We play Black Crusade in a small group and have found an issue with the mighty power of dodge in some cases, especially with single shot weapons (such as a Stalker Bolter...corrupted of course). Even with a high ballistic skill and great rolls we found that 5 degrees of success meant nothing if the target could dodge. Sure, they can only do this if the KNOW the attack is coming but found it frustrating that the average guardsman basically had a 30% chance of outright avoiding the strike!

So...we decided to make called shots a little more than just a way to avoid hit location rolls (handy in some cases but nothing more than cool in most combat). What we proposed was this: if you make a called shot (-20 to skill test) then your target needs to generate more degrees of success on their dodge test than you did on your attack test.

With the penalty to hit this really only comes into great effect against plodding enemies or when your bonuses stack up to a great number (or that time you are feeling really lucky!). It also makes taking all those sharp shooter talents worth while as you can make a sniper type character that hits things.

Example - Renegade Marine vs Dark Eldar

Marine has a decent BS of 50 and uses his first half action to aim (+10), normal strike (+10) makes it 70 or less to hit with 1 shot. Factor in the Dark Eldars dodge (Ag 58) and he has a 58% chance of dodging you outright. This makes it about a 29% chance of actually landing a blow. Forget the fact you may get 4 or 5 degrees of success...or even one...the odds of hitting are the same.

Same again, this time with called shot. Aiming takes it to under 60 while the called shot drops this to 40...doesn't sound great until you realize that at least if you make the hit and if you do a better job shooting (more degrees of success) than he does dodging then the shot sticks . Yes he has a better chance to get a heap of successes...so the game remains balanced (i.e. he is still likely to dodge), but if he does a lame job dodging (rolls 50...making one degree of success) and you do a great job shooting (I did this the other night with a 01! = 3 degrees in this example) then it is a hit...rather than a lazy and badly executed...yet successful...dodge.

It was always frustrating to see a really good shot/roll amount to nothing just because the target only just passed their agility test.

Take all of the talents that reduce the penalty for called shots and suddenly you have a chance and single shot weapons suddenly becomes viable when tactically compared to a heavy bolter! It also makes called shots something that happens more than once in a blue moon when you encounter that Space Wolf walking around with his helmet off

Then again there may have been something we missed. Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

I made a little house rule for the same reason, but rather made a Feint Action that works with Ranged attacks.

Thus it works for shooting in the exact same way as Feint does for stabbing.

love the idea and i do feel called shot should have some other bonus to it.

in our group we only allow dodging bullets if behind cover or within 10 meters and then you have to be fully aware of the shooter and that he intends to shoot you.

sorry about hijacking but seeing we are on called shots i was pondering if when making a called shot on can RF or zealous on a 9 and 10.

i really like adding to the range of what is effectivly critical hits(cant use that term and it killis me). was allso thinking that a to hit roll of 05 or below could increase it by one for any single shot or the first hit in a fullauot/lightning. but seeing i allow streetfighting to add for zealous if she started getting such a big range for crits and using boloknives 2d5 she would get one every turn doing d5+ 5 on the crit table. so dead or practically dead. meh she is (they are) meant to be awsome in our games. go glass cannons go

At first I was a bit wary of this house rule. But after witnessing a "sniper duel" between a fellow player and an ork which consisted of "shoot-dodge, shoot-dodge" until the marine got annoyed and just went full auto with his bolter, i can see the use of it. When I next run a game, I think I'll incorporate this one. It leaves sniper style characters viable in a fight outside of the surprise round.

Why not just use opposed tests? If the shooter fires one shot and has more DoS than the person dodging [even though the dodge succeeds] he hits. Applies to melee as well. Semi and Full-Auto take care of themselves against dodge already.

Not a bad idea at all. Called shots could indeed use something extra like this and I'll most definitely be implementing something similar to our next campaign

It seems a bit off to make called shots *harder* to dodge. If you want an attack to be hard to dodge, surely you just aim centre-of-mass. It shouldn't be harder to dodge a shot that is already only aiming at a small part of my body.

I'd be okay with "must beat degrees of success" as a general rule for single shots, though.

I think what makes called shots suck is that people tend to be lazy-slash-min-maxy about designing enemies. Called shots would rock if they could, well, actually do any good, but pretty much every enemy I've ever seen statted up has the same armour everywhere. A lot of enemies have armour on all locations, even though in the pictures they are *blatantly* not wearing helmets.

Perhaps called shots could be given Felling (since you're specifically aiming for vulnerable locations)?

Rather than a called shot, you could make it a subset of the Aim action:

Aim with a base of -10 instead of +10 [so accurate weapons are at 0] for the half action, 0 full, and your additional DoS get applied against dodge and parry

Losing those extra DoS does, however, mean that your Long-Las could lose some bonus damage. Hopefully that's good enough.

Ain't much point trying to use AoE against the Eldar, though that's for sure.