Sniper and Unsteady Weapons

[Evilgm]

The Hide action results in a form of Hidden that breaks "if you do anything except Hide, Sneak, or Step." Unsteady requires an Interact action to be taken before firing or else suffer a penalty, which would cause the character to stop Hiding. This makes it difficult to take advantage of the Sniper weapon trait. This would also affect Way of the Sniper Gunslingers, who will need to spend an action re-Hiding before firing to take advantage of One Shot, One Kill or face a penalty when using the Arquebus.

[Djinn71]

Agreed.

Also, does anyone else feel that the Sniper trait is way too bland? Can we have something cooler like you treat your range increment as double versus flat-footed targets?

+1 Precision damage (scaling to +2 at 16th level) is just so boring.

[RexAliquid]

Using a tripod eliminates the penalty. Looks like it is working as intended.

[Evilgm]

Using a tripod in combination with Way of the Sniper only works in rare situations where the party are set up and the combat comes to them. It takes an action and two hands to set up a Tripod, and then another action to draw your Arquebus. And then an action to Hide. That's the whole first turn of the combat, which didn't include an attack so you don't get the bonus damage from your Way.

[Djinn71]

RexAliquid wrote:

Using a tripod eliminates the penalty. Looks like it is working as intended.

The issue is that you can't set up the tripod from stealth either, as it takes an interact action. Meaning you can't use stealth to get into a shooting position, set up a tripod and fire. You have to break stealth which causes you to no longer be hidden.

I don't see why you should break stealth for setting up a tripod far away from someone, nor why you should break stealth by aiming carefully. Easily fixed by adding a caveat to the weapon trait.

[Laki7z]

I'd rather have the interact action to stabilize be the "tripod" effect and a tripod, monopod, bardiche or whatever be the flavor, stabilize, as long as you don't move, you don't get penalty. Also, there are many actions allowed when stealthing, just behind "if deemed viable by the gm" and also later explained that standing up and waving, making noise breaks stealth but trying to pick a lock silently could be done, but require another stealth check. Reloading in a distance should fall in here as crossbow users have already been sniping as rangers. There should be feat like the assassins get to increase damage from sniper

[graystone]

I'm curious why it's a tripod and not a bipod: with all the crazy clockwork mechanics around a simple attached bipod seems quite simple.

[Dubious Scholar]

Laki7z wrote:

I'd rather have the interact action to stabilize be the "tripod" effect and a tripod, monopod, bardiche or whatever be the flavor, stabilize, as long as you don't move, you don't get penalty. Also, there are many actions allowed when stealthing, just behind "if deemed viable by the gm" and also later explained that standing up and waving, making noise breaks stealth but trying to pick a lock silently could be done, but require another stealth check. Reloading in a distance should fall in here as crossbow users have already been sniping as rangers. There should be feat like the assassins get to increase damage from sniper

It needs to be explicit that "yes, you can use an unsteady firearm from stealth via X", because not everyone has permissive GMs.