I've seen a lot of examples on the board about shooting penalties where people stack up fog, glare, partial light, and possibly even blind fire for a ridiculously high penalty.
If you've got fog (-4), glare(-1), and partial light(-2) for a total of -7, you're better off just closing your eyes and taking the -6 for blind fire. Right? I mean, how can your visibility penalties be worse than blind?

Of course, you use Intuition instead of Agility when you're firing blind. This raises the initial concern of what happens when you have a high intuition character who closes their eyes to shoot more accurately? Well, this fear is quickly put to rest when you realize that the -6 blind fire penalty keeps you safe, since no one has more than 7 Intuition and less than 1 Agility, so you're okay. Right? Well no, not really, if you rule (logically) that the max penalty is -6.

So:
You're using agility as long as your pool is greater than your blind fire pool, obviously, otherwise you'd close your eyes to shoot better.
Agility+Skill+Visibility Mods+Non-visibility Mods >= Intuition + Skill -6 +Non-visibility Mods. Right?
Algebra happens:
Agility + Visibility Mods >= Intuition -6
More algebra:
Intuition-Agility-6 >= Visibility Mods
Everything on the left side is known, so let's take a normal non-munchy example of Intuition 5 and Agility 2.
Plugging into equation, as long as their visibility modifiers are -3 or better they are okay, but below that point they might as well aim, close their eyes, and fire using the -6 for blind fire and intuition, they'll actually get more dice!


So either:
1) I'm wrong, and visibility penalties can exceed -6, so firing blind in smoke is harder than firing blind.
2) There are situations where you are more accurate if you close your eyes.
3) Each character has a maximum visibility penalty equal to their Intuition-Agility-6, or -6, whichever is greater.

Sorry for the long winded explanation. Thoughts?

I'm not following your algebra. Please provide a deffinition for the following:

visibility mods vs. non-visibility mods.

Math notwithstanding, "worse than blind" would be when there is active visual distraction: eg the sudden glaring headlights in the heavy fog and low light, when you're trying to identify an entirely different target such as the line on the road which keeps you from driving off it.

I don't think that performance really increases.
It might just be that closing your eyes and trusting your intuition can sometimes be more helpful than trying to get a shot at your target with stuff not only impairing your vision, but actively distracting you...

And if some smarmy player gets the idea to have his high-int char run around and constantly blind-fire the opposition into submission? You stab him.

I suspect that many perception modifiers also take into account other senses, even when they might seem not to. However, in heavily visually-oriented people (most of us!), the data from your eyes often drowns out what your other senses are telling you. Most times we automatically filtre out what we don't immediately need, but where senses are already impaired, we tend to try to focus hard on whatever we can make out -- and a distraction or two in there (glare) can completely throw us. In the vehicle-driving example, most non brakes-related accidents in fog or heavy snow happen either from accidentally driving off the road (often when approached by on-coming vehicles in the other lane), or by following and focusing tightly on the taillights of the car ahead of you (which cuts out both distance perception and periphery).

The vehicle-driving example is inappropriate for this next part: but when you're on your feet and learning to fight in a dojo, you're often taught to react independently of what your eyes are telling you: because your eyes simply can't process all the information fast enough. By the time you see and visually process an attack coming at you, it's too late. Close your eyes, close out distractions to focus on what is immediately relevant: and yes, your performance might improve.

And yes, Naysayer, we might well call it intuition. It's just that the game mechanic does not. You could say it's not logical

This could work in different ways as well. For example, in a noisy or highly smelly environment, people tend not to react to visual stimuli as well as they normally would. A different kind of distracting sensory stimulus is pain, which has been shown to impact specifically on the same parts of the brain that govern visual processing.

Hmm, time to make a completely blind gun-adept with high intuition and the blind fighting adept power.

I'd rule that there are no worse penalties for vision than blindness. That might make it so that some characters shoot better with their eyes closed, but I'm not overly concerned with that.

Yes. And exploity.
Which is why, as a GM, it is your responsibility to maintain a sharp knife.

There, I would have to see your math in detail.

Btw -- have you realised how ironic your signature is, in this thread?

Someone with Intuition 7 and Agility 1 spend a lot of points for a cute trick, and will still suck at tons of Agility based skills unless they spent an inordinate amount of resources upping them.

Let them have their one upswing. It won't make up for the downsides.

Naysayer: Sharp knife. Check.
Talia: What math?
James: Good point. Little Miss Closer-her-eyes-when-she-shoots isn't going to be ruling combat, it's a question of total suckage vs. near-total suckage, so throw the poor dog a bone. I like it.

If you just imagine a person with Intuition 7 and Agility 1, it suddenly becomes not strange at all that closing eyes might do good for his/her aim.

Wait -- you're considering the negatives solely in the context of negatives to combat hits, and not also more generally in the context of Perception and "perceiving in detail"? We've found the latter essential in combat situations: which is why your INT / AG example threw me.

Ah, there's the confusion. Because I'm used to the kinds of combats where two sides are not clearly defined, and concealment/stealth/invisibility/masking/high signatures further make havoc of trying to identify opponents.

I dream of clearly spotted targets with known locations

A related question would be whether you could get the benifit of positive modifiers with your eyes closed? Does spending actions aiming with your eyes closed give you bonuses? How about smartlinks - do they provide any bonus if you're shooting eyes closed?

A smartlink is a vision enhancer. It's be incredibly hard to use if you've got no vision.

well, closing your eyes doesn't turn off your smartlink. it just gives your opponents full cover (from your eyelids), which is less of an impediment than certain combinations of other mods.

No, they get full Concealment from your eyelids. Cover is something that can stop or deflect a round.

The smartlink might actually foil your wannabe Rutger Hauer char, assuming it works with eyes closed (and I don't see why we would assume otherwise).
The smartlink comes with a camera, so even when YOU close your eyes, your gun still stares right into that smoky cloud of glaring heavy rain.
And then displays that mess right into your fov.

concealment and cover are the same thing, in SR. if i were an instructor, drilling new troops on basic combat techniques, i'd use the 'proper' terminology. as we're discussing SR, the proper term is the one the book uses.

Is anyone else thinking of river in Serenity?

I wasn't until now. The situation is completely different.

not really, if you assume she had an intuition of like 12. with 6 dice for pistols, that leaves her a total of 12 dice. if her Agi was 5 or less, she'd be better off shooting blind.

[edit] deleted

Ah, but she had specifically seen her opponents' locations first and marked them. Then she looks away ("can't look" -- as a purely emotional thing). That's not so much shooting blind as -- what, spatial recognition? 3-d memory?

She still would have been closing her eyes and shooting blind though. The entire point of the shooting blind in this thread was you had seen the target and then closed your eyes and shot blind. That's exactly what river had done.

Remember the old tactical computer? That's how I think River's mind might work: ie. in a way that goes beyond just sight or lack of sight. She has a sharp sense of environment that doesn't seem to be limited to what she's looking at. Intuition? Logic? Adept abilities? Something else entirely?

We don't even know exactly how her psychic Reading abilities work.

But I opened a thread to play with River specifically -- it's an interesting question.