5punk

I was reading through a Dumpshock thread about broken rules in Shadowrun. Bows can never be used because Fire Weapon only applies to firearms for example, or most NPC's cant talk because they have no language skill listed, or explosive rounds are more likely to misfire at night. Many stupid things. Its all stuff thats easily fixed by applying any amount of common sense of course, but the point of the thread was to highlight where the rules as written are fucked up. Mostly its stuff thats vaguely interesting and worth knowing about for a GM, but not that entertaining. Except for one.

Its a combination of a number of rules that taken by themselves make a lot of sense, but in combination are absurd. Here are the relevant rules:

Vehicles are immune to Stun damage (ie flashbangs, tazers, the Stunbolt spell, etc.)
When a grenade goes off near a wall, the blast reflects back from the wall. So if you are stood next to a wall, you will be hit once by the blast, then once again by the reflection of the blast.
Stun grenades do 6DV of stun damage uniformly across their 10m blast radius.
The average metahuman can take 10 points of stun damage. Any stun damage after that is converted into physical damage, which they can take another 10 of before they fall over, and on average another 3 points kills them outright. So to kill an average metahuman with stun damage, you need to hit them with at least 23 points.

All of that seems pretty sensible, until you throw a stun grenade into a car and close the door.

Ive just done the maths, and based on a car interior of about 2m x 2m x 1m (which is probably a bit on the big side, but makes for easier sums), a person in the middle of the car would end up getting hit 41 times, for a total of 246 stun damage

For comparison, a small Nuke would do about 130 damage at the centre of the blast.

That's only an interpretation of the rules though (unless the actual rules are clearer), that the reflections also reflect. You could also interpret it as no reflections because the car is not a wall, one reflection because the grenade is near a solid object, or four reflections - one for each 'wall' inside the car. I reckon a grenade going off in a car would make a mess, but not a nuke mess. I'd go with the middle option if I was GM.

Now I'm going to be thinking of crazy rules. I remember my old SLA group mentioned something about a Stormer throwing knives doing more aggregate damage than a MAL AR due to strength bonus and rate of fire (he didn't have to bring to bear). I think they stopped playing after that. Also, Browbeaters with their rate of fire of 20 could demolish armour in seconds, but you have to actually hit with all those rounds first.

Dog Pants wrote:That's only an interpretation of the rules though (unless the actual rules are clearer), that the reflections also reflect. You could also interpret it as no reflections because the car is not a wall, one reflection because the grenade is near a solid object, or four reflections - one for each 'wall' inside the car.

Actually, thats part of the issue: it is pretty clear. It specifically says that reflections do reflect (it even points out that this means a normal grenade in a small room will cause one hell of a mess as the blast will be reflecting off all the walls repeatedly.) It doesnt specify wall, is says "Barrier", and elsewhere it defines a barrier as any solid object. This works fine with normal grenades in regular rooms for a couple of reasons:

1) normal walls and the like treat all damage the same, it doesnt matter if it is stun or physical, it still damages the wall, so the blast would take out the wall long before it builds up to silly levels. Thats not happening here because vehicles are specifically stated to be unaffected by stun damage, so the "walls" are never blowing out.

2) normal grenades have a damage value at the centre of thier blast and then reduce in strength a certain amount per m from that point. So although you might be taking 6 damage from the initial blast, you might only take 4 from the first reflection, then 1 from the second reflection. Stun grenades are the exception to this, for some peculiar reason they do the same amount of damage at every point out to 10m where they abruptly stop. Fuck knows why, but those are the RAW.

I reckon a grenade going off in a car would make a mess, but not a nuke mess. I'd go with the middle option if I was GM.

Yeah, its easy enough to fix, its just the rules as written that imply stupidity. The intention clearly isnt that car+stun grenade = aerosolised people. I would probably go with "vehicles are immune to stun damage except when treating them as a barrier" and the problem is solved.

I remember my old SLA group mentioned something about a Stormer throwing knives doing more aggregate damage than a MAL AR due to strength bonus and rate of fire (he didn't have to bring to bear).

Sounds a bit like the Trollbow in Shadowrun: because bow damage is based off strength, a physical adept troll with a bow made for him does more damage than an anti-tank gun.