Boom. Headshot.

So this last game Alex started making serious use of Aimed Shots.  Specifically, he always aimed for the head of his target, and he never missed.  I was a little concerned with how effective this was, since he was dealing 8 lethal damage, plus the secondary effects of being shot, each turn.  So I did a little digging into the exact probability curve of the Aimed Shot.

A character with Small Arms at +0 has about a 30.56% chance of hitting a target at short range under normal circumstances.  A character with Small Arms at +4 has an 86% chance of hitting a target at short range  Alex has Small Arms at +7, which grants him 94.44% chance to hit (since a 2 is always a miss.)  To reduce his probability of hitting at all, I have to stack at least -3 in penalties on him.

The practical upshot is that at Short Range with his 4B/4B rifle, Alex can all but guarantee a aimed shot at the Torso, and has a 61% chance of hitting his target in the head.  Normally I would mitigate this issue with distance, but his telescopic scope negates the penalty at medium range and reduces it to -2 at long range, meaning that while the average +4 shooter is grasping at 30.56% to hit his target at all, Alex is all but guaranteed to his his target, and has a 61% chance of hitting the the target with an Aimed Shot to the head.

I practical upshot of this is that when designing encounters, I can expect Alex to drop "soft" targets (those not wearing helmets and those wearing helmets with a Ballistic BAR less than 5) with a WIL of 4 or less once per turn.  Nobody else in the party comes close to that damage effectiveness, even Shin in his Tornado.

The problem this presents me is that if I throw up an encounter that will challenge Alex, the whole party rises and falls with him; if a lucky shot takes him out of action, the party likely wipes.  If I make something the party could manage without him, he wipes the floor with it, as he did in the last session.

I discussed a number of options to solve this problem with Morgan (Shin's player).  Increasing the range was brought up, and discarded.  Putting the party up against primarily PA(L)-suited enemies to remove hit locations from the equation was another.  Using non-standard WoB equipment (such as helmets capable of dealing with 4B damage) was another option.  Finally, I could always throw Manei Domini with subdermal armor at the party.  Each of these has upsides and downsides, but the fundamental issue is that most of them still cause a combat that is primarily oriented around posing a challenge to one PC who is subject to the whims of the dice.  That said, at least "removing hit locations" lowers the absurd bonuses he has and puts him closer to on-par with the rest of the party.

The other side of this coin is that my player has sunk a very large amount of his character budget into this capability, so I want him to be able to use it often; he clearly wants to be an outstanding marksman.  I just need to figure out how to give him that without placing the rest of the party in extreme jeopardy.