I am gearing up for a game that I will be Gm'ing and wanted to make sure that I was well versed on the rules as presented in the BBB.

1. In a damage resistance test, does the wound level penalty add to the TN?

I have played it that way but the example on page 113 of the BBB doesn't take that into account. It just uses Power minus Armor resisted by Body.

2. How do you handle the fact that 6 and 7 are the same TN?

Example: Gel rounds do Power -2 [Regular Damge Code] Stun so a Predator (9M) would do 7M Stun. That's the same as 6M Stun from the point of view of the person on the receiving end.

However, the reduction in power due to armor would make a difference. Just curious.

Thank you,

- theartthief

Wound level makes no difference to Damage Resistance, only to dodging.

You can be unconscious and still resist Damage, albeit no combat pool.

as for the 6/7 TN - it doesn't bother us.

Being unconsious and resisting damage incurs a +4 tn I do believe.

Basis for my interpretation is in the rigger's section I don't know what page or which book . When a rigger is jacked into a drone they're not paying attention to their body making damage harder to compensate for. Because they can't roll with the damage, angle their body properly to avoid major organ damage and so on.

I don't have Rigger 3, but wound modifiers have never factored into resisting damage. As we interpret it, being unconscious provides a -1 TN to be hit by attacker (stationary target), and no combat pool for soaking.

Same with spell resistance.

For the 6/7 thing, it becomes more difficult once you add TN mod. (wound penalty, vision mods, etc..)

7 -> 6?

Not by my group's reading, we see it as 7->8.

A one is ALWAYS a failure, yes?

IE, my TN is 1, but I roll a single die and it comes up 1. Meets the TN, but a 1 is a failure. Too bad for me.

My TN is a 7. I roll a die, it comes up six. I re-roll, it comes up 1, except that 1 is an automatic failure. I needed at least a 2 on my re-rolled 6 in order to beat the automatic failure rule.

Ew. I'd avoid that. It messes up the whole 'rule of sixes'. It's not a good idea to punish people for having more dice, or good rolls.

I've always played a TN of 7 as being a TN of 8 for all intents and purposes. Whatever modifies it does so from seven, but if the final TN is 7, I always require my players to get an 8. I swear that rule is somewhere in the BBB, but I'm too lazy to check. Anyone have a page number?

As pointed out, TN 6 and 7 are very different, as are TN 2 and -4. Why? Modifiers. Say you've taken a box of damage; suddenly all those 6s aren't any harder to make, but the 7s are nontrivially tougher. So on and so forth.

~J

Very different is perhaps an overstatement, but they are definitely not identical, and factors do tend to shift to make them only a passing problem and sometimes part of a good dynamic. There are times, of course, when it can produce crazy results, but it's not too much of a problem, in my experience.

The TN modifiers also don't apply to drain resistance or resisting spells either.

The 7 as 8 rules is not official, mostly the difference between TN 6 and 7 only shows up when modifiers are applied.

Indeed it's not, because you're really not solving the problem, but merely delaying it; now 7 and 8 are the same TN instead of 6 and 7. It'd be a pointless rule.

On a further note, the d6 system is just complex anyway when it comes to scaling TNs. The difficulty of hitting a particular TN scales exponentially with the number, but each change changes the probabilities differently. That's the main reason that conditions that modify TNs are almost always more influential than increasing the number of dice. All in all, it's a wierd system with several variables that make calculating probabilities very odd.

Should be noted that modified exploding dice basically add the result -1 to all rolls after the first. Thus, rolling a 6 and rerolling up to a 5 would be an 11 with standard exploding dice, but a 10 with modified exploding dice. It negates the problem, but it's also somewhat slower and, more importantly, a lot of the canon TNs are designed to work around 6s and 7s being equivalent.

The math with we a while earlier using d10s instead of d6s produced some better reuslts. Just add 1 to the 'base TN'.

I prefer "fixing" it by treating all 6's as "5+Reroll." Probabilities remain about the same until you hit TNs of 12 or so, at which point they progressively become more difficult at each increment of 6... but by that time, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't fix the total lack of a single curve in the Shadowrun system, but it makes all target numbers target numbers of their own.

I know TSS did a variation similar to that using d8's but that just does the same thing while simultaneously making all TNs under 8 significantly easier.