See, this is one of the things I like about it. Maybe it's coming from a high-lethality Cyberpunk 2020 background where you had no defence roll (shots were success tests) and pretty much any shot could kill you if it hit you in the head. I love the increased lethality of shots. You certainly have to think before exposing yourself to autofire. I missed this a little in SR4.

I can see how people see these things as 'issues' though

Sure, that's cool, there's always someone who loves swing-y-ness and high lethality. Lots of people (mostly DMs, truth be told) like low-level old-skool D&D where the mage can be killed in one round by a housecat, and even the Fighter has barely enough HP to survive a single full-damage attack from an orc!

The issue is, how to counteract it, if one wants to? Higher armor values is, I think, the answer.

I would question whether CP2020 was this lethal, myself, because in CP2020, people constantly got hit and shrugged it off with zero or minimal damage - that's almost impossible here. If you're hit at all you're in trouble unless you're in truly terrifying armor (which can happen). A headshot could kill or seriously injure most people (not serious cyborgs or people with helmets on), but was a 10% chance (much lower odds than here) or a called shot, and I regularly saw tougher PCs laughingly walk through autofire in that. One thing is identical though - any DV which will even challenge someone in "serious" armor in SR5 will auto-splatter the average PC. Balancing that was always a challenge.

I'm certainly willing to admit that my experience might just be my experience. It doesn't invalidate my point, though.

When it comes to lethality, Shadowrun has always been a game of eggshells armed with giant hammers. In every edition, taking out even tough opponents has been fairly easy. In SR2 and 3, killing someone was just a matter of net successes; because of the way soak rolls worked, there was a very fixed limit on how much you could soak, regardless of how much armor you wore. SR4.5 increased the size of attack pools, but also added regular defense rolls (they used to be a managed resource), and also vastly increased the size of soak pools.

In other words, Shadowrun, like CP2020, has a history of being very all-or-nothing when it comes to damage. In my experience, wounding mooks was rather rare; you either took them out in one shot or missed. The same holds true for bosses and bigger threats; they shrugged off lesser shots until you hit them with a big enough attack. Now, though, I'm throwing huge attacks at times and only succeeding in wounding people. If you're saying that the developers wanted people to get wounded more often, instead of getting killed outright, I'd be inclined to listen-- that'd make it a feature, not a bug. I just can't see how that dovetails with the increased lethality goal they were going for. )I'll accept that this is like combat spells-- for the longest time, Shadowrun combats tended to end when the mage's turn came up. Now with the nerfs, one-shots with combat spells are infrequent, which may end up being a good thing.)

I also disagree with it from a game design standpoint. Over time, I've come to prefer systems where mooks are one-hit wonders: they're up, or they're down. Tracking separate wound tracks for each-- or hit points, or damage boxes-- can get really tiresome. If I have five different mooks, all at different levels of damage, it gets really hard to keep track. Up-and-down mechanics for mooks is much easier and simpler.



Actually, it does. Because Shadowrun is a net success game, the more accurate your attack is, the harder it is to avoid *and* the harder it is to soak. In SR4.5, a weak weapon with a lot of successes was much deadlier than a powerful weapon with one successe. In SR5, that's now folded into accuracy. So, even though an Enfield is much more powerful than an Ares Predator, the Predator is more likely to hit and hurt you. If you can routinely get 5+ successes on a dodge test, you have little to fear from the shotgun; but getting 7+ is harder, so the Predator is actually more dangerous.

The problem, Cain, is that the increased lethality is basically on the swing - as in, it's not a question of whether or not you get hit where the increase is seen, but in what happens when you do get hit. Even if the statistical breakdown of a "hit more often for less damage" and a "hit less often for fatal or near fatal damage" were the same, the experience of each would be radically different; it takes only one moderately unlikely roll to completely take things off of the "expectation". It is not simply a matter of multiplying the damage against the proportion of the time that you get hit.

That doesn't follow.

Look, comparing the shotgun to the Predator again: a Colt has a base damage of 10P, and an accuracy of 4. The Predator has a base damage of 8P, and a accuracy of 7. So, the maximum damage you can deal with a Colt is 14P, but the Predator caps out at 15! Since net successes count for both damage and accuracy, the ability to get net successes is a greater measure of lethality.

If this were D&D, you'd be right: in many games, weapon damage is independent of degree of success. But those games tend to be less lethal anyway; a dagger isn't going to kill a high-level fighter, not without something significant backing it up. But in Shadowrun, damage depends on degree of success. So capping that ends up capping damage.

You're missing my point. What I'm getting at is that in comparing the lethality of the systems, you can't use a simple statistical model of expected damage, because that wholly fails to capture the actual experience. What I'm getting at is that even if the statistical expectation is the same, the system where you hit less often, but hit for lethal or near lethal damage when you do, is going to be perceived as more lethal and in a very real way is - specifically because of what happens when results deviate from statistical expectations.

No, I get what you're saying. The problem is, damage in Shadowrun depends on net successes. Even if you ignore misses, and just figure degrees of success, Limits put a cap on how much damage you can actually deal out.

Look, in D&D, degree of success doesn't matter. The weapon with the higher damage code is the deadlier one. In Shadowrun, however, level of success matters: hitting for one net success isn't as good as hitting for five. Damage codes matter, but so does how much you stage up your hit. This has been true in every edition of Shadowrun so far: eight net successes means just about any hit is deadly!

The problem is that in SR5, you can't *use* those eight successes under normal circumstances. If your accuracy is five, unless you have a way of bypassing a Limit, your damage can't be staged past that. I'll use 4.5 as an example, since it's the easiest to compare: in that system, a Roomsweeper might do 5P, while the same gun in 5th does 7P. That sounds deadlier, except that even 7P isn't enough to actually kill most humans. In addition to that, now the Roomsweeper has a limit of 4. That means, under normal circumstances, you can't actually stage the damage past 11P. So, on the best possible hit with a Roomsweeper, the other guy only needs two successes on soak to remain in the fight. In 4.5, like every other edition of Shadowrun, there was no cap on damage output, it was only limited by how many successes you got. And since you're talking about statistical outliers, you can't say that getting a lot of successes was unlikely. (Not to mention, my experience is that it wasn't; a well-built character in any edition had little trouble getting a massive pole of successes.)

Yeah, but that's sort of secondary, especially when one of the weapons you're using as a point of comparison is potentially lethal on just a single net hit.

That depends on defense pools and soak pools. Armor increased as well, so even though damage went up, so did soak pools. And defense has increased too; it's not just Reaction anymore. Soak and dodge pools don't have Limits, either: so even if you are hit with a direct shot from a Roomsweeper, if you can roll two successes you will not drop. Two successes aren't hard to get, so it strikes me that the weapon is less deadly.

The way Soak went up didn't keep pace with how much weapon damage went up. The Roomsweeper's not much of a one-shot weapon - though the flechettes are hell against unarmoured targets - because it's just a bad weapon. But let's look at some other categories, too - the AK-97's gonna do a pretty great job of one-shotting someone with average stats.

This is simply not true. On average the Enfield is vastly more dangerous. To average 5 successes you need a pool of 15. To average 7+ you need a pool of 21+. Those are huge effin' pools. You yourself said you didn't see 20+ pool characters in your games. Either way, normal enemies typically have combat pools of 8 to 12 - averages thus being 2 to 4.

Plus if you're rolling with flechettes the Enfield is negating some significant part of your Defense pool anyway (probably only doing stun damage but eh...).

You keep saying SR is a game where margin of success affects damage - this is true - but it's a small factor in most cases which aren't wild overkill. If you have numbers that mean you typically hit with 6 net, your enemies probably average 4 net - thus only 2DV comes from success - whereas 11DV comes from weapon damage and AP factors in twice too (probably more important than net successes if significant).

When SR4 came out, I remember many people saying that finally light pistols could be a threat and that PC could get killed in two shots. A few books later, and you could get bulletproof PC once again (though maybe not as much as in SR3).

So I don't know how long the "higher lethality" of SR5 will stay.

If we see a scenario where armor values generally increase whilst weapons stay the same, then "higher lethality" may decrease. For example, if armor values increase by 3 for most PCs, that'd make the lethality a fair bit lower in one sense - you'd still get two-shot (or even one-shot), but it'd be stun damage. A 6 point increase would take things up to a three shot and that'd be very noticeable, but at the same time, I think that whilst the high end will certainly increase as more books come out, the low end looks set to stick around 9 to 12 armor (with, ironically, a business suit with a coat over it being about the best unobtrusive armor you can get - much better armor than, say, explicitly armored biker leathers, thanks to the wonderful logic of Run and Gun).

You can already make pretty bulletproof PCs - it's just that they're all heavily cybered Street Sams - they'll get even tougher when the cyberware book comes out (that's not even a prediction, that's just what will happen, dermal sheathing etc.) - whereas everyone else will stay where they are.

There's also the question of whether gun modification or armor-design rules ever appear (why they weren't in Run and Gun and yet extremely lengthy environmental hazards and demolitions chapters were, god alone knows), and whether they make it easy to increase offenses or defenses.

Oddly enough, my experience was that SR2-3 was the most lethal of the editions.

In SR1, while you only got Body to soak, armor soaked wounds for you, in the form of autosuccesses. What that meant was with enough armor, you were practically invulnerable. If you had enough armor, weapon power didn't matter, you could soak anything.

SR 2 and 3 changed the model. You still only got Body to soak, but while armor made it easier, if didn't soak the damage for you. The amount you could stage down a wound was limited by your Body. No matter how much armor you piled on, a damaging enough attack would hurt and kill you. So, having a Body of 1 or 2 was a serious liability. You couldn't rely on your armor to take a hit, your Body was crucial.

SR4.5 went back to the old model. Armor soaked damage for you. This time, instead of autosuccesses, it added dice; while IMO this was a huge improvement on SR1, it still meant Body was less important. If you had enough armor, your actual body score could be low or even irrelevant, you might get the most of your soak dice from armor anyway.

Well, you're not taking into account the notion that actually can bypass that Limit on a regular basis, and that you don't often need to.

See, with most limits you probably aren't going to be exceeding them all that regularly to begin with. An accuracy of 5 means you'd need an attack pool of 15 to consistantly reach your limit. As one of the big changes that SR5 introduced was smaller dicer pool sizes compared to 4E, having 15 dice isn't as common as it once was, and consequently you're not really gonna be hitting your limit terribly often, much less actually exceeding it.

And then when you do hit your limit, another of the SR5 design philosophies comes into play. The devs wanted to reduce Edge hoarding, because the actual fact of the matter is that in 4E, a whole hell of a lot of Edge went unspent on missions (unless your character concept revolved around spending it constantly, as with a Mr. Lucky). Their intention, then, is that even when a player does hit the limit, they should merely see that as an excuse to consider using the Edge which many of them would end up not even touching during the entire mission anyway.

Unfortunately, this runs into a slight snag in the form of player perceptions - it's the old "But I Might Need It!" mentality which drives players to get to the end of an RPG with a bag stuffed full of countless unused healing potions and restorative items that they've collected on their way, but always saw as being so potentially valuable that they didn't want to use them for fear of being caught without them.

~Umi

See, I have different Experiences. DP's have GONE UP in SR5, all skill descriptive being equal. What was once professional at Rank 3 is now Professional at rank 4 or 6 depending upon how you interpret it. Since that has increased, and since I have never been one to super-stack modifiers, I end up with MORE Dice, rather than less Dice, in SR5. If the intent was to limit Pools (which many will deny) then they failed miserably. *shrug*

That's specific to your methods, TJ, not systemic.

The goal wasn't to reduce dice pool size, though, but to change the source. That said, we shouldn't pretend someone with a high dice pool will voluntarily use a low Accuracy weapon.

I don't know... I LIKE Shotguns. They are quite deadly, low Accuracy be damned.

And smartlinked they have a respectable Accuracy. The Mossberg in particular is a nice choice.

Might just be my experience, but that's not what I've found in game.

Sure, you can bypass the limit by spending Edge. Edge, however, is finite. While it's quite powerful in SR5, even more than it was in SR4, you can't rely on it for routine rolls. It's really useful for turning a borderline roll into a spectacular success, but it's not good to need it on a regular basis.

Second, while dice pools are currently lower than they were in SR4.5, SR5 also doesn't have as many options to increase dice just yet. That will come in time. Right now, though, I'm seeing bigger dice pools in SR5 than I saw at the outset of SR4. I'm not sure where things will end up in terms of dice pool sizes, but they will increase over time.


As I said, in a relative sense I'm not actually seeing smaller dice pools. I am seeing optimized characters hit their Limits on a regular basis, which does force them to spend Edge or be less effective. I am still seeing pools in their upper teens; my character rolls 19 dice on a regular basis, and can push that further with Attribute Boost. So, I'd say that 15+ dice is still common; it's the over 20's that I'm not seeing as much of.


This is another thing I never saw. In SR4.5, it was normal for most characters to end the game with no Edge left, at least at the tables I ran and the games I played in. The exceptions were high Edge characters, with an Edge of 6-8. If you avoided combat, 6 Edge was enough to give you a small surplus some of the time; and I've *never* seen an edge 8 character run out when it was properly built.


Well, with an Accuracy of 4, the defender only needs 4 successes to dodge a normal attack, no matter what the attacker is rolling. So far, the SR5 character's I've seen have a base defense pool in the double digits, so it's not all that odd for them to get 4 successes on a dodge test. At any event, this is where I see a lot of edge being used: so far in SR5, I've seen more Edge spend on defense rolls than any other kind of roll. And that makes a lot of sense, it's a very good use of Edge. But that also lowers the lethality of the game.


The problem is you need a net success to hit in the first place. In all editions of Shadowrun, Dodging > Soaking, because dodging an attack means no damage at all, while soaking carries risks. If you can't get that net success, though-- because of Limits, or because defenses went up, or in the case of SR5, both-- then you can't reliably deal damage.

Look, one of the goals of Shadowrun, from the very beginning, was to differentiate it from D&D. In D&D, a thug with a knife isn't a threat: he can't deal enough damage to kill even a moderate level fighter. In theory, Shadowrun was trying to avoid that, so a punk with a gun was a real threat. In practice, SR1 failed in this regard. SR2&3 did better, since you couldn't pad your soak dice with armor. SR4.5 and 5 are steps back to the SR1 idea: armor directly increases your soak.

More important is that dodging is easier from SR4 onwards. You didn't get a regular dodge pool in classic Shadowrun; it came from a spendable pool, which meant as you used it, it went way. Additionally, spending on defense hurt your offense. In SR4 and 5, you routinely get a dodge roll. What makes SR5 worse, though, is that non only have defense pools increased (from just Reaction to Reaction + Intuition), but attacks have limits (and defense rolls don't). That means getting a net success is harder, and you not only need that to increase your damage, but to hit in the first place.

Man, you missed the session that my 4-edge character spent three points in the space of about 15 minutes. 15 table minutes.

The only reason I didn't spend the last one was so that I had a point left in case I needed to actually stay alive. It did, however, make the combat that soon followed MUCH safer for the group as a whole (as the automated ceiling turret considered us friendlies and therefore was effectively removed from play).

(Oh and 4 edge is notoriously low for me. I almost always picked up 5, unless human in which case 6).

Wow, My Edge average is a 2-3 for all Characters.

Most of the new players I've seen go for an Edge of 3 or so, at least in SR4.5. The skilled character builders always went higher, though, usually much higher. High Edge is useful to everyone, so there's no reason not to max it if you can. There's an ongoing argument as to how far you should push it, though, or how much you should give up to get it. But in general, I've found that I don't need to give up a whole lot to end up with a bunch of Edge.

There are cases where it gets less useful - specifically, characters for whom it can be more costly to use. 01 technomancers in particular, since they have to spend 2 points rather than 1 to negate a glitch.

It might've only been three. That particular game was...gosh, at least five years ago now.

Might've been three with one edge at the tail end of one session (with a small refresh) and two more at the start of the next. It's all fuzzy.

But yeah, I literally did not have the budget to allocate to get a single extra point.

My high-edge characters rarely (if ever) spent down to having only two left to spend, but it wasn't like I stayed at 6 the whole campaign. Naw, I'd spend it, not every session, but where it counted. "This guy needs to die, edge on my attack." "Holy shit grenade, edge on defense." "Oh god I don't have this skill, edge like a mofo! I CAN BE A FACE TOO." Mostly I got high edge because the number of added dice was higher, thus each point was more useful.

I'm not sure we disagree much here. All I'm saying is that the grand result of the above is that SR5 is a game where most attacks either miss entirely, or do 60-100% of your condition meter. As I remember, rightly or wrongly, in SR1/2, most attacks seemed do relatively small amounts of damage - like 10-30% of the meter. That gives the impression of high lethality. Which is a correct impression. You're right, I think, that less attacks actually connect in SR5, but here they are much more likely to result in big trouble - this means, and this is important, that the runners have much less time to think, time to mitigate, time to retreat. You can be winning a fight and then BAM, one unlucky, unlikely set of rolls, you're dead - that's not a lot of fun, and it's not very interesting, and further, it doesn't encourage good tactics or teamwork in combat, just good ambushes, because ending the fight as quickly as possible is all that really matters. It's not even dramatic! Just shocking!

This is, ironically, very similar to early-edition D&D. The classical 1E/2E AD&D fight is the PCs brutally ambushing/bushwacking/ambuscading (I love that word) the enemies and totally wiping them out in a round or two. If the PCs were ambushed they were probably dead/captured (depending on the DM).

Whereas if you are dying in 3-4 hits instead of 1-2, there is much more tension, much more drama, much more time for people to cooperate and try to save each other, and much more reason to try retreating or the like. Same for the enemies, which makes fights a bit more entertaining, typically. There should be a chance of one-shots, sure, but it should be a small one unless there's a vast disparity in power - where due to limits and so on in SR5, it's basically either non-existent or HUGE.

I guess where we do disagree is that very last line - I think that you generally do not "need" the successes to increase your damage - you NEED that one success over defense to hit. I mean, concrete example, AK-97 - ACC5/10P/AV-2 - say the shooter has 5/5 Stat/Skill - best possible hit (as opposed to fail) is 5 successes, worst possible is 1 success. What really matters then is how many successes the Defender gets - if it's greater than or equal to your successes, the number you got is totally irrelevant. The number you get is only relevant if you beat it. Let's look at the difference between best case and worst case hits that are not dodged - best case is 5 net successes (0 defender successes), worst case is 1 net success (0 to 4 defender successes). In the best case you then have a DV of 15, worst case a DV of 11, both are AP-2 - let's say the target has an armour jacket, AV12, so -2 = mAV10, he's then using a soak of say 4+10 (body+mAV) so rolling 14 dice - which means typically 3-4 successes, let's call it 4 - so he takes between 7 and 11 damage - meaning he is either extremely badly injured, and will be downed for sure by another hit by practically anything, or he is downed. Is there a difference? Yes, but he's screwed either way.

This is what I am saying - in most real runner scenarios in SR5, you're either crippled or dead from a single hit. That's a high lethality game. You may dodge a lot of bullets before that one, but when it catches up with you...

To be clear I don't have specific solutions or the like, and I don't really intend to change the rules on this until I've run a lot more SR5, but it's a very distinctive setup, and it's one that, to me, feels more like low-level old-school D&D than older SR.

I rarely ever use it, so having a lot of it is a waste of resources. I generally make characters to never NEED to use it, so that the few points I do have can cover the "oh crap" moments.

In SR1, you only rolled Body, but armor granted soak autosuccesses. As a result, if you had enough armor you could shrug off just about anything. The relative power of the weapon was irrelevant because of the autosuccesses. If you managed to get through their armor somehow, then you were right-- you usually only did enough to hit them for a Light or Moderate wound, just what you could stage past their armor. But overall, it wasn't a very lethal system.

SR2 and 3 were basically the same system; Armor made it easier to soak, but you still only got Body in dice. As a result, combat was much deadlier; no matter how much armor you packed on, you could only get soak successes up to your Body. As a result, a low Body was an extreme liability; if you needed four successes to soak, but only had a Body of 2, you were screwed. Stage the damage far enough, by getting enough net successes, and you could kill anyone. It was very deadly. Even higher body characters, like orks and dwarves, could be felled by a good enough shot. (Trolls were safer, though. A troll with max body and armor could withstand just about anything, I've seen SR3 trolls take direct hits from assault cannons and not be wounded. Physical combat against a troll was a bad idea, you had to resort to magic.)


That's fine for PC's, and for significant enemies. It is more dramatic and fun. However, for mooks, it's a pain in the tookus. Trying to keep track of the conditions of 10 nameless guards is a major hassle, and it slows down combat. For mooks, even threatening mooks, you really need an up-or-down monitor for them. Things run much faster, combat is more entertaining, and everything is smoother and easier to track.


Well, there's the problem. With a low Limit, attacks are easier to dodge. So, against the Enfield (Acc 4), if the defender can reliably get 4+ dodge successes, he's got nothing to fear. Despite the higher damage code, the actual DPR is going to be very low. RHat suggested that these weapons were better for those with a lower attack pool; but that just makes it worse, since they're less likely to even reach the limit.

But even if he does hit, the numbers you show suggest that the most likely result is the other guy will be wounded, not out. And like I said, that's fine for serious opposition. However, SR5 mooks use the same stats and condition monitors, and wounding a mook is a horrible situation. You've got to individually track everyone's wounds, so if there's a lot of mooks, there's a lot of tracking that needs to happen. It's much better when mooks are up or down, things go much faster. (And one of my complaints with SR5 is that I never see one-shots, even against mooks; so far, everybody but one mook has taken at least two hits to take down.)


Again, I'm not seeing it. In one of my first Missions games, we went up against a sniper. The street sam was directly out of the book; he took three direct hits from the sniper, and was still fighting. (Injured, but still fighting.) We hit the sniper several times, including one Edged roll for 16 successes. He still got away. (I'm pretty sure he was badly injured, but it was still frustrating.) So, what I'm seeing personally is that you can be wounded easily, but actually killed or significantly crippled is another matter.

I'm willing to admit it might just be me, but that doesn't mean my experiences are invalid. I just haven't seen the lethality in practice that the game offers in theory.


And in my opinion, that's a bad thing.

Shadowrun combat should not be like D&D combat. In D&D, a thug with a knife is no threat to a decent level fighter; he can't do enough damage to significantly hurt the fighter. Change thug with a knife to punk with a gun, and you have a similar situation in Shadowrun; except now, it's supposed to be a credible threat. And in Sr2-3, it was: a good enough roll from the punk could injure or kill anybody except the troll tank.

You're right, SR5 has gone back to the D&D model. The only way punks with guns are a threat is if they pull a stormtrooper squad, and unload a massive volley of fire at a shadowrunner. Enough cumulative defense penalties might result in a hit. However, since armor now increases your soak, you have more dice to soak with, increasing your chances of being only lightly wounded. So, the punk with a gun is no longer a threat.

I see players use it a lot. More than anything, it's for defense tests: Players greatly prefer to dodge rather than risk a soak. As a result, how fast they use Edge depends on how much they get shot at. I don't see it used on offensive rolls nearly as often, unless someone's trying to show off. But yeah, players use a lot of Edge on defense, and how much they use depends on how often they get attacked.

I use Cover a Lot. No need to dodge if the cover will take the damage.

Well, in SR4.5, there's still a chance that you'll be hit. Frequently enough, I see players spend Edge after the defense roll, since they know how many more successes they need to fully dodge. And even if they don't get that, they will succeed in reducing the damage some. In this case, you can wait to see how your defense roll played out before you decide if you need Edge or not.

So, I suspect that even for you, if someone hit your character despite your cover, you'd probably spend Edge to avoid being shot.

You would be wrong - I usually try to soak the damage (and tend to take damage as a result - Armor values in the 7-10 range tend to have that result in SR4A). But I don't get hit a lot, because I don't tend to make myself a target. Just started a SR5 game, so we will see how that plays out, but that is my modus operandi. If you don't make yourself a target, you tend to get shot at a lot less.

This tactic works surprisingly well.

And surprisingly few people follow it.

I had a character in one came who when a firefight started, ducked down behind a bar. I was only able to take one shot per pass, at penalties, because of it.

On the other hand, I emerged from the fight as the only PC who didn't take any damage (except two who were in another room and not involved). That was also the fight that the melee-twinked vampire got one-hit KOed by a shotgun before making a single attack roll (regeneration saved him from outright death). Most of the players were like, "Eh, suppressive fire is only 5 DV, I can soak that" and shot back from the middle of an open room.

As anyone who plays tactical RPGs or the like knows, though, this tactic relies entirely and completely on other people not doing it. You say "surprisingly few people follow it". Yeah, you'd better hope it stays that way! If everyone tries to "not make themselves a target", then everyone is equally a target, and enemies will maneuver so as to deprive you of cover and so on.

It also makes you near-useless, so you're not really helping your team. It's not very different to just running away. I mean, use cover intelligently, don't just run in like a moron, but equally don't pretend hiding behind a pillar in the dark and occasionally semi-blind-firing a silenced pistol achieves much beyond personal survival!



You know I agree, right? SR5 has this with mooks, at least as an optional rule. The trouble is that people who are into "realism" abhor such rules, so they main rules have apparently been designed to make everyone pretty "up and down"!



RHat is straight-up, unarguably correct. You are wrong in your final assertion. That is simply not how math works, sorry. If you can't reach the cap even slightly reliably, you should not care about it, and should use the biggest, nastiest weapon you can. A shotgun is particularly good for low-skill types because you can use flechettes to lower the defense roll of the target. That's mathematical fact, not opinion.



Your Sam burned Edge, iirc, and was frankly, freakishly lucky. I can demonstrate the odds if you give me the parameters. As for the sniper, you have four possibilities:

1) The DM messed up the rules (quite likely - most likely I suspect - he probably did something dumb like take the sniper's armour off the weapon's DV).

2) The DM cheated/fudged in his favour (it happens).

3) The 16-success hit totally killed the sniper but the DM burned the sniper's permanent Edge in order to live.

4) Wild statistical anomaly rendering your experience irrelevant/meaningless.

Pick one!



Well, sorta. Someone will a small gun or a knife is pretty much no threat to a runner. Someone with a big gun, even a crappy one, could quite easily get lucky and take off half or more of your condition meter.

Certainly it seems a less than ideal design - it requires more book-keeping of meaningless enemies, and means PCs and important enemies can get one-shot in lolzy, undramatic ways. I do think +3 armor will make a little difference and Run and Gun gives attentive PCs +1-3 armor in general (for a few k nuyen) so there's that.

Did I have a lower kill count? Sure.

But I still contributed. I still threw lead in the opposition's general direction which ultimately reduced their dodge rolls, and on the occasional hit I did get, even if it was lower damage, still caused them to lose even more dice.

The opposition was using cover as well, just less effective cover (overturned table) and I had a better shot (table surface was between my allies and the enemies, rather than between me and them). So while I took a penalty for firing from behind cover, I didn't have to contend with their cover.

(I also didn't lace the factory we sabotaged / blew up / set on fire with improvised grenade traps in order to deter the authorities in coming after us. Like one individual in our group who just didn't seem to "get it." He then tried to take our mage as a hostage in order to "avoid being caught" as he made his way out of the building, posing as a firefighter carrying a rescued person. And then proceeded to hijack a moving car. In front of the cops. Our mage totally used that opportunity to cast Alter Memory on him...yeah, he went to the salt mines and we calculated that he'd be there for 2 years before his willpower resists would generate enough successes for him to recover his original memories. And the we booted the player from the game).

That doesn't make any sense. Because of the degree of success thing, when you're hit in SR4.5, you know how many successes you've been hit by. If you're only hit by one or two net successes, you're better off spending Edge after the roll, which gives you the best chance of completely avoiding the shot.


My statistics are weak, but the problem isn't the average, but the outliers. Because the current SR system has a high degree of variability, it's not all that rare to see 4+ successes on a small dice pool. Basically, the mook with a shotgun isn't a threat; even if he gets a really lucky roll, all successes, the defender's dodge difficulty is flat.


The sam didn't burn Edge. He did use three points of it, which I think is all he had. You can look up the parameters yourself: the sam was directly out of the book, in the hands of a new player, so there weren't any fancy character tricks going on. The module was the first Chicago Mission, I think it was called "Chasing the Wind". You can look up the sniper's stats directly.

This being an official Missions event, I doubt that the GM would have blatantly cheated, fudged, or creatively interpreted the rules. And she's a good GM in other systems, so I tend to trust her. And while a statistical anomaly is indeed possible, I find it odd that I'm encountering so many of them. One-shots, even against mooks, has been a one time thing; the rest of the time, no matter what we hit with or how many successes we get, the other guys don't go down in one hit.


Someone with a crappy big gun (low accuracy) is less of a threat than before. In previous versions of Shadowrun, even with a low dice pool, he might get lucky and get more attack successes than the other guy can dodge. So, he was a threat on a lucky shot. You're saying the same is true on a lucky shot in SR5, but the problem is that no matter how lucky he is, he can't roll more than four successes on an attack. That means it's easier to avoid the attack entirely; and even if you are tagged, even with the higher damage code, the damage is lower.

Yes, these are outliers, but I think we agree that this level of opposition is only a threat on a lucky roll. Limits prevent lucky rolls from happening.



My current SR5 character is an adept, who has been hit only twice in his career to date. Both times were from behind, I might add. In the first Mission, he was the sniper's first target; I did get lucky on that attack, as I got a good Danger Sense roll and was able to spend Edge to completely dodge. The reason I didn't get shot at more was for two reasons: One, I used cover, and Two, the sam didn't.

Anyway, the time I got hit was a nasty fight in an alley, two PC's went down due to stun damage. But in both cases, it was thanks to multiple hits: repeated Stunballs, and then getting hit by weapons hat didn't do Physical, thanks to armor. Now, I don't mind that stunballs are nerfed, I accept that as a feature. In exchange, the enemies also took multiple hits to finish. The ones who shot me in the back did hit and deal damage, (I couldn't use cover against them), but they failed to take me down despite a pretty good set of hits. I'm not sure that anyone actually died, either; I don't know what armor they were wearing, so I don't know if they took physical or stun from out attacks.

Mooks are also dangerous on unlucky rolls. In our PbP, we had a Mystic Adept get shot at by someone with a heavy pistol. The attacker got 3 hits on their attack test. The Mystic Adept got two hits on 18 dice (I know, an anomaly) - and took 8 boxes of damage, nearly killing her. If the attack had been from a shotgun instead of a heavy pistol, it would have killed her. (She was out of Edge).

That's still relying on luck. What you describe is a combination of a lucky roll on the mook's part, and an unlucky roll on the MA's part. So if you're saying it takes a combination of the two for a mook to be a threat, that's fine, it's a valid direction to take the system in. However, it is also less lethal.

Mathematically, perhaps. Experientially? Absolutely not.

I would not consider 3 hits a lucky roll for a mook. A Professional rating 0 mook has a dice pool of 6. If he aims, that goes to 7. It isn't that lucky for him to roll 3 hits. Is it the norm, no, but it isn't like it happens once in a blue moon either. If you go up to even a rating 1 "street scum" level bad guy, his dice pool jumps to 8, and then to 9 with an aim action - and now the 3 hits are far more common.

So while it requires an unlucky dice roll from the player to roll less than 3 hits, it doesn't really require a lucky roll for the goon to roll 3 hits as well (we're perhaps splitting hairs, but the idea is that bad rolls happen (the street doc tried to stabilize an NPC, and rolled 12 dice and got 0 hits ), and if the bad guy rolls average and you roll poorly, his limit doesn't affect him.

The funny part about the particular incident in the PbP was that the guy shooting at our Mystic Adept was not a mook, and rolled 15 dice, and only got 3 hits. It just so happened that when the player rolled their 18 dice, they only got 2

Even so, it was a pretty interesting combination of probabilities that led to a serious wound. And you know, that's fine, if you want to set things so mooks aren't a serious threat outside of dumb luck. That's how a number of good game systems do things, so there's nothing wrong with it. However, it *is* less lethal than regular one-hit takedowns, like we had in previous editions of Shadowrun.

I can't speak for editions prior to SR4, but one-hit kills were NOT regularly seen in SR5, and that's what people are usually comparing it to when describing SR5 as more lethal.

Bwuh?

Do you mean, one hit kills weren't regularly seen in SR4.5? I think you might have typoed there.

Anyway, I did see a lot of one-shotting in SR4.5, although it was largely against mooks. Only serious opposition could withstand a good attack from a combat character in that edition. Magic was the biggest offender, combats usually ended after the first stunball, but most of the time people's dice pools were so huge they were likely to cause an instant drop.

Like I said, Shadowrun combat has been described as a bunch of eggshells running around with very large hammers. And, I kinda like it like that, although everyone's tastes will vary. Now, I'm seeing almost no one-shots, although I am seeing a lot of wounding going on. And that works, it can make for a fine system, but I also can't see how it's *more* lethal than one-shots.

... You know, I need to clarify something: Are you defining a one shot as one successful attack, or one attack regardless of if it hits or misses? Because no way should a mook tagged with an assault rifle or shotgun not be dead in SR5. Even with a pistol, using reasonable standards of comparison, their survival is unlikely.

For serious opposition? No question SR5 is more lethal - SR4 armour values went nuts compared to damage very, very easily.

And besides that, the concern here is lethality from the player perspective, not from the opposition perspective.

One shot drops. Wounding is good and all, but a game with more one shots and down effects is decidedly more lethal.

Now, this is just my experience, but even with a huge dice pool I have trouble taking down mooks in one hit. I'm running a pistol adept with a dice pool that is usually 20+. Even when I hit my limit, I don't regularly take out mooks. And against more serious opposition, even Edged shots just wound them. I've one-shotted exactly one opponent so far, and that was a mook who failed his dodge test, versus a called shot for damage.

So, I don't know what your experience is. It could be very different than mine. And the math I've seen could go either way, although it seems like the Limit mechanic would both make it easier to dodge and cap damage. But what I've experienced is that this game is much less lethal.


I'm still not seeing it. The most serious opposition I've seen so far was the sniper, and he couldn't kill any of us. He did hurt the street sam pretty badly, but he was still in the fight after three direct hits. I haven't looked at the module to see exactly what the sniper had, but my guess is he had over 18 dice on the attack, and was using a high-power, high-accuracy weapon to boot.

As far as lethality from a player perspective goes: in my ideal system, mooks operate on a up or down mechanic. They can be a credible threat, but they also shouldn't require a lot of bookkeeping; it's easier to just take them out of the fight than try and track individual hit points. However, I'm not even seeing that level of lethality. As for the players, a lot of being one-shotted is really not much fun for them, so being able to be wounded isn't a problem on that side. I don't have a problem with that, but I can't reconcile it and say the game is much more lethal.

So, here is my question. You say you run a pistol Adept with a 20+ pool, and that you hit your limit.

Not sure what gun you are carrying, but let's assume an Ares Pred, let's load explosive rounds. Fairly basic gun and ammo.

You roll 20+ dice, let's say you aim, that gives you +1 limit. So your limit is now 8. You should roll in the area of about 7 hits, so no problem there (you can get a little lucky and get 8 hits). Fire a sem-auto burst (you can probably handle the recoil.)

What is a mook to you?

Rating 0 guys have a stats of 3 - and no armor.
Your 7 his are resisted by his 4 dice to dodge (-2 for the burst), generating 1 hit, he then rolls 3 dice and generates another hit, taking 14P, he's down.

Now, no armor seems a little extreme, but even if you gave them an armor vest, that just gives them a modified armor of 7, so they are still taking around 12P, and going down.


Rating 1 guys have a dodge of 6 (-2 for the burst) and a body+armor (-AP) of 11.
Your 7 hits are reduced by 1 for the dodge, and then another 4 from the resistance, so he takes 11P - and he's down.

Rating 2 guys have a dodge of 7 (-2 for the burst) and a body+armor(-AP) of 14.
Your 7 hits are reduced by 2 for the dodge, and then another 5 from the resistance, so he takes 9P - here is the first time that he doesn't go down from the first hit - and even in this case, he is 1 box away from being down.

So - maybe it is just an issue of defining a mook. When you say "mook" - do you mean Rating 0, 1, or 2?

You are assuming that we know that degree of success... we don't generally know that until after all such decisions have been made. Our GM asks us if we would like to spend Edge, and when we decline we are told how much damage. Sometimes he is generous and tells us how many hits we need, but I do not expect such treatment. Also, my design philosophy runs counter to having to know the effects prior to decisions. I usually roll with it and move on. On occasion, I will spend edge to aid in soak if the roll really tanked, but otherwise, I mark off damage and move along. Of course, since I tend to try and minimize my threat profile, I am not generally the primary target, which ALWAYS helps when the T-Bird pilot is targeting the Street Sam with the Vanquisher Autocannon (Always a bonus to being more nondescript in my opinion). In the rare instance where I become Prinary target, I also occasionally spend Edge on a completely tanked Dodge Roll, but again, it is very rare. When you are only rolling 6 dice or so, it isn't that big of a difference whether you get 1 or 2 hits generally. I am generally happy to get my average 2 hits, with the occasional outlier thrown in from time to time.

Lobo: I honestly don't know, i haven't personally seen the stats on the opposition. However, it is all official play, so you could look them up if you wanted to. I haven't bothered, personally.

One question, though: I didn't know you could fire a burst with a Predator. How does that work, exactly?

Semi-automatic burst. Complex action equivalent of a standard burst. usable with semi-auto weapons.

Sr4 was way more lethal.

SnS from a Supermach100 (high velocity smg) means you get +11 DV from full auto + 6 (SnS) -4 to -10 effective AP thanks to retarded elemental rules + at least 1 net hit for minimum of 18S where you soak with HALF your weakest armour (impact armour) + body. The overflow from stun was typically enough to kill targets and a guarandeed IDK (Instant disable or kill).

F11 stunbolt/ball had negligible drain and was impossible to resist and only a maxed willpower Dwarf could survive.

It was so easy to get guaranteed oneshot in SR4, that is harder in SR5 with non-grenades.

In SR4 regular singleshot guns and indirect spells were completely useless, but autofire dealing insane damage (+9 or +11) and direct spells targeting the weak willpower/stun defence were way overpowered.

SR5 has made regular guns and normal sane ways of fighting a good choice. You can melee, shoot, stab och throw a lightning bolt at your target for good effect.

Only grenades/aoe spells stand out as being overly lethal in my opinion.


The issue with hits taking >50% of your effective health, forcing you to rely on defence instead is a natural part of cyberpunk-ish game style and it makes a bad and boring board game but might suit the lethal roleplay experience for most groups. As long as everyone around the table are fully aware that shots are lethal and to laugh at "low level goblins doing just 1d4 damage" players should go play DnD5 or pathfinder. A good shadowrunner shouldn't just laugh at mooks with guns and kill everyone that insults her. She avoids stupid fights.

If unnecessary combat has a high risk of killing your character with a lucky shot then maybe the non-combat character roles don't feel so left out all the time. The decker that have to spend 80% of his nuyen on an overpriced deck don't need to feel as bad that he only get to act every 4 'rounds' in combat because he can't afford gimmick-initiative or oneshot capabel dicepools.


That said, I still houseruled -1 damage on all firearms (Except MGs) and banned motion sensor type grenades and clarified that aoe spells works LIKE GRENADES (as rules say), that is, they explode next combat turn. That 12 DV -12 AP inescapable fiery death requires at least some thought from the mage...