Too slow guys

Yup, while not a top flight stat before it had a point. In 5e taking out its purpose of capping armor makes it pretty damn useless, I guess you might take it to 3 for 10 boxes, but that is about it. Oh and never forget the ability to drink more, yeah and resist colds, you will get the sniffles less.

Disease and toxin resistance...yeah, it's pretty useless.

It isn't useless, and hyperbole wasn't the right way to approach this. It might be, though, that it's become the least useful of the 8.
However:
-One attribute has to be the least attractive, even in a subjective way. If it wasn't body, it's be charisma or something else.
-It's easy to fix with houserules.

I dunno, if you're cybered up to 10 Body that seems like it would be comparable to decent armor, and then armor on top of that and maybe some damage resist cyber....

Erm, according to the preview Body is used in Damage Resistance tests...

In a large number of cases, 1 point of reaction avoids as much damage (or more) as 1 point of body.

Not useless but uncommon enough that you can't build a stat around it. Body will be dumped staated by anyone who optimizes.

Then those people will die when shot...

Yeah but it's just 1 dice per point of body, strength on the other allows you to wear more +armor items with out penalty thus also giving that 1 dice per point while being in general more usefull then body.

Not if they can dodge.

Really? So lets see one guy goes with 5 body 12 armor and a helmet for 20 damage resistance. Guy 2, goes 2 body, and the same armor and helmet for 17 dice. He has 3 more stat points to put into a useful stat, and you think that 1 hit on damage resistance will make the difference. Crap he can put the 3 extra into strength for more +armor have the same damage resistance, have a higher physical limit and the ability to beat people to death. Body just sucks compared to the other stats.

Giving that +1Die per point IF you have those items on or to hand in a given situation. Base Soak + damage boxes + overflow without being modified for AP vs being able to use +Armour Items (helmet is in previews at +2) that are modified from AP (along with other armour).

I think some people are Massively overstating the usefulness of STR, which is looking to me like more of a dump stat.

Strength rules over the physical limit, to be fair, as well as the Running skill. Also, for melee characters, strength is anything but a dump stat. For others... yeah, pretty much. Agility and Reaction are where it's at.

Well it seems that 13P is a damage used in an example to lets tally that with say AP4 (sure that's going to be fairly reasonable)
Body 2 Str 6 stats as above + Riot shield (and helmet, but benefits are maxed) gives your soak 20. AP drops that to 16. Rule of averages gives you 5 hits. Let's say 5. So that's 8 physical off of your 9 damage boxes.

Body 5 Str 3 stats, no riot shield back to helmet. Soak of 19 dropped to 15. Thats 5 hits. . That's 8 Physical off your 11 damage boxes.

At this time things are even.

Now lets use Guy 1 again, only he gets shot in the back... so no Riot Shield. Soak is now 16, dropped to 12. That's 4 hits. So you take 9 physical off your 9 boxes. KO'd.

Guy 2 gets hits with same and is still standing as all calculations are as before.

Sure, if you don't focus on the physical or if the things you do use different limits(guns) strength can be a dump stat as well. But unless you are going for a tank build which is much more specific than physical activity based body is a big dump stat. They went out of their way to make the "character" matter more and not have all your dice come from gear and here your armor can provide 80-95% of your dice.

Totally Werewindlefr. No getting hit is always the first line of defense and the physical limit and armour stacking made STR useful (Where in SR3 it was good for melee and carrying stuff and ripping doors off cars). Now I have no experience with SR4, but I like to have my soak looking good as much as possible as often as possible (without crippling anything else) and there are many occasions where I doubt you'll have the luxury of +AV items.

Strength isn't all that hot either, but it is better than Body, as it provides the same level of damage resistance and feeds into a couple useful skills and melee damage if that's your thing.

Personally I'd expect those extra stats from Body to go into Reaction/Intuition instead.

Consider:
Average character with High Body: Body 5, Strength 3, Armor 15. Reaction 4(+2), Intuition 3.
Same character with Body swapped to Reaction/Intuition: Body 1, Strength 3, Armor 15. Reaction 6(+2), Intuition 5

Let's have them both shot at by a character that is rolling 15 dice to hit, with 9 base damage.

The first character has 9 dice to dodge, giving him a 25% chance to dodge the opponents attack. 75% of the time he gets hit, and for simplicity's sake we'll assume averages when he does get hit and it deals 11 damage, resisted by 20 soak dice, dropping the average damage on a hit down to 4.3. Factor in the 25% miss rate and it's an average 3.25 damage per shot.

Second character has 13 dice to dodge, giving him a 47% chance to dodge the opponents attack. The average damage of the attack when it does hit will be 9.6 damage. The second character now rolls his 16 soak dice, dropping the average damage on a hit to 4.3 (look familiar? It should. Since successes on the dodge test reduce the damage dealt by the shot, having the same points invested in Reaction/Intuition as Body means your damage taken on a hit will be the same), but now you get to factor in a 47% miss chance, taking the average damage per shot down to 2.438. A full 25% lower than if you had invested in body.


Now there is the fact that the high Body character has two extra boxes of health, so let's consider that. With 11 boxes, it takes 3 average shots to drop him. Getting shot 3 times takes an average of 4 attacks. So he sustains on average 4 attacks before he drops.

The low body character only has 9 boxes, but at 4.3 average damage per hit, he still barely survives after the second hit, so it takes the same 3 average shots to drop him. Getting hit those 3 times however takes 6 attacks. Meaning he actually lives ~50% longer.

If the enemy has a higher damage gun than my example, then it could be dropped to only taking 2 shots to take out the low body character. Say we bump that damage up by 1. At this point the high body character still takes 3 hits (the first two average 10.6 damage out of his 11 boxes), while the low body character drops in two. However even here it takes on average 4 attacks for the low body character to be hit 4 times, the same it takes to hit the high body character twice. And if the damage value goes up one higher, now they both drop in two hits, and the low body character's time to live is twice as high.



Of course it is optimal if all you care about is survivability to have Body, Strength, Reaction, and Intuition all as high as you can get. However none of these stats are really tied to any of the primary niches (ie Mundane Combat/Stealth (Agi), Magic (Cha/Logic), Decking (Logic), Face (Cha), etc), so chances are you really don't have the stats available to max all of these out. So it comes down to which one provides the most survivability for your investment. And the answer to that is overwhelmingly not Body. And given that out of the stats, Body is the one whose ONLY job is to provide survivability, there is absolutely no reason to invest in body for the vast majority of characters.

Sure everyone should get their soak pool as high as possible. The problem is C and below in attributes is not nearly enough to spread it around, B is still only 20 points spread among 8 attributes so just like 4e you will be dump stating and body while useful in 4e was not top notch. Weakening it further puts it solidly into dump stat territory. Reaction/intuition will get you just as much damage resistance and have better benefits, strength will get you pretty much just as much outside high AP items and is otherwise more useful. Sure you might dump charisma or logic if they don't fit your character, but body does very little.

So for a squishy human or elf, reaction is better. What about a dwarf, ork, or troll?

You need body for your healing tests. Since at least drain can't be healed other than resting....

To really get into it you need to see what else is comming your was. If there is a lot of damage, which can't be healed other than resting. (Honestly if you can't heal drain, why would you be able to heal damage from a powerbolt...)

What makes you think having some free body will make getting more body any better? If anything them already having a few points of body for free makes Reaction/Intuition that much more important.

If you care, feel free to run numbers yourself.

True. Again not getting hit is king, always has been, always will be.

However, what happens in say an ambush? (one that gets past your perception)

Guy 1 is left standing after the first shot and able to react.

Guy 2 isnt.

It is, but in SR4 things are at least a little less lopsided.


Taking my same example and using SR4 armor values (using FFBA, but not softweave or whatever that other stuff from later splats was), what you have instead is:
High Body guy: 12 Armor
Low Body guy: 4 Armor.

And of course in SR4 base damage values are lower (in exchange for being shot twice as often), and you don't get two stats for defense so it's harder to dodge. Base damage drops from 4 to 5.


So high body guy dodges 12% of the time. When he gets hit he takes an average of 8 points of damage, reduced by 5.6, for an average of 2.3 damage per hit. Factor in miss chance and he takes an average 2.02 damage per attack. He has 11 boxes of health so it takes 5 successful hits to drop him, or an average of 6 attacks. Even if he does get dropped, his armor is high enough to convert almost all of the damage to stun, so he's unconscious but not bleeding out.

Compared to the high reaction guy (who now has some free points to go somewhere else because Intuition does nothing for his dodge anymore), who dodges 20% of the time, and when he gets hit takes 7.3 damage, resisted by his 5 soak dice, causing him to take 5.6 damage per hit. Factor in the miss chance and it's ~4.5 damage per round. He has 9 boxes of health, so his expected time to live is 2 attacks. Also, any attack that does hit him is dealing physical damage, as opposed to stun for the high body guy. Basically, if you want to be an evasive dude in SR4, you have to invest heavily in the dodge skill, and using it is killing your combat effectiveness.

In fact, let's take the points from the previous 5 Intuition, and invest that into the Dodge skill. 40 bp turns into rating 6 plus specialization, with points to spare. Now the character goes on full defense with 16 dice, bumping his chance of dodging up to 62%. When he does get hit, on average it's a graze (1 net success) for 6 points of damage. This gets staged down by 5 resist dice to 4.3 average damage. Factor in miss chance, he's down to 1.72 damage per round. He has 9 boxes of health, so it takes an average of 6 attacks to drop the character.

So by giving up all offensive capability completely, he lasts a similar number of attacks as the the high body guy before dropping.





Anyway, point is, Body providing twice its value in armor encumbrance was a big deal, discarding it hurt a lot. There were also a number of other changes between SR4 and SR5 (one single big attack vs two smaller attacks. Characters getting to dodge with two stats instead of one), which all contribute to making dodging much more effective, on top of the inherent devaluation of Body.

There are niche situations where Body is used, but no other stats. But those situations are few and far between, and generally mean much less to the characters' overall survivability than the ability to avoid gunshots/indirect spells. This is the area where Body used to excel, and with the changes implemented, it now fails to really do its job.

Surprise is defeated by 3 successes on an Reaction + Intuition test, which #1 will probably succeed at.

Quick question: do Power Foci count towards the maximum Force of spells one can use before overcasting? What are the disadvantages of power foci (I've just made a legal character with 7 magic + 3 from a power foci...)?

The whole point of my first post with math was to highlight that's not really the point. Guy 2 has just as much armor as guy one, and only two boxes less health. Guy one might take 1 point less damage, but they'll both survive just fine. (As an aside: Guy 2 has higher intuition, and is more likely to spot the ambush and not be surprised, and will have much higher initiative and is more likely to go first and kill an enemy before getting shot at)


If your scenario is instead they get ambushed while not wearing any armor, then I'm going to say that neither one has a chance to live. Body doesn't provide so many damage resistance dice as to make a character survive direct hit gun shots while standing around unprotected. In that, the system is much more realistic in SR5, an unarmored guy getting shot while unaware is almost certainly going to die, regardless of how much body he has.

My suggestion in another post was to houserule body to give its full rating as bonus condition monitor boxes instead of half rating, and voila! Instant useful body.

Because not every character within a genre is of the same power/skill level. If two players show up to your game table and one is all "I totally dug the old Shadowrun novels. I want to play a character inspired by those novels, this Sam Verner kid! He'll be a plucky young corporate researcher with a datajack and average physical attributes, and then he'll find out he's Awakened as a Dog Shaman (but missing a point of Magic, and without any shadowrunner-appropriate active skills, or any magical skills at all)."

And then the other player says "I used to dig the old Shadowrun novels, too. I want to play Argent!"

Don't you have two very different, starting, "out of the box" power levels? Now, over time Twist turns into a grade-A badass. Get some karma into him, and the kid turns into a real world-shaker. But right out of the box, someone based on Argent is a world-class street samurai with a hojillion connections, way-more-than-starting-nuyen's worth of custom chrome, world-class combat skills, and on and on and on. The other guy's gonna be a shadow-liability, trying to get by on a high Edge score to make up for the fact he's got no contacts, got no combat skills, got no magical skills, doesn't know any spells, and has a datajack lowering his magical power anyways.

They're both characters from the genre, they're both being emulated...but clearly the two aren't the same.

Right? So just because a character is from the genre doesn't necessarily mean you have to be able to match them right out of the gate. That's part of what role-playing games are all about -- there wouldn't be rules for character advancement, and character advancement wouldn't be one of the focal points of just about every RPG out there, if that weren't the case.

tl;dr - I want to play Gandalf.

There is also the growing the talent side of things.

Give loyal people with potential access to the best cyberware and then wrap up their salaries and bonuses up in paying it off/upgrading it.
A very easy way to provide the corp with cyberized talent and keep them coming back to the company store.


"You got potential kid. And you have shown both loyalty to the Corp and a cool head under fire.
Here at Corp X, we like to recognize that.
We are going to patch you up.
Better than before, but I wanted to talk to you about some opportunities.

I'd like to recommend you for our SOTA retention program.
We are talking about providing you access to the best ware out there.
And the training programs so you can take full advantage of it.
I know decade long contract is a commitment and your share of the ware cost will be considerable.
But you keep going like you have been, and you will be fully vested in five years.
Just in time for the latest upgrades.

Did I tell you about my latest ware bonus...."

You can play around with the backgrounds to make this work.

Give the "Sam" a high edge and have him take some good non combat positive quantities and skills.
Sam was pretty perceptive for example so high perception skill.

Also reserve some of his skills/spells/stats till when he awakens.
Then he is very strong in Dog, and once awaken he picks up his magic skills very quickly.

Maybe even give him an unconscious Countermagic 5 that he can use to protect himself and his team.


For ex special forces "Argent", Say the last run was a real hair ball.
Argent nearly didn't make it out except for his special forces skills and training.
Lost some cyberware and is still recovering from his extensive injuries (explains his lower stats and skills).
He also lost some of his best gear during the run.
Maybe a low edge because he burned some to survive.
Lost the team mage too.
Things are hot so new face, new name (or maybe a street handle from earlier in his career) and a new city (lost some contacts and needs to rebuild his rep and contact network).
A little time to refresh his skills and get back in to shape and he will be back in Special Forces fighting form once again.
Queue the Rocky theme music and go.

Maybe Sam is putting a run together and hires Argent (Sam has to come along naturally).
During the run, Sam will awaken (at least enough to learn he can use his counter magic).
Now Argent has a reason to keep Sam around at least until he can get a real spell slinger.

Now you can have a newbie and a slightly damaged Prime runner on the same team.

A short one about Magic:

Is there an official ruling on how many copies of a specific spell (e.g. how many Armors) can be sustained on one target simultaneously?

In SR4 Armor spells can be stacked on a target but only the strongest Armor spell would apply (the effects are not cumulative). I imagine it will be same in SR5, so not many situations that would justify sustaining multiples though I could think of a few special cases.

But that highest armor spell still stacks over the physical armor your wearing.

Thanks a lot!

Nobody mentioned that STR/3 = free recoil compensation, which is AWESOME.
So STR isn't a dump stat, actually.

So you want to be Harlequin w/o most of the QQ and not as annoying?

He is pretty seriously underpowered. Are you sure?

Relatively speaking, "The Hobbit" Gandalf is underpowered to "LotR" Gandalf (inb4 becoming White)

What happens when an elemental attack's adjusted (physical) DV is lower than adjusted armor? Stun damage?

Is this confirmed in 5e or speculation?

I have SR5O... so it's confirmed. I can give you the page: 175.

Thank you that is good to know.

So this inherent RC...round up or round down?

Round up. You actually get 1 + STR/3, so even the weaklings start with 2.

Is recoil reset every turn now rather than every phase?

Nope. It doesn't reset until you do something other than shoot. So if you're shooting with Complex Actions every action phase (say, semi-auto bursts with your Predator V), the recoil keeps piling up until you have to reload.

...something other than shoot "in an entire action phase" (RAW). Also, anything but Single Shot creates progressive recoil, including semi-auto fired in single shots.

So you have t take an entire pass off to reset? Even trolls with decent recil comp on their guns might skip out on autofire entirely with that kind of rule. I guess slected situations of autofire where you know you wont be shooting again next pass do to range, finishing shots etc. But If I rack up 6 recoil with a long burst this pass, lets say all of it is compensated next pass chances are I'm penalizing myself more than the enemy if I go autofire again. Are recoil comp options vastly increased, is the effect of autofire vastly increased?

I think that taking an action to aim gave you a chance to reset your recoil, right?

-Wired_SR_AEGIS