Is that the game that makes my head asplode because it fills the screen with colourful stuff that moves around all teh time and you have to avoid being hit while shooting in various directions? Ok, seriously, that's not really a good example. Because even with one mouse it gives you freaking eye cancer. Try a hardish rail shooter like that one Resident Evil.

House of the Dead Overkill doesn't qualify, it's too easy. I played that with my girlfriend, and then by myself with two guns, and as bad as it sounds - my left hand was about as good as my g/f. Now... just don't quote that out of context .

It's also not *quite* the same task as 'pull the dots to the target(s)', though definitely similar.

I hardly see how -that- is relevant to the topic.

The ships I was using shot in a forward spread pattern. I couldn't handle any other kind. Admittedly, it was a ship I used singly as well (one other I've used allowed you to reorient your shots, but it isn't set up well, as you move in the direction you're trying to reaim for, both inputs being "mouse pointer").

The remaining two ship types were one that could make all of the shots it had on screen explode, but I never found it useful (the AoE isn't that big, plus it destroys ALL your shots on screen, causing a delay in having new shots hit your target) and one that fired charged shots. Hold right-click and release any time. Less useful that "hold right click and get a giant laser beam of death" that the spread ship had. More damage, probably, but more micromanagy.

The cable tv show, Top Shot had a dual pistol challenge. The competitors were having a super hard time of it. The point of smartgun technology is to make shooting easier or improve your accuracy. I think the thought of making the penalty of shooting akimbo or using 2 pistols on 1 target less, then that makes sense. Trying to use 2 pistols on 2 separate targets... no idea how the GM wants to do that.

In real life, there may indeed be some 'interaction' effects, but I'd still expect the lasers to help (if only a little, compared to the overall difficulty of the task).

Yeah, houseruling based of my limited experiment, I would increase the difficulty of dual-pistols (perhaps drastically), but leave the Smartlink/laser bonuses.

And probably add in a "dual wield specialist" Quality to make it a bit easier for those who really want to be great at it.





-k

Yeah. Possibly adapting the existing Ambidextrous/MA/etc. options, possibly adding new Quality/MA/Adept/'Ware options.

A nonslavish interpretation of the rules to allow a player to build the character he wants to play and have fun? Whod a thunk it.

Jesus, Miri, how many times are you going to bang that drum? I still don't understand how you couldn't have fun playing the same character without 2 dice.

We all heard you the first time, but the point remains that it's just a house rule (and one that was suggested several pages ago). It's not a "nonslavish interpretation," any more than a drug dealer is an "unlicensed pharmacist." There's nothing wrong with house rules, but let's call a spade a spade. And if some hypothetical player's entire notion of fun is entirely contingent upon whether or not he gets a house rule in his favor to give him 2 extra dice, I think I'd just as soon not play with them. You can make a frighteningly effective two-gun character without giving them smartlink bonuses, already. It's hardly squashing someone's hopes and dreams under the hobnailed boots of canon to enforce the existing rules. Folks can cheerfully choose not to, any given game table is certainly free to house rule things to their hearts' content, but you've got no real justification for your continued melodrama and hyperbole on this point.

Yes. My GM was unwilling to devise some house rules to so that even though I could get my single gun single target pool up to a team average for primary skills of 16, two gunning it at 7/7 wasn't going to be very useful in combat. So I dumped the character.

Er, you are splitting the dice pool BEFORE adding modifiers, yes?




-k

Mind if I ask the die pool breakdown? Smartlink (obviously), but what about specialization? Reflex recorder? Improved Ability? How'd you get your 16, and was the pool being divided properly for the 7/7, is basically my question.

I still don't understand anyway. You wanted to be as good as everyone else… with twice the guns at once? You can still *carry* 2 guns and fire them sequentially with the full 'necessary' DP. I'm just confused because I *know* you can build stupid-broken-good akimbo guys. If you wanted to. :/

Skill 5
Specialization 2
Adapt Skill buff 2
Agility 5
Smartgun 2

So single gun single target 16
Two guns split pool no smartgun 7

When he said no I then thought.. well.. what about two different types of guns. So I looked at them and most all the heavy pistols were 5p with only very minor differences. I wanted one to shoot at typical targets and one to shoot those really big heavy things (9mm in one hand, .45 or .50 in the other so to speak). Doing a Light Pistol/Heavy Pistol seemed counterproductive because I couldn't really find any benefit to using a light pistol as my main shooter over a heavy. So then I made Bruce Lee's 10x great grandson named Jim Crow with Martial Arts 6, specialization and adapt skill buff with Magic 6 Edge 7.

But still, 2 things: 1) Would 9/9 have been playable where 7/7 wasn't? 2) You use your whole DP unless you're firing the guns *at once*, so just… don't do that?

There is a small benefit from using like a Super Warhawk in one hand, and a normal heavy pistol in the other (ammo, rate of fire).

Not quite. You would be well served -- next time your whole character concept hinges on 2 dice, I mean -- to read over how splitting a die pool works, very carefully. Quite a few bonus dice are added after the core die pool (stat + skill) gets divided. Funny story here, but you were actually already sitting on the 9/9 split you wanted so desperately, without the GM needing to house rule anything in your favor. You just didn't know it.


1) You're off by several generations.

2) That's either one of the best, or one of the worst, character names I've ever seen, depending on how historically and politically aware you and the rest of your gaming group are. I'm thinking one of the worst, especially given how you described the character and that there seemed to be little irony to it.

I dunno, it sounds like a particularly on-the-chin blaxploitation parody, like Black Dynamite. Could be fun. As much as any Edge 7 character can be fun at all.

"Quiet, you'll wake the other Slitches."

Oh the entire group was quite familiar with the background of that name, we do live in Southern Louisiana after all. We had lots of fun with my character Jim and his martial arts sensai (advantage points spent for it..) Uncle Tom (they picked that name for him.. I was just going to leave his as the little short old martial arts teacher from Remo Williams: The Adventure begins.

He had two enemy traits.. one was a rival martial arts dojo. They made two appearances. The first time me and the ultra paranoid hacker convinced them that I was an honorable man and sent the large group of them to meet us at a warehouse to fight out our issues after we dropped off the kidnap victim we had just rescued. From said warehouse where I had just gotten done with beating the stuffing out of the gang's second in command.

The second time we ran into them we had just picked up a very hot package at SeaTac and had almost made it out of the airport when 4 of the rival dojo members showed up at the car pickup place where we were. They did the whole 'Hey You! We're here to kick your ass!' thing (in japanese of course so the vast majority of the people in the crowd had no idea what they said). We pulled the whole "look out! they have guns!" and scattered while Lone Star dealt with them. Later on after we got accused of being WMD terrorists we managed to arrange a meet with the head of Lone Star and worked out a deal where he could look good in the news by 'catching' the terrorists and even talked him into using the four guys they had picked up not too long ago.

Twas my first character since like.. second edition? (late 90s college game.. that one fell apart not long after the GM gave us a crate full of grenades..) in our first run of the 4th edition rule set. Jim had many many build mistakes in him as did most everyone else. Even the GM was new to the system.

So despite never having played the character (to see how valid the build was), and despite having discarded the character (due to a rules misunderstanding), and despite having fun with your replacement character...you've still got enough of a chip on your shoulder about this two-gun-smartlink thing to be as negative and generally crabby about it as you have been in this thread (to the extent you repeatedly refer to playing by the game rules, that you didn't get right, as "slavish loyalty")?

I'm really not meaning to outright dogpile you here or anything, man, but it all strikes me as a little weird. Maybe you didn't mean to come off with that kind of attitude in your handful of posts earlier in this thread, but...just...yeah. Weird. I'm glad you ended up having fun with your replacement character, at any rate.

Getting upset about an argument over the intertubes on a forum is.. well just silly. Maybe I've got a bit of a troll in me and just like poking buttons and seeing some of yall get all riled up. I was really hoping JC had gone off about my comment in that Strawberry Shortcake Orc thread cause he seems the most excitable right now

Edit: Besides.. look at how much discussion, both on topic and off, about the pros and cons of Akimbo style and two guns on one target has gone on

This is on the level of the old D&D 3.0/3.5/3.75 debate about dual wielding DPS vs Power Attack with 2Handed weapons vs Sword & Board style.

Thar's why ranger's got changed, because of the front-loading of their fighting ability & sheer damage output. Dual Wielding in the game was nasty... with constant DPS flowing. Here in SR, dual wielding firearms isn't as bad. The penalties to hit vs the damage potential are mitigated. Plus any bonus you do have to shooting also gets cut.

So just trolling then. Okay.

Trolling to get a discussion going. Lots of number crunching, peoples real life experience, etc etc.

I...don't see how you think much of that came about from your posts, in particular, especially the ones that consisted only of you misunderstanding the rules and then deriding others for not houseruling things. But, well, okay. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Your most memorable contributions to this thread seemed a bit less constructive than that, to me, but I'm not a mod so it's a moot point.

I can see dual wielding machine pistols/smg's to get the same amount of fire as an assault rifle. Not damage... just bullet spraying. Blanketing an area or doing wide, crazy bursts so you give covering fire.

Naw, you do it for two long bursts per round (and no other bursts). Which is also a just semi-unproblematic interpretation, as in, the rules are unclear but might allow that interpretation. At least that's how I remember it.

I'm still a friend of 2x Ruger Warhawks - you use full DP, look totally cool, and don't need to overmod the weapons to get SA fire. You do run into the usual problem that semi-auto has been gimped to death in SR4. You can't use it against any serious opposition, because a useless action (yours, semi-auto fire) and a second useless action (theirs, a full dodge) means no effect at all for the round - unless you get into huge attack DP territory. So after you've taken their action you can watch the full-auto mooks with half your DP, like drones and stuff, tear into them where your attacks just pinged because your base damage was simply soaked or got turned into some stun.



D&D and TWF is too much of a long story. As in, it went from being the done thing to being the crap option. So... that's a stupid fix. Also, you can hardly compare the systems. In D&D, basically a character who can only deal damage is fully functional, while in SR he's largely useless 90% of the time.

Ummmmm..... Semi Auto is NOT gimped. I kill more characters/Mooks with Semi Auto than with Full Automatic Weapons fire. Maybe you are just doing it wrong?

If anything, I'd compare to short bursts. There's basically nothing SA can do that 3-round can't, +2. Except *not* waste pricey ammo.

Burst Fire is more noticeable, though, even if only in Fluff. I do agree that you could just use short Bursts. But then again, not all weapons are capable of such activity either, and it is a pretty pricey upgrade (Though I guess not to most shadowrunners, who tend to have money).

And the Ammo thing too...

Ok... so.. what is there to do wrong? There are no decisions to make, it's just point and click, roll the dice.

Ok, maybe saying it's gimped is the wrong angle. It's just clearly inferior to everything else, as soon as you really want to take the guy down. I would tend to say the same thing: you can shoot more expensive ammo, but for that to be noticable, ammo costs should vary more. If S&S cost 200 or more per round people would really think about using it in an assault rifle or machine gun (at least one without an ammo selector), but I could put it in a handgun without as much as a thought. The same with APDS and the like.

Basically in my SR career I've liked to play a lot of semi-auto toting guys, and I can say that in SR4 I've been a bit frustrated while doing so, something I never (rarely) felt in SR3. In SR4 you need definite dicepool superiority to make use of semi-auto, while a mook firing long wide bursts can quickly get really dangerous.

That may be intentional, I don't know. I would LIKE semi-auto to be better, that's all. (Actually, I want recoil to be worse, as in, range dependant.)

I really am not a fan of how dual wielding works. Outside of dice pool monsters it just isn't effective. In some systems everyone dual wields, in SR4 I don't see anyone dual wield I'd kind of like a balance, where it is a viable option for people without having to make dice pool monsters but it isn't overpowered. I think the smartgun link should apply, it just makes sense and honestly I don't see 2 dice throwing the balance off that much.





I agree with this. In SR2-3 I got a lotmore one shot or 2 shot kills with semi auto than I do now. Now If I want to kill with a gun in an action it is all about the burst fire or a absurd dice pool.

I guess it's a personal thing. I'm pretty okay with it *not* being a viable option except for the true masters, but that's admittedly less cinematic.

There's a good reason to dual wield besides shooting both guns at the same time. That reason is to trade bursts and split RC between weapons so that you can use autofire and sound suppression effectively. It also means that you don't have to worry about ammunition as much on guns with low cap.

For example there's guns like the Ruger thunderbolt. BF only and 12 rounds in the clip means you're empty in 2 passes. Dual wield to trade bursts and you're no longer looking at unmanageable recoil and empty guns.

I personally don't like that the guys who invests a ton into skill and attribute gets hosed when dual-wielding compared to the guy who just relies on gear.

Take a schmoe with 2 Agility, 2 Pistols, 2 Specialization. Slap a rating 4 TacNet on him. He gets a dual-wield dice pool of 8/8.

Take another "skilled pro" with 4 Agility, 6 Pistols, 2 Specialization, and he gets... 7/7.

Really, I find that any time you use "half" or other percentage based modifiers to tests in Shadowrun, you run into problems. The "-half armor" weapons. Dual wielding. And so on. The game really works best with flat modifiers instead of percentages.



-k

*Puts on rap music* They see me trollin', they be hatin'... Tryin' to catch me postin' somethin' dirty!

It's not like he couldn't get that tacnet, though. I'm not too worried about that aspect of the game, and it applies to non-halved things just as badly. If anything, the culprit is abuse of the 'modifiers post-split', and the suspicious lack of penalties.

But why is Joe Schmoe the Newb using a Military Grade Tacnet, while the Professional is not? Give him a Tacnet as well (of the same rating) and now you have Dice Polols of 11/11 vs. that 8/8. And 16 Base Dice vs. Joe Schmoes 10.

TacNets are a problem in themselves. They provide an unrealistic bonus.
Either the information that they provide is so specific and predictive that a person using one would be 1) overwhelmed or 2) just following instructions, or the information they provide is so generic that it's 1) irrelevant or 2) something the person should already know from their training and experience.

It's just dice bloat like Emotitoys/Empathy Sensor Software. Something that every pro has by default just to demonstrate the gap between professionals and chuds.

But really, it's like a machine is doing your job for you, and it would be more akin to a secondary viewpoint (like a teamwork test) than a bonus. IOW, if it knows where your gun is pointed and is to accurate at predicting enemy movements, why doesn't it just pull the trigger for you.


As to why laser sights and smartlinks don't work while you're shooting two guns at the same time, the RL answer is easy.
When you shoot two guns at once, you are no longer aiming. You're just counting on your ability to point and shoot.

But that's what they're for: not-aiming.

Thematically I always pictured them like the hud you get when using Grenades in Gears of War. A trajectory line superimposed over your vision by either glasses or cyber. The tech part would also give you an ammo counter and probably automate many actions for you.

There's a difference between intuitive shooting and watching a dot, much less two dots at once. And there's a big difference between shooting at independent targets and shooting at independent moving targets.

Even on the same target with different colored dots, you're going to have confusion when you try to keep up with corrections at any real distance. Practice should mitigate this, as with anything, but trying to deal with two moving dots on the same moving target at 50 meters is a bastard.

Why are you using a Heavy Pistol at its max effective range of 50m? Use a SMG or Assault Rifle for those ranges.

Why aren't you dual wielding SMGs?

Because I prefer to load EXEX rounds into my SmartGun modded Ares Sliverguns.

You can EXEX a slivergun?

Ammo is interchangeable according to the ammo section. The Ares does not specifically state like the Mossberg shotgun does that it can only load flechette ammo.