Shadowrun 4, like any published system, has its share of objectively bad rules. Spirit Essence Drain leads to Bloodzilla, the Matrix Perception Action leads to the Infinity Mirror, and so on. But this section is not about them. This is about transforming the rules into something that can handle something they were never meant to deal with: open warfare and heavy weaponry.
The 4th Edition Shadowrun rules are deliberately and completely written from the perspective of normal humans shooting pistols at each other. And for that they work pretty well. You shoot a bullet into someone and they are hurt but able to fire back. You double tap them in the chest and they pretty much fall down. That is an acceptable result. But it doesn't scale well when you get out of the humans and pistols range. When you shoot an armored truck with a powerful weapon, it is pretty much impossible to
damage it – you can
only bounce off its armor or blow it to pieces in one shot. And that's unsatisfying. So what we will do is to present a set of rules that put damage onto the same log scale as other skill tasks are in SR4. So that we will be able to get roughly similar results firing big weapons at big monsters as we get by firing small weapons at small monsters.
Damage and Injury
“
The bigger they are, the bigger a gun it takes to make them fall.”
Shadowrun 4th edition experimented with a non-proportional damage system. That is, a box of injury was supposed to represent a similar amount of damage on a troll as it was on an elf – like a hit point in Dungeons & Dragons. And yes, this worked sort of OK for elves and trolls, but it completely falls apart when we deal with dogs and war machines. Things outside the human scale simply do not
fit in such a system, and they never will. A small dog
should drop from a single pistol shot, a light tank
should be able to take two LAV rockets with serious damage. But what can be done about that? The answer is fortunately found in the mechanics of previous editions of Shadowrun: Proportional Damage. That is, when the game generates “Moderate” or “Serious” Injury, that Injury is relative to the
target. A moderate injury to a small dog might have been inflicted by a sharp kick, while a moderate injury to a troll might have been inflicted with a rifle, and a moderate injury to an anthromorph combat vehicle might have been inflicted by an assault cannon. But the game generates Moderate Injury after comparing damage to soak, and we fill in the same number of boxes in every case. And that is out of the same total number of boxes in every case as well.
The way this works is that we have in all cases 10 injury boxes. Your hacker has 10 injury boxes, your troll street samurai has 10 injury boxes, your Vietnamese Amphibious Troop Transport has 10 injury boxes. If it becomes important how tough a crow or a rat is – they
also have 10 injury boxes. And when injuries occur, we fill them out in distinct amounts based on what kind of Injury they are. Injuries can be Light (one box), Moderate (3 boxes), Serious (6 boxes), Incapacitating (10 boxes), or Deadly (10 boxes + dying). Here's how that looks:
Uninjured:
Light Wound:
Moderate Wound:
Serious Wound:
Incapacitation:
But how do we determine whether an Injury should be Light or Serious? We compare it to a
chart. Or, if you don't want to look up the chart, every point of unsoaked damage makes the injury one level bigger. Or if you're super into math, each greater injury is the next triangular number of filled in boxes. Or if you're autistically into math, you fill in boxes equal to the number of unsoaked damage times one more than the number of unsoaked damage divided by 2 in boxes out of your 10 total.
Anyway, we make our soak roll as normal, and subtract the hits from the incoming damage. And the more incoming damage is left, the bigger an injury we actually suffer:
| Unsoaked Damage: | Injury Type: | Boxes Filled:
|
| 0 (or less) | None | 0
|
| 1 | Light | 1
|
| 2 | Moderate | 3
|
| 3 | Serious | 6
|
| 4 | Incapacitating | 10
|
| 5+ | Deadly | 10* |
That's a start. But unfortunately, in order to get things onto that scale, we're going to have to rewrite the input numbers for armor, weapons, vehicles, and critters. After all, with the proportional system, increasing damage by 5 is the entire difference between one shotting an opponent and bouncing off their armor (or manly chest, as appropriate). This allows us to get rid of all the silly stuff like missiles that do 120 damage, but it also means that we
have to rewrite those inputs to make things work. So let's get started on that.
