| From: | Gurth <gurth@******.NL> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: SR Lethality Follow-up |
| Date: | Wed, 24 Dec 1997 12:14:24 +0100 |
> In answer to the question "Is Shadowrun lethal enough?" the general
consensus
> I've gotten has run around the form of "Yes, but...." Most people seem to
> think that it's lethal enough at the "normal" level but breaks down at the
> higher end of the scale.
Pretty accurate summary, I think.
> (1) Currently the basic combat test (in other words, for ranged, melee, magic,
> and so on) is an Opposed Test: whoever gets more successes (attacker or
> target) stages up or stages down the damage, as appropriate. How about
> changing this back to a Resisted Test: The attacker makes his test and stages
> the damage up, based on the number of successes. Then the defender makes his
> resistance test, staging down the damage from the result (after the attacker's
> test).
IOW, reaching back to SR1's damage handling rules. To be honest, I don't
think it'll make all that much of a difference. With this system, the
attacker rolling an odd number of successes doesn't help, while in the
current system it does because the target needs to remove one additional
success. The other side is that rolling an odd number of successes won't
help the defender either, since the last one is left over as well.
On the whole, everything would probably stay as it is, except if it's
combined with your second suggestion:
> (2) For both the Attack and Resistance Tests, every two successes stages the
> Damage Level up (or down) by one step. Consider this idea: during the
> Attacker's Test, every *single* success stages the Damage Level up by one
> step; for the Resistance Test, it still takes two successes to stage the
> damage down one step.
This would work to make firearms much more lethal to strong (high Body)
characters with plenty of armor as well as unarmored, low-Body folks. It
could easily confuse new players, though, as the number of successes
required to stage up the damage is different from those needed to stage it
down again.
My own favorite is still to go back to SR1 and re-introduce Staging
numbers for damage codes.
> One final note: as they stand, ideas (1), (2), and (3) are not interlinked
> together and can stand apart from each other.
I think #1 doesn't really change much unless #2 is implemented as well.
--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html - UIN5044116
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