[JackVII]

Page 124 under "Touch-Only Attack."  "These attacks don't benefit from net hits on the attack to increase Damage Value."  From a "it makes sense, mostly" standpoint, I don't have a problem with it, but there are a low of low Str characters out there who need to rethink their melee backup option.

Considering the default answer for any melee character that was unable to produce 8 DV through Strength+Weapon DV was "get shock gloves" I am guessing they considered that a problem. I'm okay with it personally.

[Michael Chandra]

But that's not fully what that says. It says that you can make a Close Combat attack to touch them, so that you're in contact, and that during such an attack to make contact you can use shock weapons to inflict damage during that. Doesn't say that this overrides normal attacks with the weapons.

[JackVII]

Given that they refer to the SR5 BBB page number, I believe these are intended to supplement those rules. I guess you should probably check with Bull to see how that is supposed to play out in Missions.

Specifically, it seems the first paragraph deals with synchronizing touch only attacks with the new Clinch rules and the second clarifies how stun weapons work.

[Kincaid]

I think it's a fair assumption that everything citing SR5 overrides the original text.  Most of this is done to include rules for clinching, but the staging of touch attack damage seems like a case of a rules change/clarification--the final paragraph reads as a standalone entry.

[Michael Chandra]

Or it might be related to laying hands on them for casting spells.

[samoth]

I thought the DV was never modified for shock gloves in the first place; just a net success on the roll would do the base damage and -AP.  Maybe I've misread that all this time?

[JackVII]

I thought the DV was never modified for shock gloves in the first place; just a net success on the roll would do the base damage and -AP.  Maybe I've misread that all this time?

You actually didn't need a net success for a touch attack. Tie in that case when to the attacker. It was never very clear about how it worked, but there weren't any explicit rules about not staging damage up, so I guess it would go with the basic combat rules (net hits stage).

[Michael Chandra]

Given how SnS ammo doesn't have an exception, it'd be weird for the electrical melee attacks to not apply net hits.

[jim1701]

I just assumed with net hits the extra DV just meant you shocked something sensitive.   

I'm fine with no DV increase though.  I mean between the +2 dice you get for a touch only attack, the 9 DV, the -5 AP and the side effects of a electrical attack it seems a fair deal to me. 

[Dr. Meatgrinder]

You can still use Shock Gloves in a punch attack (per the item description, p. 423, SR5), which doesn't use the Touch-Only Attack rules at all.  There's nothing in the item description that requires the use of the Touch-Only Attack action.  It's just that if you use the Touch option, you get the +2 to hit, touch on a tie, and now suffer all the limitations of the Touch Attack.

[Kincaid]

You can still use Shock Gloves in a punch attack (per the item description, p. 423, SR5), which doesn't use the Touch-Only Attack rules at all.  There's nothing in the item description that requires the use of the Touch-Only Attack action.  It's just that if you use the Touch option, you get the +2 to hit, touch on a tie, and now suffer all the limitations of the Touch Attack.

This was discussed awhile ago--a number of people (myself included) weren't thrilled with the concept of double-dipping on damage based off a single, unsplit, attack roll.  If a runner wants to grab a bad guy's head with a touch attack and drive her knee into his face, split your pool and have at it.  But a single punch doing both types of damage?  Way too easy to break.

[Dr. Meatgrinder]

This was discussed awhile ago--a number of people (myself included) weren't thrilled with the concept of double-dipping on damage based off a single, unsplit, attack roll.  If a runner wants to grab a bad guy's head with a touch attack and drive her knee into his face, split your pool and have at it.  But a single punch doing both types of damage?  Way too easy to break.

I'm not suggesting that the punch does both regular unarmed damage and shock glove damage.  I'm suggesting that with the shock glove you're actually wielding a weapon (the shock glove)...it just happens to use the unarmed skill.  If you're using the shock glove as a weapon use the stats as stated for the weapon; if you're using the shock glove as just a glove use the stats for your unarmed punch.  But the shock glove says you can either touch or punch and I've seen nothing that removes the option.

If they had required spells and shock gloves to use only the Touch attack rule that might solve the problem.  But they didn't.

[Csjarrat]

Anyone notice the availability of the Thunderstruck Gauss Rifle is now 12R.     Granted it is still 26 thousand but still the heaviest weapon available at chargen.

Its 12F, and the batteries aren't available at chargen.
only way you can utilise it is on a steel lynx combat drone (comes with a heavy weapon mount) as you can use its power source instead of battery packs.
pretty awesome to behold but it does show it as being 24F in the back of the book on the summary charts.
unfortunately its another case of the usual high-quality catalyst editing!

[martinchaen]

Cross-posting this here, since I thought the writers might appreciate the constructive feedback from this customer.

I recently replied to another poster asking for opinions on Run & Gun, and this was my reply/review of my likes and dislikes of the book.

My list of pros:
1. The entire "Tactics and Tools" section
Not only does it provide a lot of cool fluff, but for someone who's executed maneuvers like travelling overwatch, counter peal, crossfire, and diamond formation in real-life this is one part of the rules where I think the developers did a fantastic job of capturing what tactical movement can look and feel like. Time will tell if the mechanics rely too heavily on the team leader rather proficient with the Small Unit Tactics skill, but I honestly think that if a runner team is built using real-world principles where everyone has a designated combat role with secondary and tertiary responsibilities, and everyone has just a rating or two of Small Unit Tactics, the team could absolutely rock over a similarly untrained team.

2. The fiction
There is a lot of awesome commentary that helps set the scene/mood for me personally, and I really appreciate the effort that's gone into the writing in terms of the in-game chatter. Great job to whomever wrote the various fiction pieces (Catspaw and Hostile Extraction in particular, but also all of the one page introductions to the chapters), with my favourite being the short intro to Tactics and Tools (shocker, I know, given the above...)

3. Alternate combat rules and additional actions
I really like having the RGX options for my table, and the expanded called shots rules, new actions, and martial arts rules are, for the most part, awesome. There's a few notable ones that need some attention, but all in all nothing that a house rule can't fix; the addition of martial art styles is cool, though overwhelming at first (I skimmed a few pages and then went "Nope! Too complex, save it for another day..."), but once I got a chance to assimilate all of the information I really like it.


And then the cons:
1. The editing and play testing/balancing process
While I think the fiction is awesome, I've got to give a big thumbs-down to the editing and play testing process; there are just so many inconsistencies with regards to the terminology used, a ton of weird grammar usage that make the rules more complex than they should be, and straight up parts that are spread all over the book, missing or ill-thought through. I WANT to like this book because the fiction makes it an awesome read but then I encounter parts of the rules that are just utterly incomprehensible and I feel a little let down. With enough house ruling these are not insurmountable obstacles, but I dislike the fact that in some cases house ruling is obviously needed. Which brings me neatly to...

2. Game/rule balance
Whoever thought the rules for Bulls-Eye Double-Tap/Burst, the repair rules, the PI-Soft rules, and the 5 page demolition rules for bringing down a building (to name a few) was a good idea needs to take a good, hard look at the consequences of their actions. There is no way in hell I'm letting an assault rifle get to -10 AP (at the very least, multiplying the base AP of -2 by x3 for a simple burst fire is the more conservative reading of those rules) for a mere -4 Dice Pool penalty; with a single well-placed burst from an Ares Alpha with a total dice pool modifier of -8 a character can take out the engine block of a Mitsubishi Nightsky, completely disabling the vehicle and causing the equivalent of 80,000¥ in damages (not even counting the 32,000¥ per box of damage this attack would inflict in addition if the "DV Limit" of "None" is representing no limit as opposed to no damage) for a mere 36¥ worth of APDS ammo and the rifle itself. And that's just the tip of the iceberg; PI-Soft rules are utterly ridiculous unless the intention is for GMs to just hand these out "on loan" from Johnsons (viable), the demo rules turns Shadowrun into Mathrun as far as I'm concerned, the majority of the Arsenal chapter is stuff I would rarely, if ever, get to use due to availability, cost or just a poor stat line, and the Martial Arts section is so overwhelmingly dense that it took me several days of dedicated study to figure it all out (and I'm still not sure I've got it down 100%).

3. The potential this book has to really slow down a game
As a GM, I love to hate this book. This goes back to my two previous con entires, in that not only am I as a GM expected to have a firm grasp of the base rules, but whenever a character now wants to hit someone in the [insert location here] I have to know what the rules for that specific location is in terms of how much damage he can do, what kind of effects are introduced, and how it is resisted. In an edition where the Matrix rules were significantly streamlined, some of the rules in Run & Gun throws a big ol' brick in the face of this method of thinking. I'm going to be spending a LOT of time referencing the book, and even though I know I can tell my players to know the rules for their stuff, I'll still be called upon knowing the effects they could possibly want to use that involves others. In short, the complexity of these rules makes me want to completely disallow some or most of them out of the game entirely, because they add too much paperwork to the game ("OK, you shot him in the ankle, so Henchman A can now only move AGI x1 for walking and AGI x2 for running, is not allowed to sprint, and is unable to perform any complex actions for the next 4 Combat Turns.") for my tastes.

These criticisms might seem harsh, and I freely admit I think they are myself, but I think that stems in large part due to my expectation that this book would add more width (breadth? I'm not a native English speaker) to the game, not more needlessly complicated depth.

Was it worth the 25USD I paid for it? Yeah, I would say so, even if I end up implementing house rules for half the content, this is still a great read.

[DeathStrobe]

What does the DV limit/ DV Max mean on the new called shots?

Does that mean that the damage has to do that amount of damage in order to have an effect or does it mean that it can only do that much DV when that called shot is done?

Lets say we do a called shot on an engine block  (p115 RAG), and we do that to the classic Bulldog (p463 core). Lets say we got a DP of 12, (6 agi + 6 gunnery). We spend our free action to do the called shot, take a -4 DP, so we now have 6DP to hit the engine block of the Bulldog. Lets go with the average and say we score 2 net hits with a (new) AK-98, so 10p + 2 hits = 12p. Lets assume for simplicity sake that the Bulldog is not moving, just so we can actually hit it.

The called shot rules says there is no DV limit, and says the effect of this shot is to disable the vehicle.  So the Bulldog gets its average soak of 9, the AK did only 3 damage to the bulldog. But does that mean I disabled the Bulldog? Permanently? Does the rigger that owns the Bulldog, if he jumps in, can he not even start it?

I don't think this sounds too over or underpowered, Because on the road, this called shot will be very unlikely to hit, I just want to make sure I got the rules right.