[X] My Assistant

[Kanada Ten]

[James McMurray]

I prefer games where the PCs are somewhere in the middle of heroes and Joes. Don't hide from death, but don't force it to happen. Ask anyone I've run a game for: death happens, sometimes quite often. If you do something that can result in your death, you'd better be able to scrape through the aftermath. But it takes a hell of a lot of screwing up for me to set up a situation with no chance of survival.

Sometimes the chacnes of survival are all predicated on running away to fight another day and the characters don't do that. In those cases, they die. Sometimes the chances are predicated on fighting the bastards off and limping away. And sometimes it means you have to figure out why you're so royally fucked and find a way to fix it. I prefer the last, because it makes for better stories then "you got shot int he head, roll a new character."

Obviously YMMV. :)

[eidolon]

For the record, the PC not only lived (through expeditious use of medical skills and karma), but the whole aftermath became quite the bitchin' story line.

[Kanada Ten]

I understood that; I just think a lot of it was run oddly. Random target? What type of sniper is this guy? He's got hours to set-up, information on the team, and he flips a coin to see who takes the first shot?

[eidolon]

Random to be fair to the players. Random from a GM "I can shoot any of them to kick the scene off right now" viewpoint.

They were all standing in a little group, and they had all changed into "regular joe" clothes on the sub. With no obvious cyber on display, no obvious weapons on their persons, and the snipers not being at all magical (and therefore unable to assense), I didn't think any of them were presenting an overly "obvious" target.

Also, show me where I said they had information on the team. I'm assuming you're trying to trap me by indicating that if the snipers knew about the team, they would "geek the mage first" (or some such thing), and therefore my rolling randomly for a target is somehow "wrong"?

[Kanada Ten]

You said he has a picture of the team. You said he had hours to prepare. You said he knew where they would be. That's information. What kind of sniper is this guy that he wouldn't ask the client which one was the mage? You set up a completely contrived scenario, the "no Perception test" is simply the tip of my feeling that you handled it wrong. I'm glad it worked for the group.

[Kremlin KOA]

As a Sniper you shot the one who you can get the best shot on

after the thrid shot you should expect to have your location known by the target

possibly after the second

[eidolon]

Look, I could keep going back through my notes, and going back through how it went during the session, but I'm not going to.

[nezumi]

I'm not a sniper, but I imagine I would go for the one who poses a threat to me personally first, followed by the one most likely to escape before I'm ready for a second shot. The guy standing in the middle of a field picking his nose I shoot last because he'll likely be the last to get into cover, which gives me a chance of getting 3 kills instead of 2.

[James McMurray]

[Kanada Ten]

[James McMurray]

What, you mean that just because the opening post and title of the thread indicated it was supposed to be a discussion/debate that people posting their game experiences in it should expect a discussion/debate? :)

[eidolon]

Oh, you totally nailed me on that one. Good job. Three marks.

I apologize if I got overly defensive. My reaction wasn't to KT's disagreement, but rather to his smarmy "holier than thou" attitude in presenting it, which may well have just been my perception and not how he intended it.

I get irritated when "debate" moves into "I'm right and you're wrong and that makes you stupid", which is how I think KT's posts started coming out. Flat out disagreement I can handle. Obviously pandering passive aggressive statements like "simply the tip of my feeling that you handled it wrong. I'm glad it worked for the group", I'm not so good with.

Let me give you why that sentence rubs me the wrong way so badly. The one point that you say is your basis for calling my actions "wrong" is that I didn't give them a perception test to notice the sniper. We've beaten that topic to death, and it comes down to a difference of opinion and personal methodology.

However, your statement carries the implication that I handled nary a thing "right" in the entire encounter, and you have no logical support for such a position. You were neither there for the scenario, nor are you possessing of the knowledge of what led to it, how it was handled from start to finish, what does and doesn't work for my group, or what resulted from the session.

The only other thing I can recall having a particular disagreement over was the method of choosing a target. I clearly explained why I chose to roll randomly for the sniper's first target. You might not have done it that way, but that's beside the point, because there really wasn't a "wrong" way to choose a target.

What else is there that we've even discussed that you can say was handled "wrong"? Honestly, it feels like after we got done with the difference in perception test usage, you were just looking for something else to argue about.

There's a big difference, to me anyway, between the way some people handle debate and disagreement (see the first half of this thread, where there was at least a modicum of respect), and the way that others handle it (see the latter). Unfortunately, it's all too easy to be drug along by the emotion of it when the second one happens.

So yeah, no offense intended, and I'm not looking for hard feelings. Even if it's just the interweb, I don't like to pee in people's cheerios overly much. That's just where I'm coming from at the moment. Feel free to correct any misperception from which I am suffering.

[Kanada Ten]

Yeah, I don't spend a whole lot of time pandering to your emotional sensitivity.

I think you handled it wrong. Peroid. I could go on for days about "no chance" and a Johnson hiring twin snipers to get out of paying, but there's no point becuase you're too emotionally charged about it.

That said, I really am glad it worked for your group. If I wasn't, it would have been made more obvious, because I would have started calling you names.