Powerlevel and Lethality, How do you stay alive in combat? Options

[Zuzuzu]

Hi everyone. I'm new to the SR system and some of its' practical aspects are unclear to me, so I thought maybe Dumpshock regulars will share their experience with the topic.

When I started studying game mechanics and comparing it with related and familiar Old WoD, it seemed that hurting the target would be difficult - defence pools are mostly greater than damage... but then it suddenly became clear to me that DV in SR is not a pool, but a full number. OMG. A little playtesting resulted in a number of dead bodies roughly equivalent to a number of init passes. If I got my numbers right, even being a dodge-happy troll in tuned up military armor, heavily 'wared toward subdermals and reaction, doesn't seem to protect enough unless you are full defensing all the time.

So, as the question in topic description goes, how do you stay alive in combat? What tactics, gear, 'ware to use, what to ditch, what dice pools to aim at? What do fights look like in your campaigns? Thanks in advance.

[Critias]

Cheat. Don't be afraid to dodge. Use cover. Gang up. Ambush. Toss smoke, flash-bang, etc, grenades. Stack modifiers that you're able to neutralize (thanks to superior tech). Learn when to fire single shots, bursts, long bursts, and aimed shots. Learn when not to fight at all. Throw grenades. Learn when to use Edge.

And, most of all, remember that fights are dangerous, and SHOULD be. That's why real people in real life with real guns and real training don't like to get into them.

[Ravor]

I have to second what Critias said, pull every dirty trick that you can think of.

[kzt]

Be extremely selective in when you decide to go to guns, and think about choosing when to use force at all, and how to intimidate people without making them lose face and come gunning for you. Learn when to walk away. Realize that fair fights are for suckers, and that applies to the NPCs too. Time and numbers are rarely on your side, and the Law of Truly Large Numbers says someone will eventually get a insanely lucky roll. So don't wait around listening to the applause and allowing the the rest of his gang to show up and shoot your ass after you beat down/intimidate some obnoxious jerk, or wait for the SWAT team to show up after you shoot your way into the place. If you can complete the job without the use of deadly force it tends to enhance the likelihood that deadly force won't be applied against you during the job.

[DocTaotsu]

I think it boils down to what Critias says: Cheat like hell, you're enemy sure is.

But I especially single out: Pick your fights. Unlike the cancer causing game you can't really "tank'. The forum just resurrected a thread about combat length, you'll notice it's pretty damn rare that combat gets beyond 3 rounds.

We try to play vaguely realistic combat without bogging it all down with minis. As such we follow basic urban tactics to keep things from devolving into "Room full of equal numbers of dead people". Don't stop in a doorway, don't stand around in open areas, don't move through open areas, blow holes in walls to escape/flank, throw grenades at anything questionable (corollary: Don't throw grenades through 2nd story windows, you have grenade launchers for that.) , armor (drone, trolls with miniguns) are your friends, make sure you do things systematically, and don't stop moving and killing until your run out of killing. We work under the assumption that combat is typically going to involve small numbers of people for about 5 minutes. At the conclusion of that 5 minutes Very Bad Things will show up and waffle stomp stupid/slow runners back to character generation. So Small vs. Big will always lose unless Small is smart and runs away appropriately.

That said, if your enemy is doing the same things your doing you should go back to "Pick your fights" and get to somewhere where they can't do that.

If you think the fights are too short just remember that it takes a handful of seconds to empty a 30 round magazine from an M16 and that your average infantryman typically only carries, at most, 6 full magazines of ammunition at a go.

Oh, and suppressing fire is your friend, provided you can do it without dying and being sneaky isn't an issue.
Surprise is vital and being able to force the enemy to keep making surprise checks is an excellent way to ruin their day. All the wires in the world won't matter if you don't see it coming.

If you're really interested in urban, small unit, fighting you can read up on MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) that's the US gold standard for killing folks in tight spaces.
This is a pretty good article although it's long as hell:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib...0-10/index.html
The Appendix is especially illuminating if you want to know things like "Can 5.56 rounds go through walls? How much walls? etc etc".

[Ryu]

1. First shot has right of way. Runners are more augmented than guards, so should go first.

2. Cover is your friend.

3. Carry a medkit, most guards will only be able to harm you.

4. Choose your conflicts. Ambush is good.

[Ravor]

Also remember that using non-lethal ammo will not earn you points in the middle of a fire-fight, corp-sec is not going to say "Wait, these are the good kind of Runners, lets switch to tasers and SnS against these guys."

[DocTaotsu]

But an unconscious Lone Star cop is going to piss his buddies off less than a thoroughly splattered Lone Star cop.

Not shooting people is best because you can usually choose, at a later time, to shoot them in the back, or as you're running away.

[ixombie]

Don't think like you're in SR3. In SR3, dodging was optional, at least if the opponents didn't have APDS.

Pretend you're in a real life firefight. There are some guys with guns, and they're definitely going to try to shoot you. Do you a) plant your feet, draw your weapon, and open fire? or b) Say "glbixhths!" and dive behind a nearby car? If you chose a, you're dead, if you chose b, you acted intelligently and you're probably alive.

Real life combat is not terribly deadly because a) shooting people at range is pretty hard, and b) people get behind things, making it even harder to shoot them. What makes it scary isn't the fact that you will get shot, because if you know what you're doing you probably won't. But the fact that you could get shot is what makes it terrifying. What makes SR4 combat deadly isn't the system itself, it's playing the system like it was SR3.

So when combat starts, first full defense everything that comes at you until you're in a good position. A good position is solid cover where the enemy won't be able to move around to negate your cover. Next, look for some way to negate the enemy's cover. This might involve one person pinning them down with suppressive fire while the other moves around. Suppressive fire is great for pinning people in cover, because it doesn't target them specifically -- cover is a penalty to the attacker, not a bonus to the defender. That means if they stick their heads out, they have to defend against the attacker's full dice pool with reaction + edge. The smartest thing for them to do is full defense as soon as suppressive fire starts, and then keep out of sight until it stops. In the meantime your friend has a covered position where he can shoot them without penalty, and they have to try and get out of there with you covering them from the other side...

[DocTaotsu]

I would tend to disagree with the assertion that real life combat isn't very deadly (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) .
Ranges are significantly shorter these days and the things people hide behind typically don't stop bullets all that well (car for instance, really not good bullet sponges). Add in that grenades roll pretty well over short distances and you have lots of running and dying horribly.

But your general thesis is that no one smart walks into combat thinking "Man! Getting shot today is going to suck!" is sound.

[Ravor]

But an unconscious Lone Star cop is going to piss his buddies off less than a thoroughly splattered Lone Star cop.

Not shooting people is best because you can usually choose, at a later time, to shoot them in the back, or as you're running away.

I agree that the pigs would be less pissed off at the Runners, where I disagree is that the difference would buy the Runners any real advantage given that life isn't just cheap in the Sixth World, it's valued at basement bargin clearance prices and that whether Lonestar ices them or not isn't going to be decided on the basis of whether or not they geeked a Pig.

[kzt]

Fights are ludicrously short in SR, but that's a metagame issue. Essentially it's far too easy to hit in RPGs in general, because players don't want games that take hours to do combat (as a 3 second turn in an RPG will typically take 3-5 minutes) because it it's really hard to hit people. SR combat is less deadly in several ways than reality, as can be shown by the fact that it's impossible for a person with a total pool of 2 dice and a tiny pistol to kill you in one shot. I've got a film somewhere of a cop wearing body armor getting killed by one .22 hit to the chest while the unarmored guy he shot with 5 .357s was just hurt a lot. Plus in SR you don't have the issue of winning the firefight, then bleeding to death internally 20 minutes later from a "minor" wound that didn't really do much at the time.

[Lionhearted]

Heh, you just discovered what one of my players experienced during our first session two days ago.
The guard had been cautious with his fire, cause he didn't want to destroy the medical equipment stored in the building they had made a "heroic entrance" to (actually one of the players had jumped through the closed window), but with his boxes counted up he decided F* this and sent a long burst into the poor sob, even with one die (wound modifiers suck) he managed to hit the PC, and the expression on my players face when i Asked him to resist 12P was priceless
(IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)
"Holy shit!"
"You might wanna use edge on this test"
He managed to scramble up 6 successes on his soaking, he survived.. Barely, first run, EVER.
What a wonderful way of saying "Welcome to the shadows chummer"

[Critias]

Yup. It's only fun when you're the one behind the gun.

[DocTaotsu]

Ah but Kzt that's a rare Resonance Cascade Critical Body Glitch! And the ganger who shot the cop was obviously using .22 APDS rounds and used edge and called shot.

But yeah, it's definitely meta gaming. If you flip it around, what player would want to play in a game where a ganger kills them with a single errant .22 shot.
Wait, I take that back, there are players who want to play in those games. It's just that I don't think they're the people SR4 is really written for.


I dunno Ravor, you don't think that having as squad of personally pissed off Lone Star is markedly worse than just having a squad of Lone Star coming after you? I'd think that if Sgt. Bob is still alive and his buddies are looking to chase runners into a dark sewer grate they might turn to each other and say "Mmm... maybe we ought to wait for backup." rather than "Fuck these mother fuckers, they killed Bob! I'm glad I ran back to my car for these WP grenades."

But your right of course, in a given gunfight I don't think LS is going to suddenly swap out their Ex-Ex rounds for gel just because they miraculously realize the troll sami is laying down stick and shock suppressing fire.

[Critias]

If you flip it around, what player would want to play in a game where a ganger kills them with a single errant .22 shot.
Wait, I take that back, there are players who want to play in those games. It's just that I don't think they're the people SR4 is really written for.

You are right on both counts (there are games like that that some of us like to play, and no SR4 doesn't seem to be especially aimed at us).

[DocTaotsu]

I like to call you folks "Headshot 2020" players but I understand that they haven't really updated those rules (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) .

[Whipstitch]

From what I've seen, Ravor and I take more or less the same stance on the "Oh, deys nice runners!" theory, so I'll just go ahead and comment: So what if they're more pissed off after the fact? They might be, they might not. It's unlikely to be the deciding factor of whether or not the Star comes after you, since they have a job to do and if it's a group like the Yaks who hold grudges pretty much no matter what then killing them rather than potentially leaving witnesses may actually be beneficial depending on the circumstances. Awakening aside, dead people usually have a rough time holding grudges. It's really a case by case issue, and while killing sprees can certainly get you in trouble at my games you shouldn't really be expecting me to have the guards pull punches in the middle of a firefight just because you're only kind of risking their lives.

As for the Sgt. Bob analogy, you're forgetting the obvious counterpoint: What if Sgt. Bob is dead and they're deciding whether to pursue the runners in the first place and one says "This is bulldrek, I'm waiting for backup. Did you see how they greased Bob? That troll had a fraggin' Panther Cannon." Intimidation doesn't really hit me as less reliable than depending on the Star's sense of fair play and mercy. It could go either way, and I'd say it's the unpredictability of these kind of situations and the many feasible ways in which they can turn out that makes each run interesting, but as I've said before and will say again, just don't expect me to have the guards play nice that often.

[Zuzuzu]

Hmm... you guys confirmed my worst expectations: in SR combat both player and DM are supposed to think hard in every encounter (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) . In D&D, which is what I play mostly, you can just think once, at character creation, where you get insane armor class, evasion, mettle, tons of immunities, etc, and after that fights do not require lots of planning and tactical strain - you pretty much level down everything that's not 5+ levels above you. But in SR, it seems, our DM will have to suffer much in every encounter because of all the situational modifiers, scenery updates (our smartguy got, like, 16 dice for demolitions) and stuff like that. Well, d'oh. Will see what it will end up like.

Related question: here's my character for this campaign. Russian text is here and there, but the charsheet itself is kosher and understandable, as I see it. Character concept is Alien-like, slightly cannibalistic ninja guy who crawls on ceilings and slices up unsuspecting guards. With 17+ attack and 13+4 infiltration dice he should be able to ignore defense roll and most of the target's armor, twice in a round (finishing move), which should be enough for covert kill most of the time, as I see it. But surviving anything in response - that is tricky. What do you think of this guy?

[Siege]

Just a quick note:

Standard US Army "combat loads" are 210 rounds for riflemen - that means, nominally, 7 30-round magazines.

The springs in the standard issue magazines don't like full capacity loads, so you will likely have 8 mags: 7 with 27 rounds and the 8th with 21 rounds.

The other factoid - few, if any, GMs can ever really incorporate all possible aspects of combat, including psychological issues. After a few gun battles, you will get a feel for how your GM runs his shootouts and plan accordingly.

A couple of hard, fast and dirty rules are always useful:
1. Geek the mage.
2. Everyone carries a trauma patch
3. Cover and concealment. Open ground is a bad, bad thing.
4. A battle is always safer when the bad guy doesn't get a chance to shoot back.

-Siege

[Stahlseele]

i stay alive by not allowing the other party of the discussion to do so . . Savalette Guardian, 12S, Called Shot, 12D, even with Gel that's still 10D Stun on ONE success . . else Darts with Gamma Scopolamine, that's 10D Stun without Armor, else Assault Rifle with a 6 round burst that goes a long way in taking anything down actually . . and of course, there's trolldos . . er, i mean, trollbows <.< . . if i get the drop on my target, well, there goes a big helping of combat pool . . on the defense? Body, Body, and another round of Body and then playing Michelin-Man comes into the equation . . with a good roll, i did in fact manage to survive(and still be standing) after being hit by a PAC Round once . . 7 Worn armor + 2 points of internal and 17 Body and 10 Combat pool means MANY dice for dodge/resistance tests in such cases . . if all else fails? i am not where the damage is done, i run like an elf if i have to . . and then i hide and wait and then i pop up like a turret and do ouchies again ^^

[mfb]

you've got Gymnastics at a decent level, so (if i recall correctly) you should be fairly able to dodge gunfire. if you don't dodge fully, though, you're pretty much guaranteed to take some damage. you're going to want to keep to cover as much as possible, to help with that.

[djinni]

As for the Sgt. Bob analogy, you're forgetting the obvious counterpoint: What if Sgt. Bob is dead and they're deciding whether to pursue the runners in the first place and one says "This is bulldrek, I'm waiting for backup. Did you see how they greased Bob? That troll had a fraggin' Panther Cannon." Intimidation doesn't really hit me as less reliable than depending on the Star's sense of fair play and mercy. It could go either way, and I'd say it's the unpredictability of these kind of situations and the many feasible ways in which they can turn out that makes each run interesting, but as I've said before and will say again, just don't expect me to have the guards play nice that often.

using nonlethal force is not an immediate helper, never has been and anyone who thinks it is, doesn't grasp the real world implication.
however what it does do is put you at the bottom of the stack for investigation. since your runner team isn't the only one out there and 90% use lethal force. you get thrown to the back of teh line, they want the killers off the street.

[DocTaotsu]

*shrugs*

I've always looked at it as a matter of motivation. Does a Star Patrolman get paid the same if he runs after you really fast or just kinda fast? It also comes down to crime and punishment. You kill a cop you go to jail (on in SR his buddies make sure you have an accident), you knock a cop out you go to jail for whatever crime you did before that and get slapped with a lesser charge. Now when LS turns you over to Aztechnology for stealing corporate secrets, you're right, it doesn't matter what the hell you did. But if you can evade Lone Star because you didn't provide a personal and utterly convincing reason to push that LS patrolman from a level 3 proffesional rating up to a "Fight to the death despite the odds" rating, that seems like a firm tactical decision. LS is still going to come after you, the Azzies are for sure going to come after you, but why the Star wants you is quiet a bit different than why the Azzie's want you.

Witness can be an issue but if an LS guys shooting at you there's a pretty damn good chance their security rigger is currently downloading all the traffic cameras in your area and you've already been made. So it's on you chummer, murder one ontop of armed robbery or just armed robbery?

And like I said, I don't think anyones going to be switching rounds mid firefight, it's more of an aftermath/follow up issue. Longterm survival versus KILL KILL KILL. It's also a matter of what their motivation is to come after you, there are things runners can do to limit the number of reasons someone will keep chasing you. Fencing gear, throwing away SIN's, etc. Life is cheap but all that ware the Yak's put in that enforcer? That's not cheap at all, and now they have to go pay a ghoul and pull it all out, what a pain in the ass. Killing people screws up an extremely mercenary orgs bottom line and if it's all about cash and asset management, well...

Nowdays, and I imagine in the future there are protocols for escalation of force. If they have pistols and you have everything up to a tank you're supposed to shoot them with not a tank unless you don't have any other options. This is partly because everyones such nice folk and mostly because the biggest stick in your arsenal leaves craters. For cops they have less than lethal alternatives so partly so they don't have to do a lot of paperwork and mostly because it's bad press if that stray round flies into an orphanage and blows up a baby. In SR i'm sure they have less than lethal weapons because the various corps get tired of digging 9 mm out of their front windows and coffee boys. Again, if a runner has an LMG and he's tinsel and soft candy into a crowd, he's going to get lit up by deadly force regardless. If he's shooting people with a super squirt... I don't know if the cops can jump right to using flamethrowers. But that's a stylistic choice in the end and I won't say you're wrong for saying that all cops show up and start putting down a hail of lead no matter what is happening. It makes for grittier play and that's not a bad thing.

Okay, you go on a run. The run recovers 50k worth of paydata. Of that your Johnnson gives you a cut of say 10k for your efforts (what a nice guy). Corporate security pays 20 grand to train a basic security guard, more if look at total costs and he and his family are on corp payrolls. Plus if he dies they have to find a replacement and that costs money too.

Scenario A: Runners case the joint, identify that the guards are armed with pistols, wear light armor, blah blah. Sami says "I can take em with gel and stick and shock" everyone nods and loads up stunning ammunition. They do the run, get in a couple brief fights, but get the hell out of there with 3 corps guards down drooling on themselves. The corps pulls up the list of what was stolen and makes a notation that the Runners have ganked 50k with of information. For simplicity I'll ignore trying to put a number on how much "real" damage that does because the data is just a mucguffin in this case.

Scenario B: Same setup but the Runners decide, what the hell, this APDS isn't going to shoot itself. They roll in, do the job, get in the same firefights and the same 3 guards go down. 2 of the guards die, one of the guards is listed as critical and requires a 6 month stay in a corporate hospital, as per his contract. The corp looks at their balance sheet. Now, by their reckoning the runners owe them for 50k in data, 60k in guards, and whatever they had to pay for hospital bills, which might be even more than the paydata was worth.

In option A the corps are only going to spend money if it's still profitable to hunt the runners down and get their data back. The amount of money they spend on retaliation might be a bit higher but it's not good business to throwing good money after bad. The corp puts out the usual bounties and files a report with Lone Star. Lone Star keeps an eye out. It probably makes the evening news but is a couple minute spot at most. If LS ID's the runners they're going to take the necessary precautions but they might not see it as necessary to call in the SWAT team, after all, it's not like the runners killed anyone.

In option B the runners have run up at least a 100k tab. Probably more because hospital stays probably haven't gotten cheaper. They've also committed a double homicide and put another person in the hospital. Corporate PR gets in touch with their branch of the local news net and broadcasts some crying family footage and a couple minute spot on "Rising violence in X!" these are pretty common but it gets the usual public outcry. Lone Star gets the same reports and goes "Damn, double homicide, goddamn runners." A detective gets assigned to the case, he's overworked but it's on somebodies blotter and now if the runners run into Johnny Law, their certainly going to get a more... vehement response. The LS patrolman who ID's them is going to see the highlights and say "Holy crap, these guys don't fuck around, better call for HTR and load up the APDS rounds." In this example we've skipped from routine traffic stop with backup enroute to "Send in the Marines!"

All I'm saying is that I tend to think that killing people is still going to be a bigger deal than not killing people, even in a dystopian future where life is cheap but not as cheap as rent. There are numerous occasions where pulling off the right kind of run is going to warrant the full waffle stomp response regardless of how many dime bag sec guards you kill. I'm just trying to show that dead people cost orgs money, live people cost them less, and no matter how worthless a meta life may be, the training and wares don't grow on trees. I don't think anyone in this situation is saying "Oh dhey nice runners!!!" and drooling like a mongoloid, I think they're saying "Oh they're thieves." vs. "Oh their murdering thieves." Now if you're playing a world where that distinction doesn't matter because... well it just doesn't, than yeah, I'd agree.

Wow, that was a lot more than I wanted to write. Oh well.

[DocTaotsu]

Oh yeah! Body! Even if you're a "wussy mage boy" you need at least a body of 4 to wear decent armor without stumbling around at -1 to everything. You can skate by with less using the gear in Arsenal but you'll be crying for that heavier armor when the bullets start meeting your insides.

And damn, one magazine in the weapon, duh. So 7 mags it is. I was just counting the six (or is it 8?) double stacks you can carry in one of those highspeed chest pouches. You can tell how many doors I've kicked in. And here's hoping they finally make magazines for weapons that actually accommodate the number of rounds it says on the box.

And the trauma patch thing is key. Giving everyone a little lvl 3 medkit isn't a bad idea either.

I hinted at it earlier but that it pays to know the difference between cover and concealment, Cover is better but only if it really is cover and not just particle board that looks like a sturdy wall.