QUOTE (toturi @ Feb 1 2011, 04:55 AM)
The point is that not every sniper is GodsHammer. If the GM is resorting to a Thor shot, it would be better to simply talk to the player instead.
There are other reasons than GM fiat for a Thor shot.
It's part of the game world, after all, of course there's plausible reasons why it could happen.
It's use has been threatened before (see Operation Reciprocity), and after the nuke in Chicago, we know that corps do not hesitate to use their weapons of mass destruction if they see an urgent need to.
Now, it's unlikely that the players pose or are faced with a problem that is roughly equal to the Bug City incident, but it's not as if this had never happened before in some campaigns.
Same could be said for a hacker, TM or AI taking over an Aesir sattelite, something similar to the scenario in
[ Spoiler ]
System Failure.
BTW, a Thor shot takes several minutes to reach it's destination.
I'm sure there's a way to spot a giant tungsten rod falling from the sky in time and
maybe even to get out of the instakill blast range 100 meters around ground zero, and into the zone where you "only" have to resist a damage of 20P.
Maneuvarability of the projectile seems fairly limited on the last mile.
This is a weapon intended to annihilate entire city blocks, not to take out individual metahuman targets.
QUOTE (Raiki @ Feb 1 2011, 05:29 AM)
My point was that if your GM is throwing an invisible, concealed, chameleon-coated sniper with 16 dice in infiltration at you, he doesn't want to negotiate and he doesn't want you to survive. He's either just killing you off, or he's knocking you out for some kind of forced scene.
I have to disagree even more on this point.
It's completely in order to assume that megacorps and some governments have agents with DPs like that.
It's equally conceivable that a high-powered team could make them believe sending out such forces could be necessary.
I wouldn't throw them at the team unless they would pose a grave threat to national security or vital corporate interests in the campaign, but if it would happen, it wouldn't be to dick around and railroad them, but as an appropriate ingame consequence of particularly drastic actions (which are, in theory, always fine with me, there's always been the option of escalating things to outright war in SR).
If the players would survive that (and you don't need 40 dice in Perception to do so, depending on which sense you use, much less could be sufficient), i'd have no problem with it, either.
I'm not saying SR4 works best when the game deals with military-grade threats.
One or two levels below that actually works better.
But a group willing to do so can pull this off, and there's sourcebooks out for nearly every edition that support such an approach at least for one-shots or the finales of long-running campaigns.