Thread: Dodgin' Bullets
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Old 03-22-2016, 09:54 AM   #35
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Dodgin' Bullets

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gigermann View Post
Personally, I've been thinking about disallowing Dodge against firearms altogether and allowing "evasive movement" (that was a thing in 3e, wasn't it?) to give a penalty to be hit—it solves the issue, but by taking away a bit of player-agency, which makes it unpopular. Pretty sure it's not the first time that's been suggested; I'm not sure what the Law of Unintended Consequences has to say about it, though.
You could still have some player agency involved. Evasive Movement would mean making a Dodge roll on your own turn (so you can't do it alongside any Maneuver that disallows a Dodge). Going off of Prediction Shooting, imposing a penalty of -2x(MoS+1) to anyone shooting you would work. However, this is actually unfair to the Dodging target, as it basically means your foes automatically take exactly the right penalty to insure they hit. A multiplier of -3 may be more fair. There is, however, the interaction with RoF to take into account, where each additional hit means you have to have a further +1 to MoS on your Dodge to actually avoid taking any damage. Things work out more-or-less fine for Rcl 3+ weapons, but for Rcl 1 and 2 weapons things get more complicated - make your attack without the penalty and determine how many hits you would have scored. Each extra hit is lost in exchange for negating -3 worth of the penalty. If the penalty reaches 0, all remaining hits were successful. If you run out of extra hits before the penalty reaches 0, apply the penalty to the initial roll to determine if you score a single hit. If you rolled well enough that you would hit with more bullets than you actually fired, you'll also want to figure out how many hits you would have scored with the full penalty in play, and use the greater result.

As an example, let's say I manage to roll an 8 against my Dodge of 9, for MoS 1 and a -6 to anyone shooting at me. I'm being shot at by a fellow with a laser pistol in semi-automatic (RoF 3). He'd normally be at skill 16 between Range, skill, and Acc. As he's firing multiple shots, he'll roll without the penalty - he rolls a 9, for 3 hits. He loses 2 hits to get the penalty to 0, for 1 hit. However, he had enough MoS for 8 hits - more than the 3 he fired - so we also need to determine how many hits he would have scored with the penalty in play. -6 would have dropped his skill to 10, for 2 hits. That's more than the 1 we calculated before, so I get hit twice.

This is a complicated idea, unfortunately, but only with multifire Rcl 1 and 2 weapons. Fortunately, the above laser pistol situation is about as bad as it gets.

You could allow characters who don't know the penalty to still opt for Predictive Shooting, where every -2 to hit negates -3 of the penalty, but that's probably an unneeded complication. You may wish to make an exception when effective skill is 18 or higher, however, as in those cases everyone's going to drop skill to 16 or 17 via Predictive Shooting.
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