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In my last campaign, I had a character (Byrn's) and an NPC in a lift having a fight. The stun clocked up It was soon aparent that a fight between two average characters might take a while. Here's the mathematics.

Average Human Character (without Street Fighting Skill):
Battle: 3 - therefore 2 close combat moves a turn
Meat: 3 - therefore, 80 stun

If the average person kicks once and punches once per turn, that does 3 (Meat) stun for the punch and 6 (2 x Meat) stun for the kick. 9 stun. Therefore, in the best scenario, it takes 9 turns to knock someone out. That's 21 seconds. Doesn't sound long realistically but in play it seems to take forever!

Most characters have combos that are not just made up of punch and kick, so it might take longer.

What I was thinking was doubling the stun done by a kick and punch, reducing this time in half. It means a very capable close combat character (5 moves, 10 meat - 40 stun per kick) can punch out just about any human in a single turn.

What do you think?

How quickly does stun recover?

Because in every real life tussle I've ever been in, people tend to bow out rather quickly, getting a solid kick in the head or sternum once is enough to seriously discourage you.

But afterward, people usually seemed OK, up, walking around, I mean, yeah a few bruises. But the next day at work and no grumbling, if not then in a couple days.

I understand that you can get serious injuries in a fist fight, broken nose, ears can be bitten or even pulled off if you're up against a totally vicious opponent, but I haven't been in enough fights to see something like that happen.

BTW, way to knock out that pornobot

Hi Sheikh,

Stun recovers at 10 points per round if you sit there and don't act - which is 3 seconds, so they would indeed be up and about in short order afterwards... it takes a truly impressive amount of stun to keep someone out for the count for any length of time, although this can be varied for the sake of the narritive.

I'd be tempted to suggest dropping the 50 baseline from the amount people have (maximum stun is 50+Meat*10) as 100 being the (PC) average is a historical artifact of the system and making it a straight 10*meat. OK, this will effect (affect?) the amount of negatives they will take to rolls due to stun before going under (-1 on a D10 per 10 stun, starting when you get within 100 of your maximum, or -10% per 10 on D100 rolls) but I don't think that would be much of a problem. It would make people much more variable on the amount of stun they have though...

Doubling up would make fights quicker, as would halving max stuns, but dealing with 5s is less easy than dealing with 10s I guess...

Anyway, I should be asleep or something.

Like it mate. The only remaining question is what to do with people with superhuman stun through psychotheatrics, bionics or bioweave.

I think improving your stun will become less appealing when they realise that their new stun of 1000 (from Neurostabiliser) means they are at -99 to stat checks and -990% to skills before they get knocked out

Two alternatives present themselves, make only the last 100 give negatives or change "improved stun" effects to "take fractional stun" effects. While I like the steady addition of negatives from the latter, I'd probably lean towards the former for ease of play - although you could just lumber the GM with the maths

A good point well made. I'd rather say that having bionics means that you don't suffer affects of stun until you're unconscious.

To avoid double posting I edited, but this is just more confusing. Moved to this post for clarity:

Or you could have an extra stun buffer that gets hit before your normal stun - like armour for stun. You did this on the BC power armour we used game before last. That would be mechanically similar to "only last 100 counts" and bolts on to the armour system pretty well.

(which is pretty much what you suggest above)

BTW, isn't stun = damage new? I thought the previous mechanic was stun = BF? Given the fixed stun recovery rate this doesn't look like it'll scale well (e.g borg gets hit with one turn of firing from a Astraripper 5, for 500. Makes a bit of a dent in his HP but will take 50 rounds to recover? Assuming 20xhuman HP, he'll be unconcious before he's half taken out by any method....

Yes, you're right. It is Stun = BF.

Stun buffer sounds like another statistic and I really want to avoid adding any more. It's not unrealistic for cyberware to negate the effects of feeling groggy. For powered armour, there will be a buffer but then you're accepting a hell of a lot of extra ruleage for the PA. With Cyber, I like to think this might be a place where we can make things easier.

Sounds sensible (you feeling OK? :P)

Out of interest, is it BF for the attack, regardless of the number of rounds that hit, or per round? I'd presume per attack, otherwise pelting people with millions of frozen peas would be a fantastic way of knocking them out..

.. back to the homework for me I think