Westin's Guide To Nonmagical Fighting

If your default pool isn't 9 or higher, forget about it.

Why Mundane Fighting

• No Paradox
• Doesn't Out You As A Mage
• Still Kills Things
• Can Take Multiple Actions

Cheating (Or: The Art of Magic Enhancing Abilities)

• Spheres at 1 are extremely useful for modifying mundane combat rolls
• Reducing mundane combat difficulties should generally use spheres at 1 or at most 2, higher ones are generally better for direct combat
• Standouts: Entropy 1 (fate, fortune, weakpoints), Mind 1 (multitasking), Forces 1 (positions, velocities), Corr 1 (distance, vectors, movement)

How To Kill Things

Hitting Things

• Magi tend to have low dice pools, but due to magic can have extremely low difficulties as well.
• At difficulty 3 (0.7 successes/die avg), you have a dice pool which is effectively 75% larger than it actually looks. A mage throwing around 8d Dex + Brawl or Dex + Firearms at difficulty 3 can hang with a vampire or KJ with a 12d dice pool in terms of strict accuracy. The higher dice pool is slightly better in some edge cases (may get more successes) but is also less reliable.

Autofire

• Bursts add +2d to accuracy and +1 difficulty. This is a net benefit as long as your base Dex + Firearms dice pool is 4d or lower.
• Automatic fire adds +10d to accuracy but +2 difficulty. This empties the magazine.
• Sprays add +10d to accuracy but adds +2 difficulty, and can strafe up to 3 meters. This divides the successes evenly between all targets in the area of effect.

As you might have noticed, autofire is a bit of a trap. At high dice pools you are more accurate with single shots than with automatic fire. (For example, with a 10d dice pool, you get 4 average successes on a single shot... but 4 average successes on an autofire roll). What it is useful for is to get guys with low dice pools to hit things semi-reliably. However autofire can be combined with magical difficulty reductions to get pretty astronomical damage numbers out of automatic firearms. In fact this should be the primary method of using autofire weapons as a mage, unless you are Bad At Shooting (in which case find another weapon. Like grenades.)

Damage

• Ideally you want to kill something before it can hit you again. This means dealing 7 health levels of damage in one blow.
  • At difficulty 6, this requires an average of (14 + enemy soak) damage to do so 50% of the time. This is why Entropy 1 is so useful for reducing difficulty, as at difficulty 3, this only requires (10 + 2*enemy soak/3) damage.
• Most mundane handheld weapons lack this capability (exceptions: .50 caliber sniper rifles, grenades, huge swords wielded by Str 5 dudes, rocket launchers). The breakpoint of being able to instantly kill most combatants in one attack is extremely beneficial and if you wish to do any sort of mundane combat should be a high priority (dead things can't hurt you most of the time). Note that frag grenades do 12L damage according to Technomancer's Toybox: This makes them a very good mundane lethal option for characters with high Athletics.
• You get additional damage from attack successes. Every +5d of attack accuracy is equivalent to an average +2d of damage on an attack that hits at diff 6. At diff 3 (0.7 successes/dice every +10d attack is +7d damage.
• So if you're using a rifle (8L) and throwing around diff 3/3 attacks, you only need a 5d attack pool (+3 damage on average, 8 base damage, for 11) to kill most normal humans with no defenses. A pistol requires a 8d attack pool on diff 3/3. This is without factoring in target dodge.
  • Most things are tougher than humans, as a note. This only demonstrates that a mage who knows how to use difficulty reducers can very easily kill normal people in combat before they can act.

Range

• Being a squishy human it is often better to stay at range than it is to get into brawls.
• Most pistols do 5-6L damage, with rifles doing 6-8L damage. This means that if you are very strong, fighting at range can significantly reduce your dice pools
• However, the safety of not being right in the face with a werewolf cannot be understated. Everyone seeking to use mundane combat skills extensively should consider having at least one ranged and one melee combat skill at a high rating.

How Not To Die Without Magic

Soak

• Soak is generally unreliable for ordinary humans against lethal damage, but is never worthless
• Stamina 4 allows soaking of lethal damage at difficulty 8. This provides a ~71% chance of reducing incoming lethal damage by 1 HL and a 42% chance of doing so by 2 HLs. Stamina 5 increases these odds to 76 and 51%.
• Primarily you will be getting lethal soak from armor. Your average 0 mobility penalty suit of armor with 3d soak will provide an 86% chance of at least 1 HL reduction in damage.
• Against high accuracy enemies, 1d of soak is approximately worth 2d of dodge: This ratio decreases in favor of dodging as the enemy's accuracy decreases.

Dodging

• Dodging is more reliable than soak against lethal damage but also compromises your offensive capabilities
• If dodging and attacking, even with 9d dice pools you will significantly impact your attack and defense, unless you give up your defense (9d vs 7d)

Maneuvers

Multiple Actions

• The most common multiple action type: Attack + Dodge (penalties of -2/-3)
• Generally multiple actions are extremely risky unless you have high pools (8-10d recommended in both areas)
• Having to take multiple defensive actions in a turn is almost always a losing game unless the enemy is incompetent. In this case seek to eliminate one enemy quickly (note the "How to kill things" section)

Called Shots

• Called shots may allow you to do things like ignore soak, increase damage, etc.
• Called shot difficulty increases also reduce your damage dice-be careful
• Each +1 difficulty modifier cuts down average successes on a pool by (dice pool)/10 and increases botch chance
• At very high pools called shots for extra damage may actually reduce your damage.
• However at low pools called shots are extremely risky (w/o WP).