Welcome to my world. And I can't say my backpack helped my scholiosis(sp?)...

I wouldn't've, but I guess I have to now.

[Edit]Hmm, was it the old forum that underlined smileys with links?[/Edit]

Uh.... your backpack massed FIFTY KILOGRAMS?? That's fragging 110 pounds!

Note the discontinuity in the rules. You can carry up to (Str × 5) kg "without appreciable effect". But the rules don't actually provide any penalties until you exceed (Str × 10) kg. I'm not sure what happens if you try to carry more than (Str × 5) kg but less than (Str × 10) kg. Maybe you collapse into a singularity and the universe is sucked into the resulting black hole.

Yeah, well that's all designed to minimize the actual carried weight. I'm fully convinced that school books are designed the exact opposite way: to cram as much weight into them as possible.

Err, that's because it's up to those limits. Hence "up to (STR×5)kg."

No, it's not. It's 1kg over the weight that a Strength 5 character can carry "without appreciable effect". However, the Stun damage does not start occurring until '[t]wice that load (Strength × 10 kg)". A Str 5 character can carry up to 50 kg without actually suffering any penalty. I'm not sure what "appreciable effect" applies between (Str × 5) kg and (Str × 10) kg, but, whatever it is, it isn't mentioned in the rules.

I can't figure out how this comment is supposed to apply to what I said.

You might be able to get to 80 pounds with a large backpack if the books are glossy-type and packed well.

Three full-sized textbooks (Hardcover, ~450 pages long IIRC), one copy of the Aeneid, one copy of the Illead, one English to Latin dictionary, one workbook-style book, a few random plays or novels depending on what was happening in English at the time, and a stack of notecards.

That's just the backpack. My laptop, the case, the random stuff I lugged around, and the ~500 sheets of paper I had stuffed into it at any given point in time probably added another 5-7 kilos.

~J

Sounds about right to me. The average troll probably couldn't lift itself.

Take, for example, the simple chin up. A lot of people can't do a single chin up, and when you start getting into people who are much taller than normal, or who are simply overweight, the rate of being able to do a single chin up decreases. I've seen a lot of small people, who weight roughly 45kgs, unable to lift their body weight in a chin up.

A troll is fucking huge, and without being very physically active, they're not going to be able to lift their body weight. Period. Your upper body does a lot less work than your lower body, and for most people the arms aren't going to be able to do as much as the legs.

As for the stun ruling, everyone go outside and do some chin ups. See how many you can do before you can't do anymore. Not many, is it? At the very high end of the scale, we're looking at around 20 before you can't do anymore, and that will be done in well under a minute. Perhaps the stun damage is too much, but the time frames for lifting aren't entirely moronic.

Although a lot of people have made this claim, I'll pick on you. Go put 40 killograms worth of cast iron weight into a backpack, then try to put it on and walk around with it. I think you'll all find that it's a lot heavier than you originally thought.

I don't have cast iron handy, but I did carry around a GPMG, a full load of 7.62 belt of ammo, my fullpack, helmet, webbing with 2 full bottles of water which in total weighed at 45-50kg (depending if I cheated and left things out of my fullpack) for 2 whole f**king years. So I do know how much 40kg should feel like. Have fun, little boy.

I used to fight in 40kg of armor... steel breastplate, vambraces, and greaves over a mail hauberk, with helm, broadsword, and a big-ass wooden war shield. I have a very good idea of how much that weighs. That was back when I was first fighting, too, and I was a scrawny geek fresh out of college. In SR terms, my Strength was certainly not higher than 3, and 2 would probably be more accurate. I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, anywhere near the Str 8 that I would've needed to wear that armor all day, as I did on a couple of occasions. (One event, I fought for six hours straight. Quit when I could no longer raise my sword above my waist. I could barely move the next morning... but under SR rules, I wouldn't have been able to do it at all, because I would've passed out after about 10 seconds.)

I don't get it. In the Medieval Shadowrun threads, all the SCAdians went on about how none of the armors weighed much over 20kg. Now why the heck would someone carry 40kg, if a full suit of plate mail weighed under 20kg?

I really don't get this whole being proud about how much dead weight you've lugged around thing. I've never carried more than 7kg to school or university in my life. Even in the military, it was very rare to have anywhere near 40kg of stuff on me -- we almost never had things that we couldn't take with us and march 20 miles with in 12 hours without too much trouble. Only the airborne, "rangers" and those stuck with a sadistic and stupid CO had to carry that much.

I didn't enjoy it or liked it if that's what you mean, but I still had to do it.

There are several "basic human need"s that we can do without.

That's untrue. If you're carrying something that happens to be, say, three feet tall, it matters a lot whether that's two feet off the ground when you're holding it or if it's actually dragging on the ground.

~J

Do you mean a closed-form equation then? No wonder you said it'd be hard.

That particular armor, the kit I'm wearing here (I'm the one with the interesting triangular shield) was a sort of hybrid armor, partial plate over a full mail hauberk. They did have armor like it in period... transitional form between mail and the later full plate. Like many transitional forms, it kinda sucked... it was extremely heavy, and didn't provide much extra protection for the weight. In period, they did the same thing I eventually did... added more plate and ditched the now-unnecessary mail completely. They also wouldn't have been using as much mail and as much plate as I had... by the time the plate got that complete, they'd stopped using full hauberks and were just wearing skirts and other small pieces of mail to cover the areas that the plate didn't, there being no point in putting mail under the plate, like I had.

The reason they used it in period was because they hadn't yet developed the armoring skills to make plate that would effectively cover certain vital areas, but did want the plate reinforcing over the more easily armored bits. The reason that I used it was because, when I first started fighting, it was what I had or could easily build that would make me list-legal so I could get out on the field (and that really comes down to the same issue... I didn't have the armoring skills to make better). I didn't use it for very long... less than a year. I eventually built a set of plate cuisses, which let me lose the mail, and cut my armor weight about in half - down to 20kg, for the full kit - while providing more protection.

I used the plate without the mail for about eight years before I finally got fed up with the knees jamming when I crouched and similar issues, and replaced it with my current armor (sadly, I'm most recognizable there by the ugly white plastic knees... I really need to replace those)... which is the mail hauberk (same one, though I gave it a major overhaul) back again, but instead of the almost-full plate over it, I'm using about a quarter-kilo of high-impact plastic underneath to provide the necessary rigid protection to make it legal (kingdom armor requirements have changed since I started, too, which lets me get away with less rigid armor). It's heavier - about 25kg - and less protective than my old kit, but it's a lot closer to what my early Saxon persona would've actually been wearing (just need to replace the plastic knees and plate vambraces with leather), and stlll nowhere near the weight of my first armor.

But, anyway, 20kg is fairly typical for good armor (as opposed to the padded tunic, bit of leather, and maybe a helmet if you're lucky that a lot of people settled for), 30kg is a bit on the heavy side, but not excessively so. 40kg is extremely heavy for real combat armor, though specialized tournament armor could exceed that. Some of the late period jousting armor was in the 50-60kg range, but you really couldn't do anything but sit on a horse and move your lance back and forth a bit with that stuff on. It included plates that they bolted on after you climbed onto the horse, sometimes spring-loaded so they'd fly off dramatically when hit, and generally would've gotten you killed in about ten seconds flat on a real battlefield.

That's not at all the point I was trying to make. Almost the opposite, in fact. My point wasn't that I was ooh strong and could carry excessive amounts of weight around, it was that even ordinary people - using myself as a scrawny teenager as an example of someone rather on the weak side - should be able to carry radically more than SR rules allow for without immediately collapsing into unconsciousness.

That's not to say that they should be able to do it without ill effect. Carrying around half my body weight in armor was exhausting... but it was exhausting over a matter of hours, not of minutes or seconds(!). It also significantly impacted my speed and agility, and the SR rules only address the former half of that... unless you count the wound penalties from being crushed into unconsciousness by 10kg of equipment as an agility penalty.

That's a really cool shield.

But as for carrying the bride over the threshold, love can do that anyway....