This section covers our house rules for combat situations.

Stun Recovery

I had a revelation a long time ago, and now that I'm GMing, I get to make my revelations into reality. This one involves Stun damage. Rightly enough, weapons and spells that do Stun damage are relatively cheap and easy to obtain. Things like rubber bullets, Sleep spells, and such are treated as "not as dangerous" as their more lethal cousins.

Only one problem: in the only way that makes any difference, they are the same. What's the difference between dispatching someone with a Manaball or a Sleep spell? Sure, there's a roleplaying difference. In the second case, the magician has not killed his unlucky victim. But if the aim of the party is to kill the foes, then a Sleep spell is as good as a Manaball. The only difference is that somebody'll have to slit the unconscious person's throat. However, to the magician, there's a big difference: namely (Force)S Drain vs. (Force-1)S Drain. That might not sound like much, but believe me, if you play a magician, you'll know what I'm talking about!

While we're at it, let's look at rubber bullets and such for a minute: they go against Impact armor! That means that if you play in a Low lethality game (as Dan and I both do), the same guy who gets 12 points of armor (5/3 coat and a helmet, doubled) against a normal bullet might only get 3 or 4 against a rubber one! (More on this in another House Rule to be posted at some later date.) But the upshot is, Stun is damage. Stun is deadly.

So I've changed Stun a bit in my campaign. Namely, instead of recovering one box of Stun every hour (divided by the successes on your Body or Willpower test), you recover it one box every ten minutes (also modified by your roll.) So, a big Troll or somebody with high Willpower might conceivably be back in action in a few minutes, while a wimpy person might take more than an hour to get all their Stun boxes back.

The exception to this rule is Stun damage caused by pharmacological means--poisons, Narcoject rounds, and so on. This damage is recovered at the normal published rate of one box per hour, modified by the Body or Willpower test. If the character has taken a combination of regular Stun and drug- or poison-related Stun, he/she recovers all the damage at the higher (1 box/hour) rate.

Aborting Actions for Defense

In keeping with our low lethality philosophy, we've introduced a concept that we borrowed from the "Champions" system: the "abort and dodge" move.

This allows a character to sacrifice his or her next move to do something defensive. For example, suppose a character rolled a 25 for initiative. He uses most of his Combat Pool attacking on 25, but fails to notice the troll with the Panther cannon sneaking up on him (hey, this is an example!) on 18. With the "abort" rules, the character can abort his move on 15 in order to refresh his dice pools and dive out of the way (or do whatever else he wants to get to safety) on 18. His next move, then, would be on 5 instead of 15.

Note that characters aborting their next move cannot do anything that could be construed as offensive. They can't attack, cast offensive spells (or neutral spells with an offensive effect) or anything else that would injure an opponent. Note also that if a character does not have a move remaining, he or she cannot abort an action.

The only exception to the "no offensive action" rule is that a character using Armed Combat or Unarmed Combat skill can counterattack by aborting an action (contrary to the published rules). See "Armed or Unarmed Combat for Defense" below.

Armed or Unarmed Combat for Defense

The Shadowrun rules allow a character with Armed or Unarmed Combat skill to counterattack whenever he or she is attacked. So a character with an initiative of 1d6 + 4 and an Armed Combat skill of 6 could kick butt on a character with an initiative of 4d6 + 12 and an Armed Combat skill of 2. This means a slow character in armed combat could get a large number of free hits if attacked by a fast character. Even considering the fact that the slow character's Combat Pool only refreshes once, it doesn't seem right that somebody moving in (comparative) slow motion should be able to stand up to someone who's a blur.

So, we allow slow characters to use their Armed or Unarmed Combat skill to defend against faster characters, but if they want to do actual damage, they must abort their next action to do so.

Reach and Counterattack

This one is to simulate the fact that when a person swings a weapon, there is an amount of time (higher for higher Reach weapons) when the character is off-balance and cannot counterattack. This rule goes with the previous one (characters can only counterattack if they burn one of their moves) and adds a bit more: for a number of segments equal to a weapon's Reach + 1, the character cannot counterattack, even if he or she has moves left.

So, for example, if Joe the troll, wielding his mighty battle axe (+3 Reach, counting his troll bonus), takes a swing at Winterhawk on 17 and (miraculously) misses, he cannot choose to counterattack until 13 (17 - 4) even though he has a move on 7 that he can burn. This also applies to getting a "free hit" on Winterhawk should 'Hawk (wisely) decide to disengage and get his tail out of harm's way on 16, 15, or 14 (if he has a move on any of these segments. If he doesn't, he's out of luck.)

Characters can always choose to defend against attack; this rule does not affect their ability to do so.

Gunnery for All Machine Guns

The published rules allow the use of Firearms skill for firing light machine guns; we use Gunnery. Also, smartgun links aren't allowed on any indirect-fire weapons.

Flash Grenade Effectiveness

The increases to Target Numbers from Flash Grenades don't count vs. non-Manipulation magic, nor do they count for staging damage down. Naturally, they do add to the Target Numbers for dodging an attack.