Ok, but which vehicle's body is used for the calculation and which takes half?

An object can always harm the vehicle if the relative velocity is high enough.

Even if the velocity is low, apparently. Light Weight Chain Link Fence Destroys Car after all.

Generally speaking "1/10th millimeter latex paint" isn't that damaging to a car, even at very high speeds. Yet, such a sheet of this material will still impart actual boxes of damage in Shadowrun.

It's not until near relativistic speeds (0.0001c and up) that this changes. Mostly due to the fact that material elasticity at these velocities (and thus forces) alters drastically. I.e. the paint can't get out of the way fast enough and everything acts like glass.

I'll also refer you to this.

So an aircraft hitting a bird is fatal to both. What is the airspeed velocity of a laden swallow, anyway?




Only one stayed behind to try and defuse the nuke. He didn't succeed, of course, but he did manage to slow down the timer a bit. This was in an abandoned missile silo, so he hid it behind some blast doors, and MacGyvered an unlikely combination of launch plates, a parasail, and a small bowl of petunias. When the blast went off, he basically let it launch him out of the silo, and then parasailed his way down. He did break most of his bones in the process, but it seemed like a suitable Hand of God to me.

bowl of petunias, eh?

well, now we know where the first time happened i guess

(oh, and a bird taking down an airplane and dying in the process is not totally unbelievable... though it is fairly unlikely, it has actually happened. by the bird going through the engines, mind you).

See, the problem with nukes is that if you're close enough to try to disarm 'em, you're too close to live when they blow. Kind of like relativistic baseballs.

~Umi

Power of physics is trumped by the power of plot.

Besides which, this is the Hand of God. It was a lot more costly than 4.5's Escape Certain Death, and could only ever be done once per runner. He had to do it with chutzpah.

It was the closing mission of the old Virtual Seattle Shadowrun Living Campaign. At the end, the big bad who had been giving the PCs endless trouble including trashing their home base and killing the team's nominal leader, was getting away in an armored sedan. Most of the rest of the team was still struggling with the mooks he had left behind, so he was gloating into our comms as he was pulling away.

He was therefore quite surprised when his car got rammed from the side by my character's battlevan, ending up wedged into an alcove in the side of a building. His doors were pinned shut, and the trouble with armored sedans is that shooting out the windows to escape doesn't work so well.

My character waved at the dude from the van and calmly exited via the rear doors, snagging a Dragon ATGM on his way out. He limped a safe distance away, aimed carefully, and sent the antitank missile into the open rear doors of the van. A van whch was stuffed with three campaign years worth of high explosives, grenades, and other volitile weapons & gear.

It was a glorious sunrise.



-k

And this is why you never mess with KarmaInferno's characters. Ever.
The list is:
Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
Never taunt KarmaInferno's characters.

I'm amazed that in three campaign years of owning a "Battlevan" stuffed full of explosives, the player didn't get it blown to smithereens a lot sooner.

In fact, recall a story on these very forums of someone getting shot at with Explosive rounds or some such, and the GM asking "How many missiles do you store in the back of your Bulldog?" and the player replying, "How many will fit?", and it not ending well.

~Umi

Well, the old Virtual Seattle rules didn't allow anything "military grade" in the game. Of course, the way they defined "military grade" was a little vague. It mostly centered on Availability, so you could slip lower availability items under the threshold. Of those, the Great Dragon ATGM was probably the biggest bang for your buck. As a result, ATGM's became the heavy weapon of choice in that era. It was the best anti-vehicle weapon you could get, and it was cheap too, so not stockpiling as many as your van could carry was a bad idea.

Incidentally, this is where the legends of Rocket Tag came from, at least in part. Rumors of two people going at each other with Great Dragons might be exaggerated, but it was also plausible.

Recently my players decided to hijack an oil tanker and have it ram the zero-zone facility they were invading as a "distraction".

So, being a serious GM, I set about googling how much gas a tanker typically had. Then figured it was close to low grade explosives, and figured out the damage code and spread based on a -2/m explosion.

Anyway 292 DV -2/m is a pretty big BOOM.

It worked pretty well. It very nearly went aweful when the team was arguing about how close behind the tanker they should be following. It was almost decided at 100 meters when they though a liiiiittle more room might be a good idea. This is good because at 100m they would have eaten 92 DV of damage...

While I can't speak much for biggest, the best explosion my group ever caused did 7 points of physical damage to the Great Dragon Ghostwalker.

It turns out being recruited by that lovable rogue Puck, joining his terrorist club, realizing you've committed too many crimes in Denver to stay in town, and then continuing your goal of being the biggest Future-Youtube shadowrun star by simsense recording all your runs and posting (heavily edited) recordings online isn't actually all that good for one's health.

The new Boston team, with only the youtube star in common with the old one, stumbled into some high profile stuff and intra-party conflict gave GW's Talons a bead on him. So they dropped in, implanting bombs in our friends, killing and framing us for murder of others, and burning down places where we used to live. Note: The framing thing was an entirely different person with a grudge against Double B (The Simsense-recording ogre in question). But we never found that out and that guy is still a loose end.

Anyway, between the shit we were getting into and the death of Double B' best friend (Which set off an LAV suicide run into a holding company who managed a huge chunk of his financial assets, further pissing off GW), BB's player decided it was time to retire his character in glory.

So we made a few calls. One to Puck and one to Martin Philip Pendrick the Ninth. Puck loved the idea of making a more personal run at the Dragon. So he opened his piggy bank (or more accurately, all other people's piggy banks he'd compromised and not exploited for just such an occasion) and refitted Double B with a bunch of deltaware and a pile of smuggler's compartments (modified to be MAD resistant) which were then loaded with high powered plastic explosive. We also paid a mage to remove knowledge of the bombs from him and a demolitions expert to rig them to explode when Double B's simsense recorder detected him throwing out a one-liner the mage implanted him to say when he saw Ghostwalker. We figured the wyrm would be pissed enough to want to kill Double B personally.

Double B then took a church hostage and called out Revere, the "Hero" of Boston as per every supervillain ever. The two fought and it turns out that assault cannon trumps katana, especially when some crazy bastard has loaded you up with delta-grade Kid Stealth legs, hydraulic jacks, and plenty of agility boosts.

After Double B finished off the Hero of Boston he was assaulted by two of the tree Talons who he surrendered to. They took him to Ghostwalker. There were a pile of bad detection rolls on GW's security staff and GW himself. Admittingly, the GM did fudge things a bit in our favor here as Double B's body was virtually out of essence and specifically built to confound scanners. He applied the essence double B didn't have as a modifier on the tests.

Anyway, there was some torture, a few questions were asked, and eventually GW bothered to ungag Double B in a, "Do you have anything to say before I give you over to my torture team and tell them to get creative?" kind of way. And then... BOOM.

GW physically wounded, the Troll Drake lieutenant I built while running the game specifically to soak more damage than double B survived with burnt edge, and my favorite of the drake trio atomized didn't have the edge to burn. Not to mention a handful of less important folks and the property damage. As I recall the DV was somewhere in the 60s at the point of origin.

Meanwhile, at a casino in Atlantic city, the rest of the group stared blankly at the TV coverage of Double B's fight with that prick, the Hero of Boston (At my fucking church, none the less!), until my character said, "Maybe we should get outta town for a while?"

So now we've used some of his contacts to pull a gig pirate hunting for 3 months in the Caribbean League. Ho Ho Ho.

Note: I ran the game in Denver, but was getting burned out so the player of the guy who 9/11'd GW's accountants picked up the slack. Boston has been ridiculous fun. Double B went out with appropriate gravitas. Good stuff. In case anyone is wondering, we used Lofwyr's stats from Street Legends for GW since they're the most physically imposing of the Great Dragons as I recall.

Our current GM has set up a "deck" of 52 targets in the style of the playing cards deck the US military put out for high-value targets in Iraq. It's going to be awesome.

Gasoline doesn't detonate - it combusts. You get a nice big plume of fire, which only expands outwards as a fireball if you burn the gas in a closed container. The real danger isn't the "explosive" force (which is minimal), but rather the burning.

There's also the question of how you ignite the damn stuff. Most vehicle fires occur when the engine becomes damaged and fuel spills out onto the hot metal. The tanker would probably need to have been running for a bit to be warm enough to reliably ignite fuel in the engine compartment. More importantly, the nature of the impact with the wall would need to such that didn't smother any potential flames with debris.

Now, if the runners knocked up some sort of ignition device, I could see them burning down the building. But if they just rammed the truck into a wall? Yeah, not likely to do anything other than make a big mess. Toss a match or a lighter onto that mess as the tanker leaks? Sure, then it'll burn. But we're still not talking a massive explosion. Even with absolute ideal conditions creating a small "explosion", it still certainly shouldn't have been almost 300 DV - you'd be lucky to get a boom big enough to warrant 15 DV in my opinion, a mere twentieth of the amount.

~Umi

-Alas! A Double Post!-

I GMed several tables of that mission. I'm so glad to read of a team that got him.

Figured it wasn't actually gasoline, actually, which if in fact unlikely due to SR's preference towards electric cars. Figured it was some sort of natural gas.

Regardless, as a GM, you have to know that being too realistic kills fun. I could have said "no that's not gonna work" to their plan for about a dozen reasons. A better GM knows that letting his players do something ridiculous but fun creates a better game. Ever hear of players tell stories of "Remember that time the GM told us we couldn't ram the tanker into the facility? Yeah, that was SUCH an awesome game"?

Hmm. Biggest (and most interesting) boom in SR would probably be during our team's escape from Bug City.

We stole a helicopter that had a "defensive countermeasure" that turned out to be (IIRC) a sizable FAE, and ended up dropping it on our low-altitude run out. It took out a number of armored vehicles and nearly knocked the chopper out of the air when it went off. My character was playing door gunner and trying to get a couple of ten year olds (long story) to stay buckled in their seats at the same time. It was a good thing I insisted on bungee-cording myself to the door frame before takeoff.

To create a distraction, we also hit a part of the cordon away from our escape point with a payload of surplus Russian nerve gas that I acquired on a whim weeks before. ("Surplus Russian nerve gas on sale? How can I say no to that?") That probably did a lot more damage than the explosion, but was a much smaller bang.


Now Eclipse Phase... We were directly responsible for blowing things up with nuclear weapons twice, but doesn't everyone set off nukes in EP?

That does indeed sound awesome.




Someone I know was GMing a game where his players built an Orion drive spacecraft on the far side of a pandora gate. So they were setting off a nuke every few seconds.

In some circles it is also referred to as a FD Drive as it mimics the legendary rate of explosions of that historic figure, or so the legends go.

Especially when the drive starts acting erratically/self destructively.

In Shadowrun, 47 kg of rating 6 explosive is our biggest. That was on a train as part of an insurance scam disguised as terrorism.

Outside Shadowrun . . . I think we blew up the sun in Mutants and Masterminds once. Then we traveled through time to fix it. Time travel powers should never be allowed in a game. Even at the time, I couldn't keep straight which game sessions had actually happened and which were retconned.

Oooooooooh. That sounds like a good story. Share?




Ah-hahahahaahahahaaaaah. Niiiiiice.

i had a character that was part of a runner team that was at ground zero of a nuclear detonation. They also managed to walk away from it, too.

There was a safe on board containing a 'diamond' (think hope diamond size) which the client had insured and was transporting cross country. The client had actually put a replica on board and the team was supposed to steal it. The team was tasked with stealing the fake so the client could collect the insurance. The safe was tougher than they anticipated and a security person from the train had shown up, so they decided to blow it. There was a guest player playing and I had given him a character based on an old demolition expert, crazed chemist character I had. He went to set the charge. I asked him how much he used. He responded, "How much do I have?" 47 kilo was how much he had and based on the type of character Twitch was, it wasn't actually out of the question that he actually had it all with him. One gunfight with security followed by a destroyed train later and the cover story was no longer that the diamond was stolen. Several of the characters had anti-corp terrorist ties, so it was even believable that they really were just blowing up the train. One character was caught in the blast and his comment was, "Is it even worth rolling? Or should I just burn edge now?"

Biggest single "Boom" I've personally managed in a game was to call a Kinetic Harpoon strike from orbit. Basically take a bunch of aerodynamic 100kg tungsten alloy penetrators, cover them in a variable ablative layer for some minimal guidance once they get shoved into the atmosphere at the right angle, and have them burn in at around Mach 6 or so. Just before impact, they spring out into an "X" shape to slam into the ground at a random angle that hopefully maximizes surface area impacting the ground. I was sufficiently in the shit to have them Ok a drop of 25 harpoons so the squad dropped a bunch of cratering "instant foxhole" charges and hunkered down.

Made an Arc Light strike look like some kids playing with firecrackers...

Biggest boom my group has done, ever, in or out of Shadowrun would have to be when they blew up the universe in Scion.

One of the NPCs used Epic Chaos (everything it touches is destroyed, basically) and the only way to counter an Epic use of a power is to use the Epic of something else.

Someone's bright idea was to use Epic Space (touches every point everywhere). There is now Epic Chaos Epicly Everywhere.

Never played Scion. Are there alternate universes to hide in or did they just destroy everything, everywhere? Also, is there an 'Epic Time' option they could have added to destroy all the past and future as well?

So did the survivors floating around play D&D afterwards?

I don't think Time was a power tree. Either way, we're talking about god-level entities beating the shit out of each other.

One player wasn't able to attend the last session and left a note with the GM saying that he was using Epic Manipulation (the whole idea of a Xanatos Gambit, really). The GM eventually interpreted this as follows:
"If my friends destroy the universe, I want to be the first one back when it restarts." (and thus became the Creator deity)
Another player used Epic Fortitude to just tank it (IIRC that was the death god).
Everyone else hitched a ride on Epic Way (this one is harder to explain, "The Way" is the power tree of being immune to traveling, ie. teleportation). The epic use of which is "Go to any place that you can describe, no matter how abstract." For example, "I want to go to a universe entirely defined by the number 8." Anyway, they went to "Someplace Safe" until the universe rebooted.

Bobson feel free to correct me if I got any of this wrong.

the epic use of not travelling is to travel?

Gods are really Zen. What else can you say?

It's not needing to travel. Travel defined as having to pass through all of the intervening space between A and B.

You cease being Here and start being There without needing to know where There is or how to get There. Or even if There exists. Why walk when you can just Be?

(You know that whole "its not the destination that counts, but the journey?" Yeah. Think the opposite of that. The journey is long, boring, and hard.)

In other words, this is the power set for gods who're too lazy to walk.

Yep.

Also, if you're familiar with the World of Darkness rules, where mortals can get up to 5 dots in things, Scion takes it to 10. Epic uses are (temporary) 11th dots. Just to give you an idea of the power scale.

(To give you an idea of how utterly crazy that campaign was, the players were basically mortals only 10 sessions prior)

Scion sounds different. Not different good, but certainly different... Drunken Review: Scion

ah ok, i think i see where i got confused. i read "immune to traveling, ie teleportation" as teleportation being the thing they're immune to. which seemed like a pretty specific thing to be immune to, but then again, also seems quite useful in a setting with essentially unfettered teleportation (that is, i had presumed that it was useful to prevent people from teleporting you into the heart of a sun or something like that)

It's kind of sad that, when I started playing Shadowrun, some people thought that was a big explosion. To he "super-subtle" elven hitman, that was Tuesday.

So, he was the quiet one on the team then?

I always thought it was an accepted fact that the single most devastatingly explosive thing in any Shadowrun campaign is the team's van.

The biggest explosion my old team ever caused was probably the razing of Kowloon, but that was done by the military and we only "caused" it in the sense than they decided it was safer to level the city with rockets than assume they had gotten all of us when they chased our amphibious van out into the bay with attack-choppers and watched it blow up in a kamikaze crash attack against one of the battleships blockading the harbor.

About that...

I'm not sure precisely how many kilos of explosives we were carrying, but we had begun to make our own during downtime and were consistently producing military-grade stuff with ratings in the low to mid teens. While in Hong Kong, we had leveled a factory by posing as a cleaning crew and sending in a dozen or so cleaning drones filled with liquid explosives instead of cleanser, (each held a gallon each) and that had been just what we whipped up for that particular occasion.

Suffice to say the amount of explosives in the van was pretty much "how much can we fit?" We kept most of our bigger/heavier gear in the plane and only brought our explosives and whatever gear we normally carried along in the van. It split the battleship in half when it went up. Fortunately we had managed to ditch out into the harbor with the help of a water spirit carrying our gear and a few kilos of explosives from the stockpile.

We burned our ID's and headed for Japan.

Ah yes. Sorry. But yeah, The Way is hard to explain, I still don't fully "get" it myself.

I recall there is a Time related tree. Stars IIRC.

I didn't actually play or read the rules, just observed. I had a class that evening, so I was only able to attend the last half of each session.

Just the subtle one. The troll was our best face, too; my rocker had so much obvious cyber, he looked less human than the street sam.

It was a combination of Ultimate Manipulation and Ultimate Intelligence. Manipulation is "Everyone within sight who isn't a full-blown god becomes your slave (permanently, unless they're demigods themselves). And you can set into action a series of events that will cause anything that is possible, however improbable, to happen. (Unless someone else does the same thing to block you)"
Ultimate Intelligence is "If it's a scientific fact, you know it. If something is possible to deduce, you do so. If it's possible to plan for something to happen, you do so (although you may not be able to carry out the plan yourself)."

My character had maxed out both - I'm sure you can see the synergy between them. He also was a Scion of Odin and had sacrificed an eye for answers to something (I forget what).

Really, most of the awesome was the GM. When the game ran over and I had to leave early, I told him something along the lines of "If things are going wrong, Intelligence to figure out how to fix them, and Manipulation to do so." A nice catch-all plan. He was the one who decided just how that played out. If I had been there, I'd like to think I would have done the same thing, but I can't be sure. I definitely like how it turned out, though.

-------------

For reference, the other Ultimate attributes:
Strength: Yes. (Everything from ripping apart mountains with your bare hands to instantly killing anyone you hit, unless they use Ultimate Stamina)
Dexterity: You move so fast that you get 10 actions while everyone else is frozen in place.
Stamina: Heal to full, or ignore all damage from any one attack (choose one per use). If you do die, you return from the dead later.

Charisma: No one can attack you or your allies for the rest of the scene, everyone forgives anything you've done to them.
Manipulation: See above.
Appearance: Everyone for miles around sees you. If you're divinely ugly, they cower in fear; if you're divinely beautiful, they fall to the ground in awe. Gods pause briefly, everyone else is driven blind or insane.

Perception: You can see anything, anywhere, on any plane that is currently happening and might be of interest. All your (really hyped up) senses apply.
Intelligence: See above.
Wits: Everything that happened in this scene is actually just a preview of what would have happened if you don't change something. "Rewind" time and let things play out differently. (Think Sherlock Holmes from the movies, when he does his "previewing the action" thing.)

So you were using an Ultimate Attributes Combo. Some combinations of Ultimate Attributes and Ultimate Purviews are quite solid too. The Mirror and the Void are both good all round counters.

I've only just started playing Shadowrun, so my contribution is the controlled demolition of a heavy machinery company's office building (which was technically an implosion) and the destruction of a few items of said company's stock.

Everyone's got to start small.

Small explosions can be fun.

You don't need more than 10Kg of explosive device to have some real fun.

Though if that 10Kg of explosive device is actually fullerened anti-uranium, you can have some fun with a megaton yield!

And the moral of that story is, never carry an explosive larger than your head.