Dodgin' Bullets

[HANS]

We have been over this several times, a search of the forums and the relevant books will bring up more details. Summing up:

Rounds per casuality figures are completely USELESS for this kind of discussion. They represent the rounds expended over time rather than per target. You can learn things from these statistics (tactics, prevalence of automatic weapons, etc), but NOT how good the shooters are.
Overall, shooters have atrocious hit rates IN COMBAT. And by atrocious I mean mainly seen from a game perspective, which is set by our own expectations how these things should turn out. Some shooters have much better average hit rates (especially snipers), but these are usually operating under specific conditions (shots from ambush, really, where the shooter controls most of the parameters -- including the target's inability to Dodge!). In a standup fight with people who shoot back at you, most shooters miss most of the time. And that means shots intended to hit, not just suppression fire. There is a huge amount of data to back this up, from police shootings and military analysts.
Now, the reasons for all those misses are NOT necessarily that the shooters lack suitable Guns skill -- although Guns 15-16 is extremely unlikely for troops of the line (Tactical Shooting, p. 42). Rather, the reasons are that most shootouts occurr under unfavourable conditions, in darkness, when you are tired, in poor weather, in surprised ambush situations where you can't clearly see the other, in confined spaces, etc, etc.
And yes, Dodge is also one of those reasons. Opponents will NOT stand still like a paper target. However, Dodge against firearms, and I cannot stress this enough, does NOT mean you are dodging the bullet. Any comparisons with dodging baseballs or melee weapons are completely missing the point. It means not being where the other shooter thinks you are. This can mean dodging the presentation, dropping to the deck, being on the move, etc, etc. It is an abstraction of the difficulty of hitting a target that does not stand perfectly still. The Dodge figures for ordinary PCs might err slightly on the high side, but that is a question of giving the players agency over their PCs to make the game fun. You can smooth that out a bit with the Tactical Dodging rules in (Tactical Shooting, p. 17), but frankly I don't even think that is necessary.

Cheers

HANS

[FF_Ninja]

Appreciate the response, Hans.

I think the biggest issue I had was that you could dodge a lot of those things from the standstill, but dodging a shot means evading and moving long before shots start coming in. Systematically, there's no difference between dodging a baseball bat and dodging the appearance of an aiming gun, but there's a good amount of telegraph to each of the former, and not as much to the latter - especially once shots start flying.

Put another way, even if someone gets the drop on you, you could steal realistically be able to defend against a melee attack. Higher velocity range weapons, though...

I don't know. I'm going to go look into those Tactical Shooting, Gun-Fu and Gunplay supplements. See what I come up with. If I get anything clever, I'll post again.

[Gigermann]

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.

[FF_Ninja]

Originally Posted by Gigermann

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.

I think before I restrict anything, I need to look into all the different practical methods used to avoid getting hit by a bullet. Not just dodging, but placement, cover, prediction - and what happens when none of these are present but death, amirite?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Gigermann

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.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Gigermann

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.

That's one of the options from Dodge This! (Pyr #3/57).

I know it's self-trumpteting, but I tried to be very comprehensive in the treatment of this, including both Hans' position (and some supporting stats) as well as several options for when to allow dodges, restricting dodges, and penalizing dodges.

[Kalzazz]

Does Dodge This have anything on the interaction between prediction ***** and ROF?

That is something that has annoyed. Say I'm shooting a shotgun at a dove (an Abyssal Terrible Dire dove, because I'm an adventurer in Real Combat TM), the dove has sweet dodge skills, so I want to prediction shot it. Except I don't, I want to NOT prediction shot, because every 2 skill I sacrifice for prediction shot is 2 pellets that aren't going to be potential hit, and the dove needs to dodge by 2 for every 2 pellets instead of by 1 for every 2 skill used for prediction shot

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Gigermann

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.

There's a great Pyramid article on this idea written by Douglas Cole. Pyramid 3-57 Gunplay, Dodge This.

[EDIT]
That's what I get for going and having a sandwich before I finish typing out a post...
[/EDIT]

[Andreas]

The penalties Dodge This assigns based on the speed of the projectile seem very small. An attack moving 2000 yards/second only give a -4 to dodge even though that is too fast for a human to be physically capable of moving out of the path of the bullet unless the attacker is very far away. Even an attack moving at light speed only gives a -12 penalty...

Also what is the reasoning behind only having a half as large penalty to dodging as the penalty for parrying or blocking? Dodging is generally easier than parrying, but it seems very strange for the difference to grow without bound with the speed of the attack. A constant difference seems like it would be more reasonable. Also is blocking with a shield really that much harder than dodging?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Andreas

The penalties Dodge This assigns based on the speed of the projectile seem very small. An attack moving 2000 yards/second only give a -4 to dodge even though that is too fast for a human to be physically capable of moving out of the path of the bullet unless the attacker is very far away. Even an attack moving at light speed only gives a -12 penalty...

Also what is the reasoning behind only having a half as large penalty to dodging as the penalty for parrying or blocking? Dodging is generally easier than parrying, but it seems very strange for the difference to grow without bound with the speed of the attack.

If the speed of light has a finite penalty, then 1/2 the penalty doesn't grow without bound.