Rules for friendly fire Options

[suoq]

Makes me wonder if you couldn't use that to make yourself out to be a god to really really dumb people. Stand against a wall and tell all your minions to unload on you with strafing fire back and forth over your person. The bullets will strike the wall all around you and you won't be hurt. God status to idiots?

Someone will want to join into the fun, and, like you said, they're idiots. Next thing you know they're all shooting their own guns, or at least throwing rocks.

[Stahlseele]

Much better: hack the opposition and set yourself up as a friendly so their guns won't shoot you.

[sabs]

Or at least have your overwatch hacker doing that.
Also, hack their Tacnet to give misleading information about your team.

2072 combat is.. intricate (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

If you have advance access. Put in timed databombs, with black out.
replace their 'smartgun software' with one that has bugs in it.

Create modified Blackout, that triggers them into VR if they have a trode, and keeps them there.. mind occupied by some btl you cooked up.

[Paul Kauphart]

If you have advance access. Put in timed databombs, with black out.
replace their 'smartgun software' with one that has bugs in it.

Create modified Blackout, that triggers them into VR if they have a trode, and keeps them there.. mind occupied by some btl you cooked up.

I won't use smartgun anymore....

[sabs]

I won't use smartgun anymore....

Meh I can do all that without the smartgun. I just need to pwn your commlink.
I can do it with your tacnet.
I can crash your IC agent running, and replace it with one of my own.

Give a hacker advanced warning before he needs to try and kill you.. and he can cook up some pretty savage stuff.

[suoq]

Give a hacker advanced warning before he needs to try and kill you.. and he can cook up some pretty savage stuff.

I'm feeling better about having taken Simsense Vertigo already.I figured I'd need a bucket for mission briefings but this makes it all worthwhile.

[Paul Kauphart]

Right then, a skinlinked smartgun with a biometric electroshok advanced satefy system. No way to hack the smartgun unless you touch it, and if you do without authorisation, your earn yourself a nice shock (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[sabs]

Right then, a skinlinked smartgun with a biometric electroshok advanced satefy system. No way to hack the smartgun unless you touch it, and if you do without authorisation, your earn yourself a nice shock (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

I can still hack your PAN(via your commlink)
But that's significantly harder.

[CanRay]

One of my PCs the first time I was GMing was stuck with "Metal-head Mike" the AI. He had a tendency of overwriting everyone's... Everything, really.

"My pistol plays 'Black Sabbath' when I pull the trigger." "Ew. Classical music!"

[StealthSigma]

I can still hack your PAN(via your commlink)
But that's significantly harder.

sabs, in a world where only 3 of 21 dice I throw when using a firearm utilized smartguns or tacnets, I think I could shutdown my comlink and cut myself off from tacnet and shut down my smartgun system and still wtf pwn stuff.

[Paul Kauphart]

I can still hack your PAN(via your commlink)
But that's significantly harder.

Exept if I'm in a combat situation where I decide it is more secure to operate my PAN in skinlink only. But I guess in that case communication with the team might prove tricky.

[Doc Chase]

So under the hacking rules, what would happen if you had four or five cheap commlinks broadcasting trash the second the bad stuff went down? Would the hacker have to guess which one's the right one, or would he know automatically?

[Dwight]

@Inca

For people in melée with the target, or just generally somewhere along the path the bullet is going to travel I tried adding Threshold (effectively subtract successes). If the shot fails friendly is hit by base weapon damage, ignore armor for soak roll. Threshold increase was, generally if I recall, +2 for each friendly engaged or in front of target, +1 for peripheral in front/beside and no penalty for 'backstop' friendlies but the were at risk of missed shots (I'd give the damage to whichever target I felt made it the funniest (IMG:style_emoticons/default/devil.gif) ). If any of the friendlies had the Friend tag you got +1 die(once, not for each). This ment SL was still very helpful but not garanteed safety.

It didn't feel quite spot on but it was close, and better that not there. Gave players pause, sometimes they still shot, other times (in poor conditions usually ) they would hold fire. Sound about right?

[sabs]

sabs, in a world where only 3 of 21 dice I throw when using a firearm utilized smartguns or tacnets, I think I could shutdown my comlink and cut myself off from tacnet and shut down my smartgun system and still wtf pwn stuff.

Absolutely
but you can't talk to your team mates.
You can't bring up a local map, unless you alredy have it loaded. And it won't get updated with the location of your teammates and known enemy combatants.
You can't have safe target on.
You can't load new skill/knowledge/lingua softs until you bring it back up.


It's a trade off (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Do you have near perfect synchronization with your team, and count on YOUR hacker protecting you from THEIR hacker, and an extra 2-6 dice depending.
Or
Do you shut everything down, and work with hand-signals, requiring free to simple actions for coordination and line of sight.

When you have security teams who have 9 dice or so, before they start adding tacnets and smartlinks.. losing 3 of 12 hurts a lot more.

[sabs]

So under the hacking rules, what would happen if you had four or five cheap commlinks broadcasting trash the second the bad stuff went down? Would the hacker have to guess which one's the right one, or would he know automatically?

He would have to do a ew+analyze, maybe decrypt each one if they're all broadcasting encrypted.
each hit gives him 1 piece of information.
so he'd want at least 4-5 hits, to get a basic information on each commlink. preferably more.
I think he would have to guess, but he could potentially do an educated guess.

Like say he analyzes the 5 traffics, and he notices that 4 of them have 0 subs on them,a nd 1 of them has 5 subscriptions.
That's a good hint.
He analyzes the traffic, and notices that 1 of your commlinks is sending data to 5 other commlinks all within his scan range.
That 's another good hint.

I don't think it would be automatic, but I don't think it would stop him for /long/

[Inca]

Makes me wonder if you couldn't use that to make yourself out to be a god to really really dumb people. Stand against a wall and tell all your minions to unload on you with strafing fire back and forth over your person. The bullets will strike the wall all around you and you won't be hurt. God status to idiots?

The problem is recoil is a random process, so there is always an element of chance when firing a gun which a smartlink could only compensate for with statistical algorithms....but statistical algorithms are designed to make it so that you won't hit your friends "on average". Your smartlink could see that there is no friendly in front of the barrel, but then you could misjudge a recoil and the barrel could kick the bullet into the path of a friendly. That's why i would rather handle Safe mode as a DP modifier and not just say it's impossible to hit your friends.

[Neurosis]

There are many combat situations which just seem very unrealistic unless I put in friendly fire rules. Like when I have 2 characters engaging an enemy in hand to hand ...and then another player from 20 m away with good recoil comp unleashes a narrow long burst at the enemy .....he never has to worry about hitting his friends unless he glitches or critical glitches. Glitches are just really rare on larger dicepools. Say on a DP of 8 (4 automatics, 4 agility)...that's only a 3% chance to glitch.....but I would say there should be some mechanism in place to make him hesitate cuz he might hit his friends....in real life nobody would ever shoot at an enemy who's in hand to hand with a friend unless it was like a hostage situation or something.
Does anyone know any good rules for handling this?
Up to now i've handled it in this way:
If it's SS or SA, then any character who is 2m or less from an enemy must make a Reaction+Edge (1) if the bullet doesn't make contact with the enemy. If it's narrow burst fire, then they need to make a R+E (2) test....if it's a wide burst or FA of any kind, then they need to make a R+E(3) test. If they succeed the test then they don't get hit....but if they fail, then they take the base damage of the weapon and get to do a damage resistance test.

How's that?

This is really off the top of my head so it's pretty ruff, but...

Nothing wrong with your system, but what I'd do is either impose a 'cover' penalty based on the number of friendlies in the way (goes without saying that a glitch or critical glitch hits an ally). This might be something like BODY/2 rounded down if you like. So it's a -1 Penalty for aiming around a Body 3 Elf and a -4 Penalty for aiming around a Body 9 Troll. Or you could have it be based on metatype rather than Body. Or you could just approximate. Up to you how or if to 'stack' penalties for multiple friendly. Alternatively, you could let the runner use a 'Take Aim' action to negate all Friendly Fire penalties. Should be incompatible with wide bursts.

Alternatively, increase the THRESHOLD (in other words, the hits on the defender's Reaction Roll) by one per friendly in the line of fire. For example, pretend your gun-bunny is trying not to hit his ally, and scores four hits. If the defender rolls two hits, your shooter hits...but maybe not as well as he would have if not for aiming around his buddy. If the defender rolls four hits, obviously your shooter misses. However, if the defender rolls three hits and your shooter misses BECAUSE OF or BY the extra hit, then they hit their ally (for base damage, no net hits).

You could use whichever one you think will ultimately result in less bookkeeping. The main difference between that and the proposed house rule in the OP is that it puts the burden of avoiding friendly fire on the shooter.

This post has been edited by Neurosis: Sep 2 2010, 05:21 PM