I have to always remind my PCs to concentrate their fire on the most wounded targets in order to eliminate threats and stay alive.

We are very different GMs.

I would say in general though that a difference of THREE BOXES OR MORE in Health is immediately obvious, although less than that might be pushing it. But if one guy has taken eight boxes and the next guy is fresh that's gotta be pretty obvious.

I'd say given his complaints and one or two of his comments that the more likely explanation is that your players are very different.

Of course players do that, in any RPG. That's not the same as knowing who that target is, possibly unfairly. We simply don't know if the difference was 8 boxes, or if the character had shot/seen that character shot, etc.

Touche.



Fair enough.

Where did I compare SR to RL? You're the one who brought RL shooting skills into the conversation. Thanks a ton for making my point for me, though: what Vincent does in the scene you linked could never happen in Shadowrun. I love it when other people make my arguments.

Nope. Thats my brother.

No.
No.
No.
About 2-3 meters, for the closer one, 5-6 for the further one.

Composure. Good idea, I tend to forget about those non-attribute attributes.


When you spend hours and hours of your free time coming up with the scenarios, you can make the calls. If all you want is to be able to show up and play: suck it up! (P.S. Dungeon"master"....Game"master") If all you want is rules and players: grab your miniature wargame and have fun.


I see what you are saying, but I like to have peope not roll all at the same time, just too much of a cluster-fuck. These guys can't keep a die on the table even when they aren't rolling them....plus what Cheops said in post #47.

I don't know what tools you use to help you run a game. If you want them to declare actions before knowing outcomes but rolling one at a time, write their actions down on a notepad, post-it note, white pad, index card, or anything else.

This way he isn't making decisions based on dice rolls he's witnessed and you're not forced to limit his decisions because of dice rolls you've witnessed.

Hmmm - seeing as how the character doesn't seem to have any compelling reason to be able to shoot at the less immediate threat (and it sounds like the closest one is very close), and how the rules state that those with the same initiative score act simultaneously, it doesn't make any sense in any way for the character to shoot at the "wounded one". If actions are happening simultaneously, there is no "wounded one" to shoot at, until the dust settles.

Maybe the player was confused since they got to go "last"? As long as they realized that everything was happening at the same time, well...

You could call for a capital "C" Composure test, I guess. I was more thinking of a negative dice pool modifier to model being able to ignore the imminent danger. Either way, whatever would keep it fun

I think you just described our last game.

Yeah, I feel your pain - been there too

This thread seems like it hearkens a little back to the other "metagaming" thread - where the questions are kind of, who's in charge and is everyone having fun and how do you get to this elusive "fun" state etc.

As a GM, it's definitely a balancing act for having fun - between meeting a player's wishes and not letting the player just do whatever the hell they want.

To be sorta on topic, mark me down as being in the "it was metagaming on the player's part" camp. But maybe with more communication and willingness to meet the player halfway (let him do it but with modifiers), this wouldn't have been more of an issue.

Just because the GM presumably invested more of his time coming up with the scenarios does not mean that he can or should place his own enjoyment above his players. Or even that of one player. All I want is to play a game and enjoy myself, I am not here for the GM to enjoy himself (it is his scenario afterall) at my expense. If all the GM wants is to enjoy himself, he can perform such self-mastorbatory exercises when we are not playing: Just because he is the GM does not mean that I should suck him up. If all you want is to play your scenario, you can go write a book.

There seem to be a lot of assumptions here. People are assuming that Rand got some kind of enjoyment out of shafting his player or that the player's enjoyment of the game was ruined because he wasn't allowed to pick his target in this unusual situation. All I see reading his post is that he and the player disagreed, and he as the GM made a call. Its not like this is a rare event, and generally speaking its poor table etiquette to argue rules during the game.

All that aside, lets not rehash the "GM is just another player" vs "GM is privileged" debate. I don't think that is what Rand was saying.

This. Come on, he may have made a bad call, but at least from what he's stated, it wasn't out of some malicious intent to make players miserable. A "dick move" in my book requires the person to actually be a dick, which is something that requires intent. Just because it's the GM that messes up doesn't automatically make it part of some plot to suck the joy from the game.

That said, I believe this was said above, but it bears repeating - the GM should very rarely say "No", the correct answer is almost always "How". In this case, if you don't think it's likely that the character could easily spot who's more wounded, a perception check with heavy penalties seems like the obvious play.

High-larious!!!

BTW
If the team had a Tacnet, and their hacker had either hacked into their biomonitors. Or, someone had used a nanite delivery system on them to activate nanite biomonitors that were sending info to said tacnet.

I'd totally let the player shoot at the 'most' hurt guy.
But in this case. He should either shoot the guy in front of him, or make a willpower check to try and shoot the other one.

Agreed, that's a great use of TacNet. Even without hacked vitals info, just knowing who'd been fired on would give a (very rough) idea of the likely wounded. If Rand had said *that* was the case, obviously things would be different.

TacNET: legitimizing metagaming since 2007

I assume that's its explicit purpose, along with Matrix 2.0. All table-talk info is instantly shared, regardless of character location, etc.

I imagine you could even put little "life bars" over the heads of team-mates via AR.






-karma

Exactly. I play my hacker character with extensive video-game-style AR overlays; I think that's what life is like in 2070.

I agree with the perception test at -2 for the perception for free action to see how badly wounded the target is. I don't tell my players how many boxes of damage they take after soak. You need a biomoniter to tell how badly hurt YOU are if you are under the effect of a pain editor.

If one of the targets has been shot and the other is not, then it's pretty clear at a glance which one is more wounded. Shotting the closest target might be your first instinct. It might not. Unless you've been in a gunfight, you have no idea what you would do. People do all kinds of things you might find surprising in the heat of battle. Like reload their weapon five time without firing a shot. Like shooting at friendlies instead of enemies. Like shooting at whatever is directly in front of them because they have tunnel vision so tight that they literally can't see anything else. Like firing on the same target other people are firing on despite it not being the most immediate threat.

Your player only gets to control one thing in the game - you shouldn't take that control away without an overwhelming reason. I don't think this remotely applies.

We don't even know if that's the situation, though. It all depends on the details.

The situation is a firefight. That's all I need to know to know that you cannot accurately predict the actions of another person, and likely not even yourself in that situation, so trying to force your predicted action onto someone else's character is wrong.

That's not 'the situation'.

"If one of the targets has been shot and the other is not, then it's pretty clear at a glance which one is more wounded." That's a situation. A conditional statement, and we simply don't know if that condition is met or not. As we've already discussed in the thread, there's a difference between shooting whoever's objectively the most hurt, and who the target thinks might be the most hurt.

It's entirely possible that the player here meant 'whoever I think looks more hurt', but it's also possible that he meant 'whoever has the fewest boxes left'. Or, for that matter, 'whoever's taken the most boxes of damage' or 'whoever's taken the most attacks', etc. It depends on the details.

Yes. It is "the situation." There is a fight. It involves guns. That's a firefight. The situation is a firefight. Period. All that other stuff is tangential and unimportant. However, let's assume that they are not. Let's assume for the moment that they are critical. It changes my argument not at all.



Here we see that "the situation" is, in point of fact, one uninjured target and one injured target, as I previously asserted. We also see that "the situation" is the GM pretending to know how another person would act in a firefight, as I also asserted.

Therefore, we can clearly see that whether or not it is "all in the details," my original statement stands exactly as written. We do know the situation, and it is exactly as I presented it.

Not quite. As I said, it depends on what the character knows about their hurt/unhurt status, and on what the player meant.

The hypothetical you present is certainly *a* possibility. Not the only one.

The hypothetical I present doesn't care what the player meant or what the character knows. It literally does not matter. For all we know, the player pointed at the map as said which one he wanted to attack, and it is Rand who called it more injured. Regardless, it doesn't matter if the player said "I want to shoot that one" or "I want to shoot the one which has taken more boxes of damage." First, one was hurt and the other was unhurt. Generally, it's pretty easy to tell which is hurt more when one is hurt and the other is unhurt. The hurt one is hurt more than the unhurt one. Second, even if the player wanted to attack the more hurt one and the character couldn't tell for some reason, the only correct response is to tell the player that the character cannot tell which one is more hurt. Trying to force the player to attack the closer one out of some "survival instinct" is pure and unadulterated crap.

Basically, this is the ONLY part that really matters: the GM though he could tell what someone else would do in a firefight. The GM cannot possibly know this. Period. Unless you can somehow show that the GM did not do this, my argument stands.

Attempting to force the player to take a specific action is the worst kind of railroading, and it's ALWAYS wrong.

AFAIK, the player said, 'I target the most injured one', and did not point at a map.

It does matter if the the player wanted to use out-of-game or in-game information. I agree that an appropriate answer may be, 'you can't tell'.

If your argument is that, then you're off-topic, and I wasn't responding to your argument in the first place. My apologies.

You've been in some pretty kind games if you think that's the worst kind of railroading

Anyway though, the OP pretty much has agreed with what you said already, so I don't see the reason for the passion?

You know nothing at all on that point, in fact. Of course, as I said before, it does not matter. Once more, because you just keep failing to understand it: IT DOES NOT MATTER! It doesn't matter what the player said or how he indicated which he wanted to attack. It doesn't matter if he could or couldn't tell which one was more injured. All of these details do not matter. What matters is that the GM assumed knowledge he could not possibly have and took control of a PC out of the players hand without anything even remotely resembling a justifiable reason. Again: The GM reached across the table and took the character out of the players hands (metaphorically, I hope).



No, I haven't. I've been in games where the GM gave omniscience to every NPC in the world. I've been in games where the closest thing to a plot was "the players watch the GMPC kick ass and take names." I've been in games where the GM rolled four dice and declared six successes, told me I couldn't use intrinsic abilities of my character, and gave abilities to NPC which they could not possibly have had to win a combat... but none of those bothered me nearly as much as a GM telling me what my player does. At that point, why am I even playing?

And no, the OP did not "pretty much" agree with what I said. He has not agreed that what he did was the worst kind of railroading. He has not agreed that even if it was alright to take control of another player's character, he has no idea what another person would or wouldn't do in a firefight anyway. So he did not pretty much agree with what I said.

As I said: 'as far as *I* know'. I don't know either way, and neither do you; once again, we agree.

I don't fail to understand that *you* think it doesn't matter. My position is that it does matter.

Your hyperbole *is* pretty ridiculous. As Mooncrow says, it's not even close to "the worst kind of railroading". Be more creative.

He said that he agreed with the above quote, and that he was going to follow it in the future - and that's essentially what you're saying, emotional rhetoric aside.

Are you sure you read the OP correctly?

OK, so in last nights game, 2 characters and the bad guys had the same initiative total (14). I resolved them in the order of highest reaction to lowest. The guy with the lowest wanted to attack the enemy that was most hurt as opposed to closest and I said that the actions were happening so fast, and so close together that he couldn't actively choose his target using the game information of who was hurt and who wasn't, but I would allow him to "choose" to attack the closest target. (I would imagine one would think that they would be the most threat and attack them on instinct alone.) Or that he could roll randomly (50/50). He thought I was wrong by not letting him choose his target. What do you think?

He states that its all happening at the same time (which is the most important part). If two people both shoot at some targets at the same time there is the odd they will choose different targets or even the same target. To make your choice based on something that has not happened yet makes little to no sense. If the player had said I shoot the one of the left then that would be it and I would agree that it was abit more railroading then was needed BUT and this is the main thrust of the issue the player wanted to hit the one who had already been hit when in game both shots were going off at the same time removing the possibility that he would know the other person had hit it.

Maybe the GM handled it less well then some but I can see his logic if you have things coming towards you and you dont have a good reason to shoot someone else most people would shoot the closest guy. There are plenty of reasons to say I shot someone else but to use knowledge of something that will happen in the future (in game time) is not a good reason.

Player choice is important but so is keeping things moving in something like a logical patten or should every run end with the team trying to kill the Johnson at the meet because well we know he will screw us in the end (use of future data to decide a action in the now).

The OP has said he will try to be more flexible with his players next time something like this comes up and we should all applude him for taking someones suggestion on board for the benefit of his group rather then treating him like the worst GM we have ever had ourselves. Someone asking for a opinion on how he handled things is less likely to be some dick GM because if he was a dick he proberbly wouldnt care what we say as he would know he's right.

I can't believe this discussion keeps on going.

From a common sense perspective, there is obviously NO WAY that the character could know who was more hurt from actions taken by others with the same initiative score.

From a rules perspective, pg. 144 states "If two characters get the same score, then they act simultaneously." That means you can't observe the effects of the other guy's shooting and then decide what to do - you both fire at the same time per the rules. On top of this, what the player is asking requires an observe in detail action.

The GM was right, pure and simple. There really can't be no two ways about this, unless he houseruled something and dropped any pretense of realism.


What the player could have done was delay his action, spend a simple action to observe in detail, then shoot the most wounded enemy.

What we got was what the GM said happened.

Well without the player himself coming on to tellus other wise I'm going to take it at face value.

Saying he might be lying adds nothing to the discussion

First of all, having an idea of what other people do is the basis for all roleplaying. You are not RPGing yourself. You are RPGing a fictional character, in a fictional setting, doing fictional things. All of that is about deciding what someone else will do in those situations. Sometimes the Gm is forced to make your character act in a certain ways (because you will not) and have them act in anyway "human." If you want to play an automaton that just does the exact perfect thing in each scenario, devoid of emotion, ethics, & morals, then play a robot without an emotion-chip. If you are playing a living, breathing being that has feelings and such, then sometimes you will be acting in a manner that may not be perfectly designed to be the best action at that time. Characters get scared, mad, and all the other emotions that come with being a feeling creature, and if you aren't willing to play those emotions (even to a characters detriment, at times) what the hell are you doing playing an RPG?!? Grab a miniatures game and go to town! (Like D&D 4e - sorry, had to. )

Maybe I didn't explain it in the best manner (likely - I shouldn't have even mentioned any kind of injury, I guess). Try this:

They all had the same initiative, meaning they were going at the same time. I just resolved them in Reaction order. (I will likely go left to right next time, but I do like to reward cool character abilities even if it is just letting them roll their dice first - we all know how players can be. )
It was an ambush encounter, in poor lighting.
The character doing the "chosing" is NOT a trained warrior, but I know he has had some combat experience.
The creatures were very horrible/scary.
One was closer, and he tried to shoot at the further one.

PS: It does sound like you have had some pertty-terrible GMs Rystefn (who really wanted to play and not run, it sounds like to me) so I can understand your feelings about this topic. But, PCs aren't the "untouchables" in any game. GMs are more than within their rights to enforce certain actions in a number of situations. I would suggest you stay away from CoC where madness can make your character do all sorts of things you wouldn't like/want. (I also don't believe that there needs to be some game mechanic to explain everything, common-sense and judgement need to be exercised at times.)

I must suck at role playing because I didn't see this thread going to 4 pages and beyond.

So, what you're saying is that you either:
1) Expected the reactions in this thread because they're normal human reactions but you posted it anyway.
2) Would be forced to stop certain people's completely illogical reactions in this thread because real humans don't behave that way.

No one cares if I get beer and wasabi peas on my character sheet. They get really upset when I get beer and wasbai peas on their copy of Black Morn Manor.

Well yeah. It was all simultaneous, he might have thought everyone was going to blow away the close guy and so he was gonna take out the replacement killer. How the heck was he to know the close one would survive?

Yeah, yeah, I know. He said he shot at the guy who was wounded. If you want to simultaneous combat, resolve it simultaneously or at least declare it simultaneously. If you want to declare/resolve combat in order, then don't have simultaneous combat. If you have an idea what other people do, then you should have realized that declaring/resolving/declaring/resolving them in order was going to lead him to make the choice of shooting at the wounded character. What the player did did was human and someone could have predicted the player would do it.

He metagamed. He shot at the character closest to death.
You metagamed. You had him shoot at a character that you knew was still going to be alive after everyone else shot.

This is unavoidable when someone declares after everything else is resolved.

---------------

Just so I understand. If everyone had to shoot at the person closest to them, how did the far away dude get injured in the first place? Who was he a legal target for?

I suspect this point would be moot if he'd simply said "I'm shooting at the one further away" rather than "I'm shooting at the injured one."

A lot of you folks are making a hell of a mountain out of a molehill, here.

Not according to the GM.
Which is why I'm wondering how the further one got injured in the first place. I don't actually care, but I am curious.

Without the player himself telling us his side of the story, I'll take it with a pinch of salt.

Assuming that he isn't lying is being entirely honest adds nothing to the discussion either.

Except calling someone a liar with absolutely no shred of proof or evidence over a gaming situation seems.. obnoxious and completely non-helpful, and potentially a personal attack for no apparent good reason.

It adds consistency. It doesn't matter WHAT actually happened because what we end up discussing is theoretical anyway because we weren't there.

We can either assume it all went down as said and have a discussion on that topic or we can debate what debate means. I'll go with the "Assuming he isn't lying" discussion because it goes somewhere.

Edit: Dang. I like sabs answer better than mine. Dang Simultaneous posting. Can we declare and resolve our posts in order in the future?

I think we should declare all actions in reverse initiative order, and then resolve from left to right.

You should have declared that you attacked the weaker argument, suoq.

I would have but I took logic as a dump stat.

Really?
I thought you'd taken Charisma as your dump stat

Meh. The lynchpin of this thread the argument seems to be on the player's insistence that he's able to shoot the wounded one. An OID could've solved the problem, but if he'd worded his request based on distance and not the Condition Monitor - I don't think it would've mattered. If he'd had a lower Initiative score, it wouldn't have mattered as much. It wouldn't be the first time semantics has turned a non-issue into a game-stopping debate.



This is why I think the distance wording would've worked, along with a myriad of other options.

ROTFLMAO