Point taken. I'll try myself making such a character sometime and have him meet one of my sams ... just to see who'd win. But yeah, 3rd Ed initiative makes it possible for non-wired characters to participate in combat, though that usually applies only to NPCs.

Unless the equivalent of a VCR 3 in that system is much more essence intensive (or costly), I see no trouble there. I'll still worry about things not turning out quite as nice though. And I mourn the loss of the cyberdeck ("Yes. We’re eliminating the clunky old cyberdeck in SR4, and with no ‘deck, it doesn’t make much sense to call them deckers." SR4 FAQ 1; if any freelancer wants to correct that assumption I make, be my guest) and wonder how the hell deckers will work now without being Otaku. But Iguess I should cut the writers some slack and hope they just fix the system and don't fix it to death.

Well ... he IS a troll.

Reminds me, I hope melee gets fixed too. The way it is right now, a hyper-fast cyber ninja night one cannot hope to hit a troll in the back and not be pounded to death. This automatic counterattack thing needs to go.

Well - if the shot(s) ricochet off the dermal growths...

I think there should be at least a small possibility of it given high enough skill levels. Hell, other archetypes have to put up with that sort of thing on a regular basis - it's not like you're protected from getting nailed by someone with a gun skill of 5 and a dirt-cheap smartlink just because you're a street sam with several hundred thousand of cyber installed. Or at least a situation that'd force a rigger to actually roll vs. TN 3 once in a great while.

But I'd settle for the designers not letting the riggers rape the laws of physics on a regular basis.

Not that it matters much, since I somehow don't see our group switching to the 4th edition. (and I don't care that much anyway, but it sure is fun to argue on message boards )

That's a misconception that I really hate. Characters do not 'matrix-dodge' bullets. It's simply a facet of the abstract combat system. The designers wanted a dodge mechanic in there somewhere, and by having it occur after the attack roll makes it a little more survival friendly, since players can decide how many dice they use after seeing how difficult a task they will be faced with.

I observed one game where the GM, going for realism, had players assign Dodge dice before the attack was rolled, and although it was 'realistic,' it also tended to raise player stress levels, as well as the lethality of the game, when you ran into circumstances like assigning most of your Dodge dice when shot at by the guard with the LMG who scored only one success, so you easily stage that down, and then get nailed because you only have a die or two left when the guard with the Predator manages to stage the damage up to deadly. It also slowed things down further as players pondered how many Dodge dice an attacker was worth assigning.

Says you

I guess it just comes down to what you define as "a meaningful chance", then.

~J

Says me too. It's precisely what drove me to hate dice and love electronic dice rollers like Omnihedron.

Pretty hard to construe a snowball's chance in hell as meaningful.

Exactly. I had a old post around here somewhere, ah here it is:

This would be a good quick fix, and I'm ready to implement it if you are , but I think it avoids the deeper issues.

(note: the following opinions are those of an SR newbie with about eight months' experience GMing for Kagetenshi's rigger Alex.)

The two major issues, as I see them, are the TN problem and the Sensor mechanics. mmu1 touched on the first one, and it really is a big deal: it's not hard to bring a even a big van's handling down to 1, and then the VCR-3 offsets any situational modifiers that come up. I actually don't think the VCR is at fault for this. Instead, it's too easy to reduce the handling on an off-the-lot vehicle. Drive-by-wire is the big offender here: it's quite expensive, but it pays for itself when your TN to dodge that lightning bolt is 2 instead of 5. It pays for itself again when you ram the mage. When the guy throwing the lightning bolts is a spirit in the storm clouds above you, and it's dark and rainy and some magical effect has cut your speed by a factor of six, it can pay for itself three times in an hour of play. You get similar bad results out of [Ac|De]celeration.

Sensors. Most of the problem is in the lack of specificity, I think. There's no clear definition of how the different parts of a sensor system relate to its ability to detect things, nor of how Signature is really calculated, and the parts that are defined are often internally inconsistent. This makes it difficult to extend the Sensor rules for new situations.

Example: thermal dampers raise the Signature of the vehicle they're installed in while in use, even against vehicles with Sensors=pitiful and no heat-detection ability. Example: Sensors versus Concealment (by canon there is no interaction. Should there be?) Example: What do you do when the sensor apparatus gets covered with black paint, or freeze-foam, or a giant loogie from the troll adept? What do Sensors and Invisibility do when they interact, besides produce flamewars? Why?

I'm not suggesting a move to a more complicated system, with differing sensor components providing different modifiers against different targets. I'm saying that Signature as it stands is too abstract to be useful as a measure of an object's visibility to sensors, which forces the sensor system itself to be uselessly vague in how it does what it does.

Were I rewriting the SR vehicle rules, I'd disassociate kinds of detection systems from Sensor rating. Sensor rating would control the number of dice that you get for Sensor tests and perhaps the amount of magnification that you can muster, and would represent sophistication of the image interpretation software that the vehicle carries. Sensor tests would work similarly to Perception tests, with maybe a few Sensor-specific modifiers. Add-ons for the sensor system (ultrasound, thermo, &c) would be available, and would work like their cybernetic counterparts. Signature would be taken behind the woodshed and dealt with.

There are other, minor issues: vehicle fragility/invulnerability, the tendency of the Acceleration test to nonconsensually violate the physics fairy, the whole Ramming thing, vehicles containing other vehicles. But Acceleration and Ramming become more fair when the TNs involved are 4 instead of 2, and fragility/invulnerability has been done to death on these boards. Ultimately I suspect that all of the vehicle rules need to be scrapped and re-written, but I've no idea how to do such a thing usefully.

Given that you can upgrade a lower-rated sensor package to have the same kinds of detection systems normally only found in the higher-rated packages (without increases in weight or CF, btw), I'd say that they're already disassociated, but not in the way that you want.