Didn’t I write that already?

Short post tonight, because I’m in the middle of actually writing a bit on the article on injury and healing, and I don’t want to throw off the Emporer’s groove. 

There’s a pretty fun thread over on the SJG Forums about how to account for the velocity of dodging a bullet – really, why is it a bullet is the same difficulty to dodge as a punch? 

Specifically, here’s the original question:

This was probably discussed to death years ago, but why isn’t it harder to dodge a bullet than a punch? I get that imposing a -19 penalty to dodge a bullet is basically the same as not allowing a dodge and as a result not very fun but surely there ought to be some difference.Just something that’s been bothering me lately since we’ve move from our DF game into a monster hunter one and bullet ballet is becoming a thing.

If you’ve been reading here for a bit, you’ll remember that this had bothered me before. First time it came up with a vengeance was in +Jeromy French‘s space campaign, where it wasn’t just dodging bullets, it was dodging lasers. This was judged by mid-fight as more than a bit silly.  Well, perhaps slightly less silly than first thought.

But really, out of that campaign incident and a few other thoughts along the way, I had occasion to write an article called Dodge This. It was the fifth article I’ve published in Pyr #3, and represents some fairly good rules amalgamation, with many options.

They’ve been fairly well received too.

Why bring this up? I have to somewhere between grit my teeth and smile as the thread in question features the following:

• Post 2: I point out I wrote this already.
• Post 3-5: Restate the usual explanations of what it means. I also deal with this explicitly, with math to back it up for those that care, in Dodge This
• Post 7: Line Editor +Sean Punch drops by and really takes all defenses and puts them into a hierarchy that works very well, being MECE and covering the right bases. Oh, and I also propose an Evasive Movement rule in Dodge This.
• Post 8-12 comment on how cool post 7 is.
• Post 14 brings up how critical perception is. Oh, that gets an entire section in Dodge This
• Post 35: suggests using the Size and Speed/Range table to figure penalties. Which I do in Dodge This

Yeah, this is a bit of horn-tooting. But really, I did all the work required to get the original poster exactly what was needed. If it wasn’t precisely to taste, it could be changed, of course. But having the original rules explained, the expansion rules explained (Tactical Shooting), evasive movement, gameable ways to figure perception into the mix, and finally a systematic way to both figure out how to detect and avoid/counter incoming ranged attacks of any size and speed, up to and including 300,000,000 m/s (light speed)?