I have looked over the armour and rules that deal with spirits and I came across something funny. Spirits have immunity to normal weapons, and that is good. But that power is not harden armour, just a lot of it. It states that if the power of the weapon doesn't get higher than a set number the spirit ignores it. Right? Well, that is rather good. Until you see the part where it doesn't say base power, but the power.

But still a smart little runner with EX-EX ammo in his tricky AK 97 can kill force 9 spirits, no? With full auto making it a power rating 20,and it only has to beat 18. This is also not counting staging above deadly witch I am not too clear on right now,as I forget where they put those rules.

The errata (or the FAQ I can't remember which) clarifies that it does indeed function like hardened armor in that weapons with a base power equal or less than double the spirit's force do no damage.

Staging above deadly only ups the power for melee weapons. For ranged, it just gives more successes that must be cancelled before someone can stage down.

~J

As above plus the spirit is resisting only 2D damage and rolling an average of 10 dice to do so too.

The FAQ, it should have been in the errata.

But with Staging over deadly with guns it would have to roll 2+ 10 times with 9 dice. That is before the rules were changed, as immunity reads completely different than harden armour.

No. It doesn't work that way. Except Melle combat staging happens *after* comparing the attacker's successes and defender's sucesses. The defender in physical combat (except melee) must cancel all the attacker's sucesses *then* stage down the base damage in order to totally soak, unless the attack is dodged.

In melee combat it's different because the attack is staged up and calculated *before* the damage resistance roll.

If the attacker got 12 sucesses with a heavy pistol, and the defender failed to dodge, then the defender would need 16 sucesses total between his soak roll (including body, combat pool ect.) and his dodge roll in order to take no damage (since sucesses on the dodge roll count for damage resistance if the dodge failed).

second last post

Sure enough, found it in the book.
(adds to his list of rules to ignore)

ignoring that rule makes being shot a much less deadly proposition, which makes for (even less) realism in the game. if that's what you're going for, okay, but be advised about how it affects the game.

Already know the possible effects, been playing like that for a while now under house rules. IIRC when we first tried playing under the by the book ruling we had the entire team dying in one combat round.

Then the problem may have not been strictly rules related...

My group has always used a deadlier than the deadlier over damage system proposed in the book, essentially every success over deadly (thats not staged down) represents a box of overflow. Mainly because a wound that is 6 successes over 12D gets written down as 6 over deadly, or 16 boxes. Clearly not by the book, and we were a little surprised when we read "Deadlier Over Damage" and realized we were using rules twice as deadly. We still use those rules (its really not that uncommon a mistake, most groups I've played with has done it that way), and character death-- while not unknown-- is still pretty rare. I think the possibility of character death in one attack makes people more cautious.