I think this sort of scenario actually does call for making constant perception checks, annoying as that may be.

If you're being sniped by a Disguised sniper, you can't roll Reaction to dodge individual shots - after all, you don't know where the shooter is. You can, however, take cover and start looking around (making perception checks) in order to figure out where they are hiding and see through the disguise, or maybe lay down supressing fire or wide bursts in likely directions.

Likewise, if you're being shot at by someone hidden by an Invisibility spell. If you fail to pierce the Illusion via Willpower, you have to rely on your perception checks to detect them via non-visual means.

And if you just plain aren't perceiving properly (due to negative modifiers or whatever), you may be fully aware that you are in danger but without knowing where the danger is coming from you can't take any steps to avoid it until you either 1) manage to successfully perceive the danger or 2) you start making intuitive guesses and get lucky.

Being attacked by something you can't see does put you at "a disproportionate advantage". This is the entire point of stealth and camouflage. How can you kill something you can't see? How can you avoid a danger you can't locate? A landmine painted bright pink with a sign pointing to it saying "Danger! Landmine here!" is only going to be tripped by a moron. A landmine in a field of tall grass covered by a thin layer of dirt is one of the deadliest things I can think of.

~Umi

I dunno. Cancer's pretty good. Old age is up there. Car accidents is a good annual killer.

...not gonna bite. Sorry.

~Umi

Wow. Awesome post, dude.

I forgot the "Observe in Detail" bonus. With that a -12 to Perception can be beaten by any samurai with solid senseware. Intuition 4+, Perception 3+, Cyberears(Audio Enhancement 3, Spatial Recognizer) +5, Attention Coprocessor 3 for 15 dice, so 6 dice for "Observe in Detail". If you absolutely must hunt the sniper in such a situation, and don´t have a living mage left, consider spending Edge.

(That char should likely be shot before the mage. Scary amount of easily relayed information for the TacNet.)

My great-uncle Morris lost a leg at the knee, to exactly that, in a field a few miles inland... in Normandy, 1945.

Stop that, ok?

.... what?

Seriously, what'd I do? It's just a comment on the side of the conversation.

Yeah, maybe. Just got on my nerves, my apologies for that (and for coming across rude).

I didn't find it out of place or improper either. *shrug*

No big. I do hope your uncle lived a long, full life after that. My gramps was in the Pacific as a medic.

~Umi

*Edited*

Sometimes feeding a troll, even a mod troll, isn't worth the fun.

Funny how everyone *else* is always the troll for almost normal, including the mods.

You sound butthurt.

*shrug* That's just a word that means 'I am a troll'.

The problem with doing constant Perception checks is that you often also have to taken into account various senses. So you're not just doing several tests, but several sets of several tests. :/

Arguably, this is my issue.

What are the rules for pinpointing the location of a sound? Is it an increased threshold? A dice penalty? Call me crazy but I think it should be at least somewhat more difficult to pinpoint a source of a sound than to just notice it.

Depends on the situation. On an open field, it's easy. In a canyon of skyscrapers it's remarkably difficult. I'd give it a penalty depending on environmental factors.
Strong wind blowing away from characters? -2
Other noises present? -X
It's arbitrarily decided, but you get the picture

I know, there's just a number of frustrations regarding perception and stealth.

True, but it's not a simple thing to put into abstract rules.
At least it's WAY better than SR3 (IMHO)

I think the rule is that meeting the Threshold is 'noticed', and additional info is from increasing net hits. But yes, AFAIK there is not explicit description of that 'more info' scale.

That doesn't work with spatial analyzers. They are supposed to only apply. their dice to pinpoint a sound so if you pinpoint off a hearing check, then you need to apply the spatial analyzers, but then you run the risk that someone only hears something because of the additional dice from the spatial analyzer which they should not have been able to hear.

I guess you could run a basic hearing check, then if the sound is heard, roll the spatial analyzer dice to see if it gets enough hits to meet the threshold for pinpointing.

True, but that's a special sensor, therefore a special case. I agree: you have to first hear it, then you can add the dice to find it. Yes, that kind of multi-level Perception mess is exactly the problem.

I guess, to simplify you could use two colors of dice. That way you only have one roll. Again though, that's a mess that shouldn't be required of the players or GM.

Well, you absolutely cannot localize unless you have first detected... Not that big of a deal really.
Some rolls depend upon other actions to succeed before they become useful.

It's not just that, of course. There's also the other senses, again. A very normal task would be noticing, locating, and getting details (recognizing face, gear, etc.) of a sneaky person, vehicle, or object. So that's maybe sight, hearing, and smell, to notice, locate (visually, more like 'track'), and detail, each with different ranges, sensors, sensor software, and modifiers (situational and personal). :/

Remember that Perception is pretty abstracted. Figure out which sense is the best for the job (read: gives the best DP), use that one, and be done with it.

Yes, that sometimes works. Sometimes. Even then, you're doing all the calculations (which is the hard part, not the rolling) in order to find out which is the best DP.

Which is why any good Shadowrunner has all those DP's calculated and noted...

Not your personal base DPs, the exact situational ones. How big/shiny/far away is that thing? How distracted/busy is the area? Is it more likely to show up on thermal, audio, or radar? (Some of these should be Sensor tests anyway, even if the rules don't really say so.) And so on. You can definitely get a somewhat used to it and all (even then, you're still making multi-step tests), but it seems like there's a better way.

There might be a better way, but I have yet to see it.
That said, we have managed to make it work pretty seamlessly, at our table.

Good catch: I meant to write 'should be', not 'is'.

I know. I generally go with one perception roll right before the ambush or the action (like noticing the mark slipping a comlink into another persons pocket). If there is combat making the players spend actions to observe in detail should make that part easy. The hard part is infiltration. If in the duckblind (using disguise (camoflauge) ) you just roll once. If using the infiltration skill, I'd make him roll every complex action spent infiltrating.


My big issues are for the modifiers on the players perception rolls. In general I add the negative mods as positive mods to the NPC's stealth check. The reason is simple, they do not know what the opposition is doing.

I dislike that since perception penalties can easily push a perception check into longshot territory which means the mark spends edge to perceive something or simply cannot. By applying it as bonus you give opportunity to the observer that he should not have. And yes, while it might be better to not do that since they might end up with say 2 dice for their perception check while long shot gives them 3 because they spent the edge, it's still forcing opponents to use edge on stupid tasks rather than something significantly more useful.

Of course, the book does say GMs should roll perception checks to avoid that metagame issue.

Don't forget about glitches, as well.

I'm not exactly sure what would happen when you glitch a perception check. You saw something that doesn't exist? Your cyber eyes malfunction? What if you don't have cybereyes?

I would say mabye a Crit Glitch would make your cyber eyes malfunction, or make you see something you thought you didnt...a normal glitch means you may have succeded still, mabye a flash of light blinded you for a second, or you were so suprised by what you saw that you didnt react right away, but no know its their now...etc

One of my runners suffered a Critical Glitch on a perception check once. He was utterly convinced that he saw a dragon rampaging through the streets as a result. Everyone else was staring at him like he'd lost his mind when he mentioned what he (thought he) saw.

~Umi

Really, StealthSigma? Seeing something that's not there is kind of a game staple, I would think. A Critical Glitch could be a sensor/cybereyes malfunction, maybe, but it could also just be a really strong hallucination. People glitch on perception all the time, thinking they saw something, heard something. It's the same as glitching on something like Judge Intentions.

Not just a halluscination. Maybe he oh-so-briefly caught a glimps of somethign happening in a Metaplane; maybe "the boundaries were weak" in that spot, for just a few seconds.

Or maybe there WAS a dragon in teh area, daydreaming abut it, and he got a flash of THAT.

...

Remember, "world with real magic" ... not everything has to obey the laws of physics 24/7/52.

Well, it starts with having several "visions". They are switched very easy in SR. So how do you handle it? Which spektrum do you use for the test. Does the player needs to decide?

Then it begs the question what you want to see, if you you can see it using the vision you use. And how good?
Ultrasound makes it hard to find the guy in the red shirt, as does thermal vision...

So yes, you are and will always be in GM-Fiat-Land. What would be a better solution?
Well, ain't easy. You can of course write exact rules on what can be seen with each kind of vision, but that would be a lot of work and can very fast end up with enormous dice pool modifiers...

To my mind a glitch would be something like thinking you caught something with the corner of your eye, or got distracted or dazzled by the sunlight reflected in a window or something.

A critical glitch could be cybereye malfunction, but I would probably go with "You see a gun barrel poking out from behind the stack of crates there!" ... cue diving for cover, confusing teammates, then embarrassment when the character sees it is just the end of a broomstick or something along those lines ...

we had a botch make for one of our most memorable moments in 2nd edition when one character tried to whisper to another in a crowded bar to "drag him in the backroom" and the other fella turned up too many ones and heard "dragon in the back room" at which point he screamed and jumped for cover.

to this day we make the inside joke "drag him in the back room? dragim in the back room? dragon in the back room? THERE'S A DRAGON IN THE BACK ROOM!"

Yeah and glitches become less. I know it isn't raw, but raw doesn't always work that well. So far the RPG police with a warrant from the rules lawyers have not shown up at my door either .

I know. I'm just saying that as a player, I prefer the penalties just because of the fact that it can become a resource drain. I'd rather the mook spend edge seeing me than spend edge shooting me.

You could of course take it the other way - not only does he not see the thing the GM had in mind but he also doesn't see something else which has immediate ramifications. A pickpocket who grabs his link and runs off down the street, one of his contacts who then feels blanked, traffic lights turning red, possibilities are endless.

This.
Plus, adding dice to one side is not probabilistically equivalent to subtracting them from the other. 1 vs 3 is very different to 4 vs 6. By turning a penalty into an opponent's bonus you weaken the stronger side by reducing the dice ratio.

Good discussion.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/JEbrh.jpg[/img]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/8AHPE.jpg[/img]

A few urban camo pics for the thread.

The general consensus seems to be:

Infiltration- When moving and avoiding line of sight and detection
Disguise - Hiding using camouflage to avoid detection when you have to have some portion of your person visible (your rifle for when you are, for example, sniping)

Looks like this is in keeping with RAW and common sense. Were there any counter arguments that hadn't been discredited?

However, the GM needs to adjust in special cases. I mean the vision of those two soldiers in the pictures is limited, too.

On the one hand, most snipers work as a team, for exactly that reason: oen shooter, one spotter.

On the other hand, the sniper doesn't need to have a very wide field of view, if he's chosen the right "killing ground".

And on the gripping hand ... SR4 snipers can use drones and emplaced sensor packages scattered around their OA, to provide all the situational awareness they need.

Does anything you say, change anything I said?
No, it does not. You do not ask for a perception test to test, if somebody sees something happening directly in front of his nose. Thats silly.

So, yes if you take messures to offset the disadvantages, you offset them. But there are then ways again to make your advantage a dissadvantage and so on...

Yes, it does.

You suggested adjustments due to the Sniper's restricted field of view. I pointed out that IRL snipers generally have a buddy along. And that in SR terms, that buddy could be a drone or two (for extra shits and giggles, the sniper can run a TacNet in conjunction with his drone(s), for a couple extra dice when shooting ...). And finally, I pointed out that a well-chosen sniping roost will already present a limited field of view. The phrase is "Long sight lines" - long, narrow spaces in which the target will be naturally restricted to the sniper's existing field of view.


I was also talking about things that might be a thousand meters down-range from the sniper.