-A-Moves with Predators and regular ammo and a waiting guy with a Flame Thrower.

I agree.

Point. But it's not that often that you're up against a bunch of harmless mooks and one lone threat.

One should remember, however, that the negative modifier caps at -4. Extra mooks will still offer up good meatshieldiness, and force the defender to wipe out a greater number of them before they stop taking negatives, but at that point the defender should really be gunning for the lone threat to begin with. You don't take down a Devil Rat by killing the swarm of ordinary rats, after all. (Unless we're talking AoE, of course.)

~Umi

True, but when you are...

The point was that the toys all attack before the flamethower and thus force the spirit to defend 10 times giving him a -9 to the defense against the flame thrower, if not defending is forbidden. BTW the toys had firearms so "Friends in Melee" (that's what I assume you meant by the -4) does not even apply.

Yes Umi... and the penalty is for each time you've been attacked since the end of your last turn. That's why I keep saying there's absolutely no RAW provision for not reacting and obviating the penalty. (and surprise means no defense until you get your first action... and you're not allowed to react to anything causing surprise in wierd cases where you're partially surprised by some and not others).

Each bullet hits like a punch... even with armor... each punch knocks you a little more off balance. So yes it does make sense.


As far as the 10 bust-a-moves...did you remember to roll each of their initiative's seperately. What is the initiative with the guy with the flamethrower. Did you remember the spirit has the option of delay action just like the guy with the flamethrower!

Spirit acts (probably wins on initiative)... flamer acts (delays on initiative)... bust-amoves loose individually... they each go... spirit goes concurrently with one of the last bust-a-moves or just after. And turns flamer into a popsickle. Flamer tries to act but spirit has now used his action phase and has full reaction pool available.

THAT is how RAW handles it strictly. People don't use the delay mechanic... that's why these situations crop up! That spirit is int/log 10... he's smarter than the guy with the flamethrower. Play him as such!

Woops somehow I forgot about delaying for the spirit while using it on the flame thrower guy.

My bad, confused which modifier was capped, or rather misremembered it as them both capping at -4. Not sure why I thought that, but ah well.

And this is why I have dice modifier cheat sheets with me when I run my games. Too many different things to keep straight via memory alone.

~Umi