Some of those are pure GM-fiat though, with no rules for them (or defending against them). If you do that to a character, they'd better have a reasonable ability to expect and plan for it (potentially speaking), or you're just griefing them.

I agree, be creative, but the player should be theoretically able to expect mechanical effects. Otherwise, sad player, sad player bad. :) What this means is, if the player thinks he good in vacuum because he's a synth, that's *player* knowledge error, not *character* knowledge error. You'd assume someone in a Swarmanoid in-game would know the general limitations and weaknesses, even if the player didn't buy Common Sense. For me, it's kind of hard to imagine he *didn't* get Magnetic System, Grip Pads, maybe asked the GM for Laser/Microwave links; as a seasoned roleplayer, I know never to give the GM the benefit of the doubt. ;)

Cereth wrote:

Was curious for some ideas on some nasty ways to deal with swarmanoid characters since more conventional attacks are mostly pointless.

One word: Shop-Vac. (Or is that two?) Another word: Hairspray. It would gum up the flying microbots like nobody's business (my grandmother used to kill wasps in the house with it.)

Yerameyahu wrote:

Sadly, neither of those exist in The Future. Everyone has perfect hair, possibly using nanites, and Cleaners handle all shop-vac-ing.

Maybe that's why people are so interested in "artifacts" from Earth! Also, shop vac won't work: "Swarms are not affected by vacuum." p 329.

Cereth wrote:

Was curious for some ideas on some nasty ways to deal with swarmanoid characters since more conventional attacks are mostly pointless. Apart from other nanoswarms, what are some ideas for nasty things that can befall a swarmanoid character? I have one person in my group that I want to amp up the tension with in my current campaign because I think he is a little too comfortable in his swarmanoid morph. Thanks in advance for any ideas. :)

Unless you're purposefully pursuing an adversarial player-GM relationship, I don't think you should worry about him "becoming too comfortable". You shouldn't target him for an attitude adjustment just because he has found a cool Morph or mechanical niché, unless you're sure that's the type of game you want to run. That said, it does make sense in the context of the game world for his enemies to prepare themselves appropriately if they know that he's coming, and there are some options available to them, as other posters have pointed out. Swarmanoids are actually very fragile in a lot of ways. For instance, someone mentioned area weapons, and this is a sentiment I feel I can cosign. A single High-Explosive grenade or Plasma Rifle shot can take out half a swarm in one pop. A Disassembler or Saboteur nanoswarm is even more terrifying, since the usual methods of protecting against them aren't available to swarmanoids. If you're running hard sci-fi, then look up the square-cube law. One consequence of it is that small objects are much easier to heat with thermal radiation (large surface area per volume), so wide-angle beam weapons like the Microwave Agonizer should work wonders. Finally, the Eye had a fun (and terrifying) article on distributed consciousness, linked below. In short, if the character's consciousness is being stored as more or less discrete parcels, running in syncronicity on fifty different microcomputers, then what happens when some of those computers are destroyed or drop out of the network for more than a short while? http://www.firewall-darkcast.com/theeye/rule-hacking-swarmanoid-morphs Destroying the entire swarm with a big gun or a pair of grenades is merciful. The real horror is when you destroy just enough that he knows he's lost some part of himself, but cannot remember what.