All Head Shots, All The Time

[Abub]

Have you ever had a player that only takes head shots?  Of course this will always always always be the maxed out munchkin where any penalty the system has to levy against the called shot will be insignificant to deter the attempt.

I had this player in a game a few years back and it always annoyed me.  It didn't really break anything in the game except the other players were not munchkins at all... i guess it just annoyed me because of the lack of variety... and the fact that he was creating a situation where either I had to increase the enemies defenses they were fighting to give them some chance to avoid the continue conveyor belt of insta-kills and that would have left the other players in a bad spot of never being able to hit anything. 

This was in a Rifts game before the RUE changes to drastically nerf ranged combat to strike bonuses.  I think (because he would take head shots in either ranged or melee combat) I started to give enemies a bonus to their parry/dodge in melee when they had some way of seeing the consistency of the character's tactic (like if they were the third of forth target they would get a better reading on the fact that a head shot was incoming).

This tactic also had the effect of generating wealth for the players because undamaged armor... sometimes undamaged power armor can be paired up with new helmets from other enemies that the rest of the party felled. 

So have you ever had this type of player and was it a problem and if it was how did you deal with it?


PS... the NERF i mentioned... was good for the Rifts system.  RUE has a few minor adjustments that improve the palladium system IMHO

[Setherick]

Did you try throwing monsters at him that had no heads?

[KallMeKip]

Did you try throwing monsters at him that had no heads?

crap you beat me to it. Other that this try bullet proof helmets or combat situations where discharging a gun would be a bad idea, make the players use their brain.

[ArtfulShrapnel]

Helmets, Robots, and Shoggoths. Problem solved.

Seriously though. If the system is broken to favor headshots, you could attempt to make a rules adjustment to fix it. Perhaps increase the to-hit penalty for heads, which I feel is usually a bit small in most games. From the front, the human head occupies an area about 1/5th the size of the torso, and 1/10th the size of the whole body. Hitting a target that size consistently should be hard. To make it more "fair", any shot that falls in the range between old penalty and new penalty could be a body shot. (Missed the head, hit the body).

[iceemaker]

Leaking gas line, like in one of the many iterations of Splinter Cell... can't recall which one at the moment. At any rate, you had to proceed past all of the guards in the bowels of a huge ship without alterting them. Otherwise, they would fire off their guns and ignite the gas leaking into the hold. They apparently do not notice the smell or something.