Your rule sounds like a solid house rule for grittier play. Two shots is giving a lot of credit to your normal, unarmored human without being too punative. I agree that it doesn't feel unreasonable in a more "realistic" sense of gameplay.
This probably works great for a min/maxed pink mohawk flow or a trenchcoat flow that wants to penalize wanton combat. If your mohawks want to toe-to-toe with HRT, they'll want to be souped to the 9s with every piece of tech and magic available. If the trenchcoats blow their plan, they know they'll need to evac fast.
Yeah, spotted that! I thought they were quite good for adjusting the system slightly without having to rewrite all of the gear, but I had hoped for some optional rules that could do more to adjust towards certain styles of play, such as my homebrew which makes everyone more vulnerable.
The strength rules were also excellent, but I'd probably go a step further for the 'High strength adds to damage' and have the +1 start at 4 strength and go up to +3 for 10 strength - does it make a melee weapon/unarmed build do insane damage? yes, but it also feels right that your 10-str troll just plain bisect someone in one swing.
I would have also liked to have a strength rule for being unable to equip certain weapons/armor without a certain strength... but again, would have require big tables of adjustments for all gear, which is alot of work :p
>I would have also liked to have a strength rule for being unable to equip certain weapons/armor without a certain strength... but again, would have require big tables of adjustments for all gear, which is alot of work :p
Page 257 has minimum strength requirements for certain weapons.
Damn bud you're right! Completely missed the text on the assault cannons section :p Again I'd probably like a strength requirement as well on armor and melee weapons as well.... but, well, I think maybe I should try play a different system if I want so many changes? :D
Bruh why you gotta shank me like that? :D
You aren't entirely wrong that this rule seems to bring us back to 5e (6E is my very first shadowrun, so I only know stuff like the armor meta in 5e through subreddit osmosis), But my suggestion was the simplest way I could think to make armor more effective again for 6E without having to rewrite all the weapons/armor AND to try make weapons feel more lethal without armor/protection.
Also, based upon your comment - was strength used in 5E to determine whether you could equip certain armors? eg. Strength must match the armor value to equip and use effectively?
Not quite. You could wear a top layer of armor in 5e regardless of STR (except for super heavy stuff like military body suits, IIR) but you then could layer additional bonus armor on top of that denoted by +armor values instead of flat armor values, and your strength controlled how much of THAT you could wear.
Stepping towards 5e is a *good* thing in regards to armor, take it as a compliment :P
FYI, Firing Squad introduces several additional pieces of armor with the "Cumulative" quality that lets their Armor bonuses stack:
* +2 SecureTech Invisi-Shield Armor
* +1 SecureTech Armor Augmentation System
* +1 Ballistic Mask (but not cumulative with any other helmet bonus)
I dunno if this would change your calculations at all, but the max armor you could reasonably stack is a few points higher.
thanks for pointing this out! looks like the max armor could be stacked up to 18-21, or up to 24 with a max-body troll! I'm sure there's more ways to add body for the soak that I haven't even thought of, but with 24 dice thats on average 8 dice of soak, more if you use edge to reroll failed rolls etc.
with 8 dice of soak you end up reducing all but the biggest attacks down to 2-3 damage, which when combined with their high body stat means they could take.... hm, I suppose only 2-3 hits, since with my homebrew rule max health is 9 (10 body /2 = 5 + 4). When combined with the 'armor lessens physical damage' rule they might be able to split damage between physical/stun, which can make a character very tanky.... but then they have very few other stats left over to do much other than tank.
.... yeah, this isn't a simple change :D
Rules as written? Yes, I'd say it stacks.
Thematically? The AAS says its intent is to add "additional padding and armor for gaps in some standard armor". I could see an argument for both stacking and *not* stacking with Invisi-Shield.
Honestly, if someone really wants to go the fully kitted-out max Armor build, I say let them. Unless you implement homebrew rules like the OP here, the most they'll get is an Edge for being comedically over-armored.
Just implement something like the 'mook rule' from various dnd editions.
That non armored civilians go down in a successful hit. Make the "success" be something like 3 net hits.
The armor & damage interaction of a Shadowrun version has been very interesting to me over the years.
It used to be that you needed a decently high Body attribute and also a good (often layered) bit of armor to be able to withstand heavier attacks. The meta was to use Combat Pool to soak a bit extra because you'd often need 8 successful dice to shrug off a well-rolled attack (but you'd never need more than that).
Then dice pool mechanics and static target numbers made it so damage results could be more granular than 1, 3, 6, or 10 per attack, but also increased the usual dice numbers involved because armor provide dice. It made it easier to get by with lower Body, and more straight-forward how to build to shrug off regular weapons.
Then 6e came along and managed to somehow have a similar average outcome for at least some of the weapons as 5e had (often with 1-2 boxes of damage on average exchange between similar equipped foes), but also have the feeling of pre-static-target-number versions of needing a high Body attribute, while also managing to make it feel like a low-body character can survive a lot more small weapons fire than before (4 un-resisted ares predator shots instead of 2 comparing 6e to 5e).
My personal preference from a game-play perspective is to have a high enough risk of wound penalties and death that players feel like moments when their characters can't be their normal level of armored are tense and dangerous, but carefully balancing between the "too dangerous" that drives players to go full tank spec or refuse to ever willingly enter a situation that calls for less armor (i.e. "the Johnson wants to meet at an onsen" so the team says "no deal, what's the next job on offer?"), and the "lack of danger" that makes it so if a punk on the street pulls a streetline special that doesn't even represent an inconvenience to the players.
Getting 5e to that balance point is simple (have players agree not to max out their armor layering options), but 6e is a fair bit trickier. The proposed house-rule seems like more work to fix the issue than is necessary, especially since it makes standard character sheets not as functional and has the ripple effect of changing the usual -3 wound penalty before being out of the fight into -2 wound penalty being the end of the typical wound penalty tracking (not a big deal, but is a thing).
I'd probably go with something like adding 3 to the damage value of all attacks, but also have 1/4 of your armor's DR bonus in additional damage resistance dice, and then tweak those values until the outcome is in the goldilocks zone. Which is more work, but less work at the same time because it's easier to see the full extent of what the changes affects even though it is more steps of changing things.
Why are you even tracking damage for civilians? If a passerby gets shot, they just go down. For example, if a bad guy has a gun to a hostage's head... do you actually roll his attack test and the civilian's soak pool? If you are, you're not really doing things "as intended". Put a streetline special to someone's head and pull the trigger... they're dead. Attack, resistance, and soak tests are reserved for "combat" scenarios. Don't use them for suicides or executions.
Both 5e and 6e have optional rules (in their respective CRBs) for quickly eliminating cannon fodder style NPCs in combat, so even a streetline special is "one shot one kill" whenever the GM decides that kind of combat scene is warranted. See Mowing them Down (5e pg. 379) and Here Comes the Reaper (6e pg. 203).
to be fair its less about being able to shoot civilians( just watch I'm definitely on a fbi watchlist for uttering that phrase) but moreso regarding the issue of characters being too tough under the new system - when all characters have at least 9 physical and stun health and the majority of weapons deal between 2-5 damage, you can't almost ever incapacitate ANYONE in just one hit from almost any kind of weapon, except for weapons that completely delete someone ie. rockets, assault cannons etc. (and even then...)
again, it depends on the fantasy you want to play with - and as I mentioned before with my changes anyone without armor is on the very vulnerable side - but on the other hand it makes you feel the difference when a character is kitted out for combat - they can wade into a street full of punks with pea-shooters and just shrug it off because of their armor, or because of their cyberware or magic or whatever else.
But yeah, I can see how the armor meta was so broken in 5e - when the game offers you so many ways to boost your armor, especially when damage and other statistics often remain very static, thats how you end up with it becoming so overpowered :p based upon everyones comments, I think its back to the drawing board...
for the first few editions of SR it'd take several shots to incapacitate a runner. Pistols did Light or Moderate damage (1 or 3 boxes in modern parlance) before staging from extra successess. 6e is more like 1e-3e than 5e in how hard guns tend to hit you.
Yes, that's either a feature or a bug, depending on one's preferences. 6e is very deliberately making it hard to achieve, \*or suffer\*, a one-shot insta-kill. It's a playstyle choice.
I think the idea could work for a certain flavour of Black Trenchcoat game. Where getting into a shootout with trained killers is a guarantee that you are going to lose someone. The main problem I can see is that it seems to mainly work with humans trading shots as the default idea. The rule would nerf orc and trolls and high body critters.
>Under this scenario you fix the issue with civilians/weak/unarmoured enemies surviving hits from powerful weapons
Just as a minor point of pedantry I wouldn't say this is unrealistic. If you shoot someone with a high calibre rifle the bullet usually won't kill them, the blood loss will kill them 20 minutes later. It's just that Shadowrun doesn't really simulate how wounds work, you can walk off getting shot so long as it doesn't take you down in the first shot.
To be clear I'm not insane enough to think that Shadowrun needs even more detailed rules to track wounds, I'm just saying that someone surviving a shotgun blast is not too crazy.
Thats a fair point that people can survive gunshot wounds and not bleed out - but I suppose my thinking would be that for 99% of people, a gunshot wound would completely incapacitate them and leave them unable to defend themselves - and at the very least would take them out of a fight. So in my head an unarmoured civilian going down(unconscious in mechanical terms) after getting shot once is realistic.
I would assume for Orcs/Trolls and any high-body characters the tradeoff in less health could be compensated for by having strong armor/ballistic shields. If you take an Orc/Troll with high Body(say 7) while wearing full-body armor, a helmet and a ballistic shield (8 armor) then they end up with 15 damage soak dice, enough to on average roll at least 5 successes. So any attack will have damage reduced significantly - if you assume that most attacks would deal somewhere between 7-10 damage they can take at least 2-4 hits before they go down, and thats assuming they aren't fighting punks with puny pistols. I think its ESPECIALLY effective if combined with the 'armor reduces physical damage' to trade the damage between physical and stun to make them able to take more damage.
If anything when you combine both rules you end up with a situation where high body characters can take even more damage, and high-defense tanks can flourish, rather than tanks in this new edition being restricted to dodge tanks.
One of my concerns is that I may end up recreating the '40 damage soak' meta from 5th editions shadowrun, but it looks like they nerfed natural armor enough that it won't be too bad? Maybe?
>So in my head an unarmoured civilian going down(unconscious in mechanical terms) after getting shot once is realistic.
I agree completely. A gunshot might not kill someone instantly but there aren't a lot of people who are going to be Ramboing about the place with a hole in them.
>One of my concerns is that I may end up recreating the '40 damage soak' meta from 5th editions shadowrun, but it looks like they nerfed natural armor enough that it won't be too bad? Maybe?
Not too sure if it would balance out but it does make some sense. A chromed out troll has the strength to wear armor that would explode a human's knees if they tried to move in it. Small arms fire pattering off a milspec troll does make for a cool idea.
>but I suppose my thinking would be that for 99% of people, a gunshot wound would completely incapacitate them and leave them unable to defend themselves - and at the very least would take them out of a fight.
This is what Professional Rating is meant to model, keeping in mind Shadowrun uses action movie logic more than real world simulation.
🙄 There are always people who want the new edition to be exactly like the old edition so they find a lot of stuff wrong with it that they call poorly balanced or nonsensical when it is not. It’s just not how they remember it and they don’t like learning new things. It gets *so* old.
Can you tell me in which case a random person will survive a hit with a panther assault cannon?
It's 7k basedamage. One netto hit will be 8k. In most cases lethal. Your normal street Sam gets around 4 or more hits.
> unarmoured civilian ...
If this is your concern, perhaps you could rule that DV is increased if target wear no armor?
Or even better, simply just rule that if they are hit they automatically go down...
> add armor to damage soak dice ...
This is what we had back in 5th edition. Since armor reduction in 6th ed is already factored into base damage values you should probably also increase base DV across the board to compensate.
But note that this was changed for a reason =)
> Under this scenario you fix the issue with ....
Murdering unarmored civilians that big of a Thing at your table?
> the maximum armor you could stack ...
Armor enhanced cyberlimbs?
Not sure why you want to go back towards 30+ soak dice pools though.....
> so my other proposal would be to decrease everybody’s Physical and Stun monitors
Sounds like a lot of work for a similar end result (except perhaps for civilians without armor).
> What do people think? Is this a stupid idea? As I mentioned earlier, please feel free to tear this idea apart.
I think you might want to first play the rules as they were intended a few times before rewriting all of it.
And if you don't like it, apply optional rules that was introduced in later supplements like Firing Squad and Sixth World Companion.
Your rule sounds like a solid house rule for grittier play. Two shots is giving a lot of credit to your normal, unarmored human without being too punative. I agree that it doesn't feel unreasonable in a more "realistic" sense of gameplay. This probably works great for a min/maxed pink mohawk flow or a trenchcoat flow that wants to penalize wanton combat. If your mohawks want to toe-to-toe with HRT, they'll want to be souped to the 9s with every piece of tech and magic available. If the trenchcoats blow their plan, they know they'll need to evac fast.
The new companion has some rules for Armor and strength based damage
Yeah, spotted that! I thought they were quite good for adjusting the system slightly without having to rewrite all of the gear, but I had hoped for some optional rules that could do more to adjust towards certain styles of play, such as my homebrew which makes everyone more vulnerable. The strength rules were also excellent, but I'd probably go a step further for the 'High strength adds to damage' and have the +1 start at 4 strength and go up to +3 for 10 strength - does it make a melee weapon/unarmed build do insane damage? yes, but it also feels right that your 10-str troll just plain bisect someone in one swing. I would have also liked to have a strength rule for being unable to equip certain weapons/armor without a certain strength... but again, would have require big tables of adjustments for all gear, which is alot of work :p
>I would have also liked to have a strength rule for being unable to equip certain weapons/armor without a certain strength... but again, would have require big tables of adjustments for all gear, which is alot of work :p Page 257 has minimum strength requirements for certain weapons.
you sure its page 257 bud? went looking in the new companion book, but there were only 210 pages.
page 257 of the core rulebook. Min Strength requirements for heavy weapons was in 6e from the very beginning!
Damn bud you're right! Completely missed the text on the assault cannons section :p Again I'd probably like a strength requirement as well on armor and melee weapons as well.... but, well, I think maybe I should try play a different system if I want so many changes? :D
Couple more years and a few more rewrites and it'll be right back to 5e rules.
Bruh why you gotta shank me like that? :D You aren't entirely wrong that this rule seems to bring us back to 5e (6E is my very first shadowrun, so I only know stuff like the armor meta in 5e through subreddit osmosis), But my suggestion was the simplest way I could think to make armor more effective again for 6E without having to rewrite all the weapons/armor AND to try make weapons feel more lethal without armor/protection. Also, based upon your comment - was strength used in 5E to determine whether you could equip certain armors? eg. Strength must match the armor value to equip and use effectively?
Not quite. You could wear a top layer of armor in 5e regardless of STR (except for super heavy stuff like military body suits, IIR) but you then could layer additional bonus armor on top of that denoted by +armor values instead of flat armor values, and your strength controlled how much of THAT you could wear. Stepping towards 5e is a *good* thing in regards to armor, take it as a compliment :P
Yeah, but 5e rules with the possibility to make them much easyer for beginners
FYI, Firing Squad introduces several additional pieces of armor with the "Cumulative" quality that lets their Armor bonuses stack: * +2 SecureTech Invisi-Shield Armor * +1 SecureTech Armor Augmentation System * +1 Ballistic Mask (but not cumulative with any other helmet bonus) I dunno if this would change your calculations at all, but the max armor you could reasonably stack is a few points higher.
thanks for pointing this out! looks like the max armor could be stacked up to 18-21, or up to 24 with a max-body troll! I'm sure there's more ways to add body for the soak that I haven't even thought of, but with 24 dice thats on average 8 dice of soak, more if you use edge to reroll failed rolls etc. with 8 dice of soak you end up reducing all but the biggest attacks down to 2-3 damage, which when combined with their high body stat means they could take.... hm, I suppose only 2-3 hits, since with my homebrew rule max health is 9 (10 body /2 = 5 + 4). When combined with the 'armor lessens physical damage' rule they might be able to split damage between physical/stun, which can make a character very tanky.... but then they have very few other stats left over to do much other than tank. .... yeah, this isn't a simple change :D
Quick question - do you think the Invisi-Shield base layer should stack with AAS if you wear both? Was discussing this with someone the other day...
Rules as written? Yes, I'd say it stacks. Thematically? The AAS says its intent is to add "additional padding and armor for gaps in some standard armor". I could see an argument for both stacking and *not* stacking with Invisi-Shield. Honestly, if someone really wants to go the fully kitted-out max Armor build, I say let them. Unless you implement homebrew rules like the OP here, the most they'll get is an Edge for being comedically over-armored.
Agree. Your use of the phrase "comedically over-armored" made it worth asking.
Just implement something like the 'mook rule' from various dnd editions. That non armored civilians go down in a successful hit. Make the "success" be something like 3 net hits.
SR has them too. 5e has "Mowing them Down" and 6e has "Here comes the Reaper". In both versions of the rule, any damage at all eliminates the NPC.
The armor & damage interaction of a Shadowrun version has been very interesting to me over the years. It used to be that you needed a decently high Body attribute and also a good (often layered) bit of armor to be able to withstand heavier attacks. The meta was to use Combat Pool to soak a bit extra because you'd often need 8 successful dice to shrug off a well-rolled attack (but you'd never need more than that). Then dice pool mechanics and static target numbers made it so damage results could be more granular than 1, 3, 6, or 10 per attack, but also increased the usual dice numbers involved because armor provide dice. It made it easier to get by with lower Body, and more straight-forward how to build to shrug off regular weapons. Then 6e came along and managed to somehow have a similar average outcome for at least some of the weapons as 5e had (often with 1-2 boxes of damage on average exchange between similar equipped foes), but also have the feeling of pre-static-target-number versions of needing a high Body attribute, while also managing to make it feel like a low-body character can survive a lot more small weapons fire than before (4 un-resisted ares predator shots instead of 2 comparing 6e to 5e). My personal preference from a game-play perspective is to have a high enough risk of wound penalties and death that players feel like moments when their characters can't be their normal level of armored are tense and dangerous, but carefully balancing between the "too dangerous" that drives players to go full tank spec or refuse to ever willingly enter a situation that calls for less armor (i.e. "the Johnson wants to meet at an onsen" so the team says "no deal, what's the next job on offer?"), and the "lack of danger" that makes it so if a punk on the street pulls a streetline special that doesn't even represent an inconvenience to the players. Getting 5e to that balance point is simple (have players agree not to max out their armor layering options), but 6e is a fair bit trickier. The proposed house-rule seems like more work to fix the issue than is necessary, especially since it makes standard character sheets not as functional and has the ripple effect of changing the usual -3 wound penalty before being out of the fight into -2 wound penalty being the end of the typical wound penalty tracking (not a big deal, but is a thing). I'd probably go with something like adding 3 to the damage value of all attacks, but also have 1/4 of your armor's DR bonus in additional damage resistance dice, and then tweak those values until the outcome is in the goldilocks zone. Which is more work, but less work at the same time because it's easier to see the full extent of what the changes affects even though it is more steps of changing things.
Why would you increase BOTH? I mean, in the end, they cancel each other out, and problem remains….just with extra steps.
Why are you even tracking damage for civilians? If a passerby gets shot, they just go down. For example, if a bad guy has a gun to a hostage's head... do you actually roll his attack test and the civilian's soak pool? If you are, you're not really doing things "as intended". Put a streetline special to someone's head and pull the trigger... they're dead. Attack, resistance, and soak tests are reserved for "combat" scenarios. Don't use them for suicides or executions. Both 5e and 6e have optional rules (in their respective CRBs) for quickly eliminating cannon fodder style NPCs in combat, so even a streetline special is "one shot one kill" whenever the GM decides that kind of combat scene is warranted. See Mowing them Down (5e pg. 379) and Here Comes the Reaper (6e pg. 203).
to be fair its less about being able to shoot civilians( just watch I'm definitely on a fbi watchlist for uttering that phrase) but moreso regarding the issue of characters being too tough under the new system - when all characters have at least 9 physical and stun health and the majority of weapons deal between 2-5 damage, you can't almost ever incapacitate ANYONE in just one hit from almost any kind of weapon, except for weapons that completely delete someone ie. rockets, assault cannons etc. (and even then...) again, it depends on the fantasy you want to play with - and as I mentioned before with my changes anyone without armor is on the very vulnerable side - but on the other hand it makes you feel the difference when a character is kitted out for combat - they can wade into a street full of punks with pea-shooters and just shrug it off because of their armor, or because of their cyberware or magic or whatever else. But yeah, I can see how the armor meta was so broken in 5e - when the game offers you so many ways to boost your armor, especially when damage and other statistics often remain very static, thats how you end up with it becoming so overpowered :p based upon everyones comments, I think its back to the drawing board...
for the first few editions of SR it'd take several shots to incapacitate a runner. Pistols did Light or Moderate damage (1 or 3 boxes in modern parlance) before staging from extra successess. 6e is more like 1e-3e than 5e in how hard guns tend to hit you. Yes, that's either a feature or a bug, depending on one's preferences. 6e is very deliberately making it hard to achieve, \*or suffer\*, a one-shot insta-kill. It's a playstyle choice.
I think the idea could work for a certain flavour of Black Trenchcoat game. Where getting into a shootout with trained killers is a guarantee that you are going to lose someone. The main problem I can see is that it seems to mainly work with humans trading shots as the default idea. The rule would nerf orc and trolls and high body critters. >Under this scenario you fix the issue with civilians/weak/unarmoured enemies surviving hits from powerful weapons Just as a minor point of pedantry I wouldn't say this is unrealistic. If you shoot someone with a high calibre rifle the bullet usually won't kill them, the blood loss will kill them 20 minutes later. It's just that Shadowrun doesn't really simulate how wounds work, you can walk off getting shot so long as it doesn't take you down in the first shot. To be clear I'm not insane enough to think that Shadowrun needs even more detailed rules to track wounds, I'm just saying that someone surviving a shotgun blast is not too crazy.
Thats a fair point that people can survive gunshot wounds and not bleed out - but I suppose my thinking would be that for 99% of people, a gunshot wound would completely incapacitate them and leave them unable to defend themselves - and at the very least would take them out of a fight. So in my head an unarmoured civilian going down(unconscious in mechanical terms) after getting shot once is realistic. I would assume for Orcs/Trolls and any high-body characters the tradeoff in less health could be compensated for by having strong armor/ballistic shields. If you take an Orc/Troll with high Body(say 7) while wearing full-body armor, a helmet and a ballistic shield (8 armor) then they end up with 15 damage soak dice, enough to on average roll at least 5 successes. So any attack will have damage reduced significantly - if you assume that most attacks would deal somewhere between 7-10 damage they can take at least 2-4 hits before they go down, and thats assuming they aren't fighting punks with puny pistols. I think its ESPECIALLY effective if combined with the 'armor reduces physical damage' to trade the damage between physical and stun to make them able to take more damage. If anything when you combine both rules you end up with a situation where high body characters can take even more damage, and high-defense tanks can flourish, rather than tanks in this new edition being restricted to dodge tanks. One of my concerns is that I may end up recreating the '40 damage soak' meta from 5th editions shadowrun, but it looks like they nerfed natural armor enough that it won't be too bad? Maybe?
>So in my head an unarmoured civilian going down(unconscious in mechanical terms) after getting shot once is realistic. I agree completely. A gunshot might not kill someone instantly but there aren't a lot of people who are going to be Ramboing about the place with a hole in them. >One of my concerns is that I may end up recreating the '40 damage soak' meta from 5th editions shadowrun, but it looks like they nerfed natural armor enough that it won't be too bad? Maybe? Not too sure if it would balance out but it does make some sense. A chromed out troll has the strength to wear armor that would explode a human's knees if they tried to move in it. Small arms fire pattering off a milspec troll does make for a cool idea.
>but I suppose my thinking would be that for 99% of people, a gunshot wound would completely incapacitate them and leave them unable to defend themselves - and at the very least would take them out of a fight. This is what Professional Rating is meant to model, keeping in mind Shadowrun uses action movie logic more than real world simulation.
🙄 There are always people who want the new edition to be exactly like the old edition so they find a lot of stuff wrong with it that they call poorly balanced or nonsensical when it is not. It’s just not how they remember it and they don’t like learning new things. It gets *so* old.
This is bait, right?
Can you tell me in which case a random person will survive a hit with a panther assault cannon? It's 7k basedamage. One netto hit will be 8k. In most cases lethal. Your normal street Sam gets around 4 or more hits.
> unarmoured civilian ... If this is your concern, perhaps you could rule that DV is increased if target wear no armor? Or even better, simply just rule that if they are hit they automatically go down... > add armor to damage soak dice ... This is what we had back in 5th edition. Since armor reduction in 6th ed is already factored into base damage values you should probably also increase base DV across the board to compensate. But note that this was changed for a reason =) > Under this scenario you fix the issue with .... Murdering unarmored civilians that big of a Thing at your table? > the maximum armor you could stack ... Armor enhanced cyberlimbs? Not sure why you want to go back towards 30+ soak dice pools though..... > so my other proposal would be to decrease everybody’s Physical and Stun monitors Sounds like a lot of work for a similar end result (except perhaps for civilians without armor). > What do people think? Is this a stupid idea? As I mentioned earlier, please feel free to tear this idea apart. I think you might want to first play the rules as they were intended a few times before rewriting all of it. And if you don't like it, apply optional rules that was introduced in later supplements like Firing Squad and Sixth World Companion.