| From: | Paul Jonathan Adam <Paul@********.DEMON.CO.UK> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: Speed is Life (Is it?) |
| Date: | Thu, 21 Sep 1995 02:10:02 GMT |
> > On Wed, 20 Sep 1995, Eve Forward wrote:
> > Could you post some alternatives to "Speed=Everything"? Speed and
> > reaction and not-being-surprised pretty much -are- everything in
> > just about every combat I've seen.
>
> Skill, weight of numbers, reach, superior positioning and tactics,
> suppressive fire, and anti-personnel mines. A good plan beats a fast gun
> any day of the week.
> Also keep in mind that in you basic shoot-out with corp guards,
> speed is really not going to be that much of an advantage. When you
> include all the modifiers (here I go again...) for shooter's movement,
> target's movement, poor visibility, your cover, their cover, wounds, and
> other random situational modifiers, you're often looking at a
> double-digit target number. Suddenly skill, far more than speed,
> becomes the deciding factor. Faster characters just waste more ammo.
Low hit probability means he who fires most often wins.
> In situations like this you also have to worry about the weight
> of numbers. Yes, you'll shoot twice before the goons go, but your
> chances of hitting, much less killing one are slim. If they have
> superior numbers, they will ultimately end up rolling more dice than
> you. In addition, they can often lower their target numbers to less than
> yours by doing things like trapping you in a cross-fire where you have
> less (or even no) cover in relation to some of them.
Speed gives you more chance to deal with that. Speed also gives you more
time to retreat and live to lie about it. And if you have thermographic
or ultrasound and they don't, speed lets you dirty the area up with smoke
grenades. It hurts them more than you and evens the odds.
If you run into security who are dug in and organised, smoke them off and
pull back behind a hail of gunfire and anything that might spoil their
shooting (flash packs, flash grenades, smoke, setting fires, activating
the sprinklers...) If you're outnumbered, attacking into a prepared position's
killing ground will get you killed however much you paid for those wires.
> How about surprise? If they are laying in wait to ambush you,
> their target number for the surprise test is at -2. So while you're
> looking for 4's, they're looking for 2's. A wired-3, max natural
> Reaction sammy has a Reaction of about 12. That's 6 successes,
> statistically speaking. The corp goon with Reaction 5 and a Threat
> Rating of 2 is going to at least tie. That Lone Star DED trooper with a
> Reaction 8 and Threat Rating 3 is going to blow you away. And if there
> are two of them? Goodbye.
So where is the Reaction 5-6 non-wired PC at any advantage at all? The wireboy
at least starts out even. Without wires, you're completely hosed. This
certainly doesn't support the contention that high speed is irrelevant.
> On to supressive fire. It doesn't matter how fast you are,
> you're still going to take rounds if you step out into an area that's
> being suppressed. Though the rules don't explicitly state it, it is
> reasonable to allow suppressive fire to "wrap around" from one combat
> round to another. After all, you're just holding down the trigger.
Not at all: suppressive fire takes conscious thought and training. Anyone
can put holes in landscape: putting rounds where they will pin and intimidate
an enemy into staying put, is a skill the British Army teaches you.
"Holding the trigger down" on any automatic weapon leads to a lot of lead
fired harmlessly into the sky, an empty magazine within three seconds,
and if you keep reloading, you can shoot off your entire ammo load in
under two minutes. By then the barrel is red-hot and ruined.
In this scenario, the bad guys are emptying magazines as fast as they
can slap them into the weapons: embarrasing when thirty or forty Combat
Phases into the fight, the entire opposing force runs out of ammo in unison.
> So
> it doesn't matter how fast you are. Once you start, the renewal of
> suppressive fire is a free action (house rule, but makes sense). You can
> keep it up all day long, or until you run out of ammo (or you barrel
> melts). And when that happens, the three goons that you didn't see while
> you were pinned down have already taken up positions to hose you.
The way you put suppressive fire on two men is to have eight troops keep
a steady fire of single aimed shots into their position. In SR terms, you
hold your action and then stagger them through the combat turn. Recall
that in real life, you maintain suppressive fire on a position for up
to fifteen minutes while your assault section moves into place and attacks.
> As you can see, speed is definitely not everything, especially
> when facing a well-trained opponent who actually thinks rather than
> standing out in the open and shooting from a standstill in a well-lit
> corridor. And facing an opponent who knows you're coming and has
> prepared for it? The fastest one is the first one in the bodybag.
The problem is that fast is still better than slow. Every one of your
examples is simply "smart bad guys with superior numbers can beat the
hell out of the players". Now play the same numbers with non-wired
characters... and if both wired and non-wired fight smart, you'll see
a lot more of the wireboys/girls get out alive.
An ambush? Wired sammy needs 4s on 12 dice, goons need 2s on 6 dice? Fine.
But non-wired PC needs 4s on 6 dice, goons need 2s on 6 dice, is even more
of a slaughter.
Try a meeting engagement: guards and runners both alert, both looking
for the others. The first side to get a grenade launcher or squad automatic
weapon firing controls the engagement from that point on. In other words,
he who reacts fastest writes the contact report.
A running fight as the players pull back through the corridors? The wireboys
have more actions in which to place surprises as they retreat. Without
wires you're less able to take an action to check the corridor, before moving
into it.
Wires, all the sensory mods you can use, smartgun links, selected bioware
(endurance mods like synthacardium, plus damage compensators) are exactly
what you need to help you fight when routinely outnumbered. Use speed and
surprise to tackle larger forces, use superior senses to avoid being caught
by surprise. When engaged, screw up visibility: it hurts them more than you.
If things go bad, you can run further and faster than them, and you
can fight while hurt if necessary.
If you can dictate the terms of the engagement you've already won: if you
had that advantage and lost, you did something badly wrong. The question is,
how well do you cope when you are *not* dictating the terms? When the melee-
combat death-on-legs physad finds himself under fire from a medium MG four
hundred yards away, when the sniper discovers there's a guard in her chosen
firing position, when the demolition expert is attacked while laying those
handy AP mines...
Saying speed will automatically let you win is ludicrous. But a smart merc
or samurai knows that wires buy you time to re-evaluate your options: speed
counts when you run away, too.
--
"When you have shot and killed a man, you have defined your attitude towards
him. You have offered a definite answer to a definite problem. For better
or for worse, you have acted decisively.
In fact, the next move is up to him." <R.A. Lafferty>
Paul J. Adam paul@********.demon.co.uk
