Training people to shoot seems like the easy part - training people to know when to shoot, when not to shoot, etc. and to actually execute that correctly in hgh-stress situations? Noooooot so much.

Also, I wouldn't say ANY job - I'd have a hard time figuring a wired programming team, for example.

That is what the skillsofts are for, though. So you don't have to...

There are some jobs where recorded thoughts and actions aren't gonna cut it.

ummm... education is not as expensive as you seem to think it is.

my education as a technician took 2 years and cost me less than 10 grand (canadian) including books. that was 3 years ago now.

particularly since the corps often don't have to bear the burden of the cost of the education of their employees.



i have no problem with skillwires being expensive. i have a problem with people claiming that skillwires are both expensive and extremely common, and are considered as a replacement to inexpensive training options.

Funny you should mention the bit about untrainable. Back in boot camp we had one guy who pretty much failed the shooting section and had to redo it a few times just to get the minimum passing score.

He was a great guy, cool under fire but an absolute menace to his own team as much as the enemy when armed.

Where did he end up?

You got it... MP

To be fair, up here those costs are a hell of a lot lower for the student then in, say, the US, because part of the money is coming from other sources (see: government).

Yeah, I was told a long story from a retired police officer about a particular "big city" recruit who. could. not. pass. qualifying. Took extra training, plenty of one on one with range officers, etc. Eventually they told the chief that he just couldn't do it, he couldn't qualify (which I think at the time was 70% or better).

Chief said "can he carry a gun without shooting himself" and they said, yes, but he can't shoot. Chief said, well, if he can carry a gun without shooting himself, that's good enough.

Yikes.

That's exactly it. In real life we have hundreds of contacts but in the game Contacts are few. Why would I pay for a bartender contact at chargen when I can just go on a pub crawl and get a bunch for free?

Loyalty. Let's say a Bartender is Connection 2, meaning that at Chargen you can get Loyalty 5. Getting a Connection 2 Contact is easy, but getting a Loyalty 5 Contact is not.

Whether you bought them or earned them, they still have to be tracked.

A fair point and one of the reasons I kind of preferred the basic contact from 1-3e. Yeah more levels of differentiation can add something, but when you go down to 1 either for loyalty or connection it quickly become obvious that any character should have something like chrx10 loyalty 1 contacts. I am more antisocial than most people and I have a crap ton more contacts than virtually any starting character in SR and many of them are over loyalty 1. How do these people know so few people chrx3 does not come close to a reasonable number. There really should be more to what a contact is on the connection side at the least where even 1 is enough that I'd scratch most the names off my list and say hey those are just people I know and not functioning contacts, but the descriptions don't hold that up.

That's not true! *Holds up knife* Um... which end do the bullets go in again?

If they're not responding to the firearms, try pointing them at their loved ones. The thing to remember when training people is that you must be willing to follow through on any threat you make and so make sure you aim for something that's not vital.

John Connor : "Hey! I said no killing!"
Terminator : "He'll live." *after having shot gate guard in both kneecaps*

to be fair, education is subsidized in most first-world countries (to a greater or lesser extent). in the states, you can generally expect 16,000 a year or less if you're not going to an ivy league 4-year university program. (and let's face it, you're not going to send someone through a 4-year engineering program so they can do maintenance on your drones, more likely it's a 2-year program. for anything that needs a 4-year program or more, you're generally paying someone to do creative work, which skillwires aren't exactly suited for in the first place).

and to be even more fair, the corporation mostly only cares that they aren't the ones footing the bill. so long as it's someone else paying, it doesn't matter (to them) how much it costs.

To be fair, even in private universities with massive 35 to 40k per year tuitions, the schools are offsetting a good chunk of their operating costs through dividends and interest on their endowments rather than passing those costs onto the students. In public universities, the difference comes from the state coffers.

Taking things back on target, I finally found something machineguns are good for. They outrange assault rifles by a ton. Being able to accurately engage targets out at sniper rifle ranges (1000+ meters) is a trick no assault rifle can pull off. Being able to engage a vehicle and all the occupants in a single trigger pull is occaisionally handy. I know it came up this weekend.

Machineguns still suck, but with enough use the little bright spots are starting to pop up.

I believe this penalty was intended for any tests a character makes for any action they are taking in the affected area. This does not count for the Reaction + Edge test. See the example in the book (page 179). The target Ghouls are affected by 3 successes on the suppression test. They have reaction 4 and edge 1, and the book does not mention a -3 penalty for the dodge test. Also, they get 2 successes.

Because they 1. don't list the penalty, 2. The ghouls get 2 successes, I believe they are not counting the Suppression zone penalty on the dodge test.

The dice pool penalty is to actions taken while in the suppressed area. The Reaction + Edge test (and defense tests in general) isn't actually an action -- it's a response to someone else's action. Similarly, resisting damage isn't considered an action either.

And yet Reaction Tests are always affected by wound penalties, as do the penalties for being fired upon multiple times in the same pass (i.e. -1 Die per additional Attack). So in my opinion, the suppression zone should also have an effect on their Reaction as well. *shrug*

The fact that reaction tests are affected by wound penalties and multiple attack penalties is entirely irrelevant, since there are specific rules for that.

Suppressive fire penalties are to actions, not reactions.

Also, as the threshold for the test is the number of hits on the suppression test, also giving a dice pool penalty equal to this would be harsh as every hit by the shooter would be +1 threshold and -1 dice.

Just a thought

A reaction is still an action, just not one that costs initiative or impact action economy.

Nor, in fact, is it actually defined as an action in the text at any point.

An action is an action. You know, Free Action, Simple Action, Complex Action. Avoiding a shot is a Defense Test.