Actually it does. This is true of every EM weapon: It causes no Damage without TI, it may cause damage with TI.
Arguably for a Karakuri or Sun Tze v1 I'd say arguably E/M is significantly worse than potentially taking a wound (except maybe, possibly, if you're in an unconscious state), so "no damage" is exaggerating slightly.
*shrug* I was working within the hyperbolic framing of @solkan 's rhetorical question. We're agreeing though: with EM the designers have built a situation where they consider 1 DAM as potentially a better outcome than EM. That is, taking 2 DAM (vs BTS 6) from an EM CCW is still (potentially*) better than taking EM effect (vs BTS 3) and 1 DAM (vs BTS 6). To reiterate: the designers implicitly consider the option of trading EM for 1 DAM a more than fair trade in certain situations. This has no bearing on which of A,B or IJWs response is actually correct (I'm increasingly of the opinion that it's impossible to determine between A and B with the evidence at hand). It's a discussion about which is intended. * For Sun Tzu and Karakuri I agree with you, it's almost always better to risk the DAM. It's mainly vs Dogs and Chimera where taking the EM is a better option (assuming that you don't combine the rolls).
Yeah, who the heck knows. New TI is a stupidly powerful ability, seemingly brought about because someone was frustrated that their RPG PC (McMurrough) wasn't OP as all get out. Don't go looking for rationality there.
No, Total Immunity was changed because the old rules weren't very 'Total' (IIRC, they only applied to some Normal ammo types). The new rules were explicitly made to make the rule do what the name sounds like. CB just hasn't used anywhere near enough vulnerabilities with the rules change. IMO, Dogs should be Vulnerable to Fire, Karakuri and Sun should be vulnerable to EM.
This discussion made me think about different ammo in the game and how its defined in the rules. If you didn't see my post yet in the N4 ideas discussion thread, here's the result.
You're totally off base here. It applied to *all* Normal ammo types, but not to Exotic weaponry. They all should be vulnerable to non-lethal.
No, it worked weirdly. It had a list of special ammo that was Normal that oddly omitted any BTS Standard Ammo other than Nanotech (which many Total Immunity units didn't want to use because their BTS was higher) and it worked against Stun by allowing you to ignore the ARM roll (not BTS - ARM specifically) and protected against Guts Roll. This worked really weirdly for Sun Tze v1 and hacking, let's just say... As a result, Dogfaces were susceptible to Flash Pulse and Stun Pistols/Grenades. Kind of. Even though the fluff said they shouldn't and the name was very misleading. @Hecaton I'm getting the feeling that the big issue for you is being able to choose ARM or BTS, while everything else about Immunity: Total is mostly just irritations. Am I correct? (As in, I get the feeling that you'd like to see a game where e.g. a Karakuri hit by an AP Rifle should have to save on unmodified ARM while if hit by Breaker would save on unmodified BTS)