I've been thinking about the fundamental shift that happened from SR3 to SR4, and I was wondering about a "what if" scenario that involves an edition of SR that didn't completely dump all of the old systems, but modified them to work better and faster.

So I came up with this.

Skills and attributes are from SR5. Ditto goes for basic augmentation rules (+4 max). Limits go away and damage codes return, requiring a massive rewrite of the gear section which I'm not going to do here because this is a doodle, not work.

Target Numbers exist. They float between 2 and 6 (1s are always failures on the dice). If a modifier causes the TN to exceed 6, the TN remains 6 and you take the excess penalties to your dice pool.

For a simple test involving a skill, you roll the skill rating in dice. The base Target Number for using a skill is equal to 8 - (linked attribute). Additional modifiers may apply. This generates a TN of 2 to 7 for humans, meaning that the best humans (6s) get the easiest rolls, while the worst humans (1s) get the hardest rolls (TN 6 and -1 die). Average humans (3s) get TN 5. This also means that augmentations will take these TNs down into the negatives, which adds room to cope with piles of negative modifiers.

Combat tests generally work by figuring the attack as a simple test, and then adding room for a dodge test. The dodge test is (Reaction) dice versus (8 - Intuition), which can be augmented by Gymnastics for active dodging. Cover acts as a modifier to the dodge TN. Things like burst fire or area attacks can make the dodge test harder.

Combat damage uses Power (TN), LMSD levels, and staging. The 2nd, 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc net success (ie, all but the first one) each stage the damage up by one level. Once it reaches D, remaining successes add to the Power 1-for-1. Weapon Power codes generally sit between 2 and 6 -- anything bigger is typically a heavy weapon or anti-vehicular in nature. Armor codes generally sit between 0 and 4, with 4 being full security armor. Anything bigger is military. Also, generally speaking, Armor of 3 or higher is expensive, obvious, and probably illegal for the public.

A short (simple) burst (3 rounds in BF mode, 5 in FA) increases the Power by 1 and stages the damage up 1 level. It also imposes a +1 TN modifier on dodge tests. A long (complex) burst (6 rounds in BF mode, 10 in FA) increases the Power by 2 and stages the damage up 2 levels. A semi-auto (complex) burst (2 bullets in SA mode) increases the Power by 1 or stages the damage up 1 level.

Sample damage codes:
Ares Predator: 4M
Fichetti Security: 4L
AK-97: 5M
Ranger-Arms Sniper Rifle: 5S

and so on.

This is really bad math as each TN increase (exponential) is worth more than dice pool penalties (linear), You would have to chart it as no flat pool rate would be accurate.

Pulling notation out of thin air, here, but: Isn't that just Attack Skill|Agility (8 ) versus Reaction|Intuition (8 )? It doesn't seem like it's anything other than a standard opposed test...

And as a complete aside, "dodging" really is the wrong word there; conveys the wrong idea of what the character is actually doing.

And rather than fixing that base target number at 8, it kinda seems like that should be mobile based on some axis of difficulty (likely internal factors, especially given the relation to attributes), while the threshold would then shift based on another axis (likely external).

And for those who never did play SR3 or previous, any chance you could explain how damage levels work, and how precisely they differ from taking off multiple boxes at a time? Is it the sort of system where if you don't have the box for the damage at that stage, you have to tick off a higher one, and if you can't you're bleeding out/unconscious?

Light Wounds were 1 Boxes Damage
Moderate Wounds were 3 Boxes Damage
Serious Wounds were 6 Boxes Damage
Deadly Wounds were 10 Boxes Damage

You took wounds in Levels, and could stage a level up (2 Successes to stage a level up vs. target number to hit) or Down (2 Successes to stage a Level down, rolling against the power of the attack, modified by ammo and armor).

So you might see a Predator inflict 9M (Power 9, Moderate Wound Level) with a base hit of 1 success.
To stage that down, The target would subtract his armor from the Power (Say armor 4, reducing power to 5) and then use that as the target number to stage down, with each 2 successes incrementing a step. Sooo, 2 to stage to Light, and 2 more to stage to no Damage.

Had the Shooter garnered 2 successes on the attack, the attack would have resolved at 9S, requiring 6 successes to stage down to no damage.

So... It's literally just a less granular version of the current damage system? I'm actually rather surprised it didn't pop up in Arsenal as an optional rule, then - you can pretty much drop it into the existing system, after all, without requiring much if any modification to either.

Sort of... In that system, Armor was a Direct Modifier of Power, rather than dice added to soak. You could build a character that could literally ignore almost all small arms fire. I know, I did it at least once. What a wake up call when the transition to SR4 happened.

I far prefer the way SR4A handled it, over SR2/3.
Sr1 was a little different, as staging was also a variable based upon weapon. Was VERY happy to see that disappear.

I'm really not seeing much difference - net hits scale damage up, soak hits scale damage down, and the only real difference is in terms of how exactly that scaling happens. As it stands, it's a simple matter of applying the LMSD system to the current soak tests (AP conceptually taking over for Power, in this case, due to the lack of variable TNs).

I guess... In practice, it was a huge difference.
Likely due to the Variable TN's of previous editions.

Really, I'm talking about structural difference. It doensn't take a heck of a lot of structural difference to have a pretty substantial effect on play, though. Obviously having 1 hit make the difference between 6 damage and 3 is a big gameplay difference, but but structurally it's minor.

It really seems like it could have been written in as a "grittier/more lethal gameplay" optional rule.

Sure... I see where you are going.
Except to implement it, you would have to add stats to all the weapons in the game. Too much work for an optional rule, in my opinion. They have a grittier optional rule in SR4A already. And it is deadlier.

Eh. While it would be different, you could still just use Armour+Body-AP for your soak pool. With fixed thresholds, Power isn't so needed. From there you've just got to figure out how base damage relates to wound levels.

There's a Reason why Trolls were pretty much nerfed in the Transition to SR4.
A Troll starts with a Minimum Body Attribute of 6. 1 Base Point and then 5 added on top of that because of being a Troll.
A Troll can, as anybody else, put then 5 points into Body. Which gets him up to 11 already. And then Trolls got Dermal Armor.
Which worked differently under SR3. It gave Level Dice for Damage Resistance Tests to Being shot, hit and stabbed at. So 12.
Without ANY aditional Ware. 12 Dice. To resist Damage with. And now, if you had put some thoughts into it, given him a bit of Quickness and worn armor up to 8, you could take a Shotgun Blast to the Face (10D Damage) and have to resist only 2D Damage. So you had to roll . . 8+Attackers Net Hits on the Attack Roll so your TN is 2 using 12 Dice. And you could boost both the Armor AND the Body Attribute using BOTH Cyber AND Bioware.
So for example, a mid tier Combat Troll would look like 16 Body with 2 implanted points of Armor. So 10 Points of straight Damage Reduction and 16 Dice to (t)roll with.
To put this into perspective: a PAC dealt 18D Damage. After Armor, you had to roll 8+Attacker Net Hits soTN8's with your 16 Dice. And you could use Combat Pool to both try and dodge, thereby lessening the attackers net dice and to augment your body roll. So yeah, Dodge with 4 dice against set TN of i think 4, then hopefully have brought the attack down to 1 net hit and then use Body+4Combat Dice for 20 Dice to basically shrug off an anti Tank gun straight to the Chest. (i may have done this once or twice, my GM's never quite fograve me for my impersonation of the Black Knight i think)
And don't get me started on how much Damage Output you could get on such a Monster in Addition to being tough as nails in old leather boots.

Screaming PG and Min/Max over there yet?
Nope, this is not even 50% of a Trolls Starting Ressources in Attributes, Skills or Money yet.
Plenty left to have fun with.

Indeed...
By the end of our 3rd Edition Game, My Troll Adept Ganger had:
Body 11 (12)
Quickness 7
Unarmed and Melee Combat Skills of 7/8/8/9/12 (13/14/14/15/18 with Counterstrike)
A Combat Pool of 7
And Armor of 11/12.

He did not fear Melee/Small Arms at all, and the Sniper Rifle/PAC were only a mild nuisance.
He may have been a bit slow (no real Initiative boosts), but once he closed to melee, it was generally all over for those around him.
I loved the opposed Melee combat rolls in SR3.

Of course, when I re-built him for SR4, well, those firearms became a bit of a problem.
Had to learn a whole new way to fight.

i preferred high STR cyber/Bio Trolls.
use bow and Arrow for obscene Distance Damage(and reach, i had him up to 1000m for extreme, which means the SHORT reach was someting like 100m or so) and a Dikote applied pole-arm for maximum close combat carnage ^^

i also recently managed to make a rules legal starting SR3 Troll with 16 Rank 8 Skills and maxed out physical attributes too ^^

Spike used a Dikote No-Daichi...
And he had Attribute Boost: Strength (+4) on a starting Strength of 10.
He used a Bow too... which was pretty insane.

I liked him a lot. finally retired him in SR4A, in Hong Kong.

Ah, ok, that works too then ^^
i never really tried the Troll-Adept or anything with troll and magic because the points cost simply did not allow for anything but a very one trick pony to come out of it . .
technically, a Troll-Adept in close combat is very much OP, as you can deal STR(10)S or D Damage unarmed for example . .
and a troll spell-slinger with a force 6 armor spell cast upon himself would simply not care about being lit up birghtly for anybody to see because:
hurr durr, 14 points of armor, 12 points of Body to roll mostly TN2 Damage away with!

but i am no good with the magic system, i know how it should work out in theory, i just can't translate the theory to practice for some reason.
probably because of the high creation points cost and me giving up half way through because it's too much of a OTP even for my tastes <.<;,

I had no intention of carrying the exponential difficulty increases past TN 6. That was part of the problem with SR3. Basically, difficulty jumps up and then tapers until you run out of skill dice.




Dodging, defending, avoiding, however you want to describe it. The "not getting hit" roll to oppose the "totally hitting you" roll.

You don't want too many things to vary at one time, and I was looking for things you could easily write down and read off a character sheet. If your Reaction is 5 and your Intuition is 3, you would have a Defense: 5 (TN3) entry. Five dice versus target number three. From there you would apply your modifiers to TN. +X for bursts, -Y for cover, and so on. Relatively simple.



It's actually more granular, it's just that a linear scale of success leads to an (not quite) exponential scale of damage. Oh, and everyone's damage track is the same size (10 boxes).

It's not about the LMSD chart, it's about the variable Power. Power minus Armor is your Target Number, making a huge difference between a Deadly wound with a TN 2, and a Moderate wound with a TN 12.

I actually came up with some expert-ish AP rules that I didn't write in here. The idea is that an "AP" round gives a bonus to Power, but accumulates Armor Penetration -- if Armor Penetration exceeds the target's Armor, then it's overpenetrating and is consequently doing reduced damage.

And of course I typoed the defense bit. TN5.

And remember: word doodle. I'm always fiddling to try and come up with a good way to get depth out of the system while simplifying complexity in play. One thing I'm not a fan of is really high numbers of dice and things.

The one sort of fiddly thing I see is the difference between someone with a linked attribute of 3 and someone with a linked attribute of 2 is tremendous, while the difference between someone with a linked attribute of 2 and someone with a linked attribute of 1 is minimal.

If I have a linked attribute of 3, and a pool of 12 dice, I roll 12 dice needing 5's.

If I have a linked attribute of 2, and a pool of 12 dice, I roll 12 dice needing 6's.

That is roughly a 50% reduction in capability.

If I have a linked attribute of 1, and a pool of 12 dice, I roll 11 dice needing 6's.

Which is hardly a penalty at all for having a one point lower attribute.

And if you put in modifiers, it means that the dividing line between cutting my number of successes in half and simply subtracting 1 die could be between linked Attribute 6 and 5, or 4 and 3, etc.

It isn't a game breaker or anything, just something that jumped out as a little wonky.

Going from TN5 to TN6 on 12 dice reduces your chance of getting at least one hit from about 99% to about 89%. Going from TN6 with 12 dice to TN6 with 11 dice reduces it from about 89% to about 86%.

Part of it is that I wouldn't plan on having dice pools that large that often -- a dice pool of 12 would be up at the "legendary, one of a kind" level.

Assuming more normal "chargen" ranges of, oh, 3 to 7:

Attr 6 gives you a TN 2. With 3 dice, that means you have roughly 99% odds of getting at least one hit.
Attr 5 gives you a TN 3. With 3 dice, that means you have roughly 96% odds of getting at least one hit.
Attr 4 gives you a TN 4. With 3 dice, that means you have roughly 87% odds of getting at least one hit.
Attr 3 gives you a TN 5. With 3 dice, that means you have roughly 70% odds of getting at least one hit.
Attr 2 gives you a TN 6. With 3 dice, that means you have roughly 42% odds of getting at least one hit.
Attr 1 gives you a TN 6, -1 dice. With 2 dice, that means you have roughly 30% odds of getting at least one hit.

(so -1%, -4%, -13%, -30%, -58%, -70%)

Attr6, skill 7: TN2 7 dice. ~100%
Attr5: TN3 7 dice. 99.95%
Attr4: TN4 7 dice. 99.22%
Attr3: TN5 7 dice. 94.15%
Attr2: TN6 7 dice. 72.09%
Attr1: TN6 6 dice. 66.51%

(so -0%, -0.05%, -0.78%, -5.85%, - 27.01%, -33.49%)

So, yes, the biggest single jump is between Attr3 and Attr2. However, if you keep up the exponential trend, TN7 tends to drop you off the chart into a negative chance of success.

SR3 handled this sort of badly, with TN7+. TN7 = TN6 for all intents and purposes, and then you'd get a new exponential scale from 8 to 12, and then 13=12 again.

I remember a SR2 adventure I was running. There was a troll decker in the group. I found out really quick that no matter how hard the Black ICE was attacking him, mechanically, the Black ICE **COULD NOT INJURE HIM**... unless he rolled all ones on the damage resistance test. All because of the troll's Body attribute....

grr... double post

ah. 'scuse me but . . doesn't the DR roll against Matrix come fro Will-Power/Deck and not Body? O.o

Btw, the easy counter to the "tank" character in SR3 was APDS ammo. Tended to sort them out very quickly.

Only on the high end damage weapons, though. It was still pretty easy to build around that in SR3.

I think that depended on the black IC. Could either be stun or physical damage.

Depends on what you mean by "easy" and "high end damage".

If you allow mil-spec armor and are playing pink mowhawk - then you are absolutely correct. We tended to be a little more circumspect in our approach, so we weren't wearing heavy security armor with a helmet.

A "normal" high damage resistance build character would wear Lined coat over armor jacket over FFBA - giving him a Ballistic of 9. Throw in Kevlar Bone Lacing and Orthoskin to bump that to a Ballistic of 11.

Now, without APDS, non-full-auto-fire and non-heavy weapons basically bounce off.

Add APDS to that now that changes alot. You are still shrugging off pistol fire, but now shotguns and burst fire capable weapons hurt you.

A Frenchi Spas on burst fire is 13D - meaning he's got to roll 8's on his resistance, and he is probably going down.

A Savalette Guardian (which you could get easily) - or the rarer Ares Thunderbolt, both HP, are putting out 12S damage, so you are needing 7's to resist.

Even burst fire capable SMGs and Assault rifles start putting a hurt on him - since they are powers of 10S and 11S respectively, and he is needing to roll 4's and 5's to resist.

If all you faced were SA pistol fire, you were fine, but shotguns, and SMGs are not really unreasonable to run into, even in non-pink mohawk games.

Don't get me wrong, it still made you very difficult to kill (especially if you add in a Platelet Factory and Trauma Damper) - but the idea of the Troll running around ignoring Panther Assault Cannon rounds are just not really realistic.

Correct. The Black IC was doing physical damage that had to be resisted by Body. I was positive that it was wrong and I spent a good 15 minutes reviewing everything Matrix related concerning Black IC. Apparently SR2 troll brains are just as hard to fry as their bodies are to injure. Go figure... Makes me think of "Nyah!!! Missed all the vital spots" while electricity was coursing through his brain.

It was rather screwed up IMO. The Troll decker wasn't that great of one but he could certainly take the physical abuse from Matrix sources. He defined meat shield for us. It definitely was NOT something we expected from the adventure.

It used Body, but the idea that he can't be hurt without rolling all 1's is not mechanically correct. If the node had Black IC in it, it was going to be at least an Orange (and probably a Red) node, meaning the power of the attack would be somewhere between 8 and 12 and doing S damage base. The only thing that reduced the power of the attack was Hardening of the deck, which has a maximum of 3. So even if he is running a deck that had a Hardening of 3, even with a large Body, He is needing to roll at least seven successes to reduce the damage to 0 - and his TN is somewhere between 5 and 9. While I'm not saying you cannot physically roll that, it is a long way away from saying that unless he rolled all 1s he couldn't physically be hurt.

hardened armor was actually worth using in SR3.
it simply negated any damage with power below it's level.
and all other damage first lost a level in staging and then still got the usual treatment of deducting the number of the armor from the power of the attack.


so black ic really did use body then . . interesting . .
"Mungo Deck into Server." *Troll Mungo decks server one something fierce*
"Dis look like datastorage. Mungo take." *Puts HDD/SSD/Chip-Bank into Pocket*

This part is true.



This part isn't - that is only for vehicular armor (SR3 page 149).

And the only armor that counted as hardened was military armor. You could gel pack other armor, but then you couldn't layer it, which meant that sure your Armor Jacket now had a hardened armor of 5, meaning any holdout pistol bounced off of you (which it was going to anyways) - but if you got shot at by a heavy pistol it would hurt a lot. As opposed to being able to layer a lined coat over that armor jacket, over FFBA, giving you a ballistic of 9 - meaning that you can successfully resist even burst fire from SMGs or ARs (assuming they aren't using APDS).

This was part of the reason I was thinking to tighten up normal Armor and weapon Power into the typical Shadowrun rating 1-6 range (reserving the outside of the range for milspec, etc). I'd also keep armor-layering out of the game, because that gets silly.

In the above stuff, I figure for the Troll to take a deadly wound in one shot, with his ridiculous 12 soak dice, the modified attack would have to be something like 13D.

So, really, Trolls ruin everything when it comes to damage.

Ahem?
You can't layer more than 2 pieces of Armor.
You take the highest Armor Number and then add HALF of the 2nd highest.
(Don't ask what happens if there are 2 numbers that are exactly the same)

It doesn't?
Really? I thought it did o.O
Because vehicle armor is considered to be hardened armor, not the other way around @.@

@Trolls ruining things both dealing and taking Damage . .
Yes . . well . . that's basically what their intended purpose is kinda.
So it's actually BAD if a Troll can't soak or deal horrible ammounts of Damage.
Because by then, he's not a Troll anymore. He may as well just be a tall Ork.

In this particular case I had forgotten that it was a house rule that we had that said FFBA could also be layered, since it did not count for calculating penalties to Quickness and Combat Pool. However, strictly RAW, you are correct.

If you had two of exactly the same, then it would simply be the highest + half of the other one (Armor Vest w/ Plates 4/3 over FFBA 4/1 would be 6/3 (since you round down).

I still maintain that it is better to have a 7 armor (Armor Jacket and FFBA) than a 5 hardened armor. It means that Heavy Pistols (power 9) are resisted at 2's, as opposed to 4's, which makes a big difference.



Hey, no worries - it is hard to remember every single nuance of the rules (as indicated by my screw-up above)

Maybe it was just having trouble screwing up his brain anymore than being a Troll had already done.

Vehicle armor is not considered hardened armor. Vehicles are simply immune to stun. The mechanical effect (in 4th, and only 4th) is the same.