Stun damage is superior to wound b/c you can kill w/ ease anyone you knock out, don't worry about geeking a friend w/ friendly fire, can k.o. a target you are extracting, and some paranormals heal body damage, but not stun. There are some times where body damage is needed, but stun still wins based on milage. Stun bolt is actually easier to cast than mana bolt (a design mistake, IMO). It's so easy that a starting mage can cast at force 5 Serious level and will nearly never take drain w/ some spell pool dice. Plus, if cast against something on the astral plan (a non manifested spirit) it does body, b/c there is no stun damage in astral space.

I so hope they fix this!


+-<:-) SaintHax

err, from what i recall there is stun damage in astral space.
only place where there is not stun damage is in cyberspace

Stun damage is dramatically weaker than Physical because it can be trivially (if temporarily) counteracted with a single patch. An unconscious guard is a guard that can be on your tail again in seconds flat.

~J

A guard with a biomonitor implant, and a singleshot stimpack 10 can really ruin your day.

He goes down, lies still a minute or so, then suddenly awakes, clear as rain, and can call for backup or sneak up behind your team. Who by now, has probably ventured deeper into the compound.

Of course, if you stun everyone down and take care of them before they have a chance to wake up...

i like trading up stun and physical attacks on the same target. you often inflict higher wound modifiers more quickly.

I wouldn't call stun damage "broken" any more than I would regular damage. There's plenty of ways around it -- trauma damper springs right to mind, along with the already mentioned and remarkably obvious stim patch -- that work pretty well.

Never had any problems with stun damage. Neither was it too weak nor too powerful.

Drones. Sentry guns. There's lots of things that are immune to stun damage.

Agreed. Stun damage can be better than pysical with the right tactics, but that can be said for a tiffani self defender too.
It all comes back to tactics.

Silence, we need to do away with stun damage. Instead, we'll have nonlethal damage. Also, instead of physical damage, we'll have hit points! Everyone wins!

You die. You die, and you go to hell. To hell! [/shameless stealing]

Well, the hit points comment deserves that response.

Did I hallucinate, or was there some info about SR4 weapons dealing a combination of lethal and non-lethal (e.g., "wind") damage?

You did not.

If you are hit by a firearm, and roll down damage to zero, you get hit by (damage code equivalent) stun on top of that. I guess you can roll that down too, but that makes shrugging off bullets much harder - and the game significantly more deadly, since it's likely that every hit will have *some* effect now.

more correctly, if the armor (from the looks of it any armor. so in effect all armor is now hardend armor, yay) makes the attack go to 0 you will instead take the damage as stun. so its nothing about soak and all about armor...

Four years later... I'm no longer SRM Staff, and stun is still broke. I quoted Cain, b/c those things are also immune to manabolt, which has a higher drain code still.

For some of the replies above, from 2005-- several really missed the point about a KO'd gaurd later chasing you. Once they are KO'd, you coup de grace them... now they are dead.

As this applies to SR4-- a mage w/ a Magic 5 can overcast stunbolt at a 10, and resist 2P. Correct? As I've been out of SR for years, working w/ another gaming group, I'm not longer as intimate w/ the rules as I used to be. That there stunbolt (had a hillybilly moment) ignore armor still, and will be resisted w/ Willpower and Spelldefense only. Just as effective as a manabolt. And Stunball is more effective, as you aren't worried about geeking that adept you are running w/ that rushed into the middle of all 5 of the corp sec gaurds. The troll will carry him out, and he'll live to fight another day, w/ no doctor bills.

Still a game design flaw.


Oh, the first replier was wrong for 3rd Ed-- there was no stun damage in Astral, it was converted to physical (and Black ICE caused physical while in cyberspace). Is that still the case in 4th (stun converts to physical)?

There's always pain editor FTW!

Rise, thread! Your master commands it!

I just don't see the problem. Stun damage is cheap, easy, and effective. All the more reason to go apeshit on murderers.

No, all of that goofyness is gone. Astral entities have a Stun and Physical track now. Stun spells cast at Astral Entities do Stun. Also, the above posts about Armor in SR4 are completely wrong with regards to when physical damage gets converted to stun.

There is no critter that heals stun damage. Magical damage is never influenced by the regeneration power which i expect is what you meant.

Yeah, this conversation was totally worth a four year thread necro.

lol 2005...

As for stun being safe to use on your teammates? wtf kind of mage do you play? If you stun your own guys, you either have to carry them or leave them for dead. *bad* idea, and it will make them very angry. And since everyone takes more stun damage in SR4 (bullets that don't pierce armor do stun), peoples' stun tracks will fill up a lot faster. That means that catching them in a stunball may well kill them some of the time. I personally have killed lots of people with stun, since you hit them with one powerful stun attack (say, stick n shock burst fire) that doesn't knock them out, then you have to hit them with another, and you accidentally kill them. And yes, stunball without magical opposition kills retacops no problem. So does everything! Nothing is broken because of how easily it kills gangers and rentacops, those guys get killed by harsh language. I'll reiterate my objective definition of broken: that its cost is disproportionate to its benefit. Stunbolt has a lower cost than other spells because of its low drain code, but like all magic it requires you to spend every last BP on Magic, magical skills, and magic-related attributes. Being a mage is not cheap, and it has serious drawbacks in terms of starting uberness. That means that spells are not broken. Even if they are powerful, they have a steep cost and come along with numerous disadvantages (in terms of your character being physically weak) that can't be cured except through hundreds of karma.

Holy zombie thread, Batman!


Anyway, to be fair, Kage's argument is invalid - the anti-stun damage patches in SR4 don't cure stun damage like they did in earlier editions...they give you the ability to ignore (rating) boxes before calculating dice pool penalties. You still drop unconcious when your track is filled, even if you're ignoring 6 boxes for the DP mod. So no need to leave corpses behind you, they're out of the fight until someone gets to do a full first-aid on them, at minimum.


Er...F/2-2, right? at force 10, that'd be 3P. You could cast it at force 9 for 2P, but due to SR4A's quirky little "if you're good at casting, then it bites you in the ass" rule, you'd take the exact same drain for the same number of boxes of damage. (i.e. if you know you're fighting someone with will 4, therefore he's got 10 boxes of stun track, to do 10 boxes, you either need to cast a force 10 spell and choose not to increase the damage with net successes, or cast a force 9 spell and use one net success to increase damage for +1 additional drain. It gets really stupid if you try to one-shot someone without overcasting.)


No - IIRC, all drain in astral is physical, but you still have two damage tracks.

I don't think that's the case in SR4. The astral drain, I mean, not the two damage tracks. I don't have the book right here, but I think that's the case.

Yeah, you're right - I think I was remembering the earlier editions' rule there.

Standard drain rules apply.

Drain is rounded up. Also, Stunbolt does (F/2)-1 Drain, so a force 10 Stunbolt does 4P Drain. True, this is still not difficult to soak, but the chance of being damaged by the drain is present.

I though like most think drain rounded in favor so it rounds down?

Drain rounds down. BBB, pg 195

"Drain is variable, based on the spell’s Force ÷ 2, rounded down, and modified by Drain modifiers appropriate to each spell."

A green forum where we recycle threads!

I love this place!

Could it be that stun was made a bit better in the hopes that the Knights of the Dinner Table might actually stun NPC and gazebos (that issue was so funny I peed myself) instead of bringing out the tac nukes?

You are right, my mistake. I just looked at the first description of Drain in the Awakened World chapter, where it doesnt specify the rounding, and assumed it would be rounded up. Sorry bout that.

No worries. It's kind of nice when the obnoxious degree of specificity I have can do someone some good.