Rifleman Archive

Darcimir nailed it on the head. The -50 +50 doesn't take into account skill bonuses and such. You'd have to do the test with all other variables the same... accuracy and such.

Again, I'm not a magician here. I can run some numbers, but I can't jimmy up perfect situations for experiments (I tried my best though) . . .

Which is why I encourage YOU GUYS to do the same thing if you can obtain a better test. Theoretically the target or the profession (it's the skill mods we're interested in) shouldn't make much of a difference (again, if it does there's a deeper issue at work here). So, run some experiments, give me data, and I'll write up the proof.

I tried to equalize as many variables as humanly possible (it's difficult for me to encounter someone with exactly the same statistics as me, which is why I encouraged more people to do this).

However, I did cover in the "premise" section that based upon skill mods (which I had more + to accuracy in) I should have had a greater success. Myrick, I'm not quite sure what you mean by the -50 +50 not taking into account skill bonuses (if it didn't, our variables would be even closer than they would be if not (we'd both have effective +0 accuracy which we know is not the case). I did myself take into account skill bonuses though (which I had more of). It's all written there.

Darcimir - I've heard people saying that -50 might really be -80 but from what I've seen that's not the case. -50 is -50 no matter where you are, however what changes are the bonuses you can get to the accuracy. If you're at a spot where your accuracy by numbers should be -80, when doing nothing special it's -50. But if you used say /aim and that gave you say a +30 bonus, you'd still be -50 (at least so I've heard). In a sense, the "extra" -30 only acts as a counter to bonuses from skills. Nevertheless, using -40 would be the definitive way to fix this.

As for the weapon issue, theoretically no matter what weapon I use (as long as it's a cert'd rifle) I should always get the same success ratio at the same accuracy mod. So at -50 with a DLT I should be hitting as successfully as at -50 with a Laser Rifle. In that sense, which weapon you use is a non-issue, unless of course testing shows that this does change (which then is an even greater issue to deal with). Keep in mind, the reason we see percieved accuracy differences for different weapons is that -50 occurs at different ranges for separate rifles, however -50 is still -50 for each.

As for doing it at +40, that would be really interesting, but I fear that in order to get significant results I'll have to get A LOT of data (given that we would probably be succeeding with an extremely high percentage each the differences in the data will be hard to isolate with little data).

Of course, if someone would like to bring me numbers, I'd be happy to run them. The more we get (that's done more accurately) the better the case we make.

Alright Myrick, I understand what you meant now (that by simply controlling the accuracy mod I had not taken into account character skill bonuses). I actually did, and it's covered in the "premise" section of the report. I had +55 Rifle Aiming and +25 General Ranged Aiming. My friend had only +50 Pistol Aiming, so there's that.