Read:
"Sr4 was way more lethal. Let me compare [super cheese tactic that shouldn't work] which shouldn't work because [obviously broken rule]. In Sr5 you just can't do that!"

Hooray. You compared the apples of broken rule cheese with oranges, because Stick 'n Shock doesn't exist yet. Not to mention even indicating that it shouldn't work that way because of broken rules. You really expect that broken rule to persist?

Try comparing the same gun, with the same ammo, with the same armor (i.e. Ares Alpha loaded with AP rounds hitting a Flak vest).

So, stunbolt and autofire was cheese in SR4?
I tend to agree but they are kind of advertised as being pretty standard tactics.

They just happened to work way too well so the alternatives (melee, most single shot guns and indirect spells) became forgotten due to lack of effectiveness.

Yes, supermach100 with SnS is the prime example of brokeness but just regular full auto did 15+ damage and was practically impossible to soak without using even more cheese. (A troll inside FFBA inside armor jacket inside a rigger cocoon inside a max armor vehicle inside max smart armour inside a magical barrier nonsense)

Stick n' Shock getting elemental ("half armor") is the broken-ness.

Stunbolt is magic and the original poster was not complaining about magic, but bullets.

Ah, yes, you are right again. I mentioned spells as an example of what "meta" tended to be in SR4 and that it was violently lethal.

Sr5 has gotten rid of "narrow burst", and I like that. It means the difference between single shot and auto fire is not as colossal any more.

Old pistol 5P + 4-ish net hits versus some 12-14 soak dice for ~4 boxes per hit (x 2 per combat round). Very high hit chance (stat + skill versus just reaction)
New pistol: 8P + 2ish net hits and some 16-18 soak dice for ~4 boxes per hit (x 1 per combat round) moderate hit chance (stat + skill vs stat + stat is making defence much easier)

Old full auto SMG 5+9 (full auto) + 3-ish net hits versus same soak dice was around ~11 boxes per hit (x 1 per combat round), very high hit chance and very often oneshot.

New full auto SMG 8+4-ish net hits gives ~6 boxes per hit (x1 per combat round), very high hit chance, low oneshot chance.


Quick update on live longer, if you want slightly lower sudden death, how about 8+body as physical boxes instead of 8+body/2 ? That is a quick easy fix if you want characters to not get one/two-shotted so fast without fiddling with damage values, accuracy and other stuff too much.
Could that help OP to get the more slower killtime combat and less sudden death from "mooks"?

Erm, Stick-n-Shock is in the Core book for SR5.

Comparing the same gun and same ammo (Ares Alpha w/ SnS) you have 6S -half(Impact)AP with chance for instant incap or -2 Dice pool modifier to all actions (4th) vs. 9S -5AP with -1 dice pool modifier and -5 initiative (5th). Full Auto (10 bullets) gives either +9DV or -9 Dodge (4th) vs -9 Dodge (5th). For parity, assuming both Alphas use "wide" burst (the only option for 5th ed.) with Agility 4, Automatics (Assault Rifles+2) 4 and a smartlink against a max reaction target (9) with average Intuition (3), high Body (6) and an Armor Jacket, the target will either have no dice to dodge 12 dice (avg 4 hits, all net) and 9 dice with which to soak (average 3 hits) to take 7S damage (4th) or have to dodge 10 dice (avg 3 hits) with 3 dice (1 Hit) (and the option to interrupt for either dodge or full defense) and 13 dice to soeak with (avg 4 hits) and takes 7S damage again (5th). I would say that out of the two side-effects of electricity damage, the 4th edition rules are worse for the target though I would call it a draw. If the 4th ed. guy decided to narrow burst instead it would be 12 dice against 9 dice for 1 net hit and trying to resist a DV of 16 with only 9 dice, most likely completely filling the target's stun and overflowing into physical.

In this instance I would say that SR5 is either equally as or less lethal than SR4, but not necessarily in all cases.

Whoops. My mistake. I don't actually own the book, so I couldn't check on that. For some reason I thought it was splat-book.

It's core, and generally no longer broken.

It's NICE, certainly, given that you get to impose the penalties for electrical damage, but you also lose 2 DV and your AP becomes a flat -5 no matter what weapon you're using. On the upside, it is a non-lethal option that's still effective against vehicles and drones (as electrical damage explicitly becomes physical rather than stun in that case) and adds on Matrix damage if the target has a Matrix damage track. APDS and EX-Ex are still straight up better for taking things down, but SnS has it's advantages - but it also has some disadvantages against Gel rounds, particularly in larger guns (gel rounds making Knockdown ludicrously easy to achieve).

Surukai: Putting aside the whole apples to oranges issue, your whole means of comparison is invalid - you're comparing case to case, not system to system.

Not really, even your full auto comparisons, the SR4 target only has Reaction-9 to defend with, while SR5 has Intuition+Reaction-9 and that is a big difference.

The SR5 system offers a lot higher defence and that in itself reduces lethality by a large amount. In SR4 wide burst was wasted, targets had no meaningful defence anyway, you always hit. You only get around 3-4 extra damage in SR4 from doing wide while narrow gave +9 damage. That is more lethal.

SR5 system also makes full defence a lot more viable and useful and offers even greater survivability.


I am not saying SR5 is safe and not lethal. I'm just saying that the things SR4 corebook alone gave us was even worse. The difference is that SR4 had a lot of stuff that was outright terrible. Melee was so useless I want to pull my hair, Indirect spells had no forgiving qualities, machineguns were crap (still are) and so on that if you include those unused methods of killing then yes, SR4 was not lethal but who picks up a 6P sword when a cheap slivergun deals 11P, twice per action phase, ranged, silenced, concealable, offers half the defence pool and has a much more useful skill behind it?

Is it that in SR4 pregenerated mooks used the useless weapons like melee and unmodded, unrecoilcompensated guns so Shadowrunners had the advantage of overmodded superguns and marshmallow man armor stacking and GM only pitted them against helpless gangers who doesn't know how the world works?
While in SR5 the mooks use the regular guns that actually work thanks to SR5 actually making most weapons meaningful, is that why SR5 feels so lethal?

Once cheesed out a character with 26 dodge dice in sr4a. Long story short he was a horse.

I notice you're considering elements that reduce lethality, but excluding those which increase it. You get hit less often in SR5 (sort of - dice pools range higher now), but generally for more damage, which means that fights swing a great deal faster and the line between alive and dead is much, much thinner.

Also a factor: APDS is now far easier to get to the point of being CharGen legal. High end ammunition being more common makes things deadlier.

That only matters if you actually hit. Since defense pools are much larger, and because attacking has a Limit (and defending doesn't), that means actually landing a shot is harder.

I acknowledged the higher damage per hit earlier I think. In both that I agree that the general feeling of SR5 is that you take 5-8 boxes of damage when you get hit (and realize that you can't take even one more hit like that).

And many people have in good detail pointed out where that feeling can be discouraging while I think it has some good qualities to it.

It discourages stupid players from picking fights and killing everything that doesn't go their way or fall down on their knees to worship the player characters. If every mook is a potential threat there is a reason to not fight everyone.

But, if you have a high level fighter in DnD/Pathfinder and meet a lvl 3 commoner the power balance is completely different. Not even a complete combat round rolling 20 will even make a dent in the fighters HP pool. It is a matter of style how you like those things. I GM both Pathfinder and Shadowrun and I apriciate the huge difference in how players look at combat. One is pure xp/loot and the other is a necessary evil they use as backup, to speed things up or to avoid getting caught or ambushed, not the prime and only purpose of the game.

If combat pose a huge risk that people die on all sides of the conflict then all sides have a reason to let the other side flee or escape a conflict.

IT opens the doors for this nice old quote (Art of war, if I'm not mistaken)

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence. Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.

Expected damage on hit and expected damage in general have to be considered separately in judging lethality. The latter offers the statistical norm, but the former gives you an idea of what heppens when that norm is deviated from, and that's very important.

Not really. I mean, even using the rocket tag analogy, if you're using unguided rockets you're unlikely to die. One hit and you're toast, but since the odds of landing a hit are small, it's not as lethal as you'd imagine. What's lethal, both in games and the real world, is accuracy; and SR5 puts a cap on accuracy.

The flaw in this reasoning is that it excludes the extremely important factor of how fast things swing.

And that cap on accuracy is simply not imortant in the way you suggest - it's pretty damn hard to generate enough hits to meet or exceed the accuracy of most weapons.

Not in my experience. It swings fast and hard. At least one person, if not more, do it on a regular basis at our table.

That will vary from table to table, and by the relative skill of the party.

For instance, my PnP group is not very combat oriented. The "combat guy" has an Agility of 4 and a Pistols of 5. Even with a smart link wirelessly active, without modifiers he rolls 11 dice, but his Accuracy is 7. I think since we've started playing, he has hit his limit once, and never gone over it.

On the other hand, a more combat oriented character can easily start with 18+ dice, and so would be far more likely to hit that limit.

It also depends on the weapons you are using. If the same character from the PnP were to use a Roomsweeper instead of a Predator, he would hit his Limits more often, and the more advanced guy would hit them constantly.

My Technomancer uses a Roomsweeper - Dice Pool of 9, Limit 5 (Laser Sight). Limit broke more than once. What is statistically improbable to happen often, often does at our table. Seeing as how it takes Thousands of rolls to obtain an average, outliers are pretty common, in both directions. *shrug*

Your table is a statistical anomaly. Just because your table rolls above average all the time does not mean that the rules are broken. It means your table rolls above average.

I've known a guy like that. He would roll 3d6 for stats in D&D and end up with...

18, 17, 16, 18, 14, 15

I'm not kidding. He ran a game once and rolled stats for every single player because we'd roll pretty average, but he wanted above average/exceptional characters. Before racial mods the party of six had probably fifteen "18s" collectively.

Does that mean that the 3d6 method is broken?

No, it means that Joe rolled well, all the time.

Agreed... But the fact hat it happens should be factored in to the discussions of what to expect. I am sure that if you took ALL of our Rolls Over the last 10 Years and compiled them, they would be close to the statistical average, if not right on the money (because that is how statistical averaging works). However, you cannot just say that Limits are irrelevant most of the time, BECAUSE SWING IS A THING. Limits as a concept were poorly thought out, in my opinion, because of that very thing. They Punish players and their characters who do not build to the outlying areas of the game, strictly because that Swing in Dice Rolls happens, and is a lot more common (in my experience) in the Middle Range of Dice Pools than at either end.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that was the intent:
No matter how good and no matter how lucky you are, that gun can't instant-kill people at 40 yards.

To answer the original request. If you find combat too lethal I recommend a house rule that has you use body*2 instead of body.

Which is Bunk.
A Pellet Gun can kill a person at 40 Yards if they are lucky and hit their target in the right spot. Now, it might take a bit of providence to do so, but saying that the gun is completely incapable of such a feat is totally wrong. Growing up, I knew an old hunter who hunted with nothing other than a Bolt-Action .22 Rifle. Killed Deer, Wild Boar, Mountain Lion, and Varmint all with the same gun. And he did it on such a regular basis that I have to completely discount Luck as a factor, like the developers want us to believe (saying to just use Edge to bypass the Limit). Saying that a gun is incapable of killing things because of some arbitrary Limit set by someone who has absolutely no idea what weapons are capable of is the truly sad thing here.

I'd like to clarify that I was referring to generating that many hits on defense.

Yeah, with Defense not Limited, it creates oddities... Somehow, you can dodge Bullets. *shrug*

My point was that even with larger defense pools, ithard to beat the accuracy of the opponent's weapon, and thus it doesn't factor in quite the way it's been suggested it does.

It is quite hard to argue lethality on a subjective basis. As GM, you can reduce lethality by using less capable opponents with less efficient weapons. As a player you amp up your defensive pool by favoring Reaction and Intuition and using situational mods. Hitting the limit of your opponent on a regular basis is nice, having more dice is important.

Actually, it's fairly easy to measure.

A shotgun (usually) has Accuracy 4. That means if the defender can reliably get 4 successes on the defense, he's essentially safe. 4 successes is the expected result of a dice pool of 12; by a coincidence, that's also the lowest dodge pool for a custom PC that I've seen in SR5. So, the average character has little to fear from the shotgun, as more often than not, it can't hit them. Yes, the right confluence of events might conspire against the PC, but that's what Edge is for.

It´s not good to judge lethality by looking at a single, inaccurate weapon either.

Ah, but since you've decided to use shotguns, we need to bring defense penalties into play. And 12 isn't really "average" - that's generally what you see for characters going at least somewhat out of their way; we're talking about REA/INT in the area of 6/6 or 8/4 or something of the like, and you're looking at basically the lowest accuracy figure you'll ever see.

I believe "cherrypicked" is the word I'm looking for here, but even then, let's look at a medium spread, which drops the pool to 9. Add a semi-auto burst onto that, drops to 7.

With the full auto shotguns in Run and Gun you can theoretically inflict a healthy -14 dodge on a target. That'll get pretty much any target I can think of.

Accuracy on weapons brings in a golden feature of diminishing returns on spending too much on stupid dice pools and that alone is a main reason I like SR5 compared to SR4.

Though, I think there is a point with the rocket tag analogy. Even with 99% chance to take 0 damage per round if one hit is splat you don't get a feeling of "we almost didn't make it".

Characters come out from combat either dead or completely unharmed and that feels lethal and random. Some don't like that.

Also, remember that 12 dice might roll 4 hits on average, that still means they roll 3 or less 39% of the time. And a full 5% (5.4% to be more exact) for 1 or 0 hits. Those 5% are not as uncommon as you think. Rolling 0 or 1 hit on 12 dice is statistically likely to happen at every table, every other combat, every game session.

Rolling 3 or less is far far far far more common than you think. Even defence 20 is far far from safe. As GM I stopped worrying and just kept shooting my high defence targets and they all go down pretty quick.

The chance to roll 3 or less for various pools:

Pool (3 or less)
1 100,0%
2 100,0%
3 100,0%
4 98,8%
5 95,5%
6 90,0%
7 82,7%
8 74,1%
9 65,0%
10 55,9%
11 47,3%
12 39,3%
13 32,2%
14 26,1%
15 20,9%
16 16,6%
17 13,0%
18 10,2%
19 7,9%
20 6,0%



Even at 18 defence (9+9 in stat!) you are not safe from shotguns or combat axes. You are not a statistical anomaly when your character gets hit. You don't even have bad luck, it is likely to happen quite often, including you.

Method for statistics: chance to roll exactly N hits with K dice is: combinations(N over K) * (2/3)^(K-N) * (1/3)^N. I.e. the chance to roll K-N misses in row followed by N hits in a row multiplied by the number of configurations you can order hits and misses. Then sum that for N = 0, N=1 and N=3. That is how statistics works.

Dicepool/3 is just the average, not your guaranteed hits!!!

We need to get modifiers into play, and we need to calculate odds for actual opposed tests. I predict a) limits won´t matter often if you pick the right weapon, and b) picking up a weapon without training does not make you dangerous to combatants.

I used a simple example because I didn't want to do a lot of math. We can get into more complicated examples, but not at 3AM after I've spend all day in the Multimedia labs.


Actually, it doesn't. What it does is bring a new level of system mastery into play: it's no longer about massively overinflating dice pools, it's about inflating your Limit as well. This means we'll start seeing even more min/maxing, as there's two things that need to be maxed, forcing more mins.

What's more, Limits only work if they hit the sweet spot. If limits are too low, players will be constantly aggravated as their great rolls are taken away from them. If they're too high, they don't come into play, and so they end up not being a limiting factor (pun not intended). In between those two is a place where Limits can be an effective game balancer without annoying players. However, I don't think SR5 has found it yet. They might find it by the time 5.5 comes out, but I'm not going to bet money on it.

I've done the maths for opposed chances of success for a number of things. I used it to show the effectiveness of various attacks and show how an accurate attack performs compared to an inaccurate one at various defence pools versus various targets.

Some of it can be found here in my grenade post:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...c=39934&hl=

But, I've cut out the actual reference to the graph

I have here a graph of hit chance with an Accuracy 4 weapon and a grenade at various dice pools. The Acc4 gun is targeting various defence pools with 6 being weak, 9 average-ish and 12 a strong pool (+ a 15 as bonus for a decent defence, still far behind what a mysad can do but who cares). I also added a supergun (accuracy 7) versus defence 9 (average target). No matter where you look, the grenade wins all the time (and this is ONLY counting direct hits, ignoring all partial hits with 1-6 meters blasts that deal at worst 12P for a frag)
http://reptid.se/datas/users/1-grenadesautohit.png

This was mostly meant to show how broken grenades are, but the graphs with guns are still interesting.


Now, to your main argument, that limits add just another thing to inflate and min-max.

Sadly, you are correct. There is too much liberty with limit breaking tricks to make inflated dice pools get the nice neat diminishing returns they need. But that is sadly the case with a lot of numbers in Shadowrun 5, even worse than 4. The fragments of a system is there, but some people on the team must have been incompetent at maths/statistics or just didn't actually test their stuff enough to realize their errors.

I'm not just thinking about the broken aoe attacks rules that obviously doesn't work at all but also things like Quickening costing 1 karma, Reagents doing nothing useful, Alchemy/Enchanting having innate limits to their use that requires quite good understanding of the rules for players to pick the preparations that actually work. And then you see Cyberdeck costs, the missing damage gap between assault rifles and huge big heavy machine guns....

They did get rid of a lot of extended test nonsense so once again, you see that some people on the team is thinking in terms of playability and quality of life for players and GMs. Too bad that kind of thought and vision didn't go all the way through. Not to mention the terrible text quality in many chapters (Like the one describing dumpshock.. it made my brain hurt!).

Thanks for reminding me, I'll add "at no point can the limit be increased by more than +2 cap" just like attributes have +4 limit for my games to try and get the limits back in play.

I've started to find that lethality is really not an issue for my current PC. See, I use called shots to disarm (or nowdays to disable the enemy's arm), effectively taking them out of the fight in one shot anyway.

@Surukai: Since your sheet does already take all the input, can you create one for the supergun vs. various defense pools (say 6 to 18 in steps of 3)?