[X] My Assistant

[UndeadPoet]

[Shrike30]

I am *so* a fan of wide bursts.

I've got a couple of dex monkeys in my game. These are guys who have been dex monkeys since the beginning of time. Guys who gleefully discard armor, hit points, or anything resembling a solid physical build in favor of simply not being where the blow is. Guys for whom the answer is always "I get out of the way." It's this... attitude, I guess, that grates and grinds and pisses me off after a while, the way it's played and presented.

They hate it when you knock 9 dice out of their die pool. Hate it, hate it, hate it. :vegm:

[James McMurray]

And of course, if they can't hit you, they'll just switch to a new target. The first guy fires, sees you catching bullets in your teeth and batting them aside like flies, then tells his buddies to shoot everyone else (and uses his second action to shoot someone else). You've just used on one bullet at the expense of your next action.

[Shrike30]

Or they'll vector all their fire to the guy standing in the middle of the street occasionally twitching to avoid it, rather than all the other guys hiding behind cars and poking their guns over dumpsters.

All those -1s for each incoming attack? Yeah, they're rude.

[James McMurray]

Why would they spend time firing at someone they can't hit and who isn't firing back instead of firing at people they can hit? If he's the only target, sure, dump it all at him and watch those dice disappear. Otherwise you shoot someone that is trying to hurt you, either dropping him or making it harder for him to hurt you because he's wincing in pain.

[PBTHHHHT]

Aye, if there's a mass amount of folks, you prioritize, take out heavy hitters of course like mages and the machine gunner, but you also go for easy to take out guys also. So you avoid wasting shots and actions on the wannabe neo and make sure to take out all his buds. Then concentrate fire on him afterwards when he's all by himself twitching in the middle of the street.

[Big D]

Let's see.

Davy Elf with 8[12] Agi, 7[10] automatics (adept), +2 AR spec, +2 smartlink, +1 enh. art, +1 reflex recorder fires a twinked alpha at full burst, gets 25 dice.

And Neo Elf loses 9.

Put another notch on Betsy.

Or, just have the mage stunbolt Neo. How many points did hit put in Will, again?

[Shrike30]

From the point of view of your average squaddie shooting at targets half a block away, the dude twitching like a fiend in the middle of the street *is* the easiest target. God knows why you can't hit him, but it's either him or the yahoos hunkered down behind cars, and between your MG gunner keeping them suppressed and your grenadier dropping airburst explosives in their general direction, they're probably covered.

The point is, they don't KNOW they can't hit him. Characters don't know what the dice pools are doing, they know what they see. You give me a bunch of armed targets to shoot at, and one of them is standing in the open, he's going to be the first one I shoot at, because he seems like the easiest target. Now, one of them starts shooting fireballs out of his ass or blasting a flamethrower in my general direction, that's another thing, but when it's just a bunch of people shooting, the guy in the open is the easiest, best target.

[James McMurray]

He's armed but he isn't a threat. He's doing cartwheels, not shooting at you. And if you see someone dodging bullets better than what you think is metahumanly possible (because he's got magic and beyond normal metahuman speed and agility) then you'll know you can't hit him. You won't know his pool, but you don't have to know the dice involved to know that somebody who is doing the lay backwards as bullets fly past Neo stuff isn't an easy target.

Meanwhile you've got people shooting guns at you.

[Shrike30]

I think we're envisioning the scene a little differently. Senor Twitch (or, since I've got more than one of them, maybe I should say the Brothers Twitch) get as much of their "not getting hit" stuff redlined as they can, without pulling the Full Dodge thing. High Reactions, Combat Sense... whatever they can come up with to add dice to that first check. So what you end up with is a bunch of players running for cover, then the Twitchies walking straight down the block unloading with their weapons of choice, because the character build (in their mind, at least) is unhittable. If they were Full Dodging all the time, I wouldn't care where they were standing... people probably pay more attention to muzzle flashes and tracers than they do to the couple of crazies breakdancing in the road.

By the way, BigD... enhanced articulation has narrowed the range of skills it applies to. You'd have to reread the description to determine which ones, but I know it doesn't apply to shooting anymore.

[James McMurray]

In that situation I would shoot at them, probably with a few guys doing two wide long bursts each. Or just leave if I couldn't hit them that way.

It depends on the opposition's resources.

[ronin3338]

Take off and nuke'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. :smokin:

[James McMurray]

It depends on how your GM reads the dodge vs. explosives rules. You may be able to sidestep the blast. ;)

[ronin3338]

D'oh! :silly:

"I acrobatic dodge so I'm clear of ground zero"

Sounds like time to call in the Drop Bears... :evil:

[hobgoblin]

save the drop bears for later. first we try the old standby, the orbital bovine...

[James McMurray]

Those get dodged too.

And did I mention that my character is based on the SR game, so I get to teleport? ;)

[Kanada Ten]

I wonder if vision penalties should apply to Reaction (is it called Dodge Pool?) in the Opposed test.

[hobgoblin]

[Big D]

Right, stop that, that's silly!

[Oracle]

[ixombie]

I'd like to point out that dodging and being tough are not mutually exclusive. A cybered adept set up to dodge can still have 6 body with 8 ballistic armor pretty easily, enough to mean that the wide full bursts which can actually hit you won't take you out of comission. My whole point was that dodging beats soaking in SR4, not that dodging is invincible. There is a finite limit to the dice an attacker can throw at you- they cap out at around 8 probable hits, which is also where a maxed out dodge pool caps out. Those are decent odds, provided you're not an idiot who stands still without taking cover while being shot at. Damage resistance, however, caps out at maybe 10 probable hits, while DVs can go as high as 17 from guns available in chargen. Soaking power is definitely good, but it seems to me that when choosing a focus for an adept, dodging ability is far superior to toughness.

[Big D]

I have this image of a Neo elf making all these cool moves in front of a fedora-wearing PC... who then looks at Neo and blasts him with a powerbolt.

[Divine Virus]

of course, all it would take is a force 1 drain attribute to take this character out of action. 1 hit to bring Charisma (or the other one) out of action. with the high reaction it would be tricky the hit him though.

[James McMurray]

Force 1 anything is almost gauranteed to fail. All they need is a single hit to negate the entire spell.

[Divine Virus]

ah, thats true, forgot about that damn resist roll. Still, one net hit will do him in.