Not "off". Not shooting. You can throw a grenade or apply a patch. Or try to hack someone's spleen via wireless.

Aiming also works.

Oye ve. My spleen!

How does the whole aiming deal work? Do you have to succeed at a test?

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

Simple Action to Take Aim, you can Take Aim multiple times, each SA spent aiming gives you a +1 Accuracy or a +1 Die on the upcoming attack roll (the maximum ofa given boost, to limit or die pool, is one-half your Willpower, round up).

Aiming is a simple action (I think it is simple, I'm too lazy to get my book) that gives +1 die and +1 limit.
Also, recoil compensation isn't vastly increased except for the free Str/3. Bursts and full-auto don't increase damage (but base damage code are quite a lot higher), they reduce defence dice, but these have been increased a lot so it's actually quite common to miss - bursts and full-auto make this less likely. And autofire can be used for suppression, which doesn't create extra recoil and isn't affected by recoil.

And yes, rules are silly in that single shot (from an SS weapon only) and suppressive fire don't create recoil and the later doesn't suffer from recoil but they conserve recoil .
Edit: Critias, is this intended by the way?

Interesting. I think that carrying over recoil was an elegant solution to keeping combat moving. I expect that it should present the GM with a number of actions that are simple to resolve before moving to the next combat participant, and maintain a good flow between combat turns.

I can't tell you how many times SR 3 Shadowrun stretched seconds into hours for us.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

I'm mostly wondering how the 25 karma you get at chargen for purchasing qualities and completing your character compare to the karma (or is it experience now?) you earn on runs.

is it 1:1? If so, then either qualities became waaaaay cheaper (Ambidextrous costing 4 karma in the sr5 preview and 20 karma in sr4) or karma income has been drastically reduced again (from like 8-10 per run to 2-3)
if not 1:1, then OMG WHYYYYY!!!!???

and does raising a skill still cost lvl x 4 karma? because, who in the world would pay 40,44,48 karma for one more die at one test? I can choose a whole new secondary career with this kind of karma...

0_0

Soooo...what brought this one on?

Did people just really really like the inherent RC rule from Arsenal, or were people bitching about how a fully modded gun wasn't giving them enough RC?

I assume it's the change in recoil mechanics - if recoil persists until you stop shooting for an action phase, people are going to be hunting for higher and higher RC numbers so they can keep on shooting for longer.

It'll also give the 12 Strength augmented Troll the ability to rip the shit out of things with an LMG in each hand.

Ah yes, making the Heavy Weapons Troll even more viable than before besides "Melee Weapons Tank".

If that doesn't convince more people to go Troll, I dunno what will...

Strength 13 would offer 6 inherent RC... Now the question becomes whether the recoil accumulation is specific to uncompensated recoil, of if you compare RC against the accumulation.

Still, using SR4 stuff, White Knights with Personalized Grips, slings, underbarrel weights, heavy barrels, and give the troll foot anchors... That brings us up to what, 16 RC?

Man, now I kind of want to make a Latin American Formoian with a chin beard who laughs maniacially when he goes gunzerking.

As a note, you only apply recoil comp once. So while 16 points might get you through a pass and part of a second on full auto, it's unlikely to get you all the way through two passes. And Dual-wielding will rapidly get VERY ugly since you have to split your dice pool. If you have an absurdly high dice pool, you might be able to pull it off every other action pass with a bit of difficulty. But almost certainly aren't going to do much of anything if you try to do it two or more rounds in a row.

Bull

That's a misreading that came up at Origins. To bust out the linguistics jargon (shout-out to my lx peeps!), if you read the entire sentence, it syntactically could be read as "you have to not shoot for an entire Action Phase," but that reading is semantically meaningless. The only reading that makes sense is that if you interrupt your shooting (Take Aim actions are popular for this), your recoil resets.

Flip a couple pages to the example on recoil. There's some typo fun there, too (the recoil resets an Action Phase after it should have), but it pretty clearly shows that you can reset your recoil with a Simple Action that isn't shooting.

note to self:
look at page count before jumping in quoting something.

Are you sure that's a misreading? Because:
In the example, Wombat resets recoil exactly the way I was saying, by taking an entire action phase without shooting. In the previous action phase, he used the SA single shot mode (a simple action, so he had another simple action to go with it and we don't know how he used it), and still accumulated recoil. I haven't seen any part of the example that supports what you're saying.

Also, "unless the character takes, or is forced into, an action other than shooting for an entire Action Phase" is the wording. I'm not a linguist (I used to date one, but that didn't give me any skill ), but the word "entire" doesn't seem very compatible with "you can just use a take aim action in the same action phase as a SA single shot and it will reset your pool".


That's actually the only difference between an SS/BF weapon and an SA/BF one: the latter will raise your recoil every time you shoot "single shots".

So basically your standard routine is going to go something like
Pass 1 - Full Auto
Pass 2 - Take Aim/Burst

Or something along those lines?

That's his interpretation, but the rules aren't perfectly clear about that. However, the example page 177 doesn't support what he's saying - it goes:
-Pass 1: Semi-Auto Burst (Complex)
-Pass 2: Semi-Auto Single Shot (Simple)/ ? (We don't know what the second simple action is used for)
-Pass 3: Aim (Simple Action)/? (Not shooting, but we don't know what). Recoil resets here according to the example.

That's true, but having a linguistic reading of a book that wasn't written by linguist doesn't seem like a solution either (because it makes assumption about the level of attention to wording that the people writing the book had that might not reflect reality). And we're discussing what the rule has written is, and what the example means. There is already a rule and mechanics, and examples supporting this rule, so I'm not sure it's necessary to "make rulings" here.

I think the only way to resolve this is to ask Bull, Patrick Goodman or Critias. Please help us!

Do you apply a bigger or smaller penalty on the enemy per bullet fired than recoil that accumulates? Lets say last pass I hit my recoil comp exactly, I had X if fired X or X+1 bullets No recoil comp left. Next pass I do a long burst I lose 6? dice, how many dice does the enemy lose from his dodge?

And can we have clarification on what it takes to reset? Is it an entire pass, or just an action? Since I don't have access to the glossary action phase is kind of meaningless from the quotes people are dropping. I'm used to the term pass for all I know action phase could mean any action above fee action.

PREPARE FOR ULTRA-NERDY LINGUISTIC BLATHER

When you read the sentence,



the prepositional phrase, "for an entire Action Phase," ambiguously modifies either the phrase "an action" or the phrase "shooting." So the sentence in the context that I contend is incorrect would read,

Recoil penalties are cumulative over every Action Phase and Combat Turn unless the character takes, or is forced into, an action for an entire Action Phase other than shooting.

I feel this interpretation is semantically weak if not invalid because we know the rules for Shadowrun. In those rules, Simple Actions are actions and do not take an entire Action Phase. The sentence says "an action," not "an action or actions," and so refers to one and only one action. So while the syntactic logic (the meaning of the sentence without context) is ambiguous, the semantic logic (the meaning of the sentence within context) is not.


Ouch.

The biggest problem for me here is the example directly contradicting the written rule as interpreted by Aaron.

Are the examples typically not written by the same people who write the rules? In a case like this one, I would expect the example to be there to show designer intent in the case of unintentional ambiguity, and in this case the example runs directly contrary to what we're being told is the right way.

What's the question again? I got lost somewhere along the line.

The question at hand is how are recoil penalties reset?

There seems to be two conflicting readings of it. One says that spending a simple action doing something other than shooting resets it. The other says that you need to spend a full initiative pass doing something other than shooting to reset it. The first is supported by Aaron, based on a close reading of the actual rule. The second is supported by the example given in the text.

I tend to concur with Aaron on this one. I'll have to go look at the example to see its wording, but it does sound like something that should be clarified, at the very least.

Good thing there's something about it in the list of errata I'm working on.

Another example that supports my view of the recoil rules: read the description for single shot, and look at the presence of SS/BF, SA/BF and SS/SA weapons (for the last one, Defiance T-250).

If Semi-Auto fire in single shots didn't create recoil, as per Aaron's reading of the rule (remember that only one action can be use for attack, so there is NECESSARILY a second simple action not used for shooting), then SS/BF and SA/BF are exactly the same thing, and SS/SA is the same thing as just "SA".
But the rules mention for SS that it's the only firing mode that doesn't create recoil. That means SA 'single shot' creates recoil, but SS doesn't.

Aaron, I think a linguistic reading of Shadowrun rules is overkill - remember that there are significant language issues to begin with, so this is really a place where we need confirmation by whoever wrote this rule.

When did I say SA weapons didn't create recoil? If you do something-shoot for your first Action Phase and then shoot-something for your second, the recoil stacks. It probably doesn't stack enough to incur a penalty (at least with the gear and ammo in SR5), but it's still there.


Er ... if we don't use language to read what has been written, what are we using?

I was trying to avoid supporting arguments by appealing to authority, but if it helps: I'm the guy who first reworked recoil into the new framework. A number of us messed with and tweaked it, and the combat chapter was written by a freelancer who is not to my knowledge publicly on DSF and so I won't name names, but whom I hold in high regard. The whole thing was reviewed and approved by the line developer, the dulcet Jason M. Hardy.

That's why I'm asking for official rule clarifications, because it is a very blurry piece of mechanics with examples that contradict the rule. But Shadowrun books aren't always written with grammatical or linguistic perfection, so I wouldn't have been surprised if it had just been imprecise language.

It does, I didn't know you were involved with SR5. 'Arguments of authority' is kind of why I'm asking for the Word of God here. Thanks for your patience.