Hello again.

Since 4th edition I was always annoyed at the way armor could convert attacks to stun. Sure, it makes sense if most attacks are physical, but when runners were (ab)using tasers it became a liability.

For example, if in a fight two runners fires at an enemy with an armor jacket. One uses an taser dealing 7S damage after soak (tasers are good), the second one uses a heavy pistol and deals 10P damage. Now, normally if you soak some of that damage, you're still left standing due to one being stun and another being physical. However, with the armor jacket (armor 12-1AP 11 vs 10P) the damage become stun, and despite soaking 6 damage a WP 6 character still goes down from that. However, if the pistol guy used APDS, the damage would be lethal and he would still be standing assuming he soaked 1 or more.

So depending on circumstances, converting Physical to Stun is either a bonus or a flaw.

In my old SR4 game I made a house rule that halved all damage converted to stun, which worked fairly good, except armor became even more important. With the higher armor values in SR5 it might just be too much.

In SR 5 I notice blunt weapon are described of doing Stun (description of Stun damage), yet they are all listed with P for physical. Since in real life a club is generally less lethal than a knife (assuming you dont hit vital organs) due to bleeding, it would make sense that Physical damage should have some advantage over Stun damage except for healing. Since WP gives Stun boxes and Body gives physical boxes though, almost everyone can take more physical damage than stun damage. How would you counter that?

1. Have all blunt weapons split damage "pool" into stun and physical, with any leftover put into stun. a -2 called shot allows you to do full physical or stun damage. Killing Hands removes penalty, and Critical Strike reduces it by 1 per level
2. Edged weapon and ranged (P) attacks causing damage in excess of Body (after resistance) causes bleeding, doing 1 more unresisted physical damage unless succeeding a Bodyx2 (3) test per combat turn, until treated by First Aid (2). Once boxes are filled, normal rules for stabilization applies.

Rule 2 won't have much effect on tough shadowrunners, but normal people can easily bleed to death after a gunshot wound unless treated. It could also matter in longer fights with poor rolls.

None of these are strictly necessary but... the current system annoys me. Any other suggestions to fix it?

I don't like to bump my own posts but:

I was at the very least expecting a "don't change the rules, they work fine" reply to this. Does anyone have any suggestion to make edged weapons superior to blunt in some sense? Sure, for the really good ones like Katana the AP and damage is just fine, but any knife will be outclassed completely by the humble club. I know for sure if I could choose between having a club strike my torso or a knife plunged into it, I would go for the club. If the same weapon hit my face full force I'm not sure if it would matter at all which I had chosen, both are lethal when used like that.


What is your experience of the armor converting to stun rule in 5th edition? Is it balanced? Does it benefit mages more than troll street samurai?

Works just fine, if you ask me...
Depends upon what you mean by benefiting Mages more than Troll Street Sams.

Because Troll Street Sam usually have more Problems with Stun Damage than Mages, due to the mages usually having a higher willpower and thus longer stun track i guess.

Stun can be healed with slap patches. Physical cannot be. So that's a thing.

How about a slightly modified version of that: All P damage additionally causes the same amount (or half as much, or two thirds) in stun damage, while armor only reduces damage but does not shift it to stun.

The root of the problem you are describing is that there are two damage tracks, and players have at least some control over which track the damage goes to when taking or dealing damage. So if you want to do away with that (and don't consider it a feature), you either have to remove the separate tracks, or stop players from being able to choose where the damage goes.


Blunt trauma can also rupture blood vessels, organs, and everything, causing significant (read: often fatal) internal bleeding...

Exactly. It's not unlikely for a troll to have 13+ physical and 9-10 mental track, which makes taking stun damage very dangerous as you go down much faster in a firefight.



Oh I thought you could only ignore wound penalties from stun. Still, the stun comes back after some time, possible knocking you unconscious and over-bleeding into physical. Sometimes it's better to have a troll with 7-8 physical damage and no stun, than a troll with 4-5 stun after a fight than suddenly drops unconscious on the way out while being in pursuit of corpsec. Still a very relevant observation for purposes of firefight endurance, especially if you can wake the troll with yet another stimpatch.




All physical damage also causing Stun is not very realistic as you can get shot and hardly even feel it, besides i would make wound penalties horrendous. A bullet that penetrates you cleanly will feel a lot different than a bullet that has it's impact spread over a large area (blunt trauma). My old house rule in SR4 for similar though, as armor resisting the attack meant damage was halved AND converted to stun. Makes armor a lot better, and APDS more important.

As for the Blunt weapon issue, it's true that complications can arise such as internal bleeding, but it's statistically a lot less likely than from a piercing or slashing attack - most blunt impacts causes bruises, breaks bones, but the force is always spread over a much larger area than a bullet, arrow or even knife. Also, external bleeding is generally what renders you unable to fight in a low-tech battle with clubs and swords. If we want to similate such things the optional "Severe Wounds" rules in Augmentation fits well, as you can get bleeding per round or internal bleeding, unconsciousness, broken bones etc. as result. The damage minimum for triggering is 7 wounds, or glitching/critical glitching a damage resistance test. I'm assuming since there is not really higher wound capacity (boxes) is SR5, it can be used as is. Damage values are higher, but number of attacks/bullets doing damage are lower, and armors have higher values, so it should balance out. It does add complexity to a game that does not really need it though.

None of these really addresses the issue that a club is more lethal than a knife, or that against an unarmored human, a Club is as dangerous as a Katana. If you want to hear a whole argument if why that is nonsense, here's a video: sword vs quarterstaff If you have a better source or argument I would like to hear it. A simple solution might just be to nerf the damage of blunt weapons overall (str/2+x), but that makes them completely useless. Instead I want to keep them as a good option to do less lethal damage or for parrying in close combat, yet outclassed if you just want to kill someone. I have yet to find a good way to implement that.
A third solution is to make edged weapons different, maybe require less strength and have higher base, but that would make close-combat characters focusing on strength not want them. Hmm just to throw out some numbers there:
knife: str/2 +3 - average 5p
Combat Knife: str/2+4 average 6p
forearm blade: str/2 +4
sword str/2 +6 average 8P
katana str/2 +6
polearm str/2 + 6

Not sure if I would want to do this though. Maybe I'll just accept it as it is and assume the PCs will choose whatever they think they like the most. I do wish it was a way for clubs etc. to do less lethal damage, or that it was different in scale of escalation to go from a club to sword, in real life it sure is, as well as legally in many places. While a baseball bat can be considered a deadly weapon in many cases depending on use, a large knife, sword or pistol will always be considered so in it's own right. "I just want to stab him a bit" is not a valid excuse, but grabbing a chair and smashing someone in an argument causing little damage will not always be considered assault with deadly weapon.
Old Shadowrun had different legal codes depending on weapon possessed, used or threatened with - I kind of miss that.

You mean "in line with existing damage rules"

More seriously, damage rules in SR are very abstract, there is little which differentiates sawing your cyberleg in half from sticking a monofilament chainsaw into your guts. And among the problems of making it realistic there is the problem that nobody can agree on what "realistic" would mean. People suffering grievous wounds and not even realizing it are well documented, but the exact mechanisms behind that? Ask two experts on ballistic trauma and you will receive at least three answers, each claiming that anybody holding an opposing view is full of it...


True, in that scenario only stun modifiers could matter...which would translate into a pulped weaponarm not changing anything until the victim notices it.

Well, yes SR is highly abstracted, like most RPGs. However, if physical does stun damage as well, we might just combine the two damage tracks (like in VtM) and mark them down differently. The reason I'm not is that spell drain should usually not make a mage even more susceptible to normal damage, but it should add wound penalties or exacerbate them. It doesn't have to be totally realistic of course, just believable, and shooting people unconscious sounds wrong to me unless blunt trauma is in effect. Barring that, the only way to shoot someone unconscious is to hit their nervous system, brain, or from blood loss, but the first two is generally deadly, and the latter takes time.

Anyway, I think for now I'm gonna see how my 2042 rules work with the SR5 rules set before i make any more changes. Among other things I'm adopting SR1 armors, modified to fit the SR5 damage system. In practice, I doubled the Ballistic and Impact armor value to get each in SR5 values, while keeping the distinction. The new-fangled 2075 "all protection" armors that don't differentiate between bullets and knives don't exist yet. In practice, this limits the armors available and lowers their rating somewhat, but an armor jacket is still able to stop a heavy pistol round in most cases.

Thanks for contributing.

The (totally off-the-cuff) idea was to make all physical damage cause stun damage, but not vice versa. So spell drain makes you more likely to keel over from the next wound, but not more susceptible to damage.

And yes, shooting people or hitting them over the head should rarely cause immediate but quicly reversible loss of consciousness. Movie mechanics


SR1 armors, or the whole armor system?

SR1 armors with the SR4 system, more or less, modified for SR5 damage.

Good, I was beginning to doubt your sanity

I'm using as little of the SR1 rules as possible, while trying to emulate the setting, and for a good reason

Another issue there is the price list - I want prices to reflect that certain technologies is SOTA and more expensive, but at the same time I'm using the gear system from SR5 as much as I can. In many cases the prices in SR1 are just totally unbalanced or seemingly random (one pistol costing 50% more than another while having the same stats), or cyberdecks and magical equipment being horribly expensive and maybe not cost efficient. Some items are cheaper than the SR5 equivalent or about the same (most weapons), others are hilariously expensive. Despite this, using the same priorities the PCs would actually have less nuyen available for gear than their SR5 equivalents.

Prices in SR5 also seem far more in tune with the baseline provided in the book, despite the weird way it was described. A PC will probably not make more than 25k for a run, despite being very high level, fighting enemies with 20+ dicepools, and lots of complications. In comparison, SR 1-3 it seemed like 50k each was not uncommon for high-Cred characters, and 10k was common for normal runners.