Swat team snipers surrounding them with medium to high (4+) force spirits to harass them and weaken them. High armor drones along with the spirits, but spirits are cheaper to replace when damaged. A lot of it would depend on where the runners were when they were found. If they're smart they headed left the city, preferably for a place the the Star (or Kinght Errant if that's who they killed) doesn't have any legal powers.

If the offended agency doesn't have legal powers they may end up with just a runner and/or elite cop team on them.

It's possible to get out of the situation, but it'd require a lot of smarts, roleplaying, and firepower used in the right ways. Sometimes hammers miss the nail or just hit it enough to bend it without actually driving it home.

How would you handle t3h advanced riflemen? Just have the PC start resisting shots? Have the PCs roll perception and if they fail they get hit? Tell the PCs there are riflemen and have the PCs get shot at when they poke their heads up from behind cover, but in so doing let them use pool and crap to avoid dying?

I'd probably just have the first one miss or roll poorly, because dying from a sniper shot with little to no chance of living is no fun for anyone. Maybe they'd be looking to capture and so use gel or stick shock rounds.

Standard police procedure probably should be gel rounds. Accidental killings are bad for business.

Yep, and a live PC is usually funner than a dead one.

Yeah, some groups don't mind that sort of thing, but we like to at least think we have a chance of avoiding instant death.

Why didn't they have a chance to notice the sniper before he fired? Even if he was invisible and hidden there would still be resistance rolls + perception rolls. Although, if you've let them start a combat with an undetected sniper shot then they're just getting a bit of the "turn about is fair play" treatment for not having you roll perception for their victims in the past.

I fail to see how under those circumstances, a sniper with enough time to get off a shot in an area full of cover will be that much harder to spot given that in SR runners often have cyberware which would make them more capable to perceive their sniper than your average joe today. What else are they going to be doing as they walk through, anyway, if not look for danger? Stare at their shoelaces?

That's what the stealth skill is for: being stealthy. Oddly enough, the perception skill is for being perceptive. Generally the two work against one another. A boost to the TN or more dice should be available from having so much time and help, but nothing's completely undetectable. What if the helper botched his perception roll or just rolled poorly? Did you roll it out with opposed stealth and perception?

Yeah, instant death can happen at any time. Given the power the GM wields, anything and everything can cause instant death. We just don't care for that sort of game. It's not as "realistic" but we're happy to drop realism in favor of fun. Obviously YMMV, and that's cool.

James is right in that this depends *completely* on your group. If your group doesn't mind instant death at any turn, go for it. And if your group has just pissed off too many high-level people, it's probably kinder than a cow from space (althouhg less amusing than a pair of Apaches shooting in every window and demolishing the entire building).

Well, the thing about letting them have the Perception test is more about the tingle on the back of your neck that tells you something's wrong. If they scored a success against the sniper's Stealth TN + Cover + Darkness (that's a TN of 16, if the sniper rolled a 2) on the test, they get a tingle the moment before the sniper shot - and at best that means they can knock off the +2 ambush modifier from the Surprise test. If they got two successes it means they saw something odd, a flash of movement, a reflection of light off the scope, etc.

Sure, you can forgo it, but would you forgo it for the NPCs? I know I wouldn't.

Hmm, this discussion actually gives me an idea. If the PCs set up a sniping their initial targets get no chance to do anything but resist the damage without pool

This is why my street sam lives in an underground bunker.

Does it have only one entrance? If so, they could just set up a drone sniper there and have it kill him.

Now you're getting away from "specific situation" and into the "what if this, what if that" stage. Discussion from here on out will be pointless, as all it will do is show that we have different ways of using the skills in the game.

That said, if the snipers had crawled up on the building while the PCs were standing there, I would have rolled stealth for them and perception for the PCs. They didn't, however. By the time the PCs got there, all they had to do was lay there and shoot at them. Therefore, no perception test until the first shot.

Given the distance, conditions, and situation, I did not have the PCs roll perception in this particular situation. Why do you seem as though I've mortally offended you by insulting your ancestors? Want your PCs to have the chance to notice something like this in your game? That's fine, have them roll. I don't use perception when I don't think it's possible to perceive the target.

If you can see someone, they have a chance to see you unless you're watching them remotely. That chance is probably astronomically low (represented by a really high TN and/or dice pool penalties). It's still there. Obviously your group differs, since it works that way from both sides of the GM screen. As long as the rules function the same in all directions and people are enjoying themselves it's all good.

When I said to not roll it if it was impossible to detect I wasn't referring to stealth tests vs. perception. If something requires a stealth test, it should (IMO) allow a perception test. My post was more about things that can't physically be detected no matter what: visual stuff behind walls, etc.

Keep in mind, the big question here isn't so much whether the PCs should have a reasonable chance to dodge/spot/whatever, but whether your PCs are heroes, or just another group of people on the street.

If they're heroes, the rules are a bit different. They are somehow special, and they don't die from silly things like hidden snipers. If this is your game, you should roll perception against a reasonable number and, in fact, the GM should consider spending the PCs' karma pool secretly on their behalf to reroll failed perception modifiers (this completely depends on your group. I bring this up because I run online games where no one wants to see the mechanics, so it's valid. Table top groups may not like that idea so much.) The GM should also consider fudging, letting the PCs roll their dodge anyway, so on and so forth, because the idea is heroes don't fall into such silly traps.

If they're just 'another group of people on the street', they follow the same rules as everyone else. That means they're more likely to die in the gutter, alone and ignoble. Sucks to be them. They may get a perception check against some astronomical number, but no rerolls, no dodge. They can use karma pool on their damage resistance and perhaps HoG, but that's it. More than likely they're dead (or short a HoG). A simple trap like a well placed C4 mine or a group of snipers will kill the entire party quickly and cleanly, and there really isn't a whole lot they can do about it once they're in place.

So argue about perception tests all you want, both sides are 'right'. The important detail is what advantages do the PCs have over the rest of the world.

Hmm. I'm a bit concerned about even letting people roll perception vs really high numbers, since you'll end up rolling a lot of dice if you roll for each party member and furthermore people might karma reroll the perception test if they're nervous. My gut feeling is that even if you give them a TN like 25 or something they will hit it every now and then. :/

I prefer games where the PCs are somewhere in the middle of heroes and Joes. Don't hide from death, but don't force it to happen. Ask anyone I've run a game for: death happens, sometimes quite often. If you do something that can result in your death, you'd better be able to scrape through the aftermath. But it takes a hell of a lot of screwing up for me to set up a situation with no chance of survival.

Sometimes the chacnes of survival are all predicated on running away to fight another day and the characters don't do that. In those cases, they die. Sometimes the chances are predicated on fighting the bastards off and limping away. And sometimes it means you have to figure out why you're so royally fucked and find a way to fix it. I prefer the last, because it makes for better stories then "you got shot int he head, roll a new character."

Obviously YMMV.

For the record, the PC not only lived (through expeditious use of medical skills and karma), but the whole aftermath became quite the bitchin' story line.

I understood that; I just think a lot of it was run oddly. Random target? What type of sniper is this guy? He's got hours to set-up, information on the team, and he flips a coin to see who takes the first shot?

Random to be fair to the players. Random from a GM "I can shoot any of them to kick the scene off right now" viewpoint.

They were all standing in a little group, and they had all changed into "regular joe" clothes on the sub. With no obvious cyber on display, no obvious weapons on their persons, and the snipers not being at all magical (and therefore unable to assense), I didn't think any of them were presenting an overly "obvious" target.

Also, show me where I said they had information on the team. I'm assuming you're trying to trap me by indicating that if the snipers knew about the team, they would "geek the mage first" (or some such thing), and therefore my rolling randomly for a target is somehow "wrong"?

You said he has a picture of the team. You said he had hours to prepare. You said he knew where they would be. That's information. What kind of sniper is this guy that he wouldn't ask the client which one was the mage? You set up a completely contrived scenario, the "no Perception test" is simply the tip of my feeling that you handled it wrong. I'm glad it worked for the group.

As a Sniper you shot the one who you can get the best shot on

after the thrid shot you should expect to have your location known by the target

possibly after the second

Look, I could keep going back through my notes, and going back through how it went during the session, but I'm not going to.

I'm not a sniper, but I imagine I would go for the one who poses a threat to me personally first, followed by the one most likely to escape before I'm ready for a second shot. The guy standing in the middle of a field picking his nose I shoot last because he'll likely be the last to get into cover, which gives me a chance of getting 3 kills instead of 2.

What, you mean that just because the opening post and title of the thread indicated it was supposed to be a discussion/debate that people posting their game experiences in it should expect a discussion/debate?

Oh, you totally nailed me on that one. Good job. Three marks.

I apologize if I got overly defensive. My reaction wasn't to KT's disagreement, but rather to his smarmy "holier than thou" attitude in presenting it, which may well have just been my perception and not how he intended it.

I get irritated when "debate" moves into "I'm right and you're wrong and that makes you stupid", which is how I think KT's posts started coming out. Flat out disagreement I can handle. Obviously pandering passive aggressive statements like "simply the tip of my feeling that you handled it wrong. I'm glad it worked for the group", I'm not so good with.

Let me give you why that sentence rubs me the wrong way so badly. The one point that you say is your basis for calling my actions "wrong" is that I didn't give them a perception test to notice the sniper. We've beaten that topic to death, and it comes down to a difference of opinion and personal methodology.

However, your statement carries the implication that I handled nary a thing "right" in the entire encounter, and you have no logical support for such a position. You were neither there for the scenario, nor are you possessing of the knowledge of what led to it, how it was handled from start to finish, what does and doesn't work for my group, or what resulted from the session.

The only other thing I can recall having a particular disagreement over was the method of choosing a target. I clearly explained why I chose to roll randomly for the sniper's first target. You might not have done it that way, but that's beside the point, because there really wasn't a "wrong" way to choose a target.

What else is there that we've even discussed that you can say was handled "wrong"? Honestly, it feels like after we got done with the difference in perception test usage, you were just looking for something else to argue about.

There's a big difference, to me anyway, between the way some people handle debate and disagreement (see the first half of this thread, where there was at least a modicum of respect), and the way that others handle it (see the latter). Unfortunately, it's all too easy to be drug along by the emotion of it when the second one happens.

So yeah, no offense intended, and I'm not looking for hard feelings. Even if it's just the interweb, I don't like to pee in people's cheerios overly much. That's just where I'm coming from at the moment. Feel free to correct any misperception from which I am suffering.

Yeah, I don't spend a whole lot of time pandering to your emotional sensitivity.

I think you handled it wrong. Peroid. I could go on for days about "no chance" and a Johnson hiring twin snipers to get out of paying, but there's no point becuase you're too emotionally charged about it.

That said, I really am glad it worked for your group. If I wasn't, it would have been made more obvious, because I would have started calling you names.