| From: | Max Rible <slothman@*********.ORG> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: SRII Lethality |
| Date: | Wed, 17 Dec 1997 10:38:39 -0800 |
>What do you think about the lethality level of the Shadowrun combat system
>overall? This includes melee, guns, explosives, and magic.
Shadowrun is more lethal than many role-playing games. The existence of
condition monitors means that as soon as you take a wound or get tired,
you're in trouble. Compare this to games like AD&D and Champions, where
you're fine as long as you're positive on hit points or STUN and BODY.
That said, it's still amazingly easy to survive things that kill people
in the real world. People playing with guns with no skill, defaulting
off their attributes, manage to kill themselves on a regular basis.
Simulating the lethality of the real world, though, is a pain. Hit
location systems add complexity and break up the flow of a game. Having
your character get offed by a gutterpunk who's hyped up on a Duke Nukem BTL
and three lines of Turbo and brings a heavy pistol into the shopping mall
where you're having a date makes for a really bad story.
The important question is not whether or not the system is too lethal.
The important question is: is the system *sufficiently* lethal that
player characters make decisions based on "not getting shot is a really
good idea" as opposed to "Oh, Uzis, my armor jacket should be able to
handle them."
I don't have a problem with this in my game because I have good players.
They've chosen a very "Mission: Impossible" theme for the team in the first
place, and use cover and stealth to avoid getting shot.
Increasing lethality without messing up game play is tricky. If you just
make things more lethal, people's favorite player characters get killed a
little too easily. If you add more mechanics, you increase the barrier to
entry on the game system.
Things I'd like to see, though I don't know if they can be represented
decently without excessive mechanics:
1. Body armor may keep the bullets from tearing into you, but all that
kinetic energy has to go somewhere. For armor that isn't explicitly
a hardened shell that's reducing your maneuverability (lowering Combat
Pool), people should be taking bruising damage for bullets that strike
them. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of mechanics like "If the
power of the attack is greater than the ballistic rating of your body
armor and you manage to stage down the physical attack to nothing, use
extra successes to stage down a Stun wound of the original power of the
attack less the ballistic armor rating."
Examples:
hold-out pistol vs. armor jacket: you can stage a 4L down to
nothing, and because the power of 4 is less than the Ballistic 5 armor,
no problem.
Ares Predator vs. armor jacket: you stage down a 9M as if it's a 4M,
and if you stage it down to nothing, you use extra successes to stage
down a 4M stun.
This sort of rule would have runners slapping on stimpatches to try and
keep going as they're worn down by the bruising damage, requiring that
they need more successes to avoid getting taken down by weaponry, and
giving them more reason to use up that karma pool for this scene. :-)
2. Some official rules for staging up damage past Deadly would be good.
I like the existence of overflow boxes on the Condition Monitor, and the
relation to your Body score: it avoids the AD&D condition of "you're up...
you're dead!" Staging past Deadly might start staging up a Light wound
on the overflow monitor (so hitting someone for M with 9 net successes
would leave them incapacitated with three boxes of their overflow monitor
filled in).
It would be good to have some explicit overdamage rules that will apply to
make the really lethal things more lethal: explosions (especially in enclosed
spaces), called shots to vital spots, falling from a great height.
--
%% Max Rible %% slothman@*****.com %% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "Ham is good... Glowing *tattooed* ham is *bad*!" - the Tick %%
