Sounds like a ton of optimization just for that.

Just for disarm? No, that was just my favorite thing to do with it AND a good way to make unarmed useful. If all the person can do is shoot a gun and you take the gun away from them how do they fight? If they have a second gun that's not hard to take away either and that's only if I didn't kill him with his own gun before he had a chance to take out the second one. I won't explain the background but I fought our groups Gunslinger adept and ended the fight by taking both of his revolvers (he didn't think a gunslinger needed unarmed) and then beating him to death with them. Sure I used blunt but it's still a melee skill. The point is Unarmed isn't exactly the smartest thing to specialize in UNLESS you turn the battlefield to your advantage.

Close the distance using cover and distractions and suddenly your the scariest thing on the battlefield as the enemy can't shoot you without shooting their friend and you use their friend as a shield to get closer to them. Take the enemies weapon and either use it against them or just throw it away and begin beating them at something they aren't prepped for. With very little optimization you can easily hit for 9 DV. But like all builds they have their uses.

Hmm, I like that house rule of having a skill as prereq to a martial art.

Along those lines, how about these as house rules?

- Add the appropriate ranged weapon skill (including specialization if that applies) to the ranged reaction / reaction + dodge. Silly in character reasoning? A character wouldn't try to avoid the projectiles from a Longarm, particularly a shotgun, the same way they would the other firearms (skills), I would think.

- If skilled at all in a melee skill, change the melee from a complex action to a simple action. Silly in character reasoning? A character trained with the muscle memory for melee is going to do it faster than someone who has to think about their actions more actively - sure, perhaps not nearly as fast as someone pulling a trigger, but damn it, file this silly idea under the rule of cool and fun.

Going to leave how horribly broken those ideas might be game mechanically up to those who understand the full repercussions better than I.

>>>

As far as the OP goes, I too have encountered the problem of characters with more IPs than others on the team having the spotlight heavy on them in combat as a player of the higher IP character. It wasn't a particularly fun experience when the GM thought I was being munchkin with my character which I found odd for a whole host of reasons. Ever since I have wondered why that GM couldn't have seen their way to perhaps creating some scenario where the other characters could shine, you know perhaps not focus so heavily on combat being the end all be all to a role playing game. But that all depends on how the GM sets the stage and the players making choices that don't all lead to combat being the forgone response of the NPCs. *shrug*

You created a min/maxed character for combat, and you couldn't figure out why the GM couldn't find a way not to focus the game on combat?

Heh.

Yup. There are other characters than just mine, comes with the territory of being a part of a runner team. And when the team gets a job to steal this or that, why is it that the hacker's game plan is wear a sniper rifle in public and start taking pot shots at the sec forces before we even recon the target?

Just because I make a character that is good at a particular area of combat doesn't mean that from an in character perspective I think that character even wants to have to blow away sec forces, to leave that as a last resort to keep the heat off or effectively accomplish that task if that is the part of the team he was hired on to do. I'd rather not have a character who is just another mindless murderer on speed.

So, just saying, is it really the fault of the multi-IP character if they get a lot of the spot light if the other characters and GM's setting defaults to combat an inordinately large amount of the time when there are many other options available to bring the setting to life and have the non-melee/ranged combat prepped and specialized characters get their share of the spotlight of cool shit we imagined they did in the game the other night?

Who cares about spotlight-sharing issues? Your group needs to sit down figure out what's fun for all of you; that's always the answer.

Emphasis mine. That doesn't make any sense to me, even if your group all find combat to be the end all be all fun time but then make types of characters who don't excel in combat as much as some of the others, don't you think it is kind of inevitable that it will seem like a select number of characters who do excel in combat will come of as the lead(s) in this particular action fest? And even heavy combat oriented teams benefit from a range of specializations that support the heavy weaponry - so who is the character / player that is going to be left holding the bag for the other roles seen as ancillary to the combat?

Spotlight sharing issues are pretty much the emphasis of everyone having fun, including the GM. IMHO, having a multi-specialist team and varied setting should actually be easier for the whole table to have a fun time with.

No. I meant that you're asking the wrong question. It's not about spotlight, it's about the group enjoying the game. If you answer *that* question, the rest will be fixed. Me and my friends, we agree: a varied team that can handle varied missions is fun. But it's not about who's shining.

Most of those silence options only disguise the source of the sound, rather than the existence, so dudes will still hear a muffled gunshot, but not be able to pinpoint it to save their life... often literally.

I don't know... -9 to -12 is often enough to remove any chance of hearing a silenced shot at all...

Well, there are only 3 silencing options that I can recall (silencer/suppressor, electronic firing, and subsonic ammo). The first do this: "It applies a –4 dice pool modifier to Perception Tests to notice the weapon’s use or locate the weapon’s firer." That's notice *or* locate. The second only mentioned locating. The third is: "Subsonic ammunition applies a –1 dice pool modifier on all Perception Tests to notice the weapon’s use or locate the firing position."

So, 66% (most) disguise the existence *and* location, while 33% affect only location (and there's no good reason why that's the case, instead of simply affecting both). So, a silenced subsonic round electronically fired gives up to a -8 to notice, -9 to locate. That's big enough to constitute auto-failure, especially if you're taking into account -2 'Distracted', -2/-3 'Out of Vicinity'/'Far Away', -2 'Interfering Sound' and the base Threshold of 2 for silenced gunfire. They'd need like 25 dice! (I guess: -16, and 3 hits needed?) Definitely not '1 mile' of alerting people, anyway. (Obviously, I'm describing the best possible situation; unsilenced point-blank gunfire with a direct observer is a little more obvious, ha!)

Ha, Tymeaus, obviously I took 1 minute too long typing this.

Short and sweet is often better than detailed and long.....

Psh, I'd already tried that!

Touche...

Considering the fact that you avarage the stats, one arm with agility 9 doesn't do you any good.
Unless your trying to claim that the character fights with only that one arm.

Honestly, if everyone likes combat, but they need a varied team - dual-specialists are not hard to pull off. You can have a combat hacker, a sammie/break-in guy, a sammie with drones, a combat mage, and a combat-oriented adept who is also a decent face.

Spotlight issues come into play when everyone thinks that having the spotlight is fun. If I don't want the spotlight, then I don't care if the other guy actually has it all the time.

It's also worth noting that unless you do something really dumb or have a GM who is really into non-sensical levels of escalation you won't usually need the tweaked 15+ Automatics dice pool on your samurai either if everyone else in the group is dodgey/tough enough to stick their necks out a bit and make some attacks. The penalty for having defended against previous attacks since your last action can add up quite quickly when you're talking about 3 or 4 guys tossing out 2 attacks per pass at the target. Throw in a few drones, spirits or attack animals into the mix and even a dodge monkey prime runner can take it in the pants from a fairly run-of-the-mill 10 dice after smartlink & specialization Face, particularly if wide bursts are involved. It's like a Teamwork Test to murder people even before you factor in that over enough tests anyone is likely to roll badly sooner or later.

There might be a good reason to attack only with that arm, given that cyberlimbs deal P damage when used as unarmed attacks.

Saying that the character uses the cyber hand as a weapon becouse its damage code is wholly different from claiming that he only uses that one arm to fight.

The book explicitly states that you use the cyberarm's attributes if you use it for an attack. Of course it's not overly realistic because there's way more of your body involved in a good punch than just your arm but it works in game terms and it's awesome to have a high-powered mechanical arm punching holes in things so it's all good.

It's very 6 million dollar man.
Which lets face it, was all the rage when SR first came out.

Dammit, forgor that leading an attack with the cyber-arm part, for hole punching yeah the using the arms strenght kinda makes sense, the agility less so.
But who am i to argue with RAW, especially when it makes cyber limbs at least a little better, they after all do neeed all the help they can get.

Melee is for the times when you use the Escape Artist skill.

Hypothetical situation:

My 9 Agility sniper also has 1 rank in escape artist. Our team, which consists of a pistols user, a guy that prefers to fight with his fists, a guy who prefers to fight with blades, and myself who fights with longarms/assault rifles/smgs depending on the situation. We get into a situation where death is very likely and escape is improbable. We surrender. We're captured and bound and loaded into a van for transport to X location with 1-2 guards in the van with us. During the escape, I'm wriggling my way out of the bindings. Once I am free I don't act, but give an acknowledgment to the team that I am free. The pistol and blade guy cause distractions for the two guards while I either knock out one of the guards or try to free the unarmed guy.

The point of the extraneous skills is to get your character out of situations where it is outside of its comfort zone and running at lessened effectiveness. Melee firmly falls under that category for -most- characters.

--



Tactical nuclear weapons. You gotta be sure afterall.

--



Just gotta say, one of my Top 5 military leaders of World War II.

#5 - Omar Bradley
#4 - Otto Weyland
#3 - Isoroku Yamamoto
#2 - Erwin Rommel
#1 - George S. Patton

--



And that is why I make sure my firearms guy has every possible vision modification, including ultrasound, but we're not talking runners vs runners. This game is meant to be deadly. If you character can't reasonably take down your opponents without suffering a lot of damage, you either bunker down and let them get closer or run.

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Agreed. I think that's a subconscious reason why I haven't put a lot of effort into gaining more than one additional IP. I regularly see myself doing 12P damage without called shots using my firearms. If I don't kill something with a single shot, it's either got a metric crapton of damage resistance or it's badly injured and stacked up on wound modifiers. When combat his, I prefer to play tactically, taking targets in the most logical order.

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I agree with this fully. My firearms character (when looking at it from an outside perspective) would appear to be a sniper. You would think I would jump at the opportunity to open up and drop people, but I actually hate doing it. The reality is that his best utility is observation and stealth. 9 Agility, 5 Intuition, 5 Infiltration, and 4 Perception not including vision modifications, specializations, equipment, or other augments that otherwise boost the skills. I try to play as a wild card in combat and prefer to enter only when the situation tells me that the rest of the team may be overwhelmed or injured by an individual in combat.

I simply house-ruled the double melee defense away. All combatants in my game get the same base Reaction to defend against Ranged and Melee attacks, unless they choose Full Defense. It leveled the playing field and seemed no less arbitrary to my players than the RAW was. It's working out quite well for us.

No, I think it's because it's vastly harder to dodge bullets, Neo.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ooops
misread
Thought you meant my house rule

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

You know, it would fix everything if they just brought DiKote back.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.