RaiderJ:
Most of the below may be obvious regarding pistol adepts, but trying to be cover a lot of combat items, just in case.
- Pistols don’t have a lot of range on them. Your die pool can be heavily reduced by range, so you want to be reasonably close before any shooting starts, especially if they have SMG or longer weapons. Bringing a knife to a gun fight may be a classic mistake, but bringing a pistol to a sniping match is just about as bad.
- You have two main shooting modes for pistols. Both are good, and part of your job is to figure out which to use when:
- Single shot is a simple action and avoids recoil issues and allows for a ‘take-aim’ simple action before-hand, or some other simple action that you may need to do.
- A ‘semi-automatic burst’ (complex action, uses three bullets) takes two off the targets dodge pool, making it more likely that you will hit, or will hit harder. But it takes up your whole action and runs through your limited ammo more quickly.
- Note that your dodge is equal to your reaction + intuition. Compare that to your dice to hit. Not everyone will be as good as you are at shooting, but still… it is fairly easy to be hit if you are standing out in the open. Getting cover, when you reasonably can, makes you harder to hit, makes you more apt to stay in good fighting shape (unlike D&D, most of your dice pools go down as you take damage, remember). Remember too that within each turn, each dodge roll after the first one loses another die (i.e. your third dodge in the same turn is at -2). Taking on a lot of people, even if they are not highly skilled, can be a good way to get turned into a pin-cushion.
- Use that diminishing dodge thing to your benefit, too. For example, if there is someone you think is going to be very hard to hit, you might want to use just a single shot on the first action or two of the turn, and hopefully the team is providing additional fire on the target. Once their dodge pool has been worn down a bit, then you use the semi-automatic burst to take an additional two dice off it for that shot, and you have a good chance to doing damage.
- Because hitting requires overcoming the targets dodge pool (unless they are completely surprised), and because extra hits add to your damage (and if they have an armor jacket or something then you can expect them to soak a fair bit of the damage of your pistols), you almost never want to split your attack dice to make two attacks in the same action. Having two pistols makes it believable that you could split your attack, but it just isn’t good tactics very often.
- When you have a good chance to hit, called shots can be a useful option. Taking a -4 to your dice pool to add +2 to the DV can be worth it with tough but not very nimble targets, and called shots to shoot a gun out of someone’s hands, for example, can sometimes be better than just shooting them.
