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[Veggiesama]

Just played a session where we ran into two separate problems with the scatter rules, leaving us scratching our heads.

First, my character was holed up in a convenience store and threw a pair of grenades through the window outside at a massive ice spirit (force 8, though I didn't know that at the time!) that was capable of chucking cars at us.

With a lousy dicepool of about 10 (Agi 5 + Throwing 1 + Lobbing spec 2 + Tacsoft 2), I still managed to score 2 net hits over the spirit's Reaction roll (-2 area attack) on the Opposed Test. Great, I thought. We rolled scatter (Book isn't with me now, I believe it was 1d6 minus 2 per net hit, and I rolled a 4) and reduced the scatter to 0 meters. In one more pass, the grenade would explode at the ice spirit's, er, feet.

However, things got silly with my second grenade (Adept using Quick Draw power to get them both out in one pass). I managed no hits, and the spirit easily beat me. We rolled scatter and I got a 6. The direction was towards me. The spirit was only 5m away, so somehow the grenade was now 1m behind me. So we RP'd that I dropped it, which I grumbled about, but let it go, since someone else was able to grab it and throw it before it went off.

(Before the grenades exploded, the spirit ducked in an alley way, and neither boom could muster enough DV to break its hardened armor. Whoops.)

Did we do this correctly?

Second, this ice spirit wasn't going down, so we tried to escape. Everyone jumped into my truck. One guy (Sensho) picked up an AV one-shot rocket launcher and fired it out the back as the spirit gave chase.

I don't remember the rolls exactly, but Sensho rolled more hits than the spirit on the Attack test. Let's say there were 2 net hits. Then came the Scatter roll. It was 4d6 - 1 net hit (SR4A). WTF? If Sensho rolled an average of 14, it was reduced to 12.

We were only 10-15m away from the spirit. So a decent shot with 2 net hits ended up scattering 12m in some random direction, which got reduced to 0 by the time it got to the spirit (since the AV rocket had like -4/m on the blast, I think).

GM saw this, said "Ignore the scatter rules," and Sensho hit the spirit, bypassed its armor, and sent the ice spirit to a fiery hell.

So did we do anything wrong here?

Any tips or suggestions?

[Udoshi]

To answer your question more fully:

Scatter was Nerfed in 4th anniversary. Overly so. Now grenades and rockets acquire plot teleportation, and scatter so bad it couldn't the crust of the earth, much less a broad side of the barn.

My suggestion: Use non-anniversary edition's scatter rules. Here:

CODE

SR4:
Standard grenade: 1d6 meters - 2 pr net hit
Aerodynamic grenade: 2d6 meters - 4 pr net hit
Grenade launcher: 3d6 meters - 4 pr net hit
Rocket: 2d6 meters - 1 pr net hit
Missile: 2d6 meters - 1 pr net hit (- sensor rating)
Airburst: 2d6 meters - 1 pr net hit (- sensor rating)

CODE

SR4A:
Standard grenade: 1d6 meters - 1 pr net hit
Aerodynamic grenade: 2d6 meters - 2 pr net hit
Grenade launcher: 3d6 meters - 2 pr net hit
Rocket: 4d6 meters - 1 pr net hit
Missile: 4d6 meters - 1 pr net hit (- sensor rating)
Airburst: 2d6 meters - 1 pr net hit (- sensor rating)

Additionally, add back in: Net hits reduce scatter. When scatter = 0, net hits increase DV(like they may do for any other weapon.)
And the ability to aim at a point in space (in 4thA's rules, if you surprise three guys in the living room, you -can't- aim between the three of them to catch them all in the splash. You have to aim at one of them. BUT if there's an inanimate object, which doesn't resist being attacked - like the couch they're sitting on - you can just aim at that instead and get the effect of the old rules. Its a rather stupid, pointless change.)

[Veggiesama]

Scatter was Nerfed in 4th anniversary. Overly so. Now grenades and rockets acquire plot teleportation, and scatter so bad it couldn't the crust of the earth, much less a broad side of the barn.

My suggestion: Use non-anniversary edition's scatter rules.

Does anyone know what motivated the Scatter table change?

Was it done under the assumption that players were always targeting a location instead of targeting enemies, which allowed them to ignore the Defense test?

Or is it because the Defense Test (with a -2) and the previous Scatter Test was not enough to mitigate the power of explosives?

Or because they felt like it?

[RunnerPaul]

Does anyone know what motivated the Scatter table change?

If I had to guess, the goal was to make sure that any hits the players got on their rolls didn't go to waste since the rule for what to do with your extra hits once you reduce scatter to zero was taken away.

Personally, I never saw anything wrong with original SR4's rule that let you stage the damage up against your nominated target. There's a difference between a grenade that detonates 6 cm from your left foot, and one that catches a perfect bounce at the end of a cooked-off throw to go off a cm from your face, but at the increments used for the scatter rules, they're both less than 1 meter away from you. Your buddy, 3 meters away, is still going to feel the same blast in either scenario, but you, as the thrower's primary target, are going to be hurting a lot more from the latter.

But someone in the Powers That Be got it in their head that grenades are "easy" and that players who would throw to a location instead of a target were trying to get something for nothing. Then they went and removed from the rules the one incentive for a skilled thrower to actually target a person and not a location, as if to retroactively prove their point. I personally think grenades are supposed to be easy, and that you can trust the metagame consequences built into the setting to prevent abuse.