Ties going to the roller I think is the single best improvement to the system out of the entire post here. I must admit that that was the strangest thing to me out of the entire experience.

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I'd agree that ties going to the instigator is a good change insofar as it promotes action. I also appreciate the elegance that is BONUS + GOOD_DIE - BAD_DIE having to hit the target number (DIFF) instead of beating it by one (DIFF+1).

"Your target number is 4."
"Yay! Made it exactly."
"Nope, need to beat it"
"Meh!"

I don't know about cutting Dodge, though I'm willing to try it. I'd rather see Boons for limited bonuses (or penalty mitigation) to make things more theatric. Really, though, it may be good to discuss how gritty or cinematic you envision combat to be.

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There is one Boon right now that adds to Dodge and that's Combat Reflexes, which make Dodge roll calculate out like: Agiligity + (Dodge Skill / 2, round up) + 1

So there is that already in the system. The big issue is that I didn't bother to model the dice mechanics to make sure I understood how steep that +1 to difficulty could be. In short, "Bad Rory! No biscuit!"

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Yay afternoon break. Instead of wandering outside enjoying the sunshine and trimming split ends, let's geek. The programmer in me hates the inelegance of exceptions for this skill or that. I see it as a slippery slope where one skill after another gets tweaked until there are more exceptions than rules. Now, knowing your gaming philosophy, I'm not too worried about that, so it's mostly my OCD/perfectionism twitching.

If it's a matter of steep difficulty, perhaps lower situational modifiers would be appropriate? +6 for holding a hostage is HUGE and +4 for cover is really nice. Maybe a revised table or reference for modifiers would smooth things along?

And I suppose that I should define what I mean by "limited bonuses (or penalty mitigation)." Combat Reflexes is a good example, and people can counter that with Aim, though it's a huge hit in effectiveness to halve one's rate of fire, so I was thinking of offensive Boons.

What about a Boon called "Nine Lives" that ignores (or reverses!) the bad die once per session when someone is actively trying to kill you? How about "Trick Shot" that halves cover/concealment penalties?

Feng Shui may have other colorful suggestions. I seem to recall something like "Signature Weapon" that gives a bonus when using your favorite gun - though overlap with Gunslinger might be interesting or inappropriate.

In conclusion: let people buy Slays instead of nerfing armor. ;-)

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Yay afternoon break. Instead of wandering outside enjoying the sunshine and trimming split ends, let's geek.

You get an afternoon break? I get long delays between building setup packages and installing them on a VM to see if I was able to get MSIEXEC to do what I want it to. Fortunately, that's an automated process. I push a button and walk away.

It's spurts of coding followed by periods of waiting. ;)

Yay afternoon break. Instead of wandering outside enjoying the sunshine and trimming split ends, let's geek.

Yes, the +6 and +4 were grabbed out of my ass that day. In short, yes, a bad call and those are being specifically addressed along with modifiers for called shots to the head, vitals, et cetera, since cover tends to follow the same basic constraints.

What about a Boon called "Nine Lives" that ignores (or reverses!) the bad die once per session when someone is actively trying to kill you? How about "Trick Shot" that halves cover/concealment penalties?

Feng Shui may have other colorful suggestions. I seem to recall something like "Signature Weapon" that gives a bonus when using your favorite gun - though overlap with Gunslinger might be interesting or inappropriate.

Hmmm. I'll have to think about that. sylvan and I were talking about possibly using creating a system where a player could spend XP to dictate a die roll. Kind of like "Karma Points" in Shadowrun or "Force Points" in Westend Game's Star Wars.

In conclusion: let people buy Slays instead of nerfing armor. ;-)

Nah, I haven't touched the armor rules. :p But I have been thinking about the balance between gritty and cinematic and I think where I want it to lie is where damage, if hit, can easily be lethal, but the fight between the skilled should be epic.

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You get an afternoon break?

At my very first temp job back in high school, my fellow coworkers took their fifteen minute breaks religiously. Me, I just like to have the option to relax during the morning and again in the afternoon since it actually helps my productivity. Unless I'm in The Zone, of course.

Hmmm. I'll have to think about that. sylvan and I were talking about possibly using creating a system where a player could spend XP to dictate a die roll. Kind of like "Karma Points" in Shadowrun or "Force Points" in Westend Game's Star Wars.

I am generally a fan of more options rather than fewer ones and I find it an interesting mechanic, but I hesitated to suggest this considering player fondness for sheet development. Anyone can be effective if they're willing to pay the cost, so I can see it giving even a brand new player a moment of glory when it matters most to them. Now, if this mechanic also applies to NPCs, it becomes just another point sink, but maybe that's okay too. Failures make for interesting story also and pruning the top characters postpones reset and stabilizes PC power level.

I can also see it adding OOG social politics to a game -- who sacrifices for whose benefit? -- especially in PvP situations. It may be a bludgeon for highbies with points to burn or it may be the great equalizer if a lowbie boot party needs to take down a highbie. I don't think we're big enough to be quite so factionalized just yet, though PC leaders are emerging....

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"Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?"

Grenades are exactly how you deal with fortified positions: smoke, flashbang, high-explosive, or otherwise. That, and flanking -- superior numbers are staggeringly effective -- especially under cover of a smoke grenade or after the effects of a concussion grenade which may well separate the tango from the hostage. And, well, sometimes you shoot the hostage in the leg to turn them into dead weight and fix them later.

I know none of these may have been viable options at the time for that particular situation, but resourceful players can find ways to be effective regardless of ruleset if they're well-prepared and determined.

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Absolutely. No plot ever survives contact with the players. ;)

Now the big question is which of those quotes up there can you identify? :D

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Matrix. Serenity. The rest I could google, but that'd be cheating.

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Yeah, that would be cheating. ;)

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Three. We watched Lord of War last night after picking it up on the cheap from Blockbuster on the remembered advice of a dear friend who saw it in the theaters.

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Yes, it's a very good movie. :)

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Four. Just got home from 3:10 to Yuma and I loved it. Lessons in leadership to glean there....

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for combat(at least) it might just be easy to use active/passive rules. If the defender is wants to attack, they only use base dodge(aka the whole agility with no mods) and if they chose to "defend" they get the whole score (agility and skill and any mods from abilitys).

You can even make it the other way around if you want to hurt people. Skill is base dodge(min of 0) and you only get to add the agility if you push it.
So in a combat with 2 combat monsters if they are both on full attack they might have dodges of 1-4, not 7-9. However once someone decides to cut and run, the dodge goes right up.

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I'm still musing over the subject, but here's some thought experiments that may or may not matter.
1) Can you really dodge a bullet (muzzle velocity: 800-3000 feet per second) or does evasive action taken to disrupt aim amount to the same thing?
2) What about a laser weapon (c = 186,000 MILES per second)?
3) Should dodge stack with stationary cover (junk pile)?
4) Should dodge stack with mobile cover (meatshield)?

Tangent that I imagine will be addressed in the modifier table:
5) Do kneeling/sitting/prone positions give you virtual cover?
5a) ...at the expense of dodge?
5b) ...but a more stable firing platform?

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I'm still musing over the subject, but here's some thought experiments that may or may not matter.
1) Can you really dodge a bullet (muzzle velocity: 800-3000 feet per second) or does evasive action taken to disrupt aim amount to the same thing?
2) What about a laser weapon (c = 186,000 MILES per second)?
3) Should dodge stack with stationary cover (junk pile)?
4) Should dodge stack with mobile cover (meatshield)?

1) You're not really dodging the bullet per se, but rather you're taking evasive action and trying to get out of the way. Unless you're Neo and then all bets are off.
2) This is really the same thing as 1. for all intents and purposes. You can't move faster than the gun or the light beam, but you could move faster than the one pulling the trigger.
3) and 4) Yes, I think it should. The key thing to remember you get exactly one oppurtunity to Dodge per round (unless a Boon or a skill says otherwise); meaning that you may be able to dodge the first shooter, but you can't dodge the second one.

Tangent that I imagine will be addressed in the modifier table:
5) Do kneeling/sitting/prone positions give you virtual cover?
5a) ...at the expense of dodge?
5b) ...but a more stable firing platform?

5) Yes, see my most recent post.
5a) I think you would still get a dodge (you can always duck or roll out of the way).
5b) That sounds reasonable enough, but I would need to think about that in some more detail.

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Most handgun shootings occur at less than 7 yards, but even so, most bullets miss their intended target (only 11% of assailants' bullets and 25% of bullets fired by police officers hit the intended target in a study by Lesce, 1984). -- http://library.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GUNS/GUNBLST.html

Off the top of my head, three things factor into this:
1) Handguns are inaccurate and take tremendous amount of training to use effectively.
2) Targets have cover, evasive action, or cover fire (which itself skews statistics).
3) Fear of death is REALLY distracting, leading to snap shots instead of aimed shots.

Not to add insult to injury, but I wouldn't be opposed to setting rifles as the +0 standard and giving handguns a -1 penalty, -2 for concealable ones, with maybe shotguns having a +1 bonus. Scopes and targeting lasers could mitigate penalties or add bonuses, depending. Then there's range and, as previously discussed, cover and concealment.

Of course, elegance brain is griping about making things more complicated than they need to be, so it's all fundamentally a matter of style:
Simulationists will generally want detailed modifiers to more accurately model reality.
Narrativists will generally want simple mechanics to let plot flow.
Socializers will generally want to avoid mechanics altogether to maximize RP time.

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