[X] My Assistant

[ZeroPoint]

I'd like to see the problem of full auto vs multiple passes addressed...particularly suppressing fire. Why does wired reflexes make the street sam's ingram fire with 4 times the fire rate of the unaugmented face? I've thought about ways to fix it, but it would require a potentially drastic change to the current system.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

I'd like to see the problem of full auto vs multiple passes addressed...particularly suppressing fire. Why does wired reflexes make the street sam's ingram fire with 4 times the fire rate of the unaugmented face? I've thought about ways to fix it, but it would require a potentially drastic change to the current system.

I would say that it doesn't. If it is a sticking point, then set Suppressive Fire to function for a full Turn. At that point, Your 4 IP Sam wants to use Suppressive Fire, he does so his entire Turn, Nullifying his normal number of IP's. Problem Solved. No new rules involved.

[Andinel]

On the issue of magic, since direct combat spells don't really need an attack roll how exactly are they changed? Would it just be the threshold modifiers for cover?

[Brainpiercing7.6...]

I would say that it doesn't. If it is a sticking point, then set Suppressive Fire to function for a full Turn. At that point, Your 4 IP Sam wants to use Suppressive Fire, he does so his entire Turn, Nullifying his normal number of IP's. Problem Solved. No new rules involved.

Hmmm, that makes it even more lacklustre than it is now. Granted, I think suppressive fire SHOULD be a tactic for all those people who can't do snap-shots with pinpoint accuracy. However, its value in tactical situations is very limited.

I would love to see a rule that actually improves its use - which must be limiting mobility and the ability to counter-attack for the enemy, and ensuring tactical mobility for allies.

So... this is my take:

Suppressive Fire

Suppressing an enemy means forcing him to hunker down behind cover, enabling your own troops to advance to a more advantageous position. In order to suppress an enemy, a single shooter has to lay down a full burst of full-auto fire within a cone with a maximum base width of five meters. The shooter rolls an attack roll against the regular threshold for the distance of the cone base, with the usual modifiers, the result of which is left lying openly or noted. Anybody within or entering the area of fire must dodge against that attack roll with either reaction or edge (whichever is higher), or drop prone, respectively find full cover. He must repeat this for every meter of a suppressive fire zone he crosses in any manner other than crawling. If he fails to dodge, he takes damage equal to the base damage of the weapon plus the net hits of the attacker. Whether he dodges or not, any actions undertaken from within the suppressed zone - including going into full-defense - incur a dice pool penalty equal to the hits on the attack roll (=total hits minus threshold).
Several shooters can lay down covering fire with semi-automatic or burst fire weapons. The general rule is that each shooter can influence one meter of the cone base per two rounds or single short burst fired in one IP. So a semiautomatic shooter can suppress a cone with a base width of one meter, a burst fire shooter can suppress a cone with a two-meter base.

It is possible to contract the suppressive fire zone: By voluntarily halfling the witdth of the cone base, dodging character receive a threshold of 1 to dodge.

It is possible to suppress a terrain feature, too, as long as it is not larger than the cone that could be suppressed. For instance, characters advancing down a corridor could suppress the corner where an enemy might be hiding. Anybody peaking out from behind the corner would have to dodge or take damage, and incur a penalty for returning fire. If the area suppressed is sufficiently small, this automatically acts as a contracted suppressive fire zone.

Several people can work together to create overlapping zones. In this case, their hits on the attack rolls are added together against the dodge roll and for the penalty a victim must incur. The victim only takes damage once per instance.

Using Suppressive Fire is a complex action, and fills up the entire time until the shooter's next IP. The shooter has to spend ammunition for each actual IP cycle of the combat turn, even if he himself has no more actions. (So a 1IP shooter using suppressive fire on his IP in a turn with 4IPs uses 40 rounds for full auto fire.) Essentially, it allows attacking people out of turn.

Suppressive Fire can be interrupted by forcing the shooter into full defense or full cover.

Example:

CODE

Big Jim is a security rigger in a high security prison, controlling guard towers with remote controlled machine-guns. Some time during his watch, a group of runners sneak towards the perimeter over a hillock a few hundred meters from the fence. Big Jim spots them and umps into a turret and tries to engage them with accurate fire. The distance is long (2), they are moving towards him (+1), but not straight towards him, at over 200 meters (+1), and he is using a smartlink, for a final threshold of 3. He fires a full wide burst at the leading runner, using sensors+gunnery+rigger control+smartlink (DP 14) and gets 4 hits, 1 hit over threshold.  The runner has to dodge vs a threshold of 3, and fails, taking 2S damage, and continues to advance, while readying his grenade launcher to engage the turrets.
It is paramount to stop them, though, so Big Jim uses the Command action on two (other) linked turrets to lay down overlapping suppressive fire zones. The Threshold is 2(long)-1(smart), because he can ignore individual target movement.  He rolls 3 and 2 hits over threshold, respectively. The runners must dodge against 5 hits with reaction or edge or drop prone. The sam decides to risk it, and remains standing to continue advancing, but the others can't dodge that well, and must drop, and crawl out of the zone. The team's sam rolls his 8 reaction and gets three hits. He takes 8P damage from the light machine guns, and gets another 3S damage. However, when he tries to shoot back at the turrets he incurs a penalty of 5 dice on his attack rolls. He rolls 9+5+2-5-1-1= 9 dice against a threshold of 1(medium distance) to hit one of the turrets with a white phosphorus grenade, which does not manage to knock out the turret in one hit. He is also still moving, so he takes another 3S damage that turn for moving across a meter of suppressive fire zone.

The other team members did not take damage, but likewise incur that penalty when trying to do anything but move, and therefore also don't manage to kill one of the turrets.

Big Jim now has his target(s) trapped: He is still jumped into his other turret, and now fires another full wide burst at the sam, getting two hits over threshold. The sam foolishly had not dropped prone, and has to dodge vs a threshold of 3, with a penalty of 5 to his full dodge (and a general wound penalty of 2). He ends up getting knocked out from stun damage. The other runners are still caught in the overlapping zone.

[ZeroPoint]

The problem isn't just with Suppresive fire...its full auto period.

How does having 4 IP vs 1 IP allow a Samurai to shoot 4 times as many bullets (using 4 full bursts) compared to a the 1 IP Face (1 full burst)...they are both just holding down the trigger...I don't remember how long a full Turn is supposed to be in SR....3 seconds? so a Face doing Full burst only holds the trigger for .75 seconds through the whole turn and the sam (by virtue of super wired reflexes) can hold down that trigger for a full 3 seconds....

doesn't make any sense at all...

short burst is a little less rediculous, but still is...

I think firing modes should be limited to a specific rate of fire per turn, but allow those with more IPs to place their shots more accurately....

perhaps something like, the face with a full auto SMG would get 1 full burst that would deal 5 (+9 burst damage)

whereas, the 4 IP sam would be able to split that up as he wants over 4 IPs and each time get 1 full bullet's worth of damage and add any extras as burst damage...for example: (i'm assuming full burst fires 10 bullets because i havn't played SR in about 6 months and can't remember the actual amount off the top of my head)
1 - 3 bullets - 5+2 burst
2 - 3 bullets - 5+2 burst
3 - 2 bullets - 5+1 burst
4 - 2 bullets - 5+1 burst

[Seerow]

The problem isn't just with Suppresive fire...its full auto period.

How does having 4 IP vs 1 IP allow a Samurai to shoot 4 times as many bullets (using 4 full bursts) compared to a the 1 IP Face (1 full burst)...they are both just holding down the trigger...I don't remember how long a full Turn is supposed to be in SR....3 seconds? so a Face doing Full burst only holds the trigger for .75 seconds through the whole turn and the sam (by virtue of super wired reflexes) can hold down that trigger for a full 3 seconds....

doesn't make any sense at all...

short burst is a little less rediculous, but still is...

I think firing modes should be limited to a specific rate of fire per turn, but allow those with more IPs to place their shots more accurately....

perhaps something like, the face with a full auto SMG would get 1 full burst that would deal 5 (+9 burst damage)

whereas, the 4 IP sam would be able to split that up as he wants over 4 IPs and each time get 1 full bullet's worth of damage and add any extras as burst damage...for example: (i'm assuming full burst fires 10 bullets because i havn't played SR in about 6 months and can't remember the actual amount off the top of my head)
1 - 3 bullets - 5+2 burst
2 - 3 bullets - 5+2 burst
3 - 2 bullets - 5+1 burst
4 - 2 bullets - 5+1 burst

The problem with this is it does result in BF being far superior to FA.


If you want to make it more realistic, instead make FA allow extra attacks on phases you normally don't get an IP, with a penalty if you didn't have an IP that pass. A heavy one, like -10 DP modifier. Or you get the dice pool from however many passes you have normally to split up among all 4 passes. (like say you have a dicepool of 14, and 2 IPs. You full auto, now you have 28 dice to use over 4 IPs, so you can have 10 dice in 2 passes and 4 dice in 2 others, or 7 dice in each pass, or 14 in 2 passes and none in the last 2 (ie you just shoot wildly wasting bullets those passes)

[Draco18s]

Two things:

1) Vision Magnification should reduce distances by 1 category rather than being all or nothing. This means that you're still taking penalties for those long range shots, they don't automatically become close range.

2) I dislike headshots, it's a move back towards SR3 where everyone took "called shots to the eye" because "it has no armor." I'd prefer it based on armor values and each +1 TH or -1 DP counter some X value of armor (vehicular armor having its own separate X value).

[Runner Smurf]

I'll keep pondering suggestions, and look at possible fixes with my regular group tomorrow. In the meantime:

1. The Full Auto Problem.
I actually don't think this is that much of a problem. A real automatic weapon will empty the clip in <3 seconds, so I figure it's a matter of control - if you have multiple passes, you are able to control the weapon better, so you can fire more rounds without them going completely wild. The poor saps with one pass don't hold down the trigger the whole time - they let go after a dozen rounds as the weapon is going all squirrelly on them.

Yeah, it's a kludge, and doesn't work if you think too much about it...but there's all sorts of problems with multiple initiative passes. You have to just live with it at some point and not get to wrapped up in it. Yes, I know that's rich coming from me, but considering that I used to play a lot of Advanced Squad Leader, I think I'm doing pretty well overall.

2. Suppressive Fire
I actually think the suppressive fire rule works pretty well, but Brainpiercing's idea of applying a threshold or penalty to any actions while in the area are a great idea. For the sake of simplicity, I think I'd go with simply having a penalty of net attacker hits to any action's dice pool while being shot at - but that may actually be too much. Plus, shadowrunners are supposed to be cool under fire, etc. I'm going to have to noodle it. Personally, I think the risk of getting shot should be enough to keep their heads down.

3. Scopes (Revisited, Again)
Draco - I think my system effectively does that - it reduce by one category. I've added the additional +1 die per rating to give bonus to having really good optics.

4. Headshots/Called Shots
I tend to agree with Draco that I don't like called shots much either - I think I may drop that specific bit.

[Brainpiercing7.6...]

I've been away for a week, so sorry for the late reply/early necro (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) .

I'll keep pondering suggestions, and look at possible fixes with my regular group tomorrow. In the meantime:

1. The Full Auto Problem.
I actually don't think this is that much of a problem. A real automatic weapon will empty the clip in <3 seconds, so I figure it's a matter of control - if you have multiple passes, you are able to control the weapon better, so you can fire more rounds without them going completely wild. The poor saps with one pass don't hold down the trigger the whole time - they let go after a dozen rounds as the weapon is going all squirrelly on them.

Yeah, it's a kludge, and doesn't work if you think too much about it...but there's all sorts of problems with multiple initiative passes. You have to just live with it at some point and not get to wrapped up in it. Yes, I know that's rich coming from me, but considering that I used to play a lot of Advanced Squad Leader, I think I'm doing pretty well overall.

It's the way I rationalise it, too.

2. Suppressive Fire
I actually think the suppressive fire rule works pretty well, but Brainpiercing's idea of applying a threshold or penalty to any actions while in the area are a great idea. For the sake of simplicity, I think I'd go with simply having a penalty of net attacker hits to any action's dice pool while being shot at - but that may actually be too much. Plus, shadowrunners are supposed to be cool under fire, etc. I'm going to have to noodle it. Personally, I think the risk of getting shot should be enough to keep their heads down.

Well, unless you are suppressing at a very high DP, you simply aren't going to do a lot with it under the current rules. The only benefit right now seems to be the penalty to dodge. Now with high damage explosive weapons, as with the rules from WAR, suppressing might work using the RAW, but I still think the tactical benefit is rather too weak. Maybe I'm just not using it right, though.

I still think a penalty to all actions is better. However, my system could end up really powerful, to the point that who suppresses first wins. I would have to playtest that, or at least do a few more thought experiments.

[JesterZero]

One quick concern/issue that I wanted to point out with Runner Smurf's proposed changes...

While threshold modifiers rather than dicepool modifiers serve the purpose of making such modifiers meaningful (or at least, more meaningful) as dicepools get progressively larger, there is one mechanical effect that no one has called out yet. Perhaps there's an existing rule that I'm unaware of, but here goes.

When using negative dicepool modifiers, reducing the number of dice to 0 or less does not render the action in question impossible. If memory serves, there's a rule on the books that allows the character to expend and roll edge, and an optional rule to limit the number of Edge dice (relative to the penalty). Generally, you get into very-unlikely-but-never-impossible territory.

Using threshold modifers, there is no way (that I am aware of), for a player to succeed at a task if their dicepool is less than the threshold. In other words, a character with a dicepool of 1 can simply never succeed on test with a threshold of 2. Full stop. They simply auto-fail.

Where this becomes troubling (at least for me), is that a character with a low dicepool potentially cannot succeed on shots in the long/extreme ranges. That one-in-a-million shot becomes simply impossible.

I mention this simply because going back to previous editions of Shadowrun, a long-standing GM rule has been "never say no, just provide a ridiculous TN." Most of the time, the player will fail. It's that rare occasion where they pull it off that provides a great deal of excitement and memories. Now granted, the fixed-TN of SR4 complicates this. Since we're in houserule territory already, it may be as simple as creating a houserule allowing a player to apply Edge to that situation as well...but it's still something that I just wanted to bubble-up for consideration.

[Seerow]

Where this becomes troubling (at least for me), is that a character with a low dicepool potentially cannot succeed on shots in the long/extreme ranges. That one-in-a-million shot becomes simply impossible.

Well what dice pool do you consider low, and how high a target number are you talking?


Because no, I don't care how lucky that mage is, if he has 2 agility and no gun skill, and tries to fire a sniper at someone 1000 meters away, he's going to fail.


On the other hand, someone with a relatively low dice pool. An average joe with say 3 agility, 3 skill and smart link) has 8 dice to roll. Even before throwing in edge, that's enough to possibly hit any target number RS set. (Extreme range +3, target moving eratically at >200 meters +3, target the size of a CD +2, total target number: 8. He can't hit the micro target, or succeed on a called shot while making his shot, without spending edge. While spending edge, he can succeed even on the micro target, and possibly on the called shot depending on armor. Mind you none of these shots are particularly likely, and he is going to fail most of the time. But you just want a one-in-a-million shot, which is wholly possible here.


Actually, if the mage had enough edge, he could conceivably hit an erratically moving medium size target while edging at that range with a lucky shot, which is pretty impressive.

[JesterZero]

I'm specifically thinking of dicepools in the 1-4 range. Let's leave Smartlinks and other weapon modifiers out of it and just consider a player character, the weapon, and the rules.

At extreme range, a player has a threshold of 4, which can be reduced to 3 by Taking Aim. If the dicepool is 1-2, the player cannot succeed. Ever. No amount of Edge, fluke luck, or chanting "Big Money" can change that.

I understand that such a shot is highly improbable. I question the design that makes it simply impossible. It may be that Runner Smurf can address this by another houserule allowing the use of Edge in that case. I just wanted to point out that this could happen, and a dicepool of 3 becomes the equivalent of "you MUST be this tall to shoot things far away."

[Draco18s]

Using threshold modifers, there is no way (that I am aware of), for a player to succeed at a task if their dicepool is less than the threshold. In other words, a character with a dicepool of 1 can simply never succeed on test with a threshold of 2. Full stop. They simply auto-fail.

Um. Roll with edge?

[Seerow]

I'm specifically thinking of dicepools in the 1-4 range. Let's leave Smartlinks and other weapon modifiers out of it and just consider a player character, the weapon, and the rules.

At extreme range, a player has a threshold of 4, which can be reduced to 3 by Taking Aim. If the dicepool is 1-2, the player cannot succeed. Ever. No amount of Edge, fluke luck, or chanting "Big Money" can change that.

I understand that such a shot is highly improbable. I question the design that makes it simply impossible. It may be that Runner Smurf can address this by another houserule allowing the use of Edge in that case. I just wanted to point out that this could happen, and a dicepool of 3 becomes the equivalent of "you MUST be this tall to shoot things far away."

Said shot SHOULD be impossible. You're talking about an untrained person with 3 agility, and not using even a scope, smartgun, or other targeting system.

Yes it SHOULD require some training and/or preparation to be able to hit a target at extreme range.

Also, as Draco said, use edge. Right now with your dicepool of 2, extreme range gives you a -1 dice pool. So you have to edge to be able to roll on that.

[JesterZero]

Two things:

1) Draco actually raises an excellent point. Now that I'm off work and have my books, I can see that I was conflating part of using Edge with part of the Longshot rules. So from a mathematical perspective, that can be solved. It does some funny things with the numbers (where certain cases flip from have a probability of 0% to instantly having a probability greater than 50%), but hey, that's Edge for you. So thank you Draco, and I'll happily concede that point.

2) I probably should just leave it at that, but I want to again just challenge your claim that "said shot SHOULD be impossible." It really shouldn't be. Let's illustrate this. A person with STR 1, AGI 1, and ARCHERY 1 starts taking pot shots at a human-sized target 16 meters away. In other words, we've got a kid on their first day of camp, and that's being generous. Under the proposed rules by Runner Smurf, that child CANNOT hit the target without spending edge (dicepool of 2, threshold of 4, -1 threshold for taking aim). The problem with this is that kids hit that ALL DAY LONG. We usually start them around the 20m mark, and walk them back from there. I've seen kids on their first day put anywhere from 10% to 50% of their arrows into targets at 30m and 40m.

If you'd rather do firearms and abstract it, then let's use a dicepool of 2, a light pistol, and a human-sized target 16m away. Again, this is technically impossible (same math as before), but people hit it ALL THE TIME.

Now I understand that we're dealing with abstracts here, and trying too hard to apply real-life to SR4A is going to result in headaches all around. Rather, the issue as I see it is this:

1) By switching from dicepool modifiers to threshold modifiers, you are basically changing -1 modifer to a -2 to -4 modifer for most of the expected values that you'll see in Shadowrun. This works great given the power creep that any game experiences over time, where "average" dicepools can double or triple depending how far along the splatbook publication cycle you are. Runner Smurf proposed a rather elegant solution for dealing with that, and deserves credit.

2) The problem is that just like dicepools struggle with meaningful granularity on the high end (and actually on the non-negative low-end as well), the threshold system struggles with meaningful granularity on the low end as well. As I've shown, things that you say are "impossible" actually happen (and SHOULD happen) a statistically-significant portion of the time. That may not even be the majority of the time, but when things that previously had a likeihood of 30% to 40% now have a likelihood of "no," you have an issue. When that issue arises in something as commonplace as combat, that requires a long, hard look.

3) Under Runner Smurf's rules, the problem is compounded by halving the ranges. That means that you are now encountering threshold modifiers twice as fast. The problem arises that you have a arbitrary "cliff" on the border between long and extreme, and you have another mathematical "cliff" where total dicepool is less than required threshold.

There are ways to smooth that out: you could revise the ranges to remove that long/extreme cliff, or you could make Take Aim continue to reduce the threshold beyond the first use. I'm sure there are other possibilities as well.

If you wanted to, you could even just ignore the problem, and for a number of tables it might not matter at all. If your characters have larger dicepools, and you don't mind low-attribute, low-skill people being no threat instead of minimal threat in certain situations, it's fine. And honestly, I could see a number of groups doing that, since the proposed changes would solve more problems than they cause, or solve more relevant problems than they cause. However, there are still times where it will produce undesirable and ridiculous results, even if those times don't crop up at the power level of most games.

[Yerameyahu]

You're simply going to lose a certain amount of granularity with reasonable sizes of d6 dicepools. That's how it is. :/

[JesterZero]

Without even getting into what "reasonable" means, sure. But to try to point this out again, it's one thing to lose "granularity," assuming you define that as the range of the probabilities. You can see this at the lowest end of the current system for non-negative dicepools. If you have even one die left, you've got a 33% shot. I'm not thrilled about that, and I doubt most GM's are either.

It's something else entirely when losing "granularity" means that things which really should be unlikely (or even probable given enough attempts at reproducing it) automatically become impossible. And THAT is the problem that lives on the corner of threshold modifers and small dicepools.

[Seerow]

2) I probably should just leave it at that, but I want to again just challenge your claim that "said shot SHOULD be impossible." It really shouldn't be. Let's illustrate this. A person with STR 1, AGI 1, and ARCHERY 1 starts taking pot shots at a human-sized target 16 meters away. In other words, we've got a kid on their first day of camp, and that's being generous. Under the proposed rules by Runner Smurf, that child CANNOT hit the target without spending edge (dicepool of 2, threshold of 4, -1 threshold for taking aim). The problem with this is that kids hit that ALL DAY LONG. We usually start them around the 20m mark, and walk them back from there. I've seen kids on their first day put anywhere from 10% to 50% of their arrows into targets at 30m and 40m.

Average person is 3 in all stats. Str 1 agi 1 is a gimp. He finds it nearly impossible to lift more than 30 pounds. He can barely get out of bed without tripping over himself. I mean if you REALLY want to get into it, by RAW your 1 str kid can't even draw the weakest bow in the books, it only goes down to 2. But anyway, bump that kid up to 3 agility, and suddenly he's rolling 4 dice. It's a nonmoving human sized target 20 meters away (range increment is 20 meters, so that's in short range if barely), so the threshold is 0. He hits a bit over 50% of the time. I'm not sure where you got that threshold of 4 from. Move that dummy back to the 40 meter mark you specify at the extreme range, and now you're 1 range increment out. That ups the threshold by 1. Still a threshold 1 test so he still hits about over 50% of the time since the only difference in threshold 0 and threshold 1 is 1 damage. If you instead assume a base threshold of 1 exists, will now you have a threshold 2, and the kid will still hit that fairly regularly with his 4 dice.

If you'd rather do firearms and abstract it, then let's use a dicepool of 2, a light pistol, and a human-sized target 16m away. Again, this is technically impossible (same math as before), but people hit it ALL THE TIME.

Prove it. Find someone of average agility who has never held a firearm in their life, and tell them to shoot something 45 feet away. Only let them take the one shot, then you have to find someone else who's never shot a pistol. See how long it takes to find someone who hits that target first try. (If you let them fire indefinitely, they'll eventually have the equivalent of skill rating 1 and suddenly have 4 dice to throw at it)

People who are skilled hit it all the time.





Most importantly, you design the system to work around where it is intended to work. The game really really is not intended to work at dicepools in the 2-4 range. Even the most low powered character you find are going to have a dicepool of at least 6-8 in a skill they bother trying to use. Anything lower than that, and that's what they have teammates for. if they expect to shoot a gun, you can guarantee they will have enough skill and/or agility and/or other modifiers to roll at least that many dice. Seriously, the game not working well at low dice pools is nothing new. As it is, in game if a character has a dice pool of 2 to shoot, he probably has something more useful to do than shooting. He will either cast a spell, or be busy hacking, possibly hacking some other gun to shoot for him. Trying to say a system is bad because your physically crippled character who has no training whatsoever using firearms can no longer make a one in a million shot is not a valid argument. It seriously isn't.

[Draco18s]

Prove it. Find someone of average agility who has never held a firearm in their life, and tell them to shoot something 30 feet away. Only let them take the one shot, then you have to find someone else who's never shot a pistol. See how long it takes to find someone who hits that target first try.

Human sized target 30 feet away? I did it.

Hell, first time on the firing range (admittedly we're talking .22 rifles here) I was getting shots within a foot of each other at a range of...oh, 30 to 45 feet?

That is, of my first 10 bullets ever fired, most--if not all--of them hit the target (a sheet of paper about 12" square). Almost every boy scout manages to get one bullet (of 10) on the target their first time on the range and I'm pretty sure we can consider 11 year old kids to be "Agility 2, Skill 0," tops.

One year (mind, I only ever used guns at summer camp, so Skill Rust applies) I managed to get all 10 shots to fit under a quarter.

Another time I managed to use a bow and arrow supremely well (range of 30 feet). (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) First time ever, did better than one of the instructors (who was using a compound bow with a scope--admittedly it wasn't adjusted properly and he missed two shots (at a range of about 10 feet, I might add) and had to buy me a drink).

Edit:
Oh yeah. "Untrained" in a skill isn't "never used a gun, ever ever ever." That's Incompetent. Skill 0 is "held a gun, maybe fired it a few times, no real training or experience."

[Seerow]

Human sized target 30 feet away? I did it.

Hell, first time on the firing range (admittedly we're talking .22 rifles here) I was getting shots within a foot of each other at a range of...oh, 30 to 45 feet?

You just said it was a Rifle. We're talking a light pistol. 30-45 feet is short range for a rifle, but long range for a pistol (extreme range by the rules Runner Smurf put forth, but I don't necessarily agree with that). So it's either a 1/36 shot, or a impossible shot without edge, depending on which range your looking at, but an easy shot for a rifle regardless.

Another time I managed to use a bow and arrow supremely well (range of 30 feet). First time ever, did better than one of the instructors (who was using a compound bow with a scope--admittedly it wasn't adjusted properly and he missed two shots (at a range of about 10 feet, I might add) and had to buy me a drink).

Again, within short range so within range of possibility with the rules as presented.


I may also add if you're that competent as a baseline with no training with these various firearms, you may have an above average (say 4 or 5) agility.

[JesterZero]

I'm not sure if I'm not being clear, or if you just love to provide arguments and counter-examples for points I'm not making.

First of all, attributes of 1 denote...not connote...denote...a character who is "weak." Not a "gimp." And another way to express their strength of 1 would be to say that they can lift 30 pounds with no test whatsoever. All day. Wheeeee.

I don't know where you get the rule that all bows have a STR minimum of 2...I don't see that in my copy of SR4A in either the combat or gear chapter. Maybe it's somewhere else? And thanks, but let's NOT arbitrarily inflate the imaginary kid's attributes so that the math works better for your strawman arguments. Under the revised range tables proposed by Runner Smurf (remember, all ranges except Extreme are halved), Extreme Range begins at 16m for a STR 1 bow, or 31M for a STR 2 bow. The default threshold for success is 1, +3 for being Extreme, -1 for taking aim. Our kid needs 3 successes, but can only roll 2 dice. If you don't bring Edge into it, he will never hit that target. Given infinite time and attempts, he will still never hit it.

You actually hit on the issue when you respond to the pistols example. Letting people take "only one shot" has nothing to do with it, because the more shots they take, the more likely they are to hit it. Yes, people are are skilled hit what they're aiming at quite often. And people who are incredibly unskilled hit it sooner or later as well. Millions of monkeys and all that rot. If you want a system that approximates that specific aspect of reality, the proposed houserules currently fail to meet that design goal.

And despite what you say, low dicepools are the issue here. I've already raised the caveat that the higher the value of the dicepools in question, the more of a non-issue this becomes. That was MY point remember? I'm simply pointing out that while the official ruleset has a statistical plateau on the high end...with a dicepool of 20, losing 40% of your dice doesn't even move the needle 1%...the proposed ruleset has a statistical cliff on the low end.

You don't have to care, because it might not ever affect you. Again, I already brought that up. But Runner Smurf asked for feedback, and that's what I offered. You can toss around pejoritive synonyms for cripples, move the goalposts, put words in my mouth I never used (I believe my term for his system was "elegant," not "bad") and propose unrelated hypotheticals, but it doesn't change the numbers.

I'm going to take a break because this honestly isn't worth any more discussion, and I have no clue why you're getting so wound up over this. If your games never include situations where this could come up, you don't need to care. But if you're modeling (N)PCs who are anything from "weak" and a "beginner" to "average" and "untrained," there are issues with the way the probability curves play out. If you are modelling (N)PCS who have access to significantly higher dice pools, the problem goes away. It's not personal, it's just math.

[Daier Mune]

I realize that the argument has moved away from this point already, but I haven't been on the boards for a few days and wanted to add something to the stew.

As far as firing more bullets in a 4 IPs vs 1 IP: Why not add a maximum rate of fire stat to automatic weapons? A character with multiple IPs can divide up how many rounds they can suppress with based on how many passes they have; like movement speed.

I still think that a 10 round burst is the most 'controlled' shot you can make in a single pass, so that wouldn't have to change.

[Seerow]

1) If your problem is the range increments, I'm with you on that. Using normal range increments, pretty much every shot you described is more or less doable. Like I've said before, I don't agree with everything RS has done here, however the majority of your arguments seem to be a bias against a threshold based system, which I disagree with.

2) I'm assuming an average individual as opposed to someone who is far below average. And yes, if 6 represents the peak of physical conditioning while a 3 is average, then a 1 is pretty gimp. And yes, the character with 1 strength will almost never pick up more than that 30 pounds, because he rolls a strength+body check to try to pick up more. Good luck getting hits on that with your 1s across the board.

3) The minimum strength I think came in the same errata that had the maximum strength cap for bows. I could be wrong on there being a minimum strength 2, but I'm pretty sure it is there.

4) If someone is naturally unsuited for something, has put no effort into training for something, then yes, they should need a lot of luck to be able to succeed at it. That is what edge is for. If you don't have enough edge to make up the difference and get that lucky roll, well that sucks. You've already said you don't like the current system where if someone has a single die they have a 33% chance of hitting, so basically I'm not seeing a solution that WOULD please you, unless we went back to 3rd edition style TNs, where the TN for such a shot might be 14 with only a single die to roll, but you have a small chance of making it. And while that may be better to represent statistical anomalies, it really is worse at just about everything else.

5) Your average joe untrained guy shouldn't be getting involved in your firefights. On the rare occasion it comes up (say he's an abduction target and happens to carry one around with him despite never training with it) and he finds that he can't actually hit someone who's not in his face.. is that really such a bad thing? If it really matters THAT much to you, a house rule of something like if after spending edge you still don't have enough dice to potentially hit the target number you need, you can make a straight up edge test, threshold 2 (or 3 depending on how hard you want it to be, 2 is enough to make it unlikely but possible for all but the luckiest people), to succeed. This would more or less replicate the effects of the rule that you are missing.

6) If you REALLY want some sort of simulationist "The longer you shoot at the same unmoving target the more likely you are to eventually hit it" test, to simulate the 12 year old shooting his bow or the guy going to the firing range with his pistol, you can allow aiming bonuses to stack one higher for every 2 shots you take at the target, but only allow it on stationary targets such as target dummies. Now you can simulate these guys hitting stuff on the range after firing a few shots while still being totally bewildered (as they should be) in a real fire fight. But once again, this is something that doesn't matter because it shouldn't realistically come up in a real game session. It's just an extra useless rule to make you feel better about the game working like the real world.

7) It is worth noting, what you are asking for is for untrained, unskilled people with no natural aptitude towards the task at hand to be able to succeed at that task. Consider the equivalent in a different field: Would you expect a average joe with no computer skills, 3 logic, a normal commlink with no illegal programs to be able to hack a corporate database by sheer luck? Would you expect same average joe with 3 logic and no mechanic skill to be able to go out back, kick his car, and it magically starts up? Because if you want hard things to be doable for anyone with shooting, the same thing should apply to everything else, and it really doesn't.

[Brainpiercing7.6...]

Too many things have been said to quote easily, so I'll try to thow in another 2 cents just like this:

The threshold problem and low dice pools:

Really, I don't see it. Average people are not affected by this problem. An average person defaulting on a skill has 2 dice, yes, that makes certain tasks statisitically impossible. Even worse, it makes glitches so probable that this guy will be hurting himself half the time he tried. That's a basice problem of the basic dice rules. Quarrelling about whether thresholds make the system worse when the base system is already so bad is really besides the point. The threshold system makes the game better for the majority of the cases.

The highly improbable thing can also simply be handwaved: You are watching a group of kids trying to hit a target. Now they are attempting many tests with a statistical probability of zero, and I would simply say: Rules MAKE the game world. So these kids actually NEVER do hit the target. However, if you think that rules only approximate the world, and you want things to be more like real life, then there is some wiggle room, you can handwave that. There is no relevance to these tests, so you might as well just say that they hit every 10th or 20th try.

A character trying to make a long-shot test will just have to pre-roll edge to succeed, and in this case, he CAN! When it's a relevant test then there is always a probability. Of course he can't try this indefinitely, and here the game just doesn't do very well at simulating the real world, but guess what, it's not supposed to.

I have another solution, which is well in line with the extent of the changes suggested by RS:

Return to exploding 6s by default. With the changes imposed by RS' rules, you have significantly decreased chances of hitting, so you might as well up them again a bit, to increase the randomness of the game. Now there is always a fairly slim chance of a total wimp making extreme tests. The chance is larger than I'd like it to be, because now a threshold of 2 with one die is just a 1/36th to make, but... there you have it. Your cliff is gone.

You might consider going back to surpassing thresholds then, instead of meeting them.

This makes long shots a lot more likely, and entirely removes statistical cliffs. It devalues edge, at least pre-roll edge, sure enough, but you can easily come up with something that increases its value again, or simply live with the fact that life got worse for runners...

[Draco18s]

You just said it was a Rifle. We're talking a light pistol. 30-45 feet is short range for a rifle, but long range for a pistol (extreme range by the rules Runner Smurf put forth, but I don't necessarily agree with that). So it's either a 1/36 shot, or a impossible shot without edge, depending on which range your looking at, but an easy shot for a rifle regardless.

I'll find a firing range somewhere then that'll let me fire a pistol.
(someday, eventually, not soon)

Again, within short range so within range of possibility with the rules as presented.

Short range for a simple (not compound) bow? That has a mere 100 pound draw? (i.e. one that an 11 year old boy can pull, albeit with difficulty?)

I may also add if you're that competent as a baseline with no training with these various firearms, you may have an above average (say 4 or 5) agility.

Unlikely.
What else is Agility linked...that isn't a combat skill?
Not much. The only other example I could even use is Unarmed Combat, unfortunately I had several years training in Karate (not that I remember any of it at this point).
Forgery: I used tracing paper?
Gymnastics: Never did any. Maybe some balance beam work, but everyone who isn't a complete klutz (or drunk) can balance on a beam 4 inches wide.
Palming: Never tried it? I don't even know how I would gauge success.

Anyway, point is. I'm not a physically active person. I'm a programmer and always have been.