Kudos to the optional rule team. Overall great quality, several gems in here. Thank you for listening to the community even when they're yelling at you.
Thanks! The errata team wrote that chapter. It was fun, and of course it's gratifying to see people enjoying it.
Even though I'm not going to use "You Can't Dodge Bullets", it's not because I don't like the idea. I would prefer this to opposed defense rolls for ranged combat. It's just too big a change to implement into my game, and there are too many edge cases undeveloped. Was this an early draft of 6e's combat?
A magician generally shouldn't spill their secrets. But... that actually came about from the original idea of finding an optional rule to reflect that small targets *ought* to be harder to hit than larger targets. Ever notice that a bug drone is just as easy a target to shoot as a tank is? In toying around with bringing size-based thresholds into opposed attack tests we eventually just embraced thresholds outright. In playtesting the rule, we found it actually feels pretty skirmish wargame-y, so maybe players of those games might like the rule. As you say, it *is* a fairly profound deviation from how SR has usually handled attacks as opposed tests.
Another thing I haven't seen discussed yet is whether people feel like blast damage was nerfed too much, if all the optional rules affecting it were implemented. DR converts blast damage to stun at a rate of 1 per 4 pts of DR and the Cover Shields Blasts rule reduces it at a rate of 2 per level of Cover. Both are significant reductions, and I like them both.
THIS issue, otoh, goes all the way back to 6e's pre-release. The wompin' potential damage from grenades is really out of synch with the rest of 6e's damage values, yet it's never been errata'd. And that's not because we didn't want to, nor was it because we weren't allowed to. We really couldn't come up with a SIMPLE way to address everything we wanted to fix. For example the DE and FR versions of the rules simply nerfed the maximum DV down from 16 to 12. We didn't do that for a couple reasons, but one I'll mention here is because lowering from 16 to 12 doesn't change the problem of you being automatically dead, with nothing you can do about it, if a second grenade is lobbed your way in the same combat round. The various optional rules you see in Companion regarding nerfing blasts are all based on early errata ideas. The problem with them, as you saw, is if you use them all, then it may actually go too far in "over-nerfing" blasts. Once we got word we were going to have the opportunity to do this chapter, we quit trying to solve the problem of overly-lethal blasts by offering a menu of options in Companion. Use them all if you really want to tone down Mr Grenade-throwing Specialist... or pick and choose which you like for your own taste. That's exactly how the entire chapter is meant to work!
Are area Combat spells also categorized as Blast damage? That would be useful info.
No, they are not blasts. For starters, they do not scatter as they did in 5e... indeed you defend against them! Furthermore, 6e spell damage doesn't tend to get really out of hand. Using these rules against fireballs and whatnot would given an unneeded kick in the junk to spellcasters. If you want to nerf MagicRun, there are options elsewhere in this chapter designed to do exactly that...
