Game Information
“Since this is for Alt.War, this will all be written out of character.”
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 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.
Optional Rule: Instant Death
You may want to institute a system for killing creatures outright with massive damage. To do this, you set a “death threshold”. That is, a number of unsoaked damage from an attack where you do not bother to keep track of a character dying and simply declare them dead. Maybe their head gets pulped like Scanners, or they get multipart shredded. But in any case, it's pretty clear that even medicine in the 2070s cannot save them. Rather unsurprisingly, the lower you set this threshold, the more often it will happen and the deadlier combat will be. If you have characters instantly die with 6 damage, in-combat instant death will happen fairly often, while if you have characters die with 9 unsoaked damage it will be almost unheard of. How deadly you want your own game is an open question.
Armor and Hardened Armor
“
People will be shooting at you, you may want some of this.”
At high values, the SR4 armor system completely falls apart. This was never detected in playtest because high values were never part of the “street level” game that was being written. The fact that the game was unable to model a missile hitting an APC really never came up. And yet, for purposes of Alt.War, where shooting anti-material rifles at hardened targets actually
is important, the rules will have to be changed into something that can handle that.
Here's the core problem: when you increase hardened armor by 3, you need to inflict 3 more damage to hurt the target at all. But if the target can be hurt at all, those 3 armor dice only generate 1 hit on average for the Soak test. So when you scale vehicles up, the smallest weapon that can hurt them at all will inflict more unsoaked damage on them than the smallest weapon that could hurt a vehicle that was less armored. At the upper end of the scale, it is literally impossible to damage tanks and great dragons without one-shot killing them. And that's
before we go to a proportional damage system where only 5 unsoaked damage is enough to drop a target.
The first step is to change what Hardened Armor
does. Now, Hardened Armor provides a die that always rolls a 5. There is no longer a minimum damage to play (save that of course, if you have enough automatic hits, you don't need to roll soak to take no damage). The second part is that if you have hardened armor
and regular armor at the same time, that hardened armor is lost
first when enemies use weapons with armor penetration numbers. The third part is that if your armor is
halved by any sort of special effect like a Fire Ball spell, then hardened armor and regular armor are halved
separately.
That is just the beginning though, since by these rules, the amounts of armor things are listed with are
insane. So there will be a new writeup of armors, vehicles, and critters in this section. However, if you're using Shadowrun materials that are printed after this is that are not on this scale, it's best to simply divide the suggested amounts of hardened armor by 2 or 3.
Autofire and Recoil
“
Something you can't understand: How I could just kill a man.”
Burst fire and fully automatic fire have rules that make some people (especially gun enthusiasts) very upset, but on the whole they are
functional in the basic game. Some of the things they produce are
extremely weird, like how the recoil on assault cannons is completely negligible because recoil only applies to
next shot so Single Shot weapons never care. Or like how the recoil on a machine pistol is much worse than the recoil on a sawed off shotgun because it's based entirely on how many bullets are fired and not on how big those bullets are. But that's not the reason that alternative Autofire and Recoil rules are being introduced in this document. That is being done because in a proportional damage system where 5 points is the difference between no wound and and an Incapacitating injury, then having a long narrow burst hand out
five extra damage points is totally unacceptable, right? And as long as we have to redo the autofire and recoil system
anyway, we might as well replace it with something that people like better.
Recoil And Strength
“
I can't hold on! I'm shooting too fast!”
The first thing that is going to be done is to remove the “bullet count” recoil mechanics. This has to be done, because we need to remove the bullet count from the
damage, meaning that we aren't going to be using the bullet count
at all. So instead what will happen is that weapons will have a Strength listed on them, which is the Strength required to use them normally. Using a weapon with a higher required Strength than your character's Strength causes them to suffer penalties. Using a weapon in a faster firing mode or firing them one-handed causes the Strength of the weapon to rise, which means that your character has to be stronger in order to use weapons in those ways without penalties.
Exceeding Character Strength With Weapon Strength
“
They weren't kidding about this being a heavy
pistol.”
If the effective Strength of a weapon that you are using (after appropriate modifiers such as gas vents and firing modes) exceeds your character's strength by 1, you suffer a -1 dicepool penalty on your attack and a -2 dicepool penalty on any other action you take (including Defense rolls, but not including Soak rolls) until the beginning of your next initiative pass. These penalties are cumulative, so if you fired twice with a weapon that exceeds your character's Strength by 1, the second attack would be at -3 and a Defense roll made after both would be at -4. If the weapon exceeds your character's Strength by more than one, simply multiply those penalties by the amount of Strength you are short. So if you're 3 Strength down, you're at -3 for the attack and anything else you attempt is at -6 for the rest of the initiative pass.
A good rule of thumb is that if a weapon's list Strength is 4 more than the character's actual strength (before modifiers for firing modes or weapon mods), then the weapon is too heavy for the character to use effectively. Small children just can't even
use machine guns, the fact that recoil would knock them over is completely secondary.