Olesh posted:

Warning: incoming sperging.

The game glosses over the numbers for the most part, but it pretty consistently uses the numbers from the PnP game. For example, a laser sight reduces the target number for ranged attacks with the weapon by 1 (so a 4+ to hit becomes a 3+), while a smartlink reduces it by 2 - that's why smartlinks actually cost essence to use, because they're fucking amazing. You can have a target number greater than 6; any dice that roll a 6 get to roll again and add the second roll to their total. The probability curve gets kind of weird.

For most actions, you generally only need a single successful roll, but additional successful rolls give you increased benefits. Let's look at the shitty pistol from the beginning of the game: The Colt American L36. It has a damage rating of 6L, which means if you shoot someone, they take a light wound (1 pip) with a power of 6. Now, if you manage to roll really well on your attack roll and get a couple extra successes, you can "stage up" the damage to moderate, which would deal 3 pips instead. If you roll FANTASTICALLY and get four extra successes, you can stage up the damage again to serious, which would deal 6 pips. Note, however, that you would need to roll at least 5 dice for this to happen and they would have to all succeed.

Now, let's assume that you did hit, and inflicted a 6L wound on the target. We know what the L part means, they take 1 pip of damage. Why's there another number? Well, that's because they don't take damage quite yet. Whenever damage is dealt in Shadowrun, the target has the opportunity to "soak" (resist) the damage and reduce its severity. The target number for the soak is the power of the attack, in this case "6", and the unlucky schlub gets to roll a number of dice equal to their Body attribute. Every two successes they make on their soak roll reduces the damage by one stage. If the damage is reduced to lower than "L", it's negated entirely, null perspiration. Armor helps by directly reducing the target number - a ballistic protection of 2 will reduce the target number needed to soak bullets by 2, and so forth.

An Ares Predator, which is the most commonly used player weapon, deals 9M damage. Not only does it deal one more stage of damage to begin with (meaning negating the damage entirely requires 4 successes instead of 2), it's much more powerful. The base target number to resist damage is a 9, meaning that you need some serious armor in order to have a chance of soaking the damage consistently.

The Allegiance shotgun, on the other hand, deals 10S damage. This gun will put any unarmored target on the ground in two shots, and will consistently deal good damage to even well-armored targets (assuming you hit). In order to negate the damage entirely, a target would need to roll 6 successes against a base target number of 10. Even with solid armor, that's a very tall order. Most people don't even have 6 dice to roll - you roll dice equal to your Body attribute, which maxes out at 6 for humans. Much better to just dodge the attack entirely.

Wait, what?

You know that Posture thing that was kind of glossed over? That's actually something from the PnP game too, called 'Combat Pool', and it's incredibly relevant to not dying (also hitting things harder). It's a pool of dice that you get every combat round that you can apply towards attack or defense. Because the genesis shadowrun is real-time instead of divided up into combat rounds, it's abstracted, but generally pips on offense means more dice for attack (added to your dice from skill), and pips on defense means dice for defense - not more, because there's no "dodge" skill and you don't get any defensive dice by default. When you apply it towards defense, you subtract your successes directly from an enemy's successes. If you roll two successes on defense and the enemy rolls two successes on offense, guess what? You dodge the enemy's attack entirely. There's different pools that do more or less the same thing for magic and decking. Your Posture (aka Combat Pool) goes up as you raise your quickness, intelligence, and willpower stats.

Damage hurts
Why are we so worried about taking damage? I mean, your health goes up to 100% and most weapons are only gonna deal one or three pips of damage, right?
Well, no. The Genesis game uses a percentage system that starts at 100% to abstract it but you really have only 10 pips of health, so you'll never see anything other than 10% increments. And being hurt sucks. Taking a single scratch (1 pip of damage) puts you at 'Lightly Wounded', which increases the target number for almost all your actions by 1. Your TN to hit a guy is 4 normally? Now it's 5. If you take a moderate wound (at least 3 pips of damage), that jumps to a +2 modifier. Have fun hitting anything when your target number is a 6. A serious wound, which is 6 pips of damage (or 40% or less health remaining) jacks it up to +3, which means even normally trivial tasks (only need a 2+) suddenly become hard (need a 5+) and hard tasks become nearly impossible. Naturally, once you've taken 10 pips of damage you're unconscious, bleeding out, and dying. If you're unlucky (and unarmored), you'll go down to two gunshots. If you're really unlucky, you'll go down to one shotgun slug. If you aren't evading/soaking damage effectively, even cheap light pistols will take you down in ten shots. It's always worthwhile to have the best available armor as soon as you can afford it, backed up with the highest Body attribute you can afford.

There's also two separate damage meters in the game, mental and physical. In the pen and paper these were referred to as stun and lethal but they operate the same way. Stun or "mental" damage is dealt by things like concussion grenades, sleep gas, most magical drain, and good old fashioned bareknuckle brawling as well as cyberspace misadventures. Physical damage is getting stabbed or shot or blown up. They both accumulate separately, although if you take too much mental damage some of it will overflow into physical damage (someone punching you repeatedly will eventually kill you), but it's mostly irrelevant considering that when you take 10 pips of mental damage you are knocked the fuck out and not contributing to the fight anymore.

Once you start taking damage, it's hard to avoid taking more and while you can heal yourself using medkits/magic, the more injured you are the harder it is to successfully heal yourself.