How do you determine damage in Shadowrun 3rd Edition?

[johnroth]

I'm a beginner in the game. I'm trying to wrap my brain around the concepts in the game, but the books seem kind of vauge. I know I'll understand it once I figure it out, but at the moment...

So, if I have a character who fights unarmed, my damage is (STR)M Stun. I understand that this is M(oderate) damage, and the book says that does 3 boxes of stun damage. What does my strength add to this? Does this mean I'd do (STR)+3 boxes of stun damage? (My character has a STR of 5, so would it be 8 total?) And then it goes on to state that you can increase the damage level per two successes over the required number of succsess... so if I have the oppurtunity to do that, say I increase my damage to (STR)S, or STR+6 boxes of damage, would I then be doing a total of 11 boxes of stun damage (As my character, again, has a str of 5). How... how does defense incorporate into all of this?

Kind of glad I opted not to use guns... but I still need to know what happens when I get shot at. <_< Anyone willing to help me out with this? Please?

[Lapak]

OK, it's been a long time since I picked up the books, so someone may step in and correct me here, but you're a bit off IIRC.

You roll your attack. If you hit, you do Medium damage (3 boxes); every two extra successes you have above the target's defense bumps that up a step - so two extra successes would make that Serious (6 boxes) and four extra successes would get you to 10 boxes.

Your Strength comes into play when they roll to resist the damage: it's the enemy's target number, with every two successes they get reducing the damage by one level. So with your strength of 5, they're rolling against a target number of 5 and need two successes to bump the damage down a step. Your strength rating doesn't add to the damage directly; it just makes it hard for them to soak it.

So say you did get enough successes to bump the hit up to a Serious Stun. The enemy now has to roll against target 5 and get two successes just to drop it to Medium again; they'd need four to drop it to Light and six to negate it completely.

(Again, it's been a while, so I may be off-base on this, but that's the situation as I recall it.)

[johnroth]

Hm, okay! I knew it would be simple once I could get it figured out. That actually makes a lot of sense. Thank you!