Reading preview #4's combat chapter and focusing on just your typical fisticuffs or busting a clip into someone's ass scenarios, with the Inherent Limit or Accuracy limiting the number of hits you can achieve, in addition, every two Stun boxes counting as only one Physical box when the Stun track is full, I noticed that new SR5 will be less lethal than 4E. Personally I was hoping it would be a bit more like Call of Cthulhu, where combat is really deadly. Or will there be a separate section in the new core book that will cover adding extra lethality to the game?

higher damage, no more Armor Stacking.

Couple things:
Accuracy is not going to clip that many hits off a roll. Typical rolls (using an appropriate gun) will average right around the hit cap. So this is effectively a null-change with regards to DV (provided your sniper isn't using a sawed off buckshot hillbilly cannon, of course).
Less-lethal guns becoming....less lethal? Le gasp. You're trying to complain that you can't kill people as easily with stick and shock, gel rounds, and flash bangs. Seriously.


Those two things aside:
Either the deadliness is staying the same or there are other changes that will make it go up. Like...

Armor stacking. Can't do it in 5E. No more trolltanks.

I've heard this a few times. But armor doesn't stack in SR4 either, right? I mean, there were splatbooks that came out with extra gear that had weird interactions, but the basic SR4(A) book didn't have armor stacking either.

No no..


they meant the SR5 book is gonna be deadlier.

At 480+ pages that hardback is gonna be lethal if someone swings it at you.

Ahahahahaha! Haha!

Sorry, I had to come out of lurking just to show my approval of this comment. It amused the hell out of me.

I will say lugging it onto an airplane so I could read it while I flew out to an assignment this week, as I ran through airport temrinals and up and down escalators and stair cases, in addition to dragging a suitcase and a bag with a 17" laptop in it made me think I might have a heart attack after a while... does that make it more lethal?

@Major Doom
get a grenade or two

with an explosive Dance
Medicineman

I've heard that the term is now "Magazine".

5 bucks into the bad pun jar please! *groans*

I think the idea is that an average heavy pistol shot or a double tap from a light pistol is going to be incapacitating or fatal to an unarmored target.

Since "armor 12" appears to be the new "armor 6" you can expect most people to clip 4-5 damage off any attack, meaning it's going to take about 2-3 heavy pistol shots to take someone down. Or (probably) one Short Burst from an assault rifle. This seems about right for Shadowrun.

Especially given that an armor vest today can stop what we'd consider a heavy pistol round pretty easily, but it's gonna sting like a bitch. (Which I'm assuming will still translate to stun damage?)

Yeah, modern body armor bruises something fierce. Stopping that much force is going to hurt one way or another. But better a bruised ribcage than a punctured lung and drowning in your own blood.

~Umi

As they say, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

We try

Shadowrun 5th Edition Origins Special Print

[Exotic Weapon Skill: Tome, Acc 1, DV 2P (if used edgewise, 1S if striking with the flat side), AP 0]
Can be used as a Shield [Armor +1]


Weapon: Shadowrun 5th Edition Hardcover

[Exotic Weapon Skill: Tome, Acc 2, DV 3P (if used edgewise, 3S if striking with the flat side), AP -1 (Edgewise only, AP 0 if using flat side)]
Can be used as a Shield [Armor +3]
Wireless Bonus: +1 Acc (if you had the appropriate connections which are still 60years off )

Now, an assault rifle will reliably kill an unarmored person if you shoot that person in the foot.

Wound Shock is a B****.

I didn't say it was a bad/unrealistic thing, although I do think it is a tad too strong.
That said, works for me: bullets in the foot strike me as a rare border case anyway. (Besides, I was going to houserule a moderate increase in condition monitors anyway ).

But that is a problem you will find in many game systems, not just SR.

Unless you want to implement a hit location/damage system like BTRC used, but then you can get bogged down in tracking it all, but it can make for more realistic effects.

You may just want a simple house rule for weird shots like that if over half the max health is lost at one time on a limb shot then you lost that limb and half that damage (so say you normally have 11 boxes, you took 7 damage after armor/resists specifically to your foot for some reason, that foot got blown to heck and is gone and you actually lost 4 health (3 points going to blowing the meat to mist) so your down to 7 health (11-4) and minus one foot and probably suffering ongoing bleeding. Consult your local street doc for a replacement and look out for the sick **** who goes around shooting people in the foot.

Normal uncalled shots are just handled normally.

End of the day you want to be able to play and enjoy it in whatever way best suits you.

Again, didn't say it was a problem. I'm answering the question that's in the topic's title: is SR5 more lethal? And the answer is yes, because an average wageslave with body 3 and nor armor has a ~3% chance of surviving an Ares Alpha round that hits with 1 success (and 25% chance of surviving being shot with an AK-97), which is a lot more lethal than SR4.

That said, I *do* think it's slightly more lethal than I would like (my knowledge of gun is very poor compared to most people on this forum, but I had the idea that gunshot wounds, even from assault rifles, were often-ish survivable if they didn't hit vital organs), so I made the Condition Monitors have 9+Body (9+Willpower) boxes respectively (which also solve the body dump stat problem, and still makes Ares Alpha wounds lethal ~30% of the time in the same circumstances).

Ah, it was the specific reference to being shot in the foot that threw me. Yeah the increased damage definitely means unhappy times for the wageslaves being used for target practice.

What? How did you THINK that Sammy got his 5 in Automatics plus specializing?

Hint: You do NOT want to fail your quarterly performance evaluations at Ares

HOW can You shoot someone in the Foot by RAW ??
I doubt that there is a Hit Location in SR5

with a doubtful Dance
Medicineman

Called Shot for Special Effect?

OK


But the special effect can't be :

He who dances Barefoot
Medicineman

At least they got 6 dice for passive doging now. (If they the Reation + Intution for dodging ranged combat from the quickstartrules is correct, that is)

If an avarage guy with a weapon skill of 1 and smartgun pistol/rifle trys to shoot an other average guy that has absolutly no combat training, from 4 meters distance with no other modifiers applying, he will have an hard time hitting him. Its 4 dice vs 6 dice and the shooter with 4 dice needs a net hit. Thats a 21% chance of hittig the target. If the shooter had a weapon skill of 3 he had 38% chance of hitting the target. Still very low for a trained shooter that trys to hit an completely untrained average guy with a smartgun rifle from 4 meters away. And that is for passiv dodging!
There is a reason why you dodge raged combat only with one attribute in SR 4. In SR 5 everybody is Neo.
----> less lethal

I think the grazing hit rule (though not sure if it's still in the new rules) is meant to deal with those cases.

The problem to me is just that there is so little variability in the possible damage from a weapon. Either you up the damage so that a single shot has a chance of killing someone with armor and then it's impossible for anyone without armor to survive. Or you keep the damage low (anticipating the pumped up player rolls that will add +8DV) and it's impossible to kill someone with a single shot from a low end weapon even if they're not wearing armor. And conversely, it's nearly impossible for someone to survive two shots from a low end weapon.

I don't think the game needs to perfectly model the real world, as long as it's consistent and fun. Which probably means different levels of damage for different people. Especially since the real way to make the shooting more realistic would be to make everyone miss a whole hell of a lot more often.

But for the sake of discussion from the real world:
In the U.S. if you're shot once by a hand-gun and go to the hospital, you have a 95% chance of surviving. Your rate goes down the more times you've been hit, but I couldn't find reliable numbers. Most of those people are not wearing body armor and not being shot by expert marksman.
Shooting yourself with a gun (usually in the head at close range) is also survivable about 20% of the time, which should be equivalent to the best sniper. Though, you usually are permanently disabled as a result and need medical attention.
Being shot by police officers firing has a survival rate of about 20%(different statistics disagree, could be as high as 50%), so trained individuals firing at unarmored people (and likely hitting multiple times) is much more deadly. EDIT: And those officers only hit in about 1:4 incidents where they fired their guns.
Overall in the U.S. all instances of someone being shot have about a 79% survival rate. This rate is much higher because it includes all weapon types and in most cases people will be shot multiple times.
If you're a soldier in Afghanistan, being shot has a 15% fatality rate. Most of those cases are trained personal wearing armor being shot by assault rifles.
If you're a soldier in Iraq, being shot has a 20% fatality rate. Again, most often that is trained personal wearing armor being shot by assault rifles. The difference is often attributed to different engagement distances as well as better training by the Iraqi opposition.
Interestingly, the old mortality rate for being shot in war use to be 30%, so armor and better medical care do seem to make a difference or we're fighting much less trained individuals.

Find me a system that accurately models that, along with serious complications from injuries, much lower rates of targets being hit, and doesn't take hours to calculate each of shot and I'll be impressed.

"The numbers on the sights are for how much power we want to hit with, right?"





-k

At the pistol level I think SR5 is less deadly for the runner.
Someone posted that narrow bursts are gone, so no quick damage bump for automatics, but it seems the base damage of assault rifles went up to roughl narrow short burst range +50% to compensate for the detail that no one wil fire burst very often thanks to the wonders of recoil stacking between passes. End result at the assault rifle level things are about even with SR4.
Now things like sniper rifles, genades etc from reports are stupid high DVs and are basically with 1 net hit(or 3 threshold) you die if you don't use edge(or aren't a tank style character). And before people start saying grenades should be powerful, well 1 its a game and instatn death isn't fun and 2 people in real life survive grenades all the time.

It was my way to say "score 1 net success on the attack roll".

one single hit on any attack means all bullets hit the target.
and even if all your bullets only hit the foot? guess.
yep, foot and probably a good chunk of lower leg gone.
or at least shot to a pulp with fractured bones and all that.

What?

I thnk its fairly clear that with damage going up by net hits a single net hit is supposed to represent a hit but pretty much the worst hit you can do and not all bullets hit and pulp you. I thik the damage values clearly show they are making no attempt to balance the game against no armor normals, not that a single net hit is supposed to be a solid hit from all of your bullets.

I don't know where you got that. Besides, I'm talking about an assault rifle fired in single-shot.

GURPS + Tactical Shooting supplement.

Incidentally, it uses modern calibers and has enough granularity to model the difference between a HK416 with a 10" barrel, and one with a 14" barrel.

It does auto fire MUCH better than Shadowrun, but still not quite representative of how it is used and works in the real world.

GURPS also has rules for playing a stalk of Asparagus.

What, doesn't everyone play a stalk of asparagus, or at least have one in their group?

Differentiating between white and green ones.

otherwise you'd have to roll to see how many bullets hit.
or you'd have to roll for each bullet you use to see if it hits.
on a single shot it does not make much of a difference.

... Abstraction, man.

Do you have any idea what real-life hit percentages are like, among trained combatants like cops and soldiers? Honestly, hitting 21-38% of the time, for someone with bog-average stats and a low-end skill (1-3) is very very good. Almost absurdly so, in fact.

And have you worked out how the damage rolls compare, after that fact? Run the numbers after even a one-hit shot connects, and see how your Joe Average is doing. It's really not nearly as "less lethal" as you're making it out to be, in my experience.

Yes, for cops the statistic is 25%. But thats not for targets standing calmly in front of them.
If you add in modifiers for visibility, cover, running target, range, running attacker or target on full defense, you will be way below that statistic.
I am not saying that a roleplaying system can simulate reality perfectly. I am just saying that SR 4 does it better in this case.


Yes, once you managed to hit an unarmored target, it becomes unrealistic the other way around. In reality statistics say that Joe has an ok chance to survive two poorly aimed hits without armor. In SR 5 that seems impossible.

@Garvel
I do not know if you already have the rulebook, if not I would wait with such "checkups" untill you do.
As for now I certainly do not know how the ranged combat modification will play out.

The joke* fooled a friend of mine for about a week while he tried to find the actual book.

Wait, that was a joke?

Then what the hell did I just buy on Amazon? O_O

Dinner.

Can't say had an asparagus in the group, but a few times could have sworn one guy was a mushroom.

I've been in a game with a character who was a tree.
Er. Ex-tree?
Hmm. Tree that had wood harvested from it in some fashion that was crafted into a quarterstaff, enchanted, gained sentience, and then shape-shifted? Yeah, we'll go with that.

So what was worse? His bark or his bite?

And are you sure it was not just a plant spirit possessing the staff? Sounds more like a trickster having a bit of a go.

Well, you will know what to cook for your next session I guess...

For extra fun, serve them some coffee at some point with that asparagus. I've almost knocked myself out from the fumes later when it passes.

I played a Tree that was convinced it as a Paladin. Ahrunk the mighty Oak