Arguably garrotes should use unarmed. Their usage probably best compared to grappling.

You have to get the garrote (instead of your arm) around their neck from behind, then you have to apply the appropriate force to choke with it. The entire point of using a garrote instead of a typical headlock is that it 1) cuts deeper due to a much smaller surface area to apply pressure with and 2) it increases your reach and leverage a bit. But other than that, it's pretty much the same principle as a guillotine hold.

~Umi

mechanically, its not really any different than the Lasers skill covering both a tiny peashooting lasergun and a huge backpack powered laser death rifle.
with traditional weapon skills, those would normally be in different groups - pistols and longarms.

Even pistols and longarms seem more similar to me than a garrote and a whip, is all. So we just disagree. Thank you for clarifying your suggestion.

Like I said, it *does* seem reasonable to have some kind of 'normal skill' equivalents for at least some of the Exotics (i.e., equivalent to Automatics, or Blades), and to allow Specs as normal.

Laserweapon do have some things in common, which makes them quite different from any other kind of weapons.
(Probably no recoil, streight line, shot travels with the speed of light and of course probably totally different to maintain than any kind of "standart" weapon.

So this skill does make sense.

Monowireweapons on the other hand are completly different. A monowire sword has probably nothing to do with an monowire wip, which has nothing to do with a monowire garrot.

Here it is probably better to have skills like:
Wips, Trick weapons etc.

I'm not even really convinced there should be more than 2 or 3 combat skills total. Hell, I'd play with one combat skill without any real complaints. Characters tend to be differentiated by their power and 'ware loadouts rather than their skills anyway. It's already a system whose skill costs and groupings are based primarily on what serves the setting rather than any consistent logic so I don't see any reason to nerd out to weapons fluff when (launchers aside) the granularity is so low that you ought not to bother.

"The Difference between a Sword and a Club is only the side you use for hitting people"

What do you do with those axes which have hammerheads on the back, then?!?

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

*explodes*

~Umi

Or with these Hammers that have a Point on the other End?

I'm with Whipstitch. There should be "Gunnery" (which covers only actual vehicular weapons, none of this "lol if you put a pistol in a weapon mount it's suddenly gunnery" shit), "Ranged Weapons" and "Melee Weapons" in a combat skills group, and the current types can be specializations.

The problem here is, that it gives mundane even less to put Karma in. The SAM could at least handle a wide array of weapons, while the mage could only use pistols...

Apples and oranges to me. Right down to the stance you would use, putting someone in a headlock and slipping a garotte around their neck are not directly comparable.

Melee Weapons should come in 3, maybe 4 variants.
Blunt, Edged, Gloves, Whips. For Blunt and Edged maybe with Long(Reach 2) and Short(Reach0/1). Specialisation for single Weapons available.

Guns should come in 2 or 3 flavours. Pistol and Stock. And one for Heavy-Weapons. Everything else is Launch weapons. Specialisation for single Weapons available.

And one Skill for Projectile Weapons with Bow and Crossbow as Specialisation.

Everything mounted on a Tripod, Smart Firing Plattform, Pintle-Mount or Bolt Mount or fixed Mount or Turret goes under Gunnery.

Swinging, poking and strange.

That's still a lot, Stahlseele… are you joking with them? Basically all you did was help normal guns at the expense of poor melee, split Heavy even further, and for some reason using a Bow is the same as using a Crossbow? You also made Gunnery even worse with the 'mount-based' definition. :/

Previous Editions did it exactly that way, and people even complained then...

Three or four depending on how the weapon works. Cleaving, Impacting, Cutting/Thrusting, Unarmed (which would include glove type weapons). You could combine Cleaving/Impacting into a single skill group. Interestingly, this almost matches the Close Combat skill group with the exception that cleaving weapons (axes) are thrown in with blades rather than clubs.



Goes from Firearms group with Pistols/Automatics/Longarms/Heavy Weapons to Pistol/Stock/Heavy Weapons/Launch Weapons.



Archery in SR4.



That's how it is in SR4.

The only weapon group you neglected was throwing weapons.

Yeah, i felt there was no need for changes in that one . .
And where would you put whips in your system? Especially the usual/monowhip where one is impact and one is edged?

Cleaving works by transferring a large amount of force into a wedge placed against an object. The force is channeled to the narrow point of contact.
Impacting works by transferring a large amount of force into an object.

In both of these, there are two elements which increase the force. You have the long haft, which increase the angular momentum (acceleration) of the head and you have the weight of the head (mass).

It wouldn't. Whips don't work by impact and they don't work by cutting. They inflict significant, but not necessarily harmful, lacerations on the victim. It's a weapon where the pain felt by the victim is no where near the level of harm inflicted when compared to other weapons. There are some arguments that monofilament whips work via a hyper-efficient method of cleaving but I think those would only apply if you're swinging the whip out in a wide arc rather than using it like a whip.

Whips and monofilament whips are the type of weapons that readily fall into the esoteric category. They don't fit into a standard category and usually using them effectively requires specialized training in that specific weapon. It's something I've hated about most RPG systems. They want to include these exotic weapons but using them penalizes the character to a significant degree.

If only there were some category for weapons that are unlike everything else. Seriously though, there's no right way to not 'penalize' these concepts. They usually have some significant advantage, but even without it, they're clearly weird. It would be worse if monowhips were a 'normal' weapon like 'Blades'.

Tripods are already Gunnery in SR4? … Are we sure about that?

Some people may like exotic weapon skills. I generally dislike them because of the narrow focus. I especially hated it in D&D where you had a very limited number of feats and exotic weapons were rarely on pare with simple or martial weapons. It's less painful in Shadowrun where it's a skill, but the cost of Exotic Weapon skills is too high for such a narrow focus. First of all, you lose the benefit of being able to specialize. Second, the skill usually applies to a single weapon. Rank * 2 (4/4/6/8/10/12)is too high of a karma cost for those skills. It should probably be dropped to Rank * 1.5 (3/3/5/6/8/9) or even cost the same as Knowledge/Language skills (2/2/3/4/5/6).

What weapons did you think I was putting in strange?

If we're talking realism here, using a club and using a slashing sword are much, much more similar than using a slashing sword and using a spear, but in SR the first two are different skills and the latter two are the same skill. "Type of Damage" is a really, really unrealistic way to divide weapon skills.

i'd honestly thought you'd misspelled strangle there . .

Shortstraw, I meant that it'd be strange to *group* strange weapons together into a single skill, right? "Hey, I'm good at… all exotics?"

Again, StealthSigma, the whole point in D&D was that people always picked the Exotics (and there were many) that specifically *were* better than Martials (and the Martials are almost all better than the Simples). So your spiked chain, your bastard sword, your wonky transforming or double-sided stuff.

I'm not saying the current setup is correct. I'm saying the exotics *are* special (fluff and crunch), so there should be a premium of some kind. Not a crippling one, no.

One thing I've considered is making exotics work similar to purchasing martial arts/maneuvers, treating it more like a quality then an actual skill. When you purchase the exotic skill, it attaches to an existing skill. There would be some adjustments but would be for the most part pretty straightforward.

For example:
You have Pistols 4, longarms 3, blades 5. You purchase Exotic Weapon (Laser Pistol), Exotic weapon (laser rifle), Exotic weapon (Monowhip), for 5BP each.
You can now use the laser pistol at rank 4, the ares laser rifle at rank 3, and a monowhip at rank 5.
You can then later purchase Exotic weapon (Gyrojet Pistol) and Exotic weapon (Sonic Rifle) to add the gyrojet pistol to your pistols skill and sonic rifle to your longarms skill for 10 karma each.

That would be a kind of solution too . .

Hm. That is kind of interesting. Ironically, that's *more* like D&D's exotic weapon proficiencies.

true, but its a happy medium between current overly expensive and limiting exotic weapons, and the overly generalized "no such thing as exotic weapons", and the extremely generalized "melee weapons skill and ranged weapons skill only"

Yeah, it sounds like it might be good. The existence of the MA system in generic is just feat-like… possibly opening the door for more featlike things, like your suggestion. The fact that it's based on Karma, instead of (super-limited) feats like D&D, could be the crucial difference.

Not to mention, using a Laser weapon is very different than using a FireArm weapon. A Laser is a CUTTING device, whereas a normal firearm is an IMPACT/PUNCTURE device.

Using a Laser effectively means knowing how to hold the beam on a specific location to burn or melt through, or slashing the beam across an area to cut. This is very different from a firearm where a shot is more of an impulse type attack.

In terms of aiming the laser, they tend to be similar to firearms, is the issue. So there *are* similarities and also crucial differences. People usually want there to be at least some bleedover. This is (roughly) why you used to be able to default to similar skills, to me. So I could see adding laser experience to your 'shooting' skill via a MA-style 5BP (10karma) addon… just as one example of a mechanical house rule.

Obviously, we lose something in the service of abstraction and simplicity, but that's usually unavoidable with any rules scheme.

I agree with you that there should be a median defaulting step for similar skills.

Maybe...
If you have the skill: Attrib + Skill
If you have a similar skill: Attrib + SimilarSkill - 2
If you are just winging it totally: Attrib - 2

The GM would determine if the Similar Skill is Similar enough for this situation.

Unfortunately, this is not in the rules.

It was in SR3
It is called defaulting.

That's what I said: you used to be able to default to similar skills. A laser, then, would be similar-but-not-same as your Pistol/Rifle/whatever skill.

This doesn't really work for monowhips at all, but screw them.

No, it does not work for the Monowhip.
Because it did not need to work for the Monowhip under SR3.
Because with the Whips skill, you could use both normal and Monowhips.

… Yes, but we're talking about SR4. As you say, there's no Whips skill. Personally, 'Whips' already *is* an Exotic skill, because that's a tiny, narrow category even if it contains 2 whole things.

So, my point was that there's no skill for whips (mono or not) to be 'similar' to, that's all. This would be the case for other things, I imagine, so the basic 'exotic problem' remains for at least several things.

That's questionable. Descriptions I've read of how a RL laser weapon might work emphasize flash-vaporization of the water in tissue, basically blasting craters in a person.

Also pulse lasers not beam lasers.

It doesn't really matter, because they're still gonna be un-gunlike. But since it was brought up again… 'pulse laser' doesn't mean anything at all like 'shoots something analogous to a bullet', right? AFAIK, it means the beam is pulsed very, very rapidly, for too rapidly to be anything like 'a shot' in the sense that a firearm has. Fluorescent lights pulse, but we wouldn't say they shoot 'pulses' (like 'shots' or 'bolts') of light. That's not too say no one could ever make a laser that fires in intervals analogous to the firing of a bullet, but it's just silly when people say, 'well what about pulse lasers!?'.

That's one possible interpretation of a "pulse laser," and is the way most laser instruments work AFAIK. Weapon lasers are a different beast, though. Increased power requirements might mandate that at least the first models be "semiautomatic," so to speak: you squeeze the trigger once, you get one pulse.

I agree, and this is readily understandable as the same reason guns have 'burst' triggers instead of just 'hold down full auto'. I'm not sure 'semi-automatic' is a valid meaning for 'pulse laser', though. Luckily, it's sci fi and we can do what we want. Obviously, that kind of operation is much simpler for the SR4 combat system than 'slow burn' lasers, and I don't agree that we should *assume* SR4 lasers are 'slow burn'.

My point was that even 'semi-auto' lasers have a lot to distinguish them from guns, as others listed above. They're similar, but different enough.