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Message no. 1
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Stuart M. Willis)
Subject: Trolls/Dwarfs Critical Hits (Was [OT] Leading Edge Games)
Date: Tue Feb 19 09:30:01 2002
Gurth doth speweth:

>Not me; I toyed with the idea, but when I started putting in some numbers>, it
>quickly became apparent that PCCS can't really accomodate metahumans,
>especially trolls. The tables don't go far enough to include those huge B>ody
>and Strength bonuses :(
>
>Somebody ... argh, who was it again ... Mike TGC I think (a name old-time>rs
>should recognize :) did an adaptation of the hit location/damage table of> the
>basic PCCS game. I mean the basic basic table that takes up one page, not> the
>normal basic table of two pages, or the advanced tables that require a wh>ole
>book by themselves :) The way it worked, IIRC (it was 1994 when I last lo>oked
>at it), was that each hit location had a wound level associated with it, >and if
>you hit that's the base damage you caused regardless of the weapon you we>re
>using.


(sorry mate, you come through awful on my system)

Yeah, I think most of us have probably played with a similar critical
hit table, not too hard. :) Might still be worth looking at. What was
nice about the PCCS was that it never gave an exact figure for death
- as a player you never knew when you really were going to cark it.
Sure, ther was you go reduce risk of death, but you could never
completely dimish it. Made you play a lot more cautiously and
realistically I felt...


But what this raises is the question of difficulty in hitting trolls
vs. dwarfs. A troll is big right, so hitting/seeing it should be
easier yes? A dwarf is small, so hitting/seeing it should be harder?

I'm not sure this has been hashed out on here before - and its
certainly ont discussed in the rules - but its something I'm curious
about.

Its pretty self explanatory that partial cover for a dwarf is
different from partial cover for a troll. but what about spell
casting (in terms of LOS) and, more importantly, called shots.
Surely aiming at a troll's head is easier than aiming at a humans? Or
a dwarfs? How many of you take this into account - or is the
difference too negible to translate to a call shot modifier of +4
against humans/orks/elves, +5 against dwarfs, +3 against trolls?

S.
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Message no. 2
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Gurth)
Subject: Trolls/Dwarfs Critical Hits (Was [OT] Leading Edge Games)
Date: Tue Feb 19 13:30:01 2002
According to Stuart M. Willis, on Tue, 19 Feb 2002 the word on the street was...

> Yeah, I think most of us have probably played with a similar critical
> hit table, not too hard. :) Might still be worth looking at. What was
> nice about the PCCS was that it never gave an exact figure for death
> - as a player you never knew when you really were going to cark it.

For those who've never played it, it basically does something similar to the
revised damage system I posted the other week: any time you get hit, you roll
to see if you are incapacitated; if not, you can keep on fighting. However,
regardless of whether you go down or not, you have a chance of dying in a
certain time from your wounds unless they are treated. The thing is, though,
that if you take 1 point of damage (like from having a bullet graze your little
finger) you have a 95% chance of surviving, and if not, of dying in 79 hours if
you get no treatment. But try to headbutt a HMG round and your survival chance
drops to 1%, with death in a few seconds if you fail the roll.

> But what this raises is the question of difficulty in hitting trolls
> vs. dwarfs. A troll is big right, so hitting/seeing it should be
> easier yes? A dwarf is small, so hitting/seeing it should be harder?

In PCCS, you'd figure out the size of each and use the appropriate modifier for
it. In SR, though, I don't think the size difference is large enough to warrant
a separate modifier. This is also the way some (optional?) TN modifier table is
set up in an SR book, but I can't remember which one :(

--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Dat is de kip voor het ei spannen.
-> NAGEE Editor * ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
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Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
Message no. 3
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Damion Milliken)
Subject: Trolls/Dwarfs Critical Hits (Was [OT] Leading Edge Games)
Date: Fri Mar 1 01:35:01 2002
Stuart M. Willis writes:

> But what this raises is the question of difficulty in hitting trolls
> vs. dwarfs. A troll is big right, so hitting/seeing it should be
> easier yes? A dwarf is small, so hitting/seeing it should be harder?

We sometimes use the modifiers in the Manual Gunnery Table in the Vehicles
section of SR3. This has useful modifiers for handling situations such as
characters running at 120 mph (thanks to spirit Movement Powers), and
shooting tiny paranatural critters (like those giant cockroach things). I'm
not sure what the modifiers are exactly (that's what the tables are for
;-)), but I recall that only Gnome characters managed to get any modifier.
The modifiers were something along the lines of +1 TN if target was less
than 1/3 the size of a human, and -1 if it was 3x the size of a human.
Trolls, being only around twice as large as a human, failed to become easier
to hit (the target had to be about as large as a small car to get the
modifier). Anyway, check it out yourself and see what you think.

--
Damion Milliken University of Wollongong
Unofficial Shadowrun Guru E-mail: dam01@***.edu.au
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