[Jason]

As a sort of postscript, I should add that this past session I ran used two house rules for combat:

Dodge was eliminated entirely as a skill, instead defaulting to an unmodified Agility roll. I did this for both game-world reasons (who just practices dodging independent of other combat strategies unless it's a fighting style specifically about defense, like aikido?) and for combat-mechanics reasons (I wanted my PCs to actually hit my NPCs). This DID succeed in making it easier to kill my NPCs, but it still took several rounds. The other side of the coin, of course, is that it made my PCs go down much faster too. (Maybe I should also add that my favorite "combat system" is the original Castle Falkenstein's, where fights are over pretty much instantly depending on who has the higher relevant combat ability, possibly modified by placing down a playing card from the hand.)

Bullets were more damaging and caused more disturbance. I didn't come up with a house rule I really liked before the game started, so I used an improvised one in the middle of a fight. Bullets did double CD damage plus Power, but the Dodge CD was subtracted before any damage modifiers were added or multiplied in, so a result of 0 damage was still possible. In other words, Damage = (2 x [AttackCD - DodgeCD]) + Power. Any shot from a gun automatically caused AttackCD disturbance. I'll probably modify this house rule quite a bit in the future, but it actually worked quite a bit better than I expected. Guns did consistently more damage than close-range weapons, but not so much that it would necessarily outweigh the use of Symphonically quiet methods.