Everyone knows the first commandment of Shadowrunning that God handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai - Thou shalt geek the mage before any other.

This begs the question, who do you geek second. Which archetype is so universally dangerous that you should consentrat all f your deathdealing upon after you have returned the enemy magician to the soft bosom of the creator?

Please, voice your opinions.

Forget that. Geek the troll first. They're always bad news. You want to at least screw up his TN's before he starts swinging the combat axe or blasting with the auto fire shotgun (which they all carry, even the mages).

Situationally, it depends on who's carrying what and where they're positioned.

The troll or the heavy weapon, if applicable, gets my vote.

A placed sniper can seriously ruin anyone's day.

And let's hope they don't have a drone rigger providing overwatch and fire support.

Geeze...who do you geek second?

-Siege

Geek the Rigger first. Problem is, you usually can't geek the Rigger, so geek the Mage and then get the hell out of Dodge.

~J

Waste Trolls, not ammo.

I prefer geeking the guy with the many IPE offensive grenades on his belt first. It usually geeks everyone else in a 15 meter radius in a nice big tie for second geeking.

The rigger. He could be six people at once. In fact my players tend to geek the rigger first, then the magicaly active.

Just hold an action for him to pull the pin.

~J

The other mage.

Trolls can soak up a lot of damage, do not waste bullets on them. they should be targeted by mages with mana bolts.

After geek the mage? Go for the lesser people with the guns. Sure the sammie is dangerous but take out his support force. Start piling up casualties around the sammie. no matter how good the sammie is, if he's got casualties to take care of he'll have to back off.

Shooting everyone next would be a good bet.
If you're getting into a prolonged combat and the must-kill heavyweight has been taken down already, the best thing to do is to rack the opposition's target numbers up to make them as good as useless. Six injured guys is better than one dead guy and five perfectly healthy combatants.

exactly. once the casualties start to add up the opposition's ability to progress is reduced. Do they leave the wounded to fend for themselves? They cannot go forward.
Think of the scene in BlackHawk Down where the rescue mission finally digs in. The captain declares "We are combat ineffective!" They could still fight and hold the ground but they had so many wounded slowing them down they could no longer advance.

The opposition's sammie may have wired reflexes 3 and a skill of 8 with ingram smart guns, but he can't leave his team behind, and they are too wounded to go forward..

Ahhh, yes. The logic behind adopting the 5.56 round.

1. Which doesn't really count if the enemy is not worried about his casualties
2. Depending on the force and situation, you may not have the resources to treat the wounded in mid-conflict
3. In small unit conflicts, disengaging to treat the wounded isn't really an option in the face of an aggressive opposing force

-Siege

Use area of affect weaponry. Geek the mage, the sams and seriously hurt the troll at the same time. As a side note, missiles also work well against drones ...

... but attract Lone Star like a donut shop with a sale on.

Someone has clearly not read the Great Dragon ATGM entry recently.

~J

After the mage, pop their fastest guy. Whether he's a samurai, an adept or a rigger jumped into a drone (I guess that's the drone you have to shoot) the speedster is the one with the most opportunities to shoot you. The big troll may look scary, but if he only shoots once for every three times the Sammy goes, then the Sammy gets the most bang for your buck.

Of course, you could just start with air timed IPE grenades and just geek everybody all at once

Man does nobody use riggers? A rigger is hands down the single most powerful character you can have on any professional team. Striking from a distance, not limited by any LOS restrictions, capable of using targeting programs, and heavy weapons en mass, able to coordinate multiple teams, drones and communicate with the authorities/back up or whatever near instantaneously all in the relative safety of an armored heavily armed vehicle.

Add in some Magical back up inside his vehicle, and he is nigh invincible.

A mage is limited by drain, and essence. Riggers are only limited by money.

For some reason the troll with a Grenade Launcher, SL2 and air timed using it like a shotgun reminds me of the CyberDemon from Doom.....

Mine do in the nasty fights when they're forced to cast high-force spells. Or keeping multiple spells up (the +2 modifer for each sustained spell applies to the drain TN as well, it's a nasty house rule, i know).
But rarely had more than M drain after a fight, though.

Some mages are extremely tough to kill and targeting them will cost you the fight and your lives. A mage with Immunity to Normal Weapons(not a difficulty), decent armour(with the conspicuous Armour spell = me mage!) and concentrating on spell defense can act as decoy for any of the more fragile group members like the street sam, adept or troll who are concentrating on killing off your team.

So while geeking the mage first is a truism that is mostly valid, like most things in SR, you cannot always rely on it.

If its a uniformed group, I'd say take out command and control. Target their Police Commander, or the Security Shift Leader or what have you. If they are 'runners or gangers or otherwise from street level, that might more difficult to determine. If you've got a reasonable gm, that should effect their response considerably.

My favorite decker PC approached running with the philosophy that if you look geeky and frail enough, the enemy will shoot at you last and be more inclined to let you surrender first.

Oddly enough, it worked.

So I say attack the biggest, nastiest, most heavily armored cyber-troll freak in the group. Spare the geeks.

They're NPCs - they can always find someone crazy, desperate or psychotic enough to work for them.

-Siege

I pretty much agree with Sicarius.

The standard targets for snipers throughout history have been, in descending order:

(1) Officers;

(2) Non-commissioned officers (usually anyone between Sergeant and Lieutenant Second Class, although Lance Corporals (Marine Corps) Corporals, and Warrant Officers, or their naval equivalents, might also be counted);

(3) Communications officers (the guy with the field radio on his back); and

(4) Heavy-weapons people--i.e, anyone carrying a squad automatic weapon, light, medium, or heavy machine gun (or their components, such as the tripod), bazooka, mortar (or components), or ammunition for the aforementioned weapons.

Example: During World War II, the favorite target of enemy snipers--after officers, NCOs, and communications personnel--was the man with the Browning Automatic Rifle ("BAR"), because the enemy had learned, from experience, that the BAR man was individually the most dangerous man in the squad, because his weapon was more portable than, but had about the same firepower as, a light or medium machine gun. Its main flaw was a low ammunition capacity--it had a maximum cyclic rate of 600 rounds per minute (10 shots per second in SR parlance)--but only a 20-round magazine.

(Emphasis mine.)

A story was once related to me of a BAR man whose entire unit (a squad or two, I think, that is, ten or fifteen men--something smaller than a platoon, at any rate)--except for him, that is--was wiped out by an enemy attack. He had survived by scrounging supplies (food and water) and ammunition from his dead comrades during lulls in the fighting. When another patrol found him later, he was alive and pretty much unhurt, but had been driven to the brink of insanity by rage, grief, fear, and exhaustion.

His BAR was useless; the barrel had been "washed out"--that is, the rifling had been destroyed, and the barrel itself warped from excessive heat, from the almost-constant firing.

His foxhole was surrounded by the corpses of between eighty and one hundred enemy soldiers. I say "enemy soldiers" because I am not certain whether the incident took place in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) or in the Pacific Theater--or, for that matter, whether the fellow in question was a soldier (U.S. Army, that is), or a U.S. Marine.

--Foreigner

Who, reminds me of the stories about the Browning .30 cal water cooled LMG and the South Pacific theater. I forget which island but two guys and the Browning held off thousands of Japanese troops.

Oh, and it's my dwarven sam's policy to (after taking out the most obvious threats) shoot the tallest guy first.

Sniper targets in history may have been that way, but in modern times through a grunt's view (mine) this is the target order.

#1: Officer or whoever seems to be in charge (if on the battlefield, and clearly giving orders. They will not display rank, so figuring out who an officer is will be difficult.

#2: The guy with the heavy weaponry (machine guns, MK12's, etc). That is why all grunts are cross-trained with the heavy weaponry guy so they can jump on it when he dies. Heavy weapon is suppression and when it goes down, our people die.

#3: Comm guy. The dude has a HUGE antenna (the good ones do) and a sniper will see that. They stick out like a sore thumb, because they will have a big pack displaying their com gear.


Some terrorists might actually wound medics first, but that is a whole other story.

I say waste the damn radio guy first. What's more dangerous? A machinegun, or a multiple Snake and Nape run on your position? Not to mention loss of command and control.

I suppose I've been tempted to aim my second shot at the teammate who fumbled his stealth roll, but since that's been me just as often as anyone else...

nice.

I like coordination with my teammates. This sometimes takes the form of focus fire, but more often means prioritizing targets based on who is best equipped for the situation. As you can imagine, it varies greatly depending on fields of fire and the condition the team is in (for example, the mage isn't much use if he's already fighting off +5 combined damage modifiers), but generally it breaks down like this:

The mage Manabolt or Stunbolts the biggest, most cybered target; a troll, a gilette, the guy in Heavy Combat Armor with a gyro-mounted weapon. They usually aren't hard to find since they're either huge, don't bother with cover, or go way before the mage in the initiative order.

The sniper pops the mage. A good sniper (usually an Adept with Improved Skill: Rifles or a cyber/bio combo with Reflex Recorders and the like) with APDS/AV ammo (more affordable than you'd think since he needs so little) has surprisingly little trouble with mages... or much of anything else, for that matter.

The assault rifle users focus on whichever targets seem like they'll be the toughest to hit or damage; a nice 6+ Full-Auto attack really tears through armor and makes dodging extremely difficult.

The pistol/SMG users (usually deckers, riggers outside of vehicles, and other semi-liabilities) play clean-up since they're usually far enough down the initiative order that everything important is dead.

In the case of an entrenched battle (allies and enemies both behind cover, long ranges with poor visibility or other fights likely to last multiple rounds) we usually try to assign someone to dishing out grenades either by hand or from a launcher - both the frag kind and smokescreens for movement - and either have the rigger drop heavy and possibly indirect fire from drones, have the mage whistle up some spirits/elementals for support, or just let him go crazy with -ball spells.

You'll notice we don't many allowances for melee fighters; that's not an oversight. The general policy I take on them is thus: "If you want to get your ass shot off trying to run over there, be my guest. I'll be behind cover. Mind the grenades, we won't be holding back on your account."

We usually play fairly 'professional' level runners, though. I'm not sure how I'd handle a street level campaign. I guess for one thing melee (probably via a troll adept or similar) would become a lot more important.

I geek the other magically-active character.

IME, every group has at least two.