Hey guys

I just got the book (yay!) and have been reading through it. The rules are mostly familiar for a SW veteran. One thing struck me when reading through the talents. The Hamstring Shot seems to open the doors for a lot of abuse.

It is a tier 1 talent, so anyone can get it for 5 xp. It can be used once per turn when making a shooting attack. The attack does half damage (before soak) and the target is automatically immobilized. You don't need to get any damage through soak to do this, nor do you need to spend advantages to activate the hamstring effect. Unlike pretty much all other cool effects like this in the game. So if you manage 1 success but get 5 threats and a despair, you can still immobilize your target with a tiny pea-shooter even if they have monstrous soak you could never penetrate even on a good shot.

Is it just me, or is this open to a lot of abuse? Everyone in the group gets this talent, the poorer shots use it most of the time to keep any melee-specialists on the enemy side permanently out of combat. And if (heaven's forbid) the baddies want to run away, they will be hamstrung by everyone and their grandmother. And, of course, the baddies can do the same thing to the PCs, if it comes to that (and the GM is very evil).

I'm not sure this talent is balanced. What's your opinion on this?

You don't need to bypass Soak to inflict Ensnared with any weapons that have the effect. You can also just spend Advantages and Triumphs on a combat check to 'hobble' a target anyway. The Talent lets you not have to use your Advantages and Triumphs so it's decent but not world ending imo.

While all that is true, you need a weapon with the ensnare ability and advantages to activate. Not just any random gun (or, for that matter, a grenade...). If this were a tier 3 or so talent I would be fine with it. But it seems unbalanced as is.

Yes, but as a I pointed out, with any weapon, or your bare hands you can accomplish the same thing with requisite Advantages and Triumphs.

Immobilize is not that strong. Especially not in a game with lots of ranged weapons like in your example. If you're at range to shoot someone, they're at range to shoot you.

And you say the poorer shots in the group will abuse this, but you still need to hit for it to work, so you don't want to be that poor of a shot. So you're trading damage for a situationally-useful condition.

Good encounter design makes this weaker as well. The PCs should usually be outnumbered, which makes sacrificing damage to inconvenience one enemy a poor decision. Encounters should include minion groups, against which you should pretty much always choose damage over this. The targets you'd want to use this on are rivals and nemeses, which will often (or always at higher xp levels) have adversary ranks, so the poor shots will have trouble hitting them.

I don't see many situations where this talent is good, frankly. It's more useful in a fantasy setting where ranged is less common than melee. I'm having trouble imagining a time to use it besides when a dangerous beast or a rampaging orc with a battleaxe can be kept out of the battle temporarily.

As to how useful the ability is: Seems like it will make the already disadvantaged melee-based characters even worse off in a game with firearms. That includes the big monsters the group can just hobble and kill from a distance before the natural weapons of the monster can be brought to bear.

5 xp for a talent that normally requires 3 advantage or a triumph to trigger is not only a steal of a deal, but at that cost should be part of any ranged combatant’s standard build for dealing with inbound melee characters. You'd be insane not to take it.

Edit: I’m putting together a Starfinder conversion, so both melee and range need to be allowed to shine.

I probably would never allow this talent to work on a monster of silhouette 3 or higher, and would think hard before I allowed it on a silhouette 2. Of course, once you get to silhouette 3 or more, you could often say the monster could reach into short range with its melee attacks.

And remember that the Ensnare quality usually lasts for multiple turns and requires an action to remove early, so this talent doesn't make the advantage pointless.

This system was highly lethal in star wars (In terms of wound threshold, that is. The crits are generally as lethal as the gm chooses.), and I don't imagine it has changed much from reading the talents. Giving up most, if not all, of your damage for the turn is a steep price for this action.

If a player is somehow abusing it, its trivial to start giving most of your melee threats a back-up ranged weapon.

I think the biggest reason for my lack of concern is why wouldn't a GM allow this? I mean in how many genres/movies do we see the 'just wing em!' move used? You just can't use Maneuvers, it doesn't stop the bad guy from shooting back with their laser sighted bazooka machine gun. Plus you make the Talent overly expensive they just won't bother buying it and they'll make a point of carrying a bola or whip or whatever anyway.

Of course any sensible GM would say "NO!" , but there is nothing in the talent suggesting the PCs couldn't just spend one shot per turn immobilizing the monstrously big Krayt Dragon with the blaster pistol that can't possibly damage it while the others shoot it with high-power guns/rockets/orbital cannons. At least that would give the characters with no interest in investing in combat abilities a reason to pull out the tiny gun they carry "just in case"

Seems like a good fix could be "Increase difficulty of the attack by 1. If the attack hits for damage after soak, you can choose to reduce the damage to 1 and immobilize the target instead." The increased difficulty indicates you're not trying to hit the target, but rather a specific location. That takes care of the peeshooter and the dragon scenario and still allows a fancy trickshooter a chance to do something more interesting than damage. Making the talent tier 1 is then fine since you're building additional costs and limitations into the ability.

That sounds like a good fix.

I think there are 2 issues being addressed here. One is the talent and what it does, and the other is "Is ensnare OP?"

Order 66 podcast brought this up early on when I believe we only had EOTE. One of their listeners wrote in saying that the bola was OP bc it basically needed 2 adv to keep a rancor out of range and they were able to bring him down. I believe that FFG kept the rules for ensnare simple, so that the ability is easier to use. I think you need to use some common sense here too though and make up some house rules. I might allow a net/bola to take down a silhouette 2 creature, but not a silhouette 3 unless you got a much larger net. A bola on a rancor would be a pretty ankle bracelet, nothing more. You may need to tell your players to use common sense there.

As for the actual talent compare it to a weapon that has ensnare. Most weapons with ensnare have an ensnare rating of 3 (Net gun has a rating of 5!) meaning that while they do require 2 advantage to use, they last for a few rounds. If you average out the Adv cost per round that's less than 1 advantage per round for the ensnare ability if you're using a weapon that has it. So I could see it being justifiable for tier 1 bc no matter what, if you're using the talent you HAVE to hit it every single round.

The common sense element could have been articulated a bit better in the talent description, since we're on the second page of this discussion at this point and haven't reached a consensus. A new player showing up on game day with the talent selected may not be able to second guess what the GM will rule as all the times he won't be able to use the talent.

The third issue, by the way, is that it's Tier 1. For 5 points everyone who uses a ranged weapon really should have the talent.

2 hours ago, Kymrel said:

That sounds like a good fix.

Thanks! Another, even simpler fix:

Quote

If the check is successful, halve the damage inflicted by the attack (before reducing damage by the target's soak). If the result still damages the target , the target is immobilized until the end of its next turn.

Again, bringing a slingshot to a Krayt fight is accounted for nicely here, and doesn't even need to address silhouette differences. Unless you have a powerful weapon, you won't try this particular move, and you can still pay for it with advantages and triumphs as normal if the dice roll your way on a standard attack.