The Shadowrun Situation

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 9:03 pm

Sorry, I meant "be a troll fetishist." I was texting in a hurry. Anyway, I call it having a troll fetish because the only people I know of who were happy with SR3 melee combat were the people who loved trolls enough that they were if anything pleased that the other metatypes were largely relegated to sucking eggs.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 12:09 am

I love Trolls on principle.
Trolling by the rules is always fun.
IF i had been made to play SR4, i'd have played a Troll there too.
Perfectly 100% rules legal broken in one regard without being a one trick pony too . . ultimate mundane climber with 46 dice in climbing, if you went all out, and 40 dice still in there if you only went 90% of the way ^^

shau · Post by **shau** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 12:51 am

I honestly don't think it is possible to balance melee combat in SR4 and SR5. You could start play with the Super Katana that does infinite damage and I could not give less of a fuck because everyone even vaguely competent with assault weapons drops anything they attack in a single round.

I think the best role for an adept is actually the Face/Pornomancer. Talking comes up enough that you don't feel bad that you have thirty dice in it, and you still have enough points left over to shoot fools.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 1:28 am

yeah, for melee to work you'd have to find a way to make guns suck more but not become worthless . . or limit the space of encounters drastically so you can actually run up to somebody and punch/disarm him . .
and then his buddies decide he ain't that good of a buddy and drop a grenade on you two.

Werewindlefr · Post by **Werewindlefr** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 1:49 am

Isn't it simpler to moderately increase survivability? What if, for instance, condition monitors were 10+body/willpower (not divided by 2) and you used 2xattribute for damage resistance/regular attribute+skill dodge for ranged attacks? I know there would be significant side effects, but would this work overall?

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 5:39 am

Why? Being a dedicated hth guy should be a suboptimal design in SR. It's like trying to be "mundane fighter" in a level 16 D&D game.

There is a pretty good reason why people stopped running around with swords, axes and clubs and went to guns. It's because guns kill people at a distance and melee weapons don't. If your character wants to try to pretend it's 1750 Japan under the Shogun then good for you, but the world shouldn't support that sort of silliness. So you should usually get shot to pieces when you try to charge a guy with a gun.

If you actually get there you'll almost certainly win, but that last 20 feet or so should really, really suck.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 5:58 am

Actually, that last 20 feet is the best part for the sword guy.

Everything leading up to the 20 feet is the danger zone. Once you're inside that, you've practically already chopped them down.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 6:01 am

kzt wrote:If your character wants to try to pretend it's 1750 Japan under the Shogun then good for you, but the world shouldn't support that sort of silliness. So you should usually get shot to pieces when you try to charge a guy with a gun.

Well, Raven made it work, by giving people an excellent incentive to not shoot him.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 7:22 am

Lokathor wrote:Actually, that last 20 feet is the best part for the sword guy.

Everything leading up to the 20 feet is the danger zone. Once you're inside that, you've practically already chopped them down.

It's a lot easier to shoot someone with a pistol at 5 meters then 50 meters. Rifles are good for both ranges, but you pretty much have to work at missing a man-sized target at 5 meters with a semiauto carbine, much less a fully automatic assault rifle or SMG.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 7:31 am

No, I'm serious though, this is a real thing that security forces of various types have to think about. If the person isn't already holding out their gun and trying to shoot at people (eg: a guard at a facility gate, or a foot-patrol), then once the adversary is within 20ft there's a strong chance you're already dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 8:32 am

Lokathor wrote:No, I'm serious though, this is a real thing that security forces of various types have to think about. If the person isn't already holding out their gun and trying to shoot at people (eg: a guard at a facility gate, or a foot-patrol), then once the adversary is within 20ft there's a strong chance you're already dead.

I've both read the original article and talked to Denis Tueller about it (he's a glock armorer trainer these days, or was two years ago). He also said if he was to do it again he'd have said 30 feet was the critical distance. It doesn't mean dude with knife doesn't get shot or killed, it means the guy with the gun will likely get stabbed, since pistols generally suck a lot more at stopping motivated people than games portray. And guys with knives who decide to charge a guy with a gun are usually pretty motivated. Your one or two shots might well kill him, but he might take a while to figure this out, during which he's doing a good imitation of a sewing machine on you.

That's if the guy with a gun doesn't have his hand on his gun. I've done some drills where you are reacting to a guy charging you and yeah, if you don't have your hand on your pistol you probably will get at most one shot off before he's right on you. If you do have your hand on the pistol (and if needed your various time consuming holster interlocks already removed) you'll likely shoot him 4 or 5 times as you move and shoot. If you are actually holding him at gunpoint the question becomes more whether you can finish reloading before the target reaches you and no, I was never that good. But shooting him 12-15 times should probably reduce his ability to hurt me.

So yeah, if you allow sword guy to get close without feeling like maybe you should take some sort of precaution about his waving around a two foot razor blade then you have likely chosen poorly and you are probably going to have a bad day.

Once you do end up in a close fight the guy with the melee weapon pretty much has all the advantages. It's really hard to shoot someone right on you, since he knows about the whole gun thing and will do things like use one hand to keep it from shooting him while he slices and dices you with the knife in his other hand. Guns in knife fights are just as bad as knives in gunfights.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 3:38 pm

That's true, but there is no way to win a knife fight. You just lose less.

Werewindlefr · Post by **Werewindlefr** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 10:02 pm

Even with body armor, reflex cyberware and magical powers?

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 3:54 am

The 20/30 foot rule is for mundane people. If you're jacked through the roof with reflex/dex boosting cyberware that makes your physical reactions 2-3 times as fast as normal humans, there's no reason why a street sammy within 30 feet couldn't kill a gun wielding whoever, assuming they aren't jacked up to a similar degree.

And towards that end, I think I can count on my hands with fingers left over the number of battles that occur at say over 75 feet in Shadowrun.

TheNotoriousAMP · Post by **TheNotoriousAMP** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 4:29 am

There's another thing to consider, which is that accuracy decreases wildly once the opponent enters into 15 meter range. Adrenaline, fear and the like fucks up your to think when someone's charging you. It's why charging was still an effective tactic, even into the Franco-Prussian war (the Civil War is an odd case because of the fact that thanks to volunteer armies, which often lacked the will to stop shooting and move forward, and an officer corps that was primarily composed of engineers, it was actually a far more defense conflict that the weapons of the time would suggest). Drawn out firefights are murder, while shock action forced the guys off the terrain you wanted and helped resolve the matter.

Plus, it only takes about 4-5 seconds for an un-augmented human athlete to run 40 meters, that's not a ton of time to react to someone charging you. So you basically have 2-3 seconds before the guy is in your threat range.

And ditto to the knife fight comment, worked as a bouncer in a pretty rough bar last summer and I've seen what people who used to fight with knives look like. You don't win. From what I've seen from ARMA (association for Renaissance Martial arts, pretty hard core guys who try and fully recreate what swordfighting actually looked like) swords are a bit different, because skill comes into play

Aryxbez · Post by **Aryxbez** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:38 am

Stahlseele wrote:I love Trolls on principle.
Trolling by the rules is always fun.
IF i had been made to play SR4, i'd have played a Troll there too.
Perfectly 100% rules legal broken in one regard without being a one trick pony too . . ultimate mundane climber with 46 dice in climbing, if you went all out, and 40 dice still in there if you only went 90% of the way ^^

I kinda like Trolls...for the fact I'm currently playing one, we had missions fighting a Troll Gang ("The Spikes" canonical gang faction), and I sorta want to play a Cyclops for some reason.

Though, Trolls aren't really that great, ye have ability to pay more for...a dump stat, and a survival tax-stat not as "good" as other attributes. However, I never really played 3rd beyond an extremely brief time at a con, so how are they getting that high of a Dice Pool??

In terms of houserules, how far should one go into consolidating of Skills in 4th edition Shadowrun? Currently, best I can think of off-hand, is the obvious Melee/Ranged Combat skills into own skill respectively, and BS like Diving/Falling into Gymnastics/Swimming/Athletics-group where it belongs.

Oh, and my prior question(s) as well.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 2:05 pm

The ultimate mundane climber is SR4, not SR3.
And they get that high dicepool, because climbing is strength linked and all cyber and bioware for climbing stacks directly with each other.

In SR3, Trolls only got the biggest Dice-Pool in Damage-Resistance. Because getting Body up to 18 in Char-Gen was trivial.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 2:59 pm

The civil war's weirdnesses were largely driven by everyone at the time studying Jomini. Jomini had some interesting ideas and taxonomy, but provided absolutely no useful information. It's exactly like GNS theory, and his (lack of) substance is exactly as herp-derp as soon as anyone tries to act on it.

TheNotoriousAMP · Post by **TheNotoriousAMP** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 9:26 pm

fectin wrote:The civil war's weirdnesses were largely driven by everyone at the time studying Jomini. Jomini had some interesting ideas and taxonomy, but provided absolutely no useful information. It's exactly like GNS theory, and his (lack of) substance is exactly as herp-derp as soon as anyone tries to act on it.

I'm a huge history nut, so I've heard this theory put forward before and it isn't exactly true. Its based on an over positive view of what the Civil War armies were. While they could be tough as nails and absorb tons of punishment, they always lacked the shock factor of the more disciplined European troops. The rifle itself didn't really change to many things because, as we've discovered, most firefights happened at Napoleonic ranges anyway. Troops rarely got target practice so the extra range didn't help much.

And while they may have read Jomini, the decisive factor, at least from what I've seen, still remains that these were armies lead by people who had been trained to build fortifications. So, sort of in a reverse early WW1 situation, you have this cult of the defensive that appears. Earthworks begin to be considered to be so invincible that no one tries to storm them, so instead you get into these murderous firefights. Same thing happened in the Napoleonic wars, well trained troops suffered fewer casualties because they had the discipline to stop shooting and rush forward. It was the conscipts who would butcher each other instead of breaking the enemy.

The battle for the bloody angle during the Spotsylvania campaign shows what happens when people actually move forward. Instead of the usual firefight, Hancock's corps attacked at a full run and quickly overran what would have been a normally murderous position, unfortunately they then lost discipline and didn't exploit the breakthrough and it went back to WW1 lite.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Thu Mar 06, 2014 4:47 am

The interesting thing about the civil was how few bayonet casualties are in the records. If these are accurate it seems pretty clear that most soldiers choose to run when facing a determined bayonet charge that wasn't going to be stopped by gunfire.

Werewindlefr · Post by **Werewindlefr** » Thu Mar 06, 2014 7:26 am

So what changed that in WWI? The phasing out of muzzle-loaders in favor of repeaters? The vickers/maxims? The fast-firing artillery and melinite shells?

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Thu Mar 06, 2014 7:30 am

Trenchfighting.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Mar 06, 2014 9:50 am

Err . . no, Trench-Fighting is basically what happened with the earth-works fortifications just on a larger scale.
Both meant throwing men and material at fucking hardcore positions to try and maybe take them with probably no real chance of holding them for fear of being cut off from support or due to the simple fact that they were built in such a way that they were hard to attack from one side but hard to defend from the other side.

artillery changed the earthworks and palisades to trenches and tunnels because they were harder to hit and easier to build.

and of course the end of WWI was coming with the tanks which simply rolled across the open field and over trenches and barbed wire and right by gun emplacements without caring about fast firing machine guns that would have decimated hundreds if not thousands of men in the same attempt.

mlangsdorf · Post by **mlangsdorf** » Thu Mar 06, 2014 4:42 pm

Werewindlefr wrote:So what changed that in WWI? The phasing out of muzzle-loaders in favor of repeaters? The vickers/maxims? The fast-firing artillery and melinite shells?

A combination of long-range artillery and long-range, rapid, and accurate rifle fire/machine guns made it impossible for even disciplined troops to close with the enemy before they got cut down. It was still possible to pin and flank a position, but once the trenches extended across Europe, that became impossible.