Cergorach said:
Well, i was just talking about nothing really special, just the core rules (he was just a human) with some additional equipment. Specialized in a single gun, and some bioware, the guy wasn't even using any cyberware. You might want to call it powergaming, but something to that extreme isn't really possible with the core rules, a starting character with one shot one kill i mean.
Oh, no?
Maxxed-out Pistols skill, specialised in an Ares Viper Slivergun. Smartlinked, of course, and with both thermo & lo-light vision, as well as flare comps, in the eyes. Crank the combat pool as far as it'll go - about 8 dice, done "right" - and dropit all alongside yur 8-die skill wiht the gun. Burst fire mode.
Damage code on the Viper starts out 9S, burst fire brings it to 12D. Sixteen dice, at close range, with a TN of 2? Should be 13 or 14 successes - to
not be dropped on the first shot, you'd have to get 14 or
16 successes between dodging and soak, unless you're wearing better than street-weight armor. Let's call it 13 successes for now.
And that's one simple action; the follow-on shot may only have 8 dice behind it, but with another 12D hit coming your way ...
Let's say you're a typical "brick"-type street-sammie - ork or troll, lots of bodmods to boost your ability to soak damage. Say a soak of 12 dice (
quite nicely jacked up, that), plus your own near-top-of-the-line 8-die combat pool. Assume the typical Secure Long coat for armor, at 4/1 or thereabouts; your target for dodging or resisting the damage is (12-4=) 8. So you have to roll a 6, then reroll a 2 or better, to get a success on defense.
With 20 dice, you should get three-and-a-third sixes, of which, about 2.75 successes will be generated. Let's say you pull off 3 successes. Now you blow karma to reroll failures; 17 more dice, should get - let's call it another three successes. A
slightly lucky roll for you, but not extraordinarily so.
Guess what, that's six successes, to my thirteen; I have you by seven, and stage up three times.
Not that it matters, unless you're using the optional "more than deadly" rules. You drop like a sackof potatoes, several dozen fine tungsten slivers having turned some vital part or other (probably your brain, with that kind of hit) into orkburger.
Conversely, let's assume you get an astounding
sixteen net successes, still blowing karma. That's an obscenely lucky roll, as any SR veteran will ralise given the numbers I'm throwing around here. So, your sixteen to my thirteen is three successes in yoru favor; that stages me down a notch, so the damage is only (S)erious, not (D)eadly.
Which is where the second shot comes in. Yes, I've only 8 dice, and fired a burst this round, so my TN is now 5; no biggie. one-third of those dice should come up successes ... 2 or 3. I'll call it 2.
You only have those 12 BODY dice to soak with this time, same TN of 8; even if you get FOUR successes (very much against the odds, unless you have more Karma Pool to blow on another reroll), that's still only two successes in your favor ... staging down to a (S)erious wound again.
(S)erious + (S)erious = (D)eadly and two boxes of overflow. Sack of potatoes, take two.
And that's a
starting character, with only 90K nuyen towards gear and cyberwear -
not a million-nuyen "WarBorg". With a basically off-the-shelf gun, no less.
^_^ Oh, the Viper was my favorite SR gun - can't you tell? ^_^ Granted, using it was a bit of a gamble, 'cause with enough armor, they could just bounce Slivergun shots like they were mosquitos - but then, in a supplement (the
Lonestar book, in fact) ... out came the Ruger Thunderbolt. ^_^ Bingo, instant secondary gun, hehehe.
As for a
Shadowrun d20 fan-conversion, I'd very much like to see something like that done. Once I get
d20 Future, I'll have to lookover my surviving SR books, and see what I can come up with. ^_^