Condition Modifier Rules

I'm not quite sure where people are seeing ambiguity to be honest. Boxes 1-3 you have -1 penalty, 4-6 your at -2 etc.

You black out the lower boxes you don't have as the extent of your condition bar is based on Body for physical etc so beyond a certain point you flip into overflow and then death as usual. Stun still eventually feeds into physical. Stun damage modifiers + Physical damage modifiers stack. So if you have 1 box of stun and 1 of physical your at -2. If your at 3 boxes of stun and 3 boxes of physical your still at -2. Damage still escalates from Stun > Physical > Overflow > Death.

To me the book has always been quite clear on that matter.


ON the issue of CG switching the system completely, I honestly think it was a good move on their part. They actually simplified the system a whole lot more if you ask me. People complain SR4 is complex and unwieldy but they forget just how complex and unwieldy SR3 was, refined or not, and attributes were by and large just arbitrary numbers that indicated how much you paid to raise a skill and what your skill cap was. They rarely got used for much else beyond that and soaking damage. SR4 on the other hand has your attributes tie in directly with your skills, so if you have high attributes you have a visible 'natural affinity' for skills linked to those attributes.

That said of course now they have to start refining the system all over again, and god is there ever a difference in the rules between the original SR4 rule book and SR4A

Kesslan wrote:

I'm not quite sure where people are seeing ambiguity to be honest. Boxes 1-3 you have -1 penalty, 4-6 your at -2 etc.

As T-Hawk pointed out it's ambiguous, following the core rule book rules one might apply modifiers like

1-2 boxes damage 0
3-5 boxes damage -1
6-8 boxe damage -2

or alternatively, following the example I posted above taken from another source than the core rule book

1-3 -1
4-6 -2
etc.

It's not 100% clear :-)

So then simply turn to what the rules actually state. On Page 163 of SR4A they say: For every 3 boxes of cumulative damage taken on a condition monitor track, the character suffers a -1 wound modifer. These wound modifiers are cumulative, so a character who has taken 6 boxes of physical and 3 boxes of stun suffers a total -3 wound modifier.

Reading that, it flat out means at 3, 6, 9 etc you take an additional -1 per damage track it's on, and 1-2, 4-5 etc you take no additional modifier.

Any source that predates SR4A should simply be ignored.

Actually, the word cumulative is where a lot of the confusion is coming from. Cumulative generally means "built up by degrees." It could refer to the end result of a process of accumulation, or to the process of accumulation itself. I really wish I had an English professor with me; undoubtedly, if one were to go over that sentence, they could likely divine a far more precise meaning for it than we can. In common usage, we use the word to refer to either product or process. Using the word accumulated or accumulative would offer a better picture of what was intended. The difference between the two is very slight but still present. It's not a distinction which the average speaker thinks about, or to which he pays much attention. Assuming the writer was using the word in a common fashion, rather than a purely grammatic fashion, throws the reading of the sentence into a light wherein a good bit of confusion comes into play. The reading of the "High Pain Tolerance" quality mentioned by Stampede further clouds the issue: reading it, I can see the quality either adding 1 box to the amount of damage a character can take before suffering the wound modifier (this was my original reading), or, viewing in the light of a damage tract as opposed to a damage value, it could allow the character to ignore all 3 boxes of damage in the first tract before suffering the wound modifier.

The QSR offers support the damage tract reading - they state that at 5 boxes of damage, the Samurai takes -2 on his rolls.

Reading through SR3 though, on the sidebar to pg. 52 I found this in reference to differences between 4th- and 3rd ed.:

Quote :

"Wound Levels are gone and Damage Codes were changed to a single Damage Value..."

"Wound Levels are gone..." To me this suggests that the tracts used in SR3 are no longer in use. SR3 used the wound levels (what I've been referring to as damage tracts). To say that these are gone, but in light of the presence of wound modifiers, suggests to me that the wound modifiers have a hard value, i.e. values 3, 6, 9...

But... in all of SR4 I've not managed to find any other mentions of wound modifiers. I've been combing through the combat examples, but I've not found one that mentions wounding in a hard way. I'll go through the book again later, but... well, does anyone with a copy of SR4A have anything that can be offered in any examples?

Otherwise... well, the language of in the book is ambiguous, the phrase I cited above is also ambiguous in its meaning, but the QSR offered a hard example. Unless we can get anything more definitive from the books, I suggest we go by the hard example found there.

So you see? 'S Not clear!

You could apply, according to the precise writing on page 163, EITHER of the following interpretations:

1)
1-2 boxes damage 0
3-5 boxes damage -1
6-8 boxe damage -2

or 2)
1-3 boxes damage -1
4-6 boxes damage -2

So, in our confusion, we look elsewhere. We find a modicum of clarity in the rules written in the description for "High Pain Tolerance" where it states that:

Quote :

A character who possesses this quality can ignore one box of damage per rating point when calculating wound modifiers (see Wound Modifiers, P.163). So a character with this quality at rating 2 can take 4 boxes of damage without suffering a wound modifier.

Which does, in fact, clarify the issue, letting us know that example 1 above is what the Core Rule Book intended to use as a damage track modifier.

So, in conclusion, this can now logically and simply be tacked up to one more rules-set that has been changed in SR4. Fine.

Except that they then went and contradicted themselves. And to make matters worse, they did it in between their Core Rule Book printings! And by this, of course, I am referring to the Quick Start Guide, which is intended to make "getting started" for newbies simple. You know, a concrete localized place for all the important rules... Like damage modifiers.

***********

Anyway, this thread was intended to give all you GMs and players a heads-up regarding this. The core rule does make the intended rules clear. But since it is yet another change from the historical norm, it needs to be pointed out so that we can all adjust our head-space to accomodate.

Yes i think that makes sense so it looks like example 1 is correct in my eyes

When they mean the damage levels are gone, what they are referring to Hawk is Light, Moderate, Serious and Deadly.

The way S3 and earlier weapons worked was a weapon had a TN to resist the damage, and if you failed to it automatically hit you with X boxes of damage. A light was 1 box, a Moderate was like.. 3 or 4, Serous 6, Deadly took you right out in one hit into overflow or beyond right into death. Sufficient hits could scale up light damage to moderate etc.

In SR4 however all weapons just have a flat DV code that indicates how many boxes of damage it can do to you, with hits scaling up the damage by one additional box per hit.

So in SR3 you could have something that was 2M damage. (such as a low level fall) where it was very easy to resist the damage, and if you resisted it you took light (1 box) or no damage. Failing to you took all 3. Serious wounds you'd take 6, 3, 1 or 0. Etc.

In SR4 you take what ever the DV is +net hits - Armor/Body hits.

Ugh. That's right. Please forgive the oversight. It's been awhile since I've had a 3rd ed run.

Having played 2nd, 3rd, & 4th. Being used to getting modifiers the moment I took damage, recognizing the ambiguity of 4th's wording, and having read through this thread including links to other sites (took a bit of time).

My observations:

1) The adept power still works even if you use the older edition's wound mod rules, it just happens later.
2) 1 row = 3 boxes. The rule as written states 3 cumulative boxes = -1, Cumulative means to add up all parts of the whole, not to separate them into individual portions. This leads me to conclude that 4th meant the mods to take effect at 3, 6, 9, etc
3) In the case of 2, the adept power (using the example of a power level of 2) would change the mod thresholds to 5, 8, 11, etc.
4) Using the Character Sheets picture makes me further conclude that the mod only takes place in the prescribed location of the mod. If they had meant the entire row to be included in the mod, the mod would have either been written into each box, or next to the row. [ ] [ ] [ ] -1

Opinion:

All that being said, as a gamer I prefer the 3, 6, 9 as it allows my character to be more deadly.
As a GM I like the 1, 4, 7 of old (haven't GM'd in 4th) because it forces players to be more aware of the damage they are taking.

And, of course, like all things... GM's get final say... yadda, yadda.

Hmm... if we're voting, it looks like 3,6,9's leading. Anyone else want to chime in?

Right now T-hawk that is how i am doing it 3rd,6th,9th box for the neg to take effect