What's the point of melee? Options

[Yerameyahu]

No, I think it's because it's vastly harder to dodge bullets, Neo. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Semerkhet]

No, I think it's because it's vastly harder to dodge bullets, Neo. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Is it really? If an expert in unarmed combat is already in your face, is it really that much easier to dodge blows than it is to take cover from firearms at range? Is it "double the die pool" easier? Do you have personal experience in getting shot at and defending against martial arts experts to draw on here? I'm not saying I do, but you're the one that seems to be speaking from authority. To a table full of players whose only practical knowledge of these matters is a dozen afternoons playing paintball, neither rule is any more or less arbitrary.

[Yerameyahu]

Cover is for taking cover. Dodge is for freaking out, and yes, bullets are really fast (you can take that on my authority, hehe).

[sabs]

Having practiced fighting unarmed against guns. The answer is that you don't dodge the bullets. You're dodging the gun barrrel, and disarming as fast as inhumanly possible.

But dodging bullets from 15-20 feet away is nigh impossible. Really you're not 'dodging' you're taking cover, or evasive maneuvers.

[Yerameyahu]

Indeed. And for that you get the Full Defense option. The basic Reaction-only defense doesn't really constitute taking cover, to me; the 'bugging out' nature of Full Defense makes sense. In melee, you can block, reposition your body, etc. without resorting to Full Defense, and you're that much more effective when you do.

Anyway, I'm not saying you can't use your house rule if you want to melee combat (even) deadlier. However, I can easily see a rationale behind the RAW.

[sabs]

What I would like to see for Melee combat is this:

Attack:

agility+melee/unarmed skill

defense:

reaction+melee/unarmed skill

full defense:
reaction+melee/unarmed skill+dodge

Basically, in melee, you don't get your dodge bonus unless you full dodge, and if you don't have unarmed/melee skill then your basic defense is reaction.

[Whipstitch]

Problem I have with Semerkhet's house rule is that you're nerfing as many builds as you're buffing. Hell, probably more-- it hurts melee as a defense pool vs. melee while firearms still hold all the traditional advantages over melee weapons they always had. It helps the tweaked melee adept deal damage but gymnastic dodgers may as well just drop close combat and spend their points on something less situational, since you'd need to outclass your opponent by a specialization or a couple of skill ranks just to offset the Charge bonus. The above idea hits me as better since it'd be easier to translate over things like the Counterattack power and Disarm maneuver abilities, two things that really don't work in a world in which you're pretty much never defending with a bigger pool than your attacker. More importantly, it gives having a close combat skills a definite defensive application even if you already have normal Dodge.

[Shinobi Killfist]

Indeed. And for that you get the Full Defense option. The basic Reaction-only defense doesn't really constitute taking cover, to me; the 'bugging out' nature of Full Defense makes sense. In melee, you can block, reposition your body, etc. without resorting to Full Defense, and you're that much more effective when you do.

Well they could have gone with reaction or melee combat which ever is higher and then in full defense you get both. But yeah on a conceptual level I can see why there are more defense dice against melee combat. You are not just making your self a hard target you can actively dodge or block a strike.

Which is why if I were to house rule it I'd go with melee being based on strength and not 1/2 strength just like bows. For the average human it would not make much of a difference, for the strong it would. Right not with the 1/2ing a 3 str hits the same as a 4 strength. On a large range that make some degree of sense, but given that the human range is 1-7 it doesn't make much sense. A 4 strength guy is actually a lot stronger than a 3 strength guy. He should hit harder. I have a similar issue with the TN being 5 though it reduces the effectiveness of your skill dice too much IMO the difference between an expert and a chump is barely perceptible all other things being equal. But that is another discussion.

[sabs]

Problem I have with that house rule is that you're nerfing as many builds as you're nerfing. It hurts melee as a defense pool vs. melee while firearms still hold all the traditional advantages over melee weapons they always had. It helps the tweaked melee adept out but gymnastic dodgers may as well just drop close combat and spend their points on something less situational.

ooops
misread
Thought you meant my house rule (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

On a side note.

Strength does not make you good at unarmed combat.
Agility+stamina+Skill makes you good at unarmed combat.
Strength Helps, and given equal skill the stronger opponent has an advantage (in that he does more damage if he hits you)
but.. You can develop /a lot/ of "power" from proper technique.

[Combat Mage]

With Str instead of Strength/2 as damage you could easily make a troll with unarmed base damage of 20+. That's a bit ridicoulus.

[Shinobi Killfist]

With Str instead of Strength/2 as damage you could easily make a troll with unarmed base damage of 20+. That's a bit ridicoulus.

I would not say easily, but yeah it is possible. But something close to a ton hitting you with an axe will be similar to a long burst from a gun IMO.

[Whipstitch]

ooops
misread
Thought you meant my house rule (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

On a side note.

Strength does not make you good at unarmed combat.
Agility+stamina+Skill makes you good at unarmed combat.
Strength Helps, and given equal skill the stronger opponent has an advantage (in that he does more damage if he hits you)
but.. You can develop /a lot/ of "power" from proper technique.

You didn't misread; you posted while I was posting and "above post" was Semer once upon a time. I just caught the potential mix up early but didn't finish editing before you read it. These things happen when you have 3 people making posts in as many minutes. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Shinobi Killfist]

ooops
misread
Thought you meant my house rule (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

On a side note.

Strength does not make you good at unarmed combat.
Agility+stamina+Skill makes you good at unarmed combat.
Strength Helps, and given equal skill the stronger opponent has an advantage (in that he does more damage if he hits you)
but.. You can develop /a lot/ of "power" from proper technique.

Everything depends on how you define a stat though. I think a problem is game designers like to overly broaden agility so that it covers basically everything the body does in too many games. That is fine when you place different costs on different abilities, like agility costs 20 points to raise and strength costs 10, but if they cost the same you should define the abilities to cover a similar range of things. If you defined strength to include not just your raw lifting power but muscle control to best utilize your muscles and weight, skills like unarmed combat could fall under it.

[Semerkhet]

Having practiced fighting unarmed against guns. The answer is that you don't dodge the bullets. You're dodging the gun barrrel, and disarming as fast as inhumanly possible.

But dodging bullets from 15-20 feet away is nigh impossible. Really you're not 'dodging' you're taking cover, or evasive maneuvers.

This seems plausible to me. Which is why getting Reaction to 'dodge' bullets at 15-20 feet seems arbitrary. Without cover and in the absence of "Full Defense" the difference between being hit by a bullet or not is almost completely the result of factors affecting the shooter, not the target. My relatively limited experience in firing handguns* at paper targets tells me that a whole host of factors can influence accuracy significantly, even at short range. For just one example among many, a short-barreled revolver performs differently than one with longer barrel. A four-inch barrel will be much more forgiving of a small mistake than a 2.5 inch barrel and you may miss a paper target entirely at ten meters with the 2.5 inch barrel but still hit with the 4 inch barrel. Shadowrun does not model this level of detail, instead focusing on much more coarse modifiers. Nor should it. This means we, and the game designers, are making fairly arbitrary decisions about Combat all the time, and I'm not even touching on how magic and augmentation change things.

Back to my original point and your example, how is letting the person trying to shoot you get Reaction+Dodge to avoid your unarmed blows any more or less arbitrary than just rolling Reaction? I mean, they're trying to shoot you while you're trying to hit/disarm them, right? Is it your experience that you have a *significantly* worse chance to hit or disarm your opponent in close combat than they have of screwing up their shot and missing you at 20 feet? If your practice against handgun-wielding opponents is what I envision it to be I don't think you know the answer to this question. You can't possibly be practicing with people attempting to shoot you with real handguns, with all their unique accuracy quirks, in real stressful combat conditions, so how could you know what their chances of hitting you at 20 feet are?

* I'm assuming you're talking about practicing against persons wielding handguns. My point about short-range accuracy falls down if we're talking about longarms or shotguns. All the more evidence that the SR4 "Defense Against Ranged Combat" is an arbitrary gross over-simplification of reality whose only purpose is to facilitate smooth and fair game-play. I believe my house-rule regarding "Defense Against Melee Combat" fulfills the same design imperative, and it does so without breaking the already tenuous connection that SR4 combat has to reality. In the absence of a realistic simulation all we have left to judge a rule's efficacy is "Did it seem plausible?" and "Was it fun and fair to all involved?" Obviously there is a lot of room for YMMV on those two points.

I'd also like to add a (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotate.gif) to indicate that I'm not getting worked up about this discussion at all. I'm genuinely curious about how anyone can claim to be authoritative without having actually had "combat" experience of being shot at in anger.

[Semerkhet]

Problem I have with Semerkhet's house rule is that you're nerfing as many builds as you're buffing. Hell, probably more-- it hurts melee as a defense pool vs. melee while firearms still hold all the traditional advantages over melee weapons they always had. It helps the tweaked melee adept deal damage but gymnastic dodgers may as well just drop close combat and spend their points on something less situational, since you'd need to outclass your opponent by a specialization or a couple of skill ranks just to offset the Charge bonus. The above idea hits me as better since it'd be easier to translate over things like the Counterattack power and Disarm maneuver abilities, two things that really don't work in a world in which you're pretty much never defending with a bigger pool than your attacker. More importantly, it gives having a close combat skills a definite defensive application even if you already have normal Dodge.

I agree that my house rule creates problems as well as solving them. My previous long-winded post argues that my house rule is not invalidated by appeals to realism or authority but I'm perfectly prepared to acknowledge problems with the broader ramifications of the rule change. I'm prepared to have that conversation.

One of the reasons I think it hasn't caused a problem in my game thus far is that I hold to the idea that moderate skill with Firearms is easier to obtain and more common than equivalent skill in Unarmed Combat. I know this is my interpretation, but I base it on the historical shift from highly trained medieval knights (melee specialists) to larger numbers of more easily trained musketmen. I don't apply this interpretation to the rules but it does mean that my team runs up against far fewer Unarmed Combat experts than they do "thugs with guns." So the melee adept in my group is not often facing off, Bruce Lee v.s. Chuck Norris style, with other experts in unarmed combat. This leaves him on a relatively level playing field with the street samurai in the group. The adept has to close with his opponent and only gets one attack per IP but he does more damage per attack than the samurai does. If more of the PCs and NPCs were using Unarmed Combat without being specifically tweaked for it, as the adept is, then maybe I would be running into more problems.

What I should have said in my first post on the topic was, "This house-rule works for my game and my players but may not work for you. Give it a try and see what happens."

[sabs]

Well personally I wouldn't have a dodge skill, at all.

Obviously I'm not practicing against people shooting. ouch that would hurt.
When you're in melee against someone with a hand gun, you're really trying to out react their brain.
Because if the gun is still pointing at you when the 'fire' reaction gets from their brain to their finger, you're dead.

I have nothing against your house rule, although I feel that unarmed/armed combat skill should be usable as a defense, instead of dodge when within 'melee' range.

If I was going to house rule it would be something like this:

If inside reach
Defense against projectile OR melee = reaction + melee skill

outside of reach
defense against projectile = reaction
evasive maneuvers = -3 dicepool modifier
Full Defense = reaction test to dive for partial/full cover
Gymnastics Full Defense = net hits negative modifier to their dice pool for hitting.

[CanadianWolverin...]

* I'm assuming you're talking about practicing against persons wielding handguns. My point about short-range accuracy falls down if we're talking about longarms or shotguns. All the more evidence that the SR4 "Defense Against Ranged Combat" is an arbitrary gross over-simplification of reality whose only purpose is to facilitate smooth and fair game-play.

What if you went the opposite way and just made the defence pool uniform in coming from 3 sources (reaction,dodge,related skill) instead of the uniform 2 sources (reaction, dodge)?

Evasive manoeuvres would surely differ from weapon to weapon - to bring some more fiction into this, I don't think a character would gun-kata the same way with a pair of pistols as it would with a shotgun or whatever. It would also lend more credence to why the firearms skill is split into a group of skills, which already kinda flabbergasts me that there are characters who can pull a trigger without defaulting in some types of similar devices that doesn't translate to another similar device where they do default like the basic concept of point and shoot somehow changes significantly enough to warrant a -1. I think the defence pool extra of melee skills lends credence to their being split into a group rather than a single skill that covers a bunch of specializations, IMHO. And 4th ed is all I have limited knowledge of, its just a silly observation of mine in terms of suspension of disbelief / imagination bumping into game mechanics.

[StealthSigma]

I'd also like to add a (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotate.gif) to indicate that I'm not getting worked up about this discussion at all. I'm genuinely curious about how anyone can claim to be authoritative without having actually had "combat" experience of being shot at in anger.

It's more or less mathematics.

The 9mm round travels at 400m/s. To top it off, at ground level the speed of sound is 343m/s. Basically, it's impossible since the only way you can react to the bullet being fired is -if- you can see the person pulling the trigger otherwise you lack any cues to the bullet being fired. If the barrel pointing at you when the trigger is pulled, you will get hit. So rather than dodging bullets, you are moving in a fashion that makes it difficult for the handgun user to have his barrel pointed at you when he pulls the trigger. So which is easiest to hit? Stationary Target -> Target moving in a straight line -> Target moving "randomly".

On the other hand, when dealing with melee attacks, they come much slower and you have and easier time dodging the attack. The full defense action represents your knowledge of defensive techniques with the skill to block or parry attacks so that you don't get hurt by them. It is reasonable enough that someone who is in full defense is paying attention to his opponents technique in order to avoid falling for feints while at the same time being able to defend against the attacks.

[SaintHax]

On the other hand, when dealing with melee attacks, they come much slower and you have and easier time dodging the attack.

This is true, but melee attacks are often part of a combo or feint, and can change direction mid flight which bullets can't do. In addition, melee defense already get's the benefit of being able to choose from the best of either dodge or any other melee skill you may possess. In a fist real fist fight most blows land for at least a glancing blow. This is not the case in most fire fights.

I'm not even implying that realistically they are equal, but game mechanically melee should not suffer such a grave drawback. If they are going to allow defense like this, then damage with a weapon should scale quicker.

[X-Kalibur]

You know, it would fix everything if they just brought DiKote (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smokin.gif) back.

[Yerameyahu]

I wouldn't call it a 'grave drawback'. Again, if it works better in your game to remove the 'free' +Dodge from melee defense, go nuts. It still remains very plausible to me that you can reflexively attempt to avoid a punch, but not a bullet. Semerkhet, I never claimed any 'authoritative' position (beyond joking that bullets are certainly faster than strikes), so you can stop hammering on that misdirection drum. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Besides, there are a bunch of people in this thread happy to claim that melee is already as powerful (more powerful?) than guns. Why make it worse? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Silbeg]

Did you use all the rules for shooting.
That gunslinger adept only has 11(possibly 2 more from atribute boost) dice to shoot, so for shooting both guns at the same time thats 6(7) dice for one and 5(6) dice for the other pistol, under optimal conditions. Unless the she was shooting them from less then 5m away thats -1 to those pools (-3 if over 20m distance), then there's -1 from recoil to second shots of every IP and if she shoots more then 1 target in the same IP that -2 dice to shoot the second target
That doesn't leave her with many dice per shot, she really isn't build for shooting akimbo.

So, if firing two guns, aren't the recoil penalties cumulative?
So, first action, the shots will likely be 6 dice and 5 dice, respectively.
Second shots will be -2 (after dividing) due to recoil... if the gunslinger has dispatched her target with the first shots, an additional -2 dice, so her pools will be 2 dice and 1 die (very unlikely she'll be getting a hit).

If her targets have a 4 reaction, she is relatively likely to get a clean miss... if her targets go full defence (with a Dodge skill of 2), then she has basically even odds of doing no damage, on each shot.

Still, I don't think that it is the two guns that give her the major advantage... she'd probably be far more effective with a single gun, firing twice a pass, with smartlinked guns (as another poster has stated, she could still have smartlinks though contacts, glasses, goggles, whatever). She would go up to 13 DP, which will score 4 hits on average. This is how she likely drops a target per pass.

Her real advantage over the 1IP bounty hunter are her 2 extra initiative passes. That's really it... especially at ranges under 5m...

This post has been edited by Silbeg: Aug 16 2010, 08:38 PM

[Saint Sithney]

Back to my original point and your example, how is letting the person trying to shoot you get Reaction+Dodge to avoid your unarmed blows any more or less arbitrary than just rolling Reaction?

Well, if you look at what's going on in each case, it becomes a little clearer. I mean, I'm not saying it's perfect, but...

A person who has put effort into their Dodge skill has practiced watching their opponent and using visual clues to predict their actions and respond. What changes between a swing and a shotgun blast is your margin for error. You can anticipate a swing and avoid it while it happens. But the shotgun blast, you can anticipate it, but as it happens, if you're not already out of the way, you're tagged.

Same goes with a person who is trained in a fighting style. They have learned to anticipate and react, without it necessarily breaking their own rythm. They can, of course, dedicate all their attention towards incoming blows, but as it stands, offense is a matter of maneuvering in and creating an opening for attack. Therefore, each party is constantly maneuvering.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, it really is tough to draw the line between preventative measures and truly reading and reacting, with an awful lot depending on style and the advantages of each fighter. Some guys prefer to pick off attacks as they come and counter while others prefer to just present as small of a target as possible while trying to get in and just crush the other guy-- In other words, the best form of defense is a good offense school of thought. Both can definitely get the job done.

[Mäx]

I would not say easily, but yeah it is possible. But something close to a ton hitting you with an axe will be similar to a long burst from a gun IMO.

Except its a 100 times better then a long burst(what gun are you using to get 20+ points of damage) as its counts against penetrating armor, meaning you deal Physical damage to targets which also means you can hurt vehicles.
With that rule, you could get your unarmed damage to somethink like 24P with out being an adept and atleast the same with AP-half by being an adept.
That ridiculous beyond belief, that's more damage then a full-auto assault cannon.