ok, so i have my range (pistol, rifle) skill and i get up in the grip of a melee master.

he attacks me rolling his (unarmed, edged weapon, club) skill. what do i do.

can i roll my pistols?, if i get more net success do i shoot him, or club him with the gun?

If you use your Pistols Skill, you could shoot him (albeit with a penalty)

If you use your Clubs Skill, you could thump him with the pistol.

If you used your Unarmed Skill, you could hit him with your free hand/foot/heed.

Depends.

You cannot use a ranged combat skill as a melee skill.

If you have a gun in your hands and are attacked by a melee person the only skills you may use is Clubs, or you may use a free action to drop your gun and use Unarmed Combat. If you don't have the appropriate melee skill you must use defaulting.

That's how min maxed gun people get screwed by judiciously positioned physads.

EDIT: To clarify following the last post, if I have Pistols 6 I cannot just use that to roll 6 dice for the purpose of defending against and possibly counterattacking against a NPC using Unarmed Combat 6 to make an attack on me. Pistols 6 counts for nothing when he's in the middle of attacking me with his melee attack.

Ah, I see the possibly misconception. I never meant to imply that a person could use his Pistols Skills as a defense. He could indeed still use that Pistols Skill to attack on his turn however, with a modifier as I said.

And I don't see any rule about having to 'drop a weapon' in order to be able to use Unarmed Combat. Do you have a reference?

Right, meaning you could use the limbs that don't contain the gun. You know, the feet, the head, or even the off-hand. There are no hard-and-fast rules as far as melee is concerned as far as which part of the body is used, nor are there, as far as I know, any penalties or modifiers for the different parts.

Which is where it gets fuzzy -- some GMs will let a dude toting a machinegun use Unarmed 'cause he still has his feet free and can kick. Some GMs won't let someone with a pistol in one hand use Unarmed 'cause he's just plain holding something (and pretty much everything is a Club by default, so he must use the Clubs skill).

It varies from game to game.

...letsee...

While holding a small firearm (pistol or SMG without stock extended)

Elbow smashes would work (just watch an NBA game)
Forearm smashes would work.

...of course I would allow these only if the player declares that is what his character is doing.

Of course 5 BPs for the Ambidexterity Quality and then you can shoot with one hand and punch with the other all you want.

Oh, or we could force players to use Clubs + offhand(unarmed)/2!

But that would just add to the silliness and emotional rollercoaster of the Ambidexterity rules.

Using every part of your body when making an unarmed combat attack yields no bonus.

Wearing special gloves makes an Ambidextrous person 50% better!

Wielding a knife in one hand and nothing in the other yields no bonus.

Wielding a knife in one hand and wearing a special glove on the other does!

Wielding a stun baton in one hand and nothing in the other doesn't.

Holding a gun in one hand and nothing in the other does!

Why do you think Michael Jackson has that special glove? It's all about the 50% bonus...

On grapple checks, maybe.

"Michael Jackson, look what you've done!"

~J

Well, you could penalize the character holding the ball, I mean gun. -1 die?

But, if you penalize the character for only being able to use one arm, ask yourself if you would do the same to a character who had lost an arm and is attacking using no weapons. If not, then what is the difference? I'd say that the character with two arms holding a gun has more options available to him than a one armed man not holding anything...

KK, would you insist on any TN penalty being given to a character who was handcuffed in front of his waist? His hands are about the same distance apart, his arms afforded roughly the same range of motion, as a character holding a basketball.

And remember -- just because someone is tossing elbows in a basketball game, and sometimes connects, doesn't mean they'd be effective in a fight. To use Shadowrun terms, that's one guy spending a full-round action to make Athletics checks and try to play basketball, while another guy is whipping out the Unarmed (and catching his opponent flatfooted as if in a Surprise, keeping him from getting to make a countering check). It's not two guys in a fight, it's one guy playing basketball and the other guy taking a swing.

Sure, if someone's watching something else, I can bust his nose with my elbow pretty easily. But, y'know, once the brawl breaks out on the court, dude doesn't keep holding onto the ball and kicking ass, does he?

I don't quite get the problem. If the guy with the pistol is attacked and forced into melee combat (and doesn't want to just suck up the penalty and shoot his attacker), then if he has the Clubs skill he should be able to thump his opponent's skull with the pistol, and if he has the Unarmed skill then he should be able to hoof his assailant in the nuts.

Well, if you want to follow the letter of the rules rather than the spirit of the rules, the character who is using an empty hand strike in Escrima is actually using his Clubs skill + 1/2 of his Offhand Unarmed Combat skill (or just his normal unarmed combat skill if Ambidextrous). The person who hits with the sword hilt is using his Edge Weapons (Iaido) skill + 1/2 of his Offhand Clubs (Katana Hilt) skill, which is permissible since the katana is a two-handed weapon and he is using both hands to hold it, one of which is his off hand.

The rules don't specifically disallow unarmed combat, they simply do not list unarmed combat as a secondary weapon. However, since unarmed combat is a skill rather than a weapon, and a fist is a body part rather than a weapon, and the table only listed weapons, one could stretch the intent to include offhand unarmed combat without gloves.

If you know you're stretching intent, don't say you're playing by "the letter of the rules, rather than the spirit."

This makes me curious what sort of experience you have with the court system.

A judge's duty is generally to enforce the laws as laid out, not to interpret them. A judge sits on the bench to make sure the trial is fair and follows the rules, to judge the evidence, determine guilt of the defendant and met out appropriate punishment. Only very rarely will the law be so poorly defined that it requires any sort of interpretation. I would be very concerned if I went to trial and the judge began talking about how he has to interpret what is clearly laid out.

You can argue that the rules of the game are so poorly written they regularly require interpretation, however I would have to disagree. As a GM, I spend a lot more time making up plot, rolling for NPCs, so on and so forth than interpreting anything.

I'm an originalist; the spirit of the law is the intent of its framers.
Obviously, the people who write the rules are not omniscient. They cannot know of every possible situation and they cannot write a rule or a law that applies itself correctly in every possible situation that could fall under that law. Likewise, they cannot imagine every technological or social development that might occur after the law is written, thus their intent must be filtered through a modern lens.

The single most important Judicial Canon is that no law may be interpreted in a way that produces an absurd or patently unjust result. The assumption that the legislative body did not intend to create a paradox or eschew all reason is necessary to the function of any rules system.


There are four reasonable interpretations of the two-weapon melee rules as they relate to shock glove.

The first is probably closest to the intent of the authors and is based on the fact that the second weapon does not modify the damage code at all. Assume that the secondary weapon is used primarily for parrying, blocking, and deflecting. The Shock glove contains heavy insulation and metal electrical contacts which allow it is be used to grab blades and deflect blows. Following this interpretation, one would also be required to assume that the lack of hardliner gloves was a scrivener's error.

A second interpretation is that the list cannot be taken as exhaustive but can instead be considered a set of categories and that inclusion of shock gloves necessitates the inclusion for unarmed combat, as well.

A third interpretation is that unarmed combat was never meant to provide extra dice and that empty-handed attacks were assumed to be included in the normal use of a weapon. This requires the assumption that the inclusion of shock gloves on the list was a scrivener's error.

A strictly purposive interpretation of the rule has results very similar to the first interpretation, but different reasoning. The purpose of the two-weapon combat rule of to give bonuses to characters who use two weapons. The framers never intended to grant universal melee bonuses to every ambidextrous character, which would be the result of allowing off-hand unarmed combat without gloves. The use of offhand shock gloves puts the unarmed ambidextrous fighter in the same position as the armed ambidextrous fighter. He can be disarmed and his weapon can attract unwanted attention. However, the enumerated list cannot be taken as exhaustive. The inclusion of broad weapon classifications in conjunction with very specific weapons has the potential to create absurdity. For example, a character would be able to use a four-foot-long 30-kilo solid stone club as an offhand weapon simply because it is classified as an club but would not be able to use a lighter and shorter sword in the off hand simply because it is classified as a sword. Obviously, the purpose of the list, taken as a whole, is to prevent the use of large weapons as offhand weapons. One must interpret any weapons combination in that light, rather then relying solely on the list given.


nezumi, it is absurd to assume that the law should always be applied solely according to its letter. For example, the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America guarantees that Congress may make no law abridging Freedom of Speech or Freedom of the Press.
The letter of the law, taken to its logical extreme, would make it legal to pass vital strategic information to an enemy force during a time of war, commonly known as treason and espionage. It would also allow crime lords to order their underlings to commit murder without worry. It would permit the incitement of riots, fraud, slander, and harassment.
But some judges had enough common sense to decide that the framers of the Constitution did not intend for the First Amendment to protect treason, espionage, solicitation of murder, fraud, slander, inciting riots, harassment, or any other clearly criminal act. Thus, they developed the doctrine of speech as action. They decided that using speech to commit a criminal act is different from simply stating an opinion or publishing the truth. Does the Constitution say that anywhere? No. But it would be absurd not to assume that it is implied.

Just read any written court decision and you are likely to see a huge amount of interpretation, especially from higher courts.
A good example of this is the case of the Holy Trinity Church v. United States, where the Supreme Court of the United States basically ruled that an immigration statute that was passed by the United States Congress, which was fully permissible under the Constitution, simply did not mean what it said.
http://supreme.justia.com/us/143/457/case.html
They assumed the existence of an exception that was no codified because the lack of such an exception would be an absurd violation of general public policy.
The lawmakers can't think of every possible situation in which the law could be applied, after all.

This is true even in Civil Law jurisdictions, which tend to prefer purposive interpretation. The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the world's largest Civil Law jurisdiction favors purposive interpretation, for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation

In regards to the original issue, it is obviously the intent of the SR3 framers that you defend in melee using the skill that is appropriate for the weapon that you hold in your primary hand, regardless of the attack that you are using, unless you choose to use a Martial Arts maneuver, though holding a weapon in your primary hand may preclude the use of some maneuvers unless you have chosen a martial art that allows you to use maneuvers with weapons. .

...oy, now my brain is beginning to hurt.

I'm going to stick with Fortune's take on the whole thing. It's a hell of a lot simpler..

The way I will run things is thus:

In a normal pub scrum situation, you hit the guy with the butt of your gun - you use clubs (or its default), you hit the guy with the elbow of your arm holding the gun -you use unarmed (or its default), you have some funky cinematic martial art that allows you do a combination of different attacks/maneouveres - you use that, you use a melee weapon for a different mode of attack (eg flat of the blade) - you use that melee weapon skill.

...plain and simple. Combat is complex enough already.

To be clear, I'm not saying that interpretation is not occaisionally part of a judge's job, but you make it sound like that is the whole entirety of his job. Of all of the times I've been in court, I've never seen the judge sit down and say 'well, the law says one should not go above the speed limit, but let me interpret that'...

Generally the laws are written well enough that no interpretation is required. Only when you get to the higher courts does interpretation become important.