It's bee a long time (like 15 years?) since I looked at the SR3 rules.
In my memories, attacks and damage worked something like this:
- attacker rolls, counts hits (let's ignore dodging for the moment, it's not relevant to this discussion)
- for every 2 net hit damage code is staged up, if it gets to deadly and there's hits left over, power is raised
- defender rolls body against the modified power minus armour
So I recently grabbed the SR3 pdf from drivethru and am reading the combat rules... and I remembered right... for melee combat
Ranged combat uses a different setup (p113):
- attacker rolls, count hits
- defender rolls body vs weapon base power minus armour, count hits
- compare attacker and defender hits, if attacker is higher, damage is staged up, if defender is higher damage is staged down
At which point I started thinking I was going crazy, so I got my dad to take pictures of my ancient 3rd printing sr3 that I left at my parents... and the rules are exactly the same there
So I scan here for a bit and find threads like this one:
https://forums.shadowruntabletop.com/index.php?topic=15933.msg0#newwhich definitely imply the rules I remember, not what is in the book
So, what is going on? Am I forgetting some errata? Alternate rule interpretation the community took as a given? Or is my memory just faulty and I'm misreading that thread?
The crux here is, of course, that if the rules for ranged attacks in the book are significantly more symmetrical between attacker and defender since the power can't be jacked sky high