[Michael Chandra]

As some may have noticed in the Bounty Hunter topic, the subject hit the Juggernaut and I will likely include him in a session soon. So before that happens I want to boost him a bit.


The biggest problem is Bull's Eye Double Tap. While Hardened Armor got buffed in SR5, a sniper rifle with BE can simply bypass all of it in a single called shot. So I'd need a way to protect against that, without making it impossible to injure the thing. For this I had in mind to heavily reduce AP, so only a third is left.

I considered boosting its Hardened Armor to 16, but if AP is heavily reduced that may be overkill. At 12 like in SR4, and the AP buff, say it gets hit by -8 AP, which becomes -3. 26 soak dice + 5 autohits means 14 soak average roughly, while with 16 Hardened Armor it'd be 17 soak average. That might be fitting, since it means the thing cannot be butchered by sniper rifles without worries.

But at the same time it would mean they would become basically immune to Indirect Combat Spells (due to the AP reduction) and anything weaker than a Heavy Machine Gun. Even an Alpha's 11P/-6 would become -2 so would face the same 17 soak average, requiring a called shot for damage or AP to have a decent shot at causing a bit of damage. On the other hand, it makes sense that it can shrug off most, since even fluff notes the use of machine guns against it. But the risk is that non-lethal measures become impossible. On the other hand, chances you accidentally kill it are pretty much nill at 17 overflow boxes.

Regeneration was mentioned, but in retrospect that's a bad idea. A Juggernaut already cannot be knocked unconscious by toxins, so if it cannot be held unconscious by disturbing its rest, the only way would be a system causing constant ongoing damage based on vital signs. It might be better to just make it REALLY hard to injure, so it takes an entire team and a lot of DPS to knock one out. Which makes AP/3 and Hardened Armor 16 (but counts as Vehicle for anti-vehicle weapons) a brutal combination that makes BEDT less of a solo-killer.

Against Direct Spells the 9 Willpower may be problematic though. Magical Guard could be either too weak or too powerful, so it may be better to just give it additional dice. So Hardened Mystic Armor 3 for 12 dice + 2 autohits may be nice, low enough that an excellent spellcaster can still break past and high enough that it's a big challenge.

Since the Juggernaut isn't really the kind of shape that can walk very fast, x2/x6/+1 may be decent rates. This means 12/36 instead of 15/45, and the 9+42 running dice will add PLENTY of additional meters if it tries...

Skillwise I'd just follow the x2-1 general conversion shortcut, and for damage it simply goes up with (Str/2) from 24P/-3 to 45P/-3. Yes this means only tanks can survive a hit, but well that's the entire idea. Best solution: Stay out of its way and hit it with your best shot.

This is just one approach, and I gladly will accept feedback that I can use to improve the nightmare for my players.

[Namikaze]

Make it so that killing a Juggernaut requires finding it's phylactery first.  Then they have to perform a ritual over the phylactery, which will bring the Juggernaut to the scene.  The players have to fight the Juggernaut long enough for the ritual to be complete (total of 12 days).  Once that's done, the Juggernaut becomes a mundane armadillo, which can be killed with one bullet.

This is why Juggernaut hides are so rare. 

[8-bit]

Make it so that killing a Juggernaut requires finding it's phylactery first.  Then they have to perform a ritual over the phylactery, which will bring the Juggernaut to the scene.  The players have to fight the Juggernaut long enough for the ritual to be complete (total of 12 days).  Once that's done, the Juggernaut becomes a mundane armadillo, which can be killed with one bullet.

This is why Juggernaut hides are so rare. 

Lich Juggernaut 2.0 w/ Armadillo Transformation.

@OP

Not sure what you mean by -8 AP becoming -3 AP? Is there some power or mechanic I'm missing? Anyways, I don't see how it's possible to balance hardened armor vs. Bull's Eye/Double Tap. I mean, any weapon with APDS rounds can utilize that called shot, and if you make the hardened armor too ridiculous, then nothing has a chance of damaging it. I like the anti-vehicle rounds counting the Juggernaut as a vehicle, but I don't see how someone is ever likely to damage it with a normal weapon without Bull's Eye/Double Tap. Although, APDS rounds + Ares Desert Strike is a base of -8 AP, which might be enough to break through the hardened armor. If the juggernaut soaks 17 hits on average though ... I don't think it will be hurt too much.

On the magic side of things, I would like to note that Direct spells don't get a soak test. So, I don't think Hardened Mystic Armor would give 2 autohits, but I might be wrong. I'm not sure.

I honestly don't know how to balance things on the armor end. You can either make it untouchable, or more vulnerable but give it more speed. Like, either up the Agility or the movement rates. That way, when it does get hurt and notice it's attackers, it can immediately charge them and likely kill one of them. Makes sense why most people wouldn't chase a bounty if they are likely to die.

Edit: Just remembered that Micheal put me on his ignore list. Oh well, maybe other people can dissect my ideas.

[Lucean]

I don't know what a Juggernaut is, so sorry here, but I assume it is some kind of critter.

You could give it some kind of damage shield from feeding, describe it as some unnatural glow around its body, which grows weaker with each good hit.
This way you are able to pace it entirely based on the situation, maybe even making it necessary to use different weapons. In that you could keep a high hardened armor and thereby the need for a good sniper rifle, but the damage shield is reacting to the number of projectiles and not the DV.

Damage Shield of 50 - impervious to damage, each bullet reduces the shield by 1
Hardened Armor 20 - only relevant when the shield is gone

It might even retreat when the shield gets low to feed on something to get it back again.

I hope I'm not too far off with this

[8-bit]

Juggernaut is from SR4's Running Wild. It's an enormous magical critter whose mundane equivalent is a tiny armadillo. I like the idea though.

Maybe with the damage shield it's reduced by the DV of the bullet(s)? So, Hardened Armor 12 + Body 17 soaks damage, and then any damage that is remaining goes to the shield instead of it's actual condition monitor.

I wish I could +1 that idea Lucean, that actually sounds pretty easy to use. Not sure how to mesh that with SR rules, but it's pretty easy to houserule.

[Michael Chandra]

Make it so that killing a Juggernaut requires finding it's phylactery first.  Then they have to perform a ritual over the phylactery, which will bring the Juggernaut to the scene.  The players have to fight the Juggernaut long enough for the ritual to be complete (total of 12 days).  Once that's done, the Juggernaut becomes a mundane armadillo, which can be killed with one bullet.

This is why Juggernaut hides are so rare. 

The problem there is that they aren't supposed to kill it. Now, dear players, go away. Shoo. Shoo. Git.

Okay, with that said and done:A convoy of paracritters gets hijacked on its way to the Fort Lewis Zoo. When the team catches up, the hijackers are dead and half of the trucks are empty, so they have to chase the critters and beat them into submission. When they get back, one of the remaining trucks is shaking, with a Juggernaut who woke up with a temper. So I want the stats available in case they have to knock it out (before the army shows up with combat choppers).

I don't know what a Juggernaut is, so sorry here, but I assume it is some kind of critter.

You could give it some kind of damage shield from feeding, describe it as some unnatural glow around its body, which grows weaker with each good hit.
This way you are able to pace it entirely based on the situation, maybe even making it necessary to use different weapons. In that you could keep a high hardened armor and thereby the need for a good sniper rifle, but the damage shield is reacting to the number of projectiles and not the DV.

Damage Shield of 50 - impervious to damage, each bullet reduces the shield by 1
Hardened Armor 20 - only relevant when the shield is gone

It might even retreat when the shield gets low to feed on something to get it back again.

I hope I'm not too far off with this

It's a Body 17, Strength 42 huge Armadillo with a length of 14m, a weight past 7.000 kg and 1-meter long claws which did 24P/-3 in SR4 and would thus do 45P/-3 in SR5. They're 1.5m on the market, untrained, and VERY rare. Oh and they eat EVERYTHING in their path when they chase a target. Even trees and rocks. And buildings.

The damage shield is a nice idea. I could employ Smart Armor from Arsenal with a modification. This would be a big pool of Smart Armor, out of which an amount of dice equal to the AP of the attack is used. The heavy weapons would force the Smart Armor dice to be rolled, each hit would not work against the AP so basically you average at 1/3 of the Smart Armor not working. But you also might have way more or way less AP, adding a higher (and frustrating!) variation of impact. So the APDS Alpha has a chance to do damage but may also be completely out of luck, depending on the AP roll rather than just on their net hits.

Next up would be that Smart Armor is exhaustive. I could have each attack whittle down the Smart Armor pool with a few dice, so eventually the pool will get exhausted and will stop working.

And the thing devours stuff in its path, so I like the recharge method. Take it down before it gets a chance to run straight into Puyallup and cause way too much collateral damage.

By the way, ZeConster's plan is to roar at the thing. Yes, that's 'her' (female character) thing. She already calculated the odds of success.

[ZeConster]

Not sure what you mean by -8 AP becoming -3 AP? Is there some power or mechanic I'm missing?

It's in the second paragraph - he's considering giving the Juggernaut a special kind of hardened armor that reduces the effective AP of attacks by two-thirds, thereby making sure it has a guaranteed amount of autohits. Of course, everything dies in Shadowrun if you explode enough grenades at the same time, so he may be overthinking this - maybe he should just give it the ability to burn a single point of Edge to get Not Dead Yet, Blitz, and Seize the Initiative all at once.

[8-bit]

Not sure what you mean by -8 AP becoming -3 AP? Is there some power or mechanic I'm missing?

It's in the second paragraph - he's considering giving the Juggernaut a special kind of hardened armor that reduces the effective AP of attacks by two-thirds, thereby making sure it has a guaranteed amount of autohits. Of course, everything dies in Shadowrun if you explode enough grenades at the same time, so he may be overthinking this - maybe he should just give it the ability to burn a single point of Edge to get Not Dead Yet, Blitz, and Seize the Initiative all at once.

Ah, I missed that, thanks for pointing it out. That would probably work pretty well then, but maybe drop the Hardened Armor down to 10. 12 or 16 seems a little high for that.

[firebug]

Quick question.  How big of an issue would there be if you take Bull's Eye Double Tap out of the equation?  Because I'm considering banning it from any games I GM.

[Michael Chandra]

Let's see... 14P/-10 vs 17+16 Hardened, bad defenses so the sniper can call a shot at -2 (hello called shot PQ!), so say 15 dice vs 6 (SA Burst), 3 net hits, 19P/-10 vs 17+16 = 19P vs 23 dice and 3 auto-hits, so 8P average per IP, 3 IPs to knock it out. Without full defense it'd go down rather easily still vs an APDS 121. So it's still a big issue when the biggest sniper rifles enter the game. Full defense would make it evade >50% of the shots, but at least a third likely hits, especially with multiple snipers. Fortunately the second sniper doesn't have a Barrett 121 (yet) in my game, nor the PQ, but she can still use a Remington, Call the shot and Push it for a decent hit.

In comparison, let's assume 3 Targeting 6 Pilot 3 Smartlink 1 Roto-Drones using 6-round FA bursts (and the assumption that drones can fire as simple action because they're not gunnering metas but fight as normal people do). We got 10 dice vs 8-5+9=12/11/10 in full defense. That's average 1 hit per IP with average 2 net hits per attack that hits. 12P/-8 becomes 14P/-8, so 4 auto-hits and 25 dice remain, only 2 points of damage make it through per IP. That means on average it would take 4 combat turns for them to take it down, if the Juggernaut uses Full Defense in each combat turn.

Alternatively you could equip a whole bunch of roto-drones with cheap remingtons, your hit chances would be rather poor but it'd be cheaper and with that many SA-burst attackers you will drain the defense pool just as well as full-auto bursts do. Ditch the smartlink and you're basically talking 12.5k per drone (and a single autosoft at 3k) rather than 28.5k, so you can afford 7 over 3. For 100 grand you'd have 8 of these puppies doing 2.25 hits per IP at a bit less than 2 net hits average per hit, so the Juggernaut would be down in just 2 IPs. In comparison the 121 with modifications is about 40k, so 2 snipers would already be at 80k.

So I think that even without BE/DT, the AP is a big concern. An Alpha would have a hard time even with a full burst, whereas the expensive sniper rifles can handle the Juggernaut in any environment where it cannot reach them in a single IP. Which doesn't feel right compared to the whole fluff vibe.

By the way, BE/DT might be balanced out more if you half the bonus it gives and note it doesn't grant you the wide-burst defense penalty. But that's a different tale altogether.

[Michael Chandra]

Time to run some Toxin math... At 17 Body, 9 Willpower and 6 Magic, a Juggernaut has 38 dice vs toxins of which 12 are Hardened. Neurostun X has a Penetration of -2 and hits 5x, so 36 dice + 5 autohits vs 15 damage. Average damage 0.4, so if it doesn't exit the area it takes 2 damage average. You likely will cause it to be disoriented for a bit.

Of course excessive exposure also increases the Power, so the damage goes up. If you keep it within Neurostun X for a minute, it will take 6 damage average. Use thrice the concentration as well and suddenly we're at 12.5 damage instead. Of course the question is how you're going to keep it inside a gassed area for at least a minute... At five-folded concentration 1 minute is definitely going to drop it.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

I ... don't believe armor ever gets to be Hardened against a toxin.  Does it?

[Michael Chandra]

Immunity to Toxins did not override the general Immunity part of being Hardened Armor. Just like Immunity to Normal Weapons did not note "oh and of course the Hardened part applies" in Running Wild, neither did "Immunity to (Pathogens/)Toxins". It adds twice the Magic/Essence (SR4/SR5, same value here) in dice to Toxic Resistance Tests, and follows the normal Immunity rules for the rest. Since we treat Power as 'Damage', even when no actual damage is done, there's no reason why its DV would not apply to the Hardened Armor part.

Add to that that Immunity now adds half its modified rating as automatic hits, which is not actively overridden so would reasonably apply here, and Immunity to Toxins got a nice boost that helps compensate for the heavily-buffed Power of many Toxins.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Oh, okay - you're discussing just how the power Immunity works.  From the way 5e is written, the power Hardened Armor works against physical attacks only.  Hardened Mystic Armor and Immunity to X both work the same way against damage vectors, except that Hardened Mystic Armor protects against attacks on the astral plane, and Immunity to X functions against whatever X is - toxins, diseases, fire, water, normal weapons, etc. etc.  (Immunity vs. Normal Weapons AND Hardened Armor would kind of be double-dipping, y'know?  But it could happen.)

So the DV - AP would have to be 12 or greater to even have a chance of affecting it, and even then it gets its 38 dice with 6 autohits.  Gotcha.  I guess I was muddled with the whole 'Hardened' thing.  Durrr ...

[Michael Chandra]

I made a side-note question about Immunity+Hardened in the Missions FAQ Request topic, it's not relevant for Missions so may not be answered any time soon though. But the combination can indeed happen, due to multiple possible circumstances.

But yes, I wasn't saying Hardened Armor applied, just realized Immunity to Toxins = Hardened vs. Toxins and wanted to run the math on that, see if toxin-incapacitation is an option. I'm keeping the Immunity on 12, vs buffing the Hardened to 16.

So I think I'll go with a pool of something like 40 Smart Armor, just need to figure out how exactly it's reduced. Every net hit? Every excess point of AP/DV? Increase Hardened Armor to 16, assume there's a version of Hardened Mystic Armor that applies solely to Mana Spells (so not penalizing Indirect Combat Spells any further) and basically apply 3 dice bonus defense on every test vs Direct Combat Spells and Mental Manipulation, but not against other spelltypes.