Special Weapon Systems and Damage Rules
Lasers
While photopressure exists, from a practical standpoint a laser weapon is recoilless. The Strength requirement of a laser weapon does not increase when it is fired on automatic firing modes. These are beam weapons, so there aren't literally dozens of little pellets of light. The firing modes of FA and HV actually refer to your ability to move the beam into and across targets. Laser weapons are not considered “normal weapons” and creatures with Immunity to Normal Weapons have no special resistance. Laser beams travel from the weapon to the target at the speed of light, and their “time of flight” is essentially zero at any distance combat takes place in that is not in space. Lasers use sniper rifle range, but extreme range is line of sight. Laser weapons are at a disadvantage in areas of fog, smoke, or other light-obscuring medium. In light fog/rain/mist/smoke, reduce the damage of the laser by 1 for each range increment beyond short. In heavy fog/rain/mist/smoke, reduce the damage of the laser by 2 for each range increment beyond short. If the base damage is reduced to zero in this way, the laser is ineffective.
Flame Weapons
Flame throwers project and ignite fuel (usually in liquid or powdered form). This generally comes out of an adjustable nozzle, and can come out as a cone or a stream. This is treated as Full Auto, but the adjustment of the nozzle determines which Full Auto option is used. So a user must use a change firing mode action to use a wide burst if their last attack was a walking fire action. Flame thrower streams expand to fill available space, and essentially ignore cover entirely. Literally seeing the target is not especially necessary, and the penalties for obscured visibility are halved when using a flame weapon. Flamethrower fuel used in the 2070s is pretty sticky, and anyone hit by it will catch on fire. The scenery around the flame thrower operator and target can be expected to catch fire too.
Electrical Weapons
Tasers and other shock weaponry have the ability to temporarily scramble things which require organized electrical impulses to function properly. That includes most machines and living creatures with a functional nervous system. Which means it includes metahumans and their drones, but not spirits or trees. Electrical weapons do Normal damage (which is not very effective against non-living targets), but a susceptible target must resist damage a second time, with the second soak causing no actual damage but paralyzing the target for a number of rounds equal to the amount of wound boxes that would have been filled in. The second soak test has a base damage 2 more than the base damage of the electrical weapon, but is not increased by net hits from the attack roll. The target also gets to add their Willpower to the soak test's dicepool. Note that drones don't have any Willpower and are often reset for several rounds by heavy shocks.
Explosives
Explosions from things like grenades and plastique are different from bullets in ways that make them difficult to model as instantaneous attacks of fixed strength. An explosion is not dependent upon an attack roll by any specific person. A highly agile demolitionist does not inflict any more damage than a clumsy one once the explosion goes off. Explosions also do not “miss” characters in their blast radius, and there are no defense rolls permitted. Each explosion rolls 4 dice as an “attack roll” against everything within their blast radius, with each hit raising the damage before soak. However, 0 hits is not a miss, it is simply adding 0 to the base damage. Explosions attenuate with distance, with every doubling of the distance from the target to the explosion reducing the base damage by 1.5 (round reduction down), with the initial damage being good out to 2 meters. If the base damage is reduced to 0 or less, the explosion does nothing at all and does not stage itself up. Explosives can also be stacked virtually limitlessly. If you use three times as many explosives (such as using a burst of grenades or mortar shells), the base damage is increased by 1 (and the blast radius expanded appropriately).
| Distance | Damage |
| 0-2m | Base |
| 2-4m | -1 |
| 4-8m | -3 |
| 8-16m | -4 |
| 16-32m | -6 |
| 32-64m | -7 |
| 64-128m | -9 |
| ... | ... |
Cover is very effective against explosives. The cover modifier is subtracted from the dice the explosion rolls to stage itself up, and an equal number of dice is added to the target's soak roll. If characters are aware of the danger and in heavy cover, they may make a Defense Roll, with the hits being added directly to their soak roll (the explosion still does not “miss”). Modern armor is also very effective at dealing with blasts, and the Coverage of the armor is added to armor rating of the armor (up to a maximum of doubling the armor's protective value). If the armor is Hardened, the increase from the armor's Coverage is also Hardened.
- Example: Simba is caught with his figurative (but not literal) pants down as a frag grenade lands 10 meters away from his position. The fragmentation grenade has a base damage of 5, but at 10 meters out the base damage is reduced to 1. The grenade rolls 4 dice and scores 2 hits, so Simba must soak 3 damage. Fortunately Simba is wearing armor clothing. That has an armor of 3 and a coverage of 2 so it provides a total of 5 soak dice. Combined with his own 5 soak dice from his own strength, he rolls 10 dice, and gets 3 hits. The unsoaked damage is 0 and Simba is not wounded. The guard dog closer to the center was less lucky – being within 2 meters of the blast, the dog was confronted with 7 damage, and with no pants to save it, the dog is chunky salsa.
Shaped Charges
Some explosives have a special shaping that channels the blast in a certain direction. This causes a tremendous amount of force to be focused in a small area next to the explosion. What this means in game terms is that these explosives do a lot more damage if they “hit” than if they “miss”. Shaped Charges are written with two damage numbers (and sometimes two AP numbers). The number before the slash is used for anything the charge was set against (generally whatever was actually hit with a missile, but for demolition charges it's whatever it was taped to), and the number after the slash used to determine the explosive radius and damage to everything around that immediate target. The explosive attack roll of shaped charges does not apply to the direct target damage, but shaped charges do get to increase their damage with the net hits from the attack roll (or Demolitions skill test) used to place them.
Damage Over Time (Fire, Acid, Etc.)
When a character is soaked in acid, freezing to death, on fire, or otherwise subjected to a damaging situation that is ongoing, we call this DOT or Damage Over Time. While it could be modeled as a series of tiny attacks that had a remote chance of doing damage each second, that is far fiddlier than the people actually playing the game need to deal with. DOT damage is added one wound box at a time. A DOT effect has a “delay” number, and that number determines how much time passes between filling in one wound box and the next. When a character is afflicted with a DOT, they are allowed to resist it, which is usually the same kind of resistance roll they might make against immediate damage (so a damage soak roll against “being on fire” or a poison resistance roll against “having swallowed poison”), save that the character's hits are added to the DOT's delay number rather than subtracted from the damage done. Being on fire is still a problem if you are wearing turnout gear, it's just a problem that you can respond to in the near future. DOT's will continue filling in a wound box on schedule until they end. For external sources of damage, that generally means removing the noxious stimulus, while something like an injected poison usually has an amount of time it will persist based on how much was injected (this time could be cut shorter with things like antidotes or diuretics).
| Delay Number | Time Between Damage Boxes |
| 0 | 1 second (IPs 2, 3, and 4) |
| 1 | 1 Round |
| 2 | 2 Rounds |
| 3 | 5 Rounds |
| 4 | 1 Minute |
| 5 | 2 Minutes |
| 6 | 5 Minutes |
| 7 | 15 Minutes |
| 8 | 30 Minutes |
| 9 | 1 Hour |
| 10 | 2 Hours |
| 11+ | Double Time Each Additional Delay Number (4 Hours, 8 hours, 16 Hours, etc...) |
