Right you can all imagen it, it's a saturday afternoon and we are creating characters, usual moaning and so forth. Then one of our group turns round and say's we all need Small unit tactics, 'yeah cool , good idea' we all pipe in.
However to this day I have never used it or seen anyone else use it, have we just wasted the points or is there a valid use for it? I mean there must be or it Would'ent be in the rules! I just never actually put it to the test. Can someone please explain it to me so I can ether turn round and say 'Nar thats a load of drek!' or actually use it in a game! looked in SR3 and still at a loss!

torz x

If you all took it, yes, you wasted points on most of the characters. That being said, for one or two people it's invaluable; check Cannon Companion for the rules. The Rigger makes the best SUT user.

~J

Huh? We use it all the time. It adds a few extra points to each person's next Intiative roll usually. The fastest sam uses his last Pass to use this skill to help boost the slower members a few points. The team is usually at least commlinked so they have some amount of communication beyond shouting and gesturing.

I wouldn't buy it for everyone on the team, not by a longshot. Buy it for characters that have a reason to know it (why would a bookish academic mage suddenly thrust into using his hermetic ability as a criminal be an expert at fire and manuever in an urban area?) -- and buy it for one, maybe two, people in the group tops (at start, at least).

It's a great way to get a bit of an edge for initiative when it comes to the deckers/riggers/mages (outside their specialty), and it especially appropriate and usefull if you've got a character that tends to "take charge" in the first place. It's not a bad trade-off to lose one action a round in exchange for the whole team getting a +1 or +2 (or more, especially if there's a tactical computer and/or Battletac gear involved) on initiative.

Why not? Not everyone is always in the best postion to do SUT all the time. Also, it's nice to see folks getting some skills that "fit" the character instead of the "min/max" approach.

the rules are in Canon Companion. you have to have it as an active skill, for some reason. basically, you make a roll against a TN determined by your method of communication. for every 2 successes, you can add +1 to your team's init rolls (or rea dice, if you're setting an ambush), or, optionally, +1 to their combat pool. however, if two people are trying to use the skill on the same group, the TN goes up, and only the highest result applies.

I'd argue that having every member of your team put 4-6 points into the same skill is, in a way, piling a whole lot of eggs into the SUT basket. It's not that much of an edge -- leave it to one or two characters who have both the reason to understand the SUT basics and the character type to give orders. Then you've got a primary field commander-type, and a backup (who's never standing right next to him, just in case).

Should be all you need.

Using SUT to grant initiative bonuses is a nice perk, but considering it costs a complex action to confer the bonus to others, the TN starts at 4 and climbs quickly, and you need two successes to grant a +1 bonus to init, you'll want to have equipment or augmentations (radio, battletac, etc.) which facilitate SUT. Like Kagetenshi said, the Rigger's probably the best SUT practitioner in this regard.

SUT is also very useful for stealthy killers, lone gunmen, breaking and entering type, snipers, and so forth. It doesn't cost an action to use SUT on yourself, though I've always been fuzzy on what TN to use in this situation. Should it be 4 (you must be in your own LOS afterall)? Do BattleTac mods apply? Regardless, when ambushing, reaction is nearly twice as good for the ambusher as the ambushed.

Can dice pools be used with SUT (aside from Karma, obviously)? The combat pool is a bit iffy: it's definitely a "combat" skill, but the rules for combat pool state that combat pool is only for offensive weapon skills and defensive rolls such as dodging and staging down damage. What about the encephelon's task pool? MM p. 20 states that it can be used for all intelligence linked skills, while p. 48 states only technical, b/r, knowledge and language.

The bonus combat pool dice (if allowed) is an extremely nice boon that can mean the difference between a dead team, and a team that makes it out intact. While it is nice that folks would cross train in SUT, a well-oiled team would typically defer to a single leader/tactician-type to do most of their tactical planning, and thus, only one (or possibly two, if you have a backup) person would ever get a chance to use it on a regular basis.

it is? i'd never seen it listed as such, and had kinda been wondering. where's it say that at? i'm not arguing, i just wanna be sure.

Meh. I must have been subconsciously influenced by that insidious NSRCG program.

Be that as it may though, the Task Pool can be used for 'all' Intelligence-linked skills, so my point still applies.

Nope, that only applies for certain Task Pool-granting items.

~J

bah. i was hoping he'd have a page number. i was thinking about picking up Centering: Technical skills to get a little more juice out of my Electronics and Electronics B/R skills. having it apply to SUT would be a niiice bonus.

Centering: Technical... there's a fortune for some bugger on the Bomb Squad...

Still can't use Centering for Technical Skills, according to SotA'64. Pretty much anything but Technical Skills though.

I still think that SUT should fall into the Technical Skills category. What other Active Skills are listed in canon as being special, and not coming under one of the specified categories?

Do the battle tac system increases what amount of dice to a SUT's user or is it just the -2 or -1 TN for the skill roll?

If you use a Tactical Computer as the Master Unit, you get additional dice.

~J

I have not seen any reference to bonus dice with the battle tac system except in conjuntion with the tactical computer system.
Also I do not believe that combat pool applies, especially since the Small Unit Tactics skill can either grant bonuses to init or as an optional rule bonuse dice to the combat pool.
As far as the tactical computer system, we've sort of house ruled that it is available at half cost as a NON cyber piece of equipment. Most usefull if it's a rigger using it.

Put it in a cyberlimb along with the cyberdeck.

Using the Battletac system can provide extra dice, but they're remarkably vague about "how" when you go to look it up -- the only way I can figure is that a character is capable of taking "Battletac" or something as a specialization of the SUT skill -- so, in a fashion (I guess), whenever they've got the right gear they're getting a "bonus" by getting to use their specialization.

Ah, yes. The BattleTac skill from FoF. But Critias seems to be discussing SUT (BattleTac) or (Matrix Tactics), the latter of which is only useful if you have the BattleTac Matrixlink.

Right. I'd say the difference is in the "book learning" of the character in question.

If they've been to a military academy or had SWAT officer training or something, I'd suggest they sink a few points into the SUT Knowledge skill, not just the active one; this would show that they understand the concepts and ideas behind the orders being given, they understand why and how it all comes together, and they would be able to (in a game I ran, at least) use that SUT knowledge skill to maybe have an idea of how someone else would use SUT against them.

If you know how the Lone Star SWAT team is gonna come into the room, you can know where to have your guns pointed and waiting for them. If you read the same manuals and went to the same classes as the Tir Ghost squad leader that's chasing you through Portland, maybe you know what to expect. It's also quite possible that all you've done is studied those manuals and gone to those classes, though; you could certainly have the Knowledge skill and be a bumbling jackass with no idea how to implement the ideas you've got. No Active skill required, to know the theories. There's just as many armchair officers in 2060 as today, I'd imagine.

The active skill is just that; it's doing it, not necessarily knowing it. In the same fashion that some people (most people) are quite capable of driving a car without understanding how an engine works, firing a handgun without really understanding the physics behind it, or typing very quickly without knowing how to program, some people in a world and reality as violent as Shadowrun would know what worked in a fight, and know how to tell people what to do, without really understanding the "fancy book smarts" behind it all.

A gang leader that's survived and won lots of alley-scraps and drive-bys would understand the value of fire superiority ("bust caps in their punk asses, yo!"), flanking ("shit, T-Dawg, take Rosco an' swing 'round that fuckin' alley! They's stuck behind that dumpster, y'all waste 'em!"), and tactical withdrawals ("Fuck, s'the Star! Fade!"). He might know what works in a fight, know what to look for in terms of dangerous ambush-potential terrain (chokepoints and the like), etc, etc... and just now know the names of all the shit he's learned through experience. He's got the active skill, but not the knowledge.

To me, that's the difference between the Knowledge and the Active skill(s), and the reasons someone might choose to take one, both, or neither.

CC doesn't "make" it an active skill. CC introduces an active skill of the same name. There are still plenty of reasons to take it as a knowledge skill, and nowhere does it say (in CC or anywhere else) that it's no longer available as a knowledge.

To the best of my knowledge, that's not from the basic Battletac system though (the communicators, the external gear, the receivers that each team-mate has, the display screens built into helmets or whatever, etc) -- that's from a Tactical Computer (cyberware).

The only tangible benefit a Battletac hook-up by itself gives is if the character has taken the "via battletac" specialization of the skill (implying to me that they're just really badass at communicating via that particular hardware, etc, as opposed to commando hand signals and stuff). There are intangible benefits to using the Battletac equipment, sure -- shared line of sight, quicker transfer of general data to other team members, etc... but the only numerical difference in the specific application of the SUT active skill is if there's a specialization involved.

Die quantities, certainly. The -2 TN and simple-action-only is also rather nice, though…

~J

Unarguably. I was just under the impression there was still some confusion as to "extra dice or no extra dice?" and wanted to try and clear it up -- part of the book makes it very much sound like you outright get extra dice, but it's never backed up anywhere.