[jamesfirecat]

In all fairness I always operate under the assumption that I am either out of range of an enemy decker's attention zone or running wired and offline. I hate depending on a decker for not getting killed. For the less paranoid *cough*amateurs*cough* it's a nice option. ^_^

Sorry for me one of the main advantages of having a Hacker on your team is them playing defense.  Especially in 5th edition where you can no longer just skin link everything and call it a day if you want to.

The wireless grenade bonus is what makes them so character splattering and so you need to have them set to wireless on.  Luckily with a good decker on your team your foes will never even know you have grenades let alone be able to find them and make attempts to get marks on them till it is too late.

[RHat]

Your example does not make sense the way I Shadowrun.

Like I said 75% of the fight is the set up that means flanking, positions and denying your foes cover all should be taken into account before the first bullet gets fired, if the fight starts with your foes in cover than you have thoroughly screwed up your job.  Even if they have cover availed to them they should not be in it when the fight starts and by spending edge to go first (possibly just in general also being faster as a good street samurai should be faster than any generic mook) you can get that one shot in, which like you said could probably kill them, before they ever get a chance to move to that cover.

Why would you ever start a fight with your foes in cover?  If you start a fight in that situation you have probably been ambushed and you should probably be running away/looking for an exit.

Also you just don't shoot at people you can't see.

What you do is either shoot at someone who is the open, (or at least minimal enough cover that you can see them and do not take blind fire penalties)  or you hold your actions and then dex off with the guy when he tries to pop out of cover and shoot him first.

Except that if they all have cover than yeah it's grenade time, because honestly that is what grenades were meant to do flush people out of cover.

Also no shadowrunners I would ever play would only have five points of recoil comp.  Anyone should be able to get at least double digits, you use a wireless tripod that can deploy as a free action for six points of recoil comp, and gas vents three for another three, Ares Alpha has two and you're at 11 already without needing taking into account strength!

Tactics do matter in Shadowrun but in my book they are best all taken care of before the first bullet leaves the barrel.

...  Wow, your GM is very generous.  Tactics literally cannot be all taken care of before the shooting starts.

[jamesfirecat]

The fact that it's impossible to avoid wireless grenades in any way, no matter whether you have 3 or 30 dodge dice, whether you are standing still or zigzagging at 60 km/h, meaning a short burst from a grenade launcher will auto-kill everyone no matter what?

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I love lethal grenades. But there's definitely some flaws with them right now. Adding dodging abilities and making their overlap less crazy would solve that perfectly while keeping them dangerous as hell as they should be.

Thank you!  This is more or less exactly how I feel!  I am not sure if grenades were this broken in 4th and just did not notice it because everything was broken in 4th or if they only gained the ability to have same turn detonation in 5th but either way if you use the grenade launcher which can do short bursts and with wireless grenades, that 24P -4AP does as much damage as a cruise missile did in 4th edition if memory serves and will obliterate all but the toughest of troll sand even they will have to spend edge to soak enough of it to stay standing.

[jamesfirecat]

Your example does not make sense the way I Shadowrun.

Like I said 75% of the fight is the set up that means flanking, positions and denying your foes cover all should be taken into account before the first bullet gets fired, if the fight starts with your foes in cover than you have thoroughly screwed up your job.  Even if they have cover availed to them they should not be in it when the fight starts and by spending edge to go first (possibly just in general also being faster as a good street samurai should be faster than any generic mook) you can get that one shot in, which like you said could probably kill them, before they ever get a chance to move to that cover.

Why would you ever start a fight with your foes in cover?  If you start a fight in that situation you have probably been ambushed and you should probably be running away/looking for an exit.

Also you just don't shoot at people you can't see.

What you do is either shoot at someone who is the open, (or at least minimal enough cover that you can see them and do not take blind fire penalties)  or you hold your actions and then dex off with the guy when he tries to pop out of cover and shoot him first.

Except that if they all have cover than yeah it's grenade time, because honestly that is what grenades were meant to do flush people out of cover.

Also no shadowrunners I would ever play would only have five points of recoil comp.  Anyone should be able to get at least double digits, you use a wireless tripod that can deploy as a free action for six points of recoil comp, and gas vents three for another three, Ares Alpha has two and you're at 11 already without needing taking into account strength!

Tactics do matter in Shadowrun but in my book they are best all taken care of before the first bullet leaves the barrel.

...  Wow, your GM is very generous.  Tactics literally cannot be all taken care of before the shooting starts.

No not a generous GM just a smart shadowrunning team' be stealthy be sneaky, be quick on the draw, do not let your foes suspect you are there till it is too late (spirits concealing also helps).

Its not like Shadowrun fights start with two groups of people  just bumbling into each other in a wearhouse after all.

And do you have any thoughts on my comments on how you can shoot someone before they get the action to take cover?

[RHat]

Yes.  Your GM is being EXTREMELY generous if that ends the fight or near to.  That wouldn't be considered a fight.  Against any reasonable opposition, none of what you've suggested approaches being guaranteed.  You seem to be describing a situation that goes perfectly against sub-par opposition.

[Ryo]

Not sure if that's the nicest GM or just a really bad one. Honestly it sounds boring as hell if your plan works perfectly 100% of the time, with no surprises, and you wipe out the opposition with barely a whimper of resistance before they can shoot back.

[jamesfirecat]

Not sure if that's the nicest GM or just a really bad one. Honestly it sounds boring as hell if your plan works perfectly 100% of the time, with no surprises, and you wipe out the opposition with barely a whimper of resistance before they can shoot back.

Honestly it was round robin GMing and we were doing missions so if one of us were doing it wrong we were all doing it wrong things did ot always work out 100% of the time, but we knew how to deny our foes cover through stealth, surprise magic and hilarious amounts of firepower when called for. 

If watching the daughter of our murdered fixer use our helicopters minimum to let loose with some suppressive fire that murdered the 30 guards of the guy who ordered her father's murder is wrong than frankly I do not want to be right.

[jamesfirecat]

Yes.  Your GM is being EXTREMELY generous if that ends the fight or near to.  That wouldn't be considered a fight.  Against any reasonable opposition, none of what you've suggested approaches being guaranteed.  You seem to be describing a situation that goes perfectly against sub-par opposition.

We were running season two and season three missions so "sub-par" defines the opposition quite nicely to be honest.

[RHat]

Yeah, that's the trick with Missions - it has to work for pretty much whoever shows up, limiting...  A lot of things.

[jamesfirecat]

Yeah, that's the trick with Missions - it has to work for pretty much whoever shows up, limiting...  A lot of things.

For reference has Catalyst sold any product that feature missions with a bit more bite to them?  I figure the seasons are all sort of watered down so that people don't pay $4 to get their characters killed off (give or take BallroomBlitz) but do you know if there are any stuff they've released that is stand alone like umm Ghost Cartel was it called that is more difficult?


Asking honestly since it will probably be a few more splat books before I could convince my group to do anything in fifth edition and we are bad enough dudes who know how to optimize /play /build fourth edition characters well enough that we could stand up to the challenge.

[Ryo]

Make your own runs, then. If you're bad enough dudes to know how to optimize, you're bad enough dudes to know what will wreck your shit. Throw that at yourselves.

[Michael Chandra]

The Artifacts line in SRM04 (the even missions) was definitely spiced.

[jamesfirecat]

Make your own runs, then. If you're bad enough dudes to know how to optimize, you're bad enough dudes to know what will wreck your shit. Throw that at yourselves.

It takes four hours to run a mission on average we can find that time once or twice a month (actually more like three times every two months on average)

Nobody in our group wants to spend the time it would take to write an entire mission, nor when we were having fun even when we were face rolling people since 4th editions broken combat system made it seem like even in a fight between two groups of roughly equal power somebody was still going to get face rolled (typically its the team whose Mage goes second and gets to watch a good portion of is team eat an edged stunball or just some poor bastard get hit with multicast stunbolts)

[ZeConster]

Good luck hitting with your minimum -6 on that roll for Extreme range, and I would quite frankly give you Strong winds to deal with as well on a grenade traveling half a kilometer, so that's -10. So even if you went Agility 9 Heavy Weapons 6 at chargen, you're trying to get 3 hits on 5 dice.

Take Aim with Vision Magnification makes that -3 for Range, and quite frankly, saying "Strong winds" at 500m (a third of the distance snipers are capable of) just reeks of GM cheating, unless you make a point beforehand of mentioning there's a storm going on and everyone else also gets the penalty.
So all in all, you are far more likely to have a -3 than a -10, which means a Professional Rating 5 grunt with an assumed skill level 6 in Heavy Weapons has a 70.09% of nailing the shot, 19.51% of getting 3d6-2m scatter (so 8.5m on average), and 8.67% of 3d6-1m scatter (so 9.5m on average). Add in a wireless smartlink for +1 die, and those numbers become 76.59%, 15.90% and 6.36%, even without further Take Aim actions.
With Professional Rating 4 grunts and assuming skill level 5, you're less likely to get in trouble from that distance (42.94% of nailing the shot), but at 150m, Take Aim with Vision Magnification turns that -3 into a -1 from Range, so if there's no/light rain/fog/smoke, full/partial light, and no/light winds, that's 62.28% of nailing the shot, even without further Take Aim actions. And that is what I'm most concerned about: grunts being able to wipe out the party with a single not-unlucky shot.

[GiraffeShaman]

And that is what I'm most concerned about: grunts being able to wipe out the party with a single not-unlucky shot.

Well you can remove most uses of explosives by a combination of the law cracking down on them and at the same time being averse to using them as they destroy lives and property. (Reasons for both sides of the law not to use them in more civilized places)

That still leaves fights in the Barrens, where there are no rules. But I kind of like that, as it adds a different flavor to combat there, higher risk.

And every edition of the game has certain sniper situations, set explosions, and stun grenades being thrown a bunch by guards inside buildings. These are situations the GM just has to be sparing with, if he wants a campaign to last at all.

The biggest problem I saw with adding a grenade dodge mechanic is that then you'd have to add it to fireballs and indirect AOEs. I thought it was a good idea to add a similar mechanic as  dodging suppressive fire Edge + Reaction test) until I realized how tied to grenades indirect AOE spells are in this edition.