I see from the PDF of the index that they still have fletchette rounds. I'm wondering if it's still as weak under the new system as it was in SR3. . .

Wasn't all that weak. There was barely any reason to use anything else for a hold-out, as any armor past 1 would bring your Power to 2 anyway.

~J

"Fletchette rounds: the ideal load for the world's tiniest pistols . . . ." Sounds like an advertising line

Flechette Ammo adds +2 to the DV and +2 to the AP, and uses Impact Armor to resist. The +2 AP means that you actually ADD two points of armor when you are hitting a target. However, I will note that the majority of armor in the book has 2 points of Ballistic higher than the Impact. Thus, the net effect of loading Flechette rounds often is simply adding +2 to the DV against most armored targets. There are a few armors that don't have Impact protection (Armor Clothing) or have Impact equal to the Ballistic value (Leather Jacket, Urban Explorer Jumpsuit), and you can have Helmets which usually add more to Impact than Ballistic, but in general, you aren't going to be losing too much while loading Flechette Rounds. Of course, I'd prefer EX Explosive or APDS myself.

Thanks, hahnsoo, that one's been bugging me! You're the coolest, man .

Looks like the stuff is going to be a lot more useful than it has the last two or three editions of the game.

Looks like the same situation it was in before, IMO, but each to their own.

~J

How is this the "same situation"? In SR4, you are never worse off using fletchette ammo instead of normal ammo, and you're almost always better off unless the target takes stun damage and you don't want them to. +2DV +2AV increases the number of hits by 1.33 on average, and by 2 if the target is unarmored.

Well, it may not be exactly the same, but in SR3 you were very rarely worse off with flechette—2x Impact was extremely infrequently meaningfully more than regular Ballistic.

The fact that the damage increase stays even if the target is armored is new, though, and I suppose that does make it different. It's still very similar, unless I've missed something else.

~J

I suppose in some games people may mainly go for ballistic armor. Most people in my games had impact over half ballistic because if you cannot be shot effectively, and they cannot be shot effectively, it may come to blows. And then it would be annoying to be out in one hit. Plus there's always the mage + bullet barrier thing--mage + bullet barrier + good impact armor = near immunity to ranged physical attacks, but you can still manipulate and interact with things.

If the impact armor of your target is less than 4 points greater than the ballistic armor of your target, flechette is more effective than regular ammo.

Crusher's right. An extra point of DV is worth 3 points of armor (the average number needed for a success on damage resistance). Fletchette's DV increase is worth 6 points of armor, but they add two to armor so we're back down to four.

EDIT
EX is worth 8 this way. APDS is only worth 5, so it's really only useful if you want to do Physical damage despite super heavy armor. Fletchettes actually climb somewhat above APDS in terms of pure effectiveness if you consider the fact that Impact Armor is usually two points less than ballistic. This stuff has been way jacked up!

I interpreted "bullet" as "tiny dead thing going super fast". From the view on the astral, details of it being metal or not, being a hundred little balls or a hundred .22 rounds, etc., all seem pretty unimportant. It's dead, small, and super-fast.

Arrows are not small. Explosions don't have many things that size (mostly stuff too small to be considered a "thing", plus some small and some large things). Slingshots are not super-fast. Hummingbirds are not dead.

I guess you could take the strict view that "shot" is not a 'bullet", and in some uses of the word "bullet", a capsule round isn't a "bullet" either. But I tend to view these things from the perspective of a spell hanging out in the astral, not the perspective of someone writing an ammunition catalog.

I may be misremembering, but I believe that Insect Barrier is a canon spell, and so an example of the sort of thing the restricted-target Barrier would be used for. As such, it seems to me that the general "type" of a thing is more important than its physical properties.

~J

Indeed, but insects are alive, and therefore there's something to work with on the astral. I wouldn't allow a "Barrier to commlinks running DevaOS" spell because I don't think spells can tell the difference between electronic devices running different operating systems.

Otherwise, why not set up a security system that uses a "barrier to invalid ID cards" spell?

In order to determine where to draw the line, I consider whether astral perception could tell the difference. If the answer is "no", then generally the spell can't either.