Rapid Fire Melee Attacks [Powers]

[Plane]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

By RAW, Melee Attacks cannot have Rapid Fire, but that does not mean that you cannot have Rapid Fire at Melee range. In order to do so, you just need to take Reduced Range 3 (-30%), which reduces your 1/2D range to 1 yard and your Max range to 10 yards, meaning that your full force attacks occur at a 1 yard range while the shockwaves of your attacks can deal 1/2 damage up to 10 yards away.

You can make that even more melee-ish by taking the Nuisance Effect of "Range is actually 5 yards" from Psionic Powers 36.

I'm not sure what that would do for 1/2D though...

Do you recall whether or not Jet +0% (also melee-ish) is compatible with Rapid Fire?

Also, since High-Tech basically has rules for getting melee-ish to-hit bonuses with guns used at close range (+4 for all-out determined, +4 for telegraphic) it makes me wonder whether you could use these rules for non-melee innate attacks too...

If you could then would it defeat the purpose of taking Melee-Capable?

In that case if you designed guns as innate attacks then should you be obligated to take melee-capable enhancement for them to reflect the better bonuses that guns get at immediate range?

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Selective Effect, +20%
the shockwaves of their missed attacks only effecting the surroundings if they wish

I know that Selective Effect is based on senses according to PU4 (ie if you specify "exclude my allies" it only excludes allies you actually know are there)

It seems possibly that you might actually miss (or have an attack dodged) without immediately realizing that failure to make contact...

To account for that, maybe something like a Senses roll (or even a Sacrificial Power Dodge) might be appropriate to make last-minute corrections.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Would you use this spin on the rules to represent Rapid Fire Melee Attacks?

Since it's still ranged, you could only dodge these punches, not parry or block them, so if I was trying to keep on theme, I might also take "Blockable" or "Parryable" limitations on them too.

I'm not sure if you would still do that if you took Jet, anyone know if Jets are blockable/parryable like melee attacks or dodge-only like ranged?

Of course, since you're going into a high-tier territory with that particular ability (ie bypasses DR) then you might want it to be (normally) unparryable/unblockable where only people with Cosmic Parry or Cosmic Block could defend that way.

One other area of difference is that since this is still technically a ranged attack, to get a +3 to dodge they couldn't merely do a retreat, they'd actually have to Dodge and Drop. That's a HUGE advantage IMO since you can force your foes into a less mobile posture (lying down).

Of course... you also have to then deal with the problem that when a foe is lying down, ranged attacks have a penalty to hit them, where AFAIK there isn't a penalty to hit them with melee attacks.

I don't know if there's any way around that... I guess you could also buy Accurate but the bonus to hit is only going to help if you do an Aim first, which you might not be doing if you're trying to brute-force foes with maximum attacks per second.

Note about the -20% version of No Sig, that's gotta mean one of two things:

• 1) it's NEARLY unnoticable... so people would still probably see minor fluctuations in air flow, or hear a tiny sound, equivalent to a blowdart (probably -8 to sense, based on Powers pricing)
  2) it's NORMALLY unnoticable, unless someone can sense some kind of supernatural thing like say, chi flow, in which case it would show up 100% on that.

Originally Posted by naloth

FWIW, there's a separate line in Powers that also says you can't use a power more than once per turn (to attack then Power Parry), even if you could justify exceeding a semi-automatic's RoF.

recall page? That's a pretty big hindrance to someone who might want to use Extra Attack to attack twice with various abilities included under a power.