Can someone please explain to me how the Shocking quality works when it is applied to an attack which does not inflict damage by design ?

Shock Gauntlets "Can discharge any time they have contact with the victim's skin, such as grappling an unarmoured opponent or dancing at a formal occasion" and striking the Shock Carapace with a conductive melee weapon "Results in a Toughness Test as if the attacker had been struck in the arm with a weapon with the Shocking quality" . Shocking weapons need to inflict damage, after armour and toughness, to provoke a toughness test and have to inflict at least one point of damage to stun the target for a single round, so how do they work when the source literally cannot inflict wounds on the recipient?

Thoughts?

(A few small edits made for clarity)

The Shock Gauntlets, Shock Carapace and Shock Field (Armour upgrade with the same effect as Shock Carapace) can be found on pages 152/3, 154 and 156 of the Radical's Handbook respectively.

Dr. Schadenfreude said:

You have to do a minimum of 1 damage after armour and toughness, if you do 0 damage you can't shock someone. Say that you ignore the fact of not doing damage, then the problem is now in order to calculate how many rounds the person is stun for is based off of half the damage inflicted (rounded up, I think), so 0 damage / 2 = 0 rounds that the target is stun. So to answer your question if you do no damage then shocking doesn't play into the equation then.

That's exactly my point:

The Shock Carapace is designed to shock enemies that strike you in combat ... but it doesn't inflict damage. They take a Toughness test, "as if ... hit in the arm by a Shocking weapon" , but the armour doesn't actually cause damage and thus cannot stun the attacker. EVER.

Shock Gauntlets can be used to shock someone simply by touching them, the rules even saying you can do so during a grapple, but there's no actual source of damage if they're not coupled with a melee attack. What is the point of putting in clarifications like this when there's absolutely no mechanical benefit to taking advantage of them?

It's like the designers completely forgot that the Shocking quality was entirely dependant on damage and assumed they'd set a baseline stun for anyone who failed the Toughness test.

"Any successful hit to Shock Carapace with a conductive weapon--any close combat weapon not made of wood, ceramite or glass--results in a Toughness Test as if the attacker had been hit in the arm with a weapon with the shocking quality."

Page 154 of the Radical's Handbook.

This states that they have to take a toughness test assuming with +10% per AP on the test. Well not in an obvious way the Shock Carapace is basically saying that it does at least 1 point of damage for the purposes of calculating the number of rounds of stun, for a grande total of 1 round of stun if the attacker fails their Toughness test. Now this is what I assume because if your taking a Toughness Test you have to do at least 1 point of damage to cause the opponent take a Toughness Test in the first place and then you take that and divide it by 2 and that 0.5 and then round it up to 1, for the 1 round of stun, even though it doesn't do physical damage/wounds but it's needed for calculating the stun rounds.

This is basically my opinion and what assume, it all depends on what the GM decides really, but that is how I would work it though. And with the shock gauntlets I would use the same reasoning too.

What do you think?

I agree with Mr. Phi.

When you attack with a weapon, a hit that does not cause damage because of the damage reduction of Armour and Toughness is considered to not have made solid contact with the targets body. The blow might have been deflected by armour, or just grazed a shoulder, etc. Not sufficient contact to discharge the shocking charge, anyway.

When an enemy hits you (or your shield), it is assumed that the weapon (that is tightly held in your opponents hand) makes sufficient contact for a charge release.

I personally dislike the original Shocking rules, as it makes it very hard to shock the Heavies. Tough guys who might not move fast and are generally not hard to hit (no great dodgers, here) are still difficult to even attempt to stun. And should you cause a hit, and release the charge, they still get to test their considerable Toughness to resist.

From a house-ruling perspective, that's certainly what I'd thought the best solution. It just seems really odd that the designers didn't think to include that sort of addendum in the original rules to make it clear how this stuff should work. Rules as written: You can't sneak up behind someone and use a Shock Baton to non-lethally incapacitate them, you've got to club the guy in the back of the head instead and hope it works.

Thankfully, in the situation you describe, the target counts as Helpless, and so you're almost guarantee to inflict damage.

Problem is you might inflict too much

I don't think they wanted to make shock too powerful in the core book. When you knock out someone and have several rounds to deal with them, allows you to take out guys a lot easier. Think of an Arbit and Assassin teaming up together, the Arbit stuns one guy and the Assassin could kill him on his turn, if they set it up right, well it could actually be anyone with the arbit then really.