hi there, this is my 1st post on these forums.

i wanted 2 make this post about mono-wire 'cause i've looked at the damage values given in the SR3 book, and i'm confused...

it says that if u run into a string of monowire (even if it's placed in neck-height and u're sprinting) u only take 11(S) (or was it 13?) in damage.
i don't understand this, 'cause there's no way of staging up the damage.
pictures this:
Mr. No-name, the combat mage is being chased by a group of lonestart cops and he's running all his legs can bare.
and unknown 2 him, someone's conviniently placed a string of mono-wire across the ally.
he runs into the mono-wire at top-speed, getting cut right in the neck, and he goes on, only taking servere damage!

this makes no sense 2 me... can anyone plz help me out?
have i missed some critical detail in the rules or do i need 2 make a house rule 4 this?

thanx in advance.

note: sry 4 the wierd spellings, hope u can chew through it anyways...

hmmm,

a savalette only makes 9m damage. basta. if you want to stage it up you swith to burst fire (3!!! bullets).

how do you want to accomplish that with a single mono-wire stretched around across an alley?

i cannot remember a mono-wire having burst fire.

what you probably recall to is probably this: lets say the mono-wire is placed head-high. and the guard is hit at head-height (+6 modifier for you placing the mono-wire) and the guard runs into it it will make 11d damage.

but this should be considered a house rule and only if the gm approves to this.

Because it sucks to have a PC sprint down a hallway, make an impossible resistance roll, and instantly die.

you hit the wire, but don't run through it, at least not complely! there would be some resistance that would stop you.

i'd say if the dude is on a motorcycle driving at least 50km/h the s damage goes up to d.

You could use some measure of the characters running speed as extra dice (or just automatic successes!) to stage up the damage, if you really want heads to fly.

For example, a number of dice equal to the characters running multiplier plus 1 for each 3 points of quickness they have. If they used athletics or hydraulic jacks or something to increase their quickness for running purposes, count that.

I like the S damage, because I personally don't think monowire will be strong enough to cut bone.

Extremely sharp, yes, but not very strong.

Monowire is stopped by anything with a barrier rating greater than half the monowire damage rating. It will not cut plastic bone lacing, but will slice every tendon as it slides across the plastic bone.

My house rule for it (along with any other basic damage system) is to use the grenade damage rules or a variation of it. Basically you take 1/2 the power and turn it into dice. Then you roll those dice TN 4 for staging damage. So if the monowire is 12S, you roll 6 dice TN 4. It's a given that if you place the monowire out as a trip wire you don't do this.

Bah, monowire is stupid.

Just ignore it

Welcome to Dumpshock, but here's one tip kenny. This Forum does not react well to the use of 'elite-speak' and various other lazy internet shortforms. We have a large community, many of whom do not speak English as a first language, yet they can make the effort to communicate properly in English when posting here. Please consider this in your future posts. Thanks.

Monowhip has only one damage code, which doesn't necessarily reflect all situations but does cover most circumstances, leaving the GM to house rule anything else.

For example, running into monwire could result in anything from losing some skin off the top of your head (if just above your head height - think dwarves), to losing some toes as the troll just catches his boot on the monowire trip wire, to losing half a limb, to losing your head (no pun intended).

Serious damage covers the majority of these instances - if the damage code was 11D you could end up with players complaining that monowire at ankle height shouldn't automatically kill them!

Just use the base damage code and modify based upon circumstances.

When it comes to situations like "Moving Taget+Monowire" I would use the vehicle collision rule. Let's assume that the character is riding a Bike at 60Km/H and hits a Monowire stretched across the street. The character is wearing 4/2 armor and have a body of 6.

Now, I don't really remember exactly how to calculate collision damage but I think it was Base speed/10 M damage. Monowire: 10S Bike speed: 6M. We could either add the two damages together or take two separate tests, I vote for two tests. First we have the actual collission with the Monowire: 10S (9S) and then we have the inertia of the character that would create two options.

1: The monowire does NOT snap due to a few hundred kilos of pressure to the ANCHOR points, not the wire people, but to the place where the wire has been tied. The wire stays in place and the character takes an additional 5M (4M) damage.

2: The wire snaps due to the sudden impact and the wire whipslash across the alley/street and works like a grenade blast, hitting anyone within range with a base damage code of 10S (People would have the chance to make a dodge test).

In both cases, even if the character survives there will be an immediate crash test with a realistic modifier of at least +4.

Monowire won't hold up to several hundred kgs worth of pressure. It will snap long before that.

Weak and being able to stand up to 100+kg of stress are different things. First I'm almost positive that monowire doesn't stretch much if at all. So it's not like monofilament fishing line that we know today.

In order to use it as a whip it doesn't need to be all that strong. It either cuts or it doesn't. Try this, take 20lbs test line (plastic monofilament fishing line) wrap it around both hands (around your fingers) several time and pull really hard, until it breaks. Now let us know if it cut you. There's a good chance it did. Given that the fishing line is only 20lbs test line and it's a massively thick redwood tree trunk in comparison to monofilament buckytube (ie Shadowrun monofilament), I'd say it would work well as a whip.

Do we have any physical chemists out there?

What happens to a buckytube when it breaks? Do the broken ends heal into new stable hemispheres, or do they unravel, or what?

Also that "string of monowire covering the width of an alleway" just cost many thousands of nuyen. It's pretty infeasable to use monowire as much as GM's like to

And yes, the barrier rating thing is canon. Monowire goes against double the barrier rating when determining what it can cut. It is not god.

Monowire...buckytubes? You gotta be kidding...

I had been going to suggest the vehicle collision rules ...

Even if it does break, you'll still get a whipback effect along both sides of the breaking object. Depending upon how you want to interpret those wave resonances, it might result in two or more additional "attacks", one from either side as the now loose monowire lashes back from sudden release of tautness.

Hi, kenny26, and welcome from me too.

The way it sounds, that's one of those very cinematic situations that no roleplaying game is really situated to handle. From all the descriptions in the game texts, a guy running into a string of monowire at full speed should simply be cut in half. That's what it's there for, and I'd treat it that way if a situation like that should ever arise. (specially hardenend armor materials or magic excluded here )

Only leaves me to state that I usually refrain from using certain "deathtrap" situations like that...is far too easy to kill someone because some ganger wanted to try out that wizwire he got from somewhere.

Monowire is not actually literally a monomolecular filament and is visible. Just not very visible.

Seriously, the wire should just slice you in half, but in a game where a called shot to a person's unarmored face doesn't negate armor bonuses and idiocy like this prevails in lots of other places, either rule everything realistically or stick with straight canon, but I really, really, really suggest you do not mix them up. That just never ends well for anyone.

the called shot to the head is logics to anyone who cares to grumble over the rule for more than 2 secs.
but the reason why i'm asking all these questions about mono-wire is because i really haven't got anytihng from the real world to relate it to (unless you'd happen to know some scientist that has managed to produce something simular to mono-wire and tested it on lab rats...).
my point is, i have no idea excactely how durable it is or how sharp it is (some of the posts helped me at that point).

and i usually try to rule everything realisticly. but in this case, i needed advice.

Closest thing in the real world (that's commonly available, in any case) would be something as simple as razor piano wire. Tech it up a bit (say, slightly less strength, a lot thinner, and the ability to work like something of a flexible, near-massless knife) and you get the general idea. For running into it at neck level, stage up the damage level as a called shot to the neck (probably pushing into OD damage), negate all inapplicable armor, and up the power per running speed. Roll resistance and see what happens; if the person takes a wound without dying, consider this: the player could have noticed it and tried to slow down, could have snapped the wire if it were improperly placed, or could simply have taken a would to the neck that, had it been taken in the arm, would have effectively been a light wound. After all, doesn't take much to count as serious damage if applied to the right places. Still, overall, simplest and best way to handle this is to not run a player into such a situation for a lot of reasons, foremost among them being that it's a rather big leap of believability that anyone with this stuff would just string it up and watch for fun. If it's put up for defensive purposes in an urban environment, most likely it's there for a reason and very much not an offensive application.

The power of monowire is already adjusted for running speed. In one fo the books it aid that grabbing monowire or putting your hand through it is a 7s, running through it is a 10s. Correct me if I'm wrong but a monowhip is 10s also and i'll bet that that is sure as hell already moving.

It may be moving, but placing your inertia as opposed to the near zero inertia of the wire changes things. Running into it is not the same as being whipped.

That said, you're still forgetting to stage up for what is effectively a called shot to the neck.

kenny26
You need to look a bit harder at finding Shadowrun Monowire, in real life. Do quick search on google.com for bucky tubes. That's one reason I put that in my message (bucky tubes).

link 1
link 2

Just reading over the various pieces of information brings you to a couple of conclusions. First monowire (as the term is used in Shadowrun) is pretty much way to expensive to use for anything short of controlled application. At no point is it going to be practical for hand weapon. Along those lines, the writers need to delete most if not all references to it in the game or add more detail.

Second like most things in the game, they don’t go into enough detail. So you can make a monofilament (probably bucky tubes) whip. Unless you manage to cut off exactly what you hit ever time you use the weapon, there's a good chance you're going to break it. The whip itself my be able to cut you, but if that wire doesn’t cut said bone, armor, etc it's going to get the weight at the end stuck in it. So tell me how much pressure does it take to break monowire? Now add the leverage of the handle, body movement (yours and theirs), etc. So, basically like in Cyberpunk 2020 it's going to break when stressed.

Anyway, it's in the game and since they re-added it and made rules (only enough to bother putting it in and adding a price). There needs to be more rules for it. Like running into it, once you take a serious wound…then what happens? I like to use half the power of the attack with a TN 4 for staging damage up. It makes the damage random that way. The other major issue is that the stuff by the rules won't break. Or rather they don't say that it will break. There's no rules for a controlled application of it's use. Like drilling hole in a door, pushing through a curved wand with a secured bit of monowire and using it to slowly carve out the handle. Or another practical applications of monowire, like monowire/ceramic armor composites. But hey we needed to have battle ships and subs. Like runners needs those.

i know that noone sane would pull a string of mono-wire across an ally. but i was just making a simple example.

what if the inside of a safe is protected by mono-wire and the thief trips, cutting up his face in the mono-wire. i know that sounds stupid, but it could happen...
and there are many other possibilties of cutting off your head with mono-wire (like an asassin using a mono whip to stretch across an ally. then the first example would be much more likely.

anyways, you've all helped me a bunch with the mono-wire.
thanks.

if someone in my game trilled and fell face first into a mesh of monowire they are pretty much dead, at the very least their face is gone pretty much all the way to the skull, including eyes, nose, probably their jaw. If they survived they would wish that they hadn't.

Oh, I don't know. Often enough you see runners with bone lacing. Not to mention that when you fall most if not all people put their hands out in front of them (ie damage resistance roll).

Lastly, I don't think a safe would be protected by monowire. No one but a sadist or someone with a AD&D fetish for Grimtooth's traps would do that. First, you need a way to disable the trap on your own. Second you need to be able to hide the mechanism that moves the monowire out of the way. Third, the monowire is not invisible. Given a dark room with a flashlight, night vision, etc. You're going to spot it pretty often.

Well, my group had planned to get a little...creative.

The job was to whack a certain troll go-gang as best we could (ie, nuyen for heads) so the first idea was, "Ok, we need a bunny" (Bunny = bait.)


The great plan was to get the bunny, have them attract the gang (A few rounds of WP would do fine) and then escape down a highway downramp rigged with a "Chest-hight-on-a-troll" monowire trap - a spring-loaded frap that would lie flat, then lock into place when activated. Oh, and covered with duct tape so the escaping bunny wouln't lose their tyres.

And then there'd be a few gallons of that super-slip stuff on the bottom. And then more fun and evil....

Unfortunately, by the time the wire came through, someone with a rigger dropped a few hundred gallons of napalm on the gangers clustered around an armoured truck.

But I'd assume the usual modifiers for the barrier-test would apply, as really nasty as they could be against targets speeding down a badly-lit downramp with smoke fogginf the path...