Never fudge a roll again, ever, MILES training for PCs? Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Mmm, see, over the years I decided that fudging the rolls is a bad idea.

This is the way I see it: people spend hours making their characters, buying gear, picking magic and bioware. Each of these things has a statistical impact. Sometimes, you'll use that much more of your starting nuyen to get ballistic armor higher by 1 point, which has a specific statistical effect.

I kind of feel like if the GM fudges the roles, all that time put into character creation has gone to waste. If I prioritized getting a few more points of armor over having a faster reaction time, I should get the consequences of that. Statistically, I'm less likely to die from getting shot, but statistically I'll also get shot more often. Does that balance out? It's all in the stats, and the decisions of the player.

In other words, I feel like there's simply no point to using statistical rules so painstakingly to make our characters and shape our world if the GM will just disregard them whenever something goes wrong.

When making the character, I knew the odds of my getting one-shotted by a Predator were higher or lower, based on my design. If a bad guy gets lucky and rolls mucho successes on his Pistols roll, and all and all blasts my head off...well, that was unfortunate, but those were the rules. My character design failed at that point, for whatever reason, and it's time to make a new one.

But, it's all pointless if my character design that I put hours into didn't count in the first place.

See what I mean? Why should we even bother to have a combat mechanic if that combat mechanic is going to be waived in the even of a little bad luck?

I used to believe in fudging, but now I am a firm believer in letting the dice fall where they may.

In fact, I just had an idea. Usually, in the past, with new players I would do a sample run in which I would roll the dice, explain the outcomes, but have the players be immune to damage. I would say things like, "We're playing this for familizarization, so you're not taking any damage. But if this were a real game, that'd be a Serious wound, and you'd have gotten a +3 TN to all target numbers. It's important to use cover and conserve combat pool appropriately," and things like that.

But, in the interests of immersion, and in the philosophical interest of letting the dice fall where they may, how about this?

Start all the characters off in some kind of MILES training compound. There's wooden boards and scaffolds forming houses, there's bunkers, there's underground tunnels. The characters are either equipped with MILES weapons (no damage, but beeping noises indicating wound severity), or else with simunitions (gel rounds). I'm thinking about the "McKenna MOUT" level in America's Army (www.americasarmy.com). Hell, too add flavor, we could even add the graffiti to one of the walls that says, "you can't spell lost without Lt." Let the character have a few "scrimmage matches" with gel rounds and learn the combat system.

That would be totally immersive, totally letting the dice fall where they may, and very much just pure practice in the use of the combat engine.

Hell, just to represent the practice, a GM could be entirely justified in giving each participant in the MILES session a karma point for each "scrimage". That seems totally reasonable to me.

What do you think?

EDIT:

This was originally going to be a reply post here: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?act=...=7&t=2467&st=50


EDIT 2:

How about using paintballs? That could be both flavorful and instructive. Describe where the paintball hits based on the successes the shooter had after reductions from a dodge test, and describe the pain based on the actual amount of damage that would have been caused after staging.

So, in terms of the shooter's successes,

Light = hit in the hand or foot
Medium = hit on the arm or leg
Serious = hit center of mass
Deadly = hit on the face; "are those my balls on your eyes?"

In terms of pain,

Dosen't hurt = staged away
Faint sting = light
Healthy smack = medium
Extremely painful = serious
You almost pass out from the pain = deadly