Balance. To make fist fights go that much quicker and to give more prominence to the Meat statistic. Stun is only really used when you're in close combat, if you get shot in a fire fight, you have to be bionic to not shrug off the Stun.
I'll be leaving it as is because v4 comes with a fat bionics section where you can have your Stun increased through modifications.
We had a moment in the last campaign where two relatively low Meat people were trying to beat each other up in a lift. They might have retired before finishing the fight. Removing the 50 offset means that low Meat characters can't stand a beating for 10 turns from a non-fighting-specific medium character.
Of course, the big caveat is please do house-rule the hell out of it!
As the PC involved in the said fight, I'd have to agree.
Both people had battles in the 2-4 range and middling meats. It was basically a competition of who wouldn't miss, and the damage being done was in the single digits per round each way (due to all the missing). This is suitably comical but flailing at each other for tens of rounds is a bit much.
The +50 was mainly put in there for backwards compatablity with the existing system when it was shifted from 100 (fixed) to meat based. In V4 all the numbers have been rebalanced so it should be fine I reckon.
I did wonder if it was you, Byrn - uncharacteristically getting your pacifist character into a fight in a lift with an old(ish) man. Typically, no guns were involved - I think it was because the rest of the team had an appropriate fate worse than death if I remember?
When I last ran a campaign (streetpunk setting), I enjoyed it so much, I wrote up my GM notes into a comic and have it to the players as something of a thank you. I got books made by Lulu and everything. It charts the stories, running jokes and also what was going on behind the scenes.
I really must fix the typos and get it uploaded onto the Blog.