After years of playing games like 7th Sea and Savage Worlds, the idea of having "mook" rules is extremely appealing. 4th Ed presents the concept of Grunts for that purpose. From my cursory read, the main difference is that they use a single condition track rather than 2. Seems like it would be a snap to adapt to older editions of the game with no modification necessary. Mainly, I'm interested in reducing book keeping and speeding up superfluous encounters for a more cinematic experience while still keeping something of a threat to the PCs.

So how well, in your experience, do grunts speed up combat?

Have any of you introduced any improvements on the grunt concept. Not creating new templates so much as tweaks to the overall concept.

Are there any pitfalls that I need to be aware of before dragging grunts wholesale to SR 2/3? I'm not especially familiar with the 4th edition rules.

Thanks,
Tom

Depends how pink you want your game's mohawk to be really.

Go-gangers can die by the score for all I care.

Renraku security forces, not so much.

Does that help?

Tom

Then make go-gangers weenie mooks (use the stats from the core rules or make your own). Personally, I prefer the game deadlier, but YMMV.

Won't speed combat much though since it's highly unusual to beat enemies through both damage tracks or attack different tracks each turn. When one track is through, an enemy usually is out of combat. That said, template NPC are very useful for a GM.

The big hurdle with a direct port over from SR2 and SR3 is that the value of stats was reduced across the board monoby 2/3. Additionally some of the skills have changed names and specialities. Armed Combat(Edged Weapons)MonoKatana for example is Edged Weapons (MonoKatana) in SR3 and Blades (MonoKatana) in SR4.

I'm working on a GoogleSheet to handle this type of conversion to make the Adventure Modules from SR1/2/3 usable in the SR4 ruleset.

Link

The big bookkeeping issue in older editions were individual pools (if you used pools for NPC) or Pro Rating (if you used that). Dice pools in sR 1 through 3 were different from SR4 in that they were separate from skills and attributes, almost attributes in themselves, and could be added to skill rolls (who wewre only the skill stat + pool in combat) or defense rolls (pool + body). Porting SR4 skill+attribute rules might make combat faster, but also deadlier since it significantly boosts your mooks.

Ok, just to clarify, I'm not looking to port over the skill+attribute mechanic to SR2/3. That's madness. Not do I expect that I can just drop a statblock from SR4 wholesale into the mix. I'm not looking to reduce book keeping across the board, though I have a few tricks I think might work.

I'm simply looking at the concept of Grunts and how that might be adapted to earlier editions of the game.

If all it requires is a single condition track, with both stun and physical damage being effectively the same for grunts, that's easy.

If it means simplifying dice pools for grunts, that's also easy.

Is there something else that makes grunts click in 4e that I'm missing?

Tom

In SR4, damage can be shifted over to Stun fairly easily—IIRC Physical damage with Power less than target armor becomes Stun. As a result, it's probably not uncommon to be dealing damage to both tracks.

In SR3, there's no such mechanic—it's uncommon to even be able to deal different kinds of damage with the same attack, and the only reason I can think of to deliberately mix damage types would be to increase TN mods on a difficult enemy that you can't reliably deal more than L damage to at a time. I'm assuming such an enemy wouldn't be handled under "mook" rules in any case.

My initial reaction is that whatever speed benefits are present in SR4 rely on things not present in previous editions.

~J

Uh...grunts already exist in SR3. I can't remember if it is the main book or the Shadowrun Companion but they introduced the concept of Professional Level. Part of the descriptions are mentions of damage level before they disengage. So at professional level 1 they disengage after a Light wound. Professional level 6 fight to the death.

If you want a single bullet to be able to knock multiple combatants from the fight just figure out how many thresholds get beat. So if you inflict 6 boxes against a level 1 character type then 6 of them leave the fight. If the threshold is a medium wound then 6 boxes knocks out 2.

Stun or physical doesn't matter. If they're hurt they're hurt. Just flavor the wound differently.

Well that's why I posed the question. Because I'll freely admit I'm not up to date whatsoever on SR4. I've flipped through the PDF and that's about it. Other than the one little tidbit about damage, I can't find any real difference between Grunts (or Lieutenants, really) in SR4 and your stock encounter/contact statblock in SR1/2/3. And that seems easy enough to port over. But there may be something hidden in the overall rules that is fundamental to grunts that I'm not getting from my cursory read. But if the responses I've gotten so far are any indication, there isn't much more to it. So I'll give it a spin when we start playing and see what shakes out.

Tom

Now that's interesting. I hadn't seen that. I'll have to compare the Threat/Pro Level details between SR 2 and 3.

Tom