So let's discuss snipers. Have any of your PCs been legit snipers? What system supports them best?

So let's discuss snipers. Have any of your PCs been legit snipers? What system supports them best?

NEVER.
SPLIT.
THE.
PARTY.

All snipers do, is make game play boring for one or both groups within the party (the sniper/spotter team and everyone else). Either you're always far closer than you should be so you'd be in the combat map, or you're always some salt GM away from getting assraped by random enemies wandering into your snipers nest.

I've had a lot of fun doing it in eclipse phase.
The sheer number of funny bullets alone made it fun, like being Hawkeye with s special round for all occasions

Snipers have a similar problem as "the hacker" or "the pilot" in most modern or sci fi games. They rely entirely on playing one role which is separate from the rest of the party, and they can easily get caught with their pants down.

The extra problem presented by snipers though is they're an antisocial character concept. Yes, the hacker and the spaceship pilot are one-trick ponies. But their job is assisting the party in a crucial role and they frequently interact with the world and other players. Contrast with snipers, who just fuck off to go wrack up the kill count. They're catnip for faggots who don't play well with others and just want to play up their badass lone wolf with 300+ confirmed kills power fantasy. That's not good for group cohesion.

There's nothing wrong with being GOOD at sniping and occasionally filling that role when the situation demands it. But no one wants to deal with that asshole who turns every away mission into "I go perch on a hill with my rifle and watch".

I disagree on that. Snipers can play vital roles in a party if they are played like actual snipers: Who require a lot of teamwork from their allies to do their job.

Like party members marking targets to snipe, the sniper hitting key targets, and relying heavily on their spotter to keep them safe and spot new targets.

But most people think sniping has to be a huge solo concept when their whole point is being support rather than the dps

Warlocks in 5th edition D&D are snipers. Eldritch Blast + Hex + Agonizing Blast = headshot

Although some people in this thread apparently have very different opinions on this, I have had my players create snipers in both Shadowrun and Only War, and both times it was fun.

Only War as a system works fine for creating snipers. If anything it almost makes sniping too good.
Shadowrun, I'm not sure.

Obviously, like someone in D&D who wants to rogue hard, it requires some handling by the DM. Also preferably large-scale battlemaps, but mine usually are anyway.

>NEVER.
>SPLIT.
>THE.
>PARTY.
That's dumb. You're dumb. How else are you supposed to handle multiple time-critical tasks at once?

Yeah we had a sniper player in a Traveller game I ran. It was cool. One time the party was assaulting a mansion and this sniper guy held back in a perfect sniping position, everytime he almost had a shot the guy in the window moved. It was a perfect "sniper" combat for him - constantly waiting for that perfect shot and never quite getting it.
The party took the mansion, saved the hostages and killed the enemies. The sniper never fired a shot.

Give snipers tasks actually fitting to a sniper. Pulling the trigger is the least useful skill a sniper has. If you just want to be long range accuracyboi, you're a designated marksman. You have a scope, MAYBE a rifle with longer range, and the training to land hits on distant targets. Designated marksman are part of the standard unit, fielded shoulder to shoulder with infantry.

Snipers are support units, fielded seperately from the rest of the platoon. They typically provide recon and overwatch, surveying an area long before an operation to gather intelligence. They stay in position and watch as the rest of the team completes their task, feeding them information on enemy movements, key targets, and critical locations. They will also advise a retreat should the team need to quickly extract, giving them a good route with when and where they need to seak cover.

It can be a really fun and incredibly useful asset in tabletop games IF you come up with some mechanics on how to handle them. Some examples: include line of sight in your game. Pass notes to your sniper player on enemy intel, number of people, positions, equipment. Give ypur sniper information on who comes and goes from an enemy area, maybe theres ten dudes at the enemy base right now but he knows 40 dudes are going to show up in an hour to drop off some loot.

Another thing you can do with snipers, treat the sniper team as a single character when things are going right. If the sniper team is jjst providing overwatch, its plenty for a single player to handle. If the sniper team is spotted and engaged, allow the other players to each take the role of one member of the sniper team.

Do some research on how snipers operate and what their roles are, theres a lot of good gameplay material for a sniper that isnt just "lonewolf that shoots far"

I did once in shadowrun but it was boring. I though it would be a chance to have awesome trick shots every other turn and be able to dish out very heavy dmg, what eneded up happening was that i had mid-tier dmg to not overshoadow the main dmg dealers, i would often find myself having to go in with only a pistol because we were entering buildings where i couldnt get a good spot from the outside and could not set up on the inside.

Aren't snipers suppose to work in teams?

Your GM was poopbutts and you both have a fundamental misunderatanding of the term "sniper"

main problem was that most corpret underground labs/vaults/serverrooms dont really have a place for a sniper to work. No windows, rooms not big enough for the need of recon, little place to set up shop and stay, a lot of need to move around. Plus, when playing shadowrun im not taking that marksman rifle to be realistic, im taking it to blow someones brains out in a very cool way

Infiltration is the most demanding part of a sniper's work. If a sniper goes to place and realizes he cant get the intel he needs, what do you think he does? Shit his pants for a few days then go "lol, iunno" when his team needs him? Nah, fuck that. He sneaks in, bugs the place, makes mentak notes on every security team he sees, then sneaks out. He watches the front door and learns guard rotations and shift changes. He learns the rputes those guards take on the way to work, when theyre vulnerable, and how to hurt them. He knows whos fucking who in the office, what kind of perfume the front office accountant wears, and the first name of the mail delivery man who shows up on a daily basis.

The word of the day is "intel", user. Your job ahould be to ask the GM every question you can think of and when he says "you dont know that" you figure out a way to find out.

user, shadowrun, the hacker is the guy that gets all the intel

Then it sounds like you need a hacker who is competent at shooting people in the face, not a some dude with a big gun.

It okay in Shadowrun, because it's okay in SR to split the party sometimes, you have a lot of options for spotters, like various drones, for example, and there's rule for shooting throught solid objects, so you can make some sweet killshots throught the wall.

Problem is, characters that are only good at sniping are bad, because flying drone with sniper rifle is as good (if not better) than them. So being sniper is usually second role for a guy who usually roll with a shotgun and heavy armor.

One of my players was a sniper but instead of bullets he used syringes bullets so he could heal party members or make people sleep. It was pretty great.

Even if that's true, it's not how the average RPG players sees it. It's the same >muh loner type who wants to play scouts in fantasy games. Nothing is more aggravating than someone who insists on being 200+ feet away from the rest of the party at all times.

>all these people throwing "sniper" around
>fancy word for dood who shoots far
>not understanding that snipers aren't a damage archetype
My soul hurts

couldn't you homebrew some rules for recon sniping? meaning one dude fucks off and provides intel and kills shit but stays in the party via radio or some other bullshit which suits the setting?

FGU's Merc had a special sniper chart which used a clear plastic overlay as the gunsight, then you would make a few roles to adjust it
It felt suprisingly atmospheric for the time
I'd post a picture of it but image uploading seems borked at the moment
Apparently there was some Swedish game which used a similar concept

>I am abysmal GM: The Post
>I can't handle party management: The Post
>I should be ashamed of myself: The Post
If you can't handle one of the PCs sitting in a nest further away from the rest of the group, you shouldn't be GMing. At all. Ever.
Next thing you are going to tell us it's impossible to play Kelly's Heroes as a campaign, especially the final skirmish, which involves roughtly 4 different groups doing their thing in different parts of the small town.

As long as you artificially inflate range by ten times, GURPS works the best of all systems. Then there is Twilight 2000 as close second, but making a dedicated fighter of any type is a really bad idea in that game, snipers included, even if mechanically it's fun game to use. And I shit you not, there is the extremely simplified, yet engaging shooting in The Witcher, since despite simplicity it has rules for handling long range combat better than most games handle range combat at all.
What I really fucking hate about pretty much all TTRPGs out there is the utter lack of range. So you are "sniping" at 30+ "hexes" or 50 meters or whatever unit is picked, while your "medium range" weapons used by grunts have range of 25-30 hexes too. How the fuck you are supposed to snipe, if your weapon can't fire further than what corresponds to pistol range?

It would require an abstracted combat system that would be dificult to grok on the table. Exponential range is an idea, where range in real distances increases exppnentially as range in hexes increases linearly. 1 hex is 1 yard, 2 hexes is 2 yards, 3 hexes is 4 yards, 4 hexes is 8 yards

>NEVER.
>SPLIT.
>THE.
>PARTY.
How to spot unskilled GM
>you're always some salt GM away from getting assraped by random enemies wandering into your snipers nest.
So you are not only awful GM but even worse at playing split party?

>Operator capable of spotting and taking down high priority targets at range that exceeds capacity of most other people in the squad
>Not a damage archetype
My mind hurts

Not the user you are replying to, but you are fucking retarded or never played a half-decent system supporting actual long-range combat.

Honestly, running Kelly's Heroes as a campaign is probably the ultimate test of GMing. If you can handle it, then you are competent GM and no doubts about it. If you start having issues even before the party/parties reach their final destination, you need more practice at this job.

That's probably the most stupid way to solve it, especially since if you are not playing a tabletop wargame with "real" distances to be presented, there is just no point for such multiplication, as the battle happens "Nowhere", being entirely a game of pretend based on GM's description.
And bunch of games do that really well without any sort of difficulty to "grok on the table".

Plenty of games use abstract zones and range bands with no hard measurements, and they're very easy to grok.

When was the last time you saw a sniper team in an RPG? Or any medium? Nobody wants to play a fucking spotter. This is purely about some faggot's fantasy to be the l33t awp white death super assassin

D&D 5e Warlock with
>Eldritch Blast (obviously)
>Eldritch Spear- bumps range to 300 feet
>Feat- Spell Sniper- Doubles range of spells with ranged attack rolls
Main advantage to this is that Warlock gets a lot of neat toys to make this more effective and you have unlimited "ammo", and if you want to go maximum cheese you can just do a 2 level dip in Warlock to get everything you need to be effective with it.

This is more like a rifleman than a "sniper" though, as you are basically laying down fire nonstop from out of reach.

The closer thing to an actual "one shot" Sniper would be a Wood Elf (for Longbow) Rogue with Sharpshooter, or a 1 level dip in Fighter for Archery and Longbow prof and whichever race you want.
Easy as shit, each turn it's
>Bonus action Hide
>Sneak Attack from 600 ft away
>Repeat next turn
You ignore most cover with Sharpshooter, but have to track ammo.

Neither of these solve the problem of Snipers being a mile away from the party being useless.

I'm playing a sniper in Only War - although anyone with half a brain picks a sniper rifle in that game, until their BS is at least in the 60s.

>When was the last time you saw a sniper team in an RPG
Last Wednesday
>Or any medium
I'm guessing you are not watching too many war movies or those with mercenaries in them
>Nobody wants to play a fucking spotte
You mean "I don't want to play a spotter", right? Average person familiar with spotter job is all eager to do it, because in context of RPG game, it means having a fuckload of job with protecting the sniper from enemy combatants closing in to the nest if they simply can't switch position after few shots.
>This is purely about some faggot's fantasy to be the l33t awp white death super assassin
Confirmed to never, ever playing military game set in modern times

I suggest playing some Twilight 2000.
If you play sniper in it the way you just described, you end up like pic related in very short time.

I had a Raven Guard sniper in a Deathwatch game. Also happened to be the team Librarian, though I could've used it for some enhancing effects but how the game worked, no chance.

Worked as the team's radar scout with stealth + psyniscience, our long-range support with the sniper, and the psychic blaster in the short range.

It was kind of a mess of a character, because the system worked really hard against letting there be an invisible sniper headshotting Orks from the shadows.

He also looked at Gork straight in the eye through the warp and told him to fuck off.

You are so full of shit, you probably don't even play roleplaying games.
I can tell by your butthurt multiquoting.

I can tell you are salty as fuck because you replied at all to bunch of truisms

Says the guy who never in his life played with or as a sniper PC, but bitches about it anyway. Cute

Grab it. You seem to be in dire need of those

Provided it seems to be unpopular on Veeky Forums starfinder's sniping is pretty satisfying and versatile. You even get a class that starts with proficiency and can be built for infiltration/ recon.

Thats called a designated marksman, user. The designated marksman's job is killing people. HE is the damage class. HE is the one in a squad

A sniper is observation, recon, support, and intelligence.

>Still taking down high priority targets at long range
>B-but there are other jobs
Which marksman does as well.
Not my fault apparently military doctrine in your country for infantry is fucked and you are training two different soldiers to do the same job, because they are named differently in your language. I don't even think the term "sniper" exists in military nomenclature in my country. Something akin to "selective shooter" (if directly translated) does exist, and it combines duties of both marksman, sniper and fucking forward recon.
Someone figured out that there is no point training few different type of those guys in era where infantry exists solely to hold ground conquered by air-force and mechanised units.

That doggo isn't smug, but snug, you imbecile

PUGGED

Savage Worlds if you aren't a realism autist

>an unaware target gets you a ridiculously huge bonus to hit
>penalties for targeting the head is mostly negated by this bonus
>the sci-fi and supers books add extreme range which is the absolute maximum range a weapon can fire and not too far from real-world maximum effective ranges
>actually putting a round in someone's brain is almost guaranteed death because unaware targets and headshots have big, fat damage bonuses that stack

Sounds like The Witcher
>Unaware targets get only 1 point of defense, meaning 1 of any combat skill is enough to perform auto-hit
>Penalties for aiming head-shots are negated by this bonus for any half-competent ranger
>Head-shots come with such ridiculous bonus to damage, further helped with bonus coming from low difficulty roll, you can kill almost anything with single shot
And thus average dryad will put an arrow in your eye-sockets when performing an ambush, killing you on the spot with damage easily exceeding maximum HP a humanoid can have.

I played a widowmaker in iron kingdoms. It was really fun. Mostly stayed as backline fire support and was the tracker in our bounty hunter team.

Honestly, a hacker who uses security cam footage to turn people to red mist with his modified Lahti L-39/44 (full auto) is a pretty fun support character concept.

hello I am dumb stupid idiot bad GM how do I handle a split party

Neither of them, but being attentive and having actual plan for the currently run game, along with map of the area helps a lot.
If you think you can "wing it" when party splits, you're gonna have a really bad time

What the other user already said: pre-planning the possibility of party split, or better, enforcing the split and thus being fully prepared for it, works just about fine. You need to have a clear set up, so players know exactly what's going on, at least within the knowledge of their PCs, and then just going through motions. As ridiculous as it sounds, having a timer (preferably concealed) helps a lot, because you can always give each sub-group (or individual player) roughtly the same amount of time, going to another person and thus keeping everyone engaged by the situation rather than half of players just playing with their fingers awaiting their turn.

Also, my long-term GM usually has a back-up when he needs to split us, so most likely part of the group has his wife as sub-GM for the duration. She's better at this than he is, so nobody really minds

Realistic sniping in RPGs is pretty boring, sniping mostly entails waiting.
>You sneak to the position to await your target
>After X hours you have to piss take a willpower test to hold it in or a stealth test to piss without raising attention to your position
>You see your target, roll to calculate shot
>Roll to hit
>Target eliminated withdraw

>Meanwhile the rest of the party snuck over the wall of a compound slitting the throats of the guards, entered the bad guy's mansion, shot him in the head and fought their way back out

The main difference between a designated marksman and a sniper is that the former is less specialized and are intended for direct support generally. A sniper lies around for two days waiting to shoot some guy while a designated marksman is generally attached to a platoon to deliver fire support. A sniper's main job is recon with a side of target elimination, a designated marksman's job is target elimination primarily.

Using a simple comparison a sniper is like a paladin or cleric while a designated marksman is like a fighter. A paladin and cleric have far more utility than a fighter who is focused almost entirely on killing.

I seriously wonder what kind of scenario would involve situation you've just described in a tabletop RPG.
It's less about snipers being bad for games, but how unlikely the described scenario is to happen in the first place.
Pic related is how sniping usually ends up being done in TTRPG

>Let me play pointless semantics some more
Nobody gives a fuck

>although anyone with half a brain picks SOME GRENADES in that game
FTFY

Not the original guy, but he was right, a sniper isn't the guy eliminating a platoon of guys from a kilometer away while his team advances.

...

Had a CP2020 character do a couple of sniping missions, had a particular favorite.

>Get a contract to kill the CFO of company and pin the murder on the CEO of a firm they're set to merge with.
>Be playing former KGB agent with a lot of bioware and genetic enhancements but the only cyberware was skinweave.
>Get mask made to look like framee's face, matching set of fingerprinted gloves.
>sneak single-use plastic chink-shit rifle into building across building from target office
>upper floors are high security so I can't go higher than 20th
>Decide to just set up in a random office so I walk in, bust some asshole's jaw and tuck him into a corner.
>GM tells me that while I can see the target, I'll be under considerable penalties while firing through two safety-glass windows and "uphill"
>Take the shot anyway against a 35 difficulty.
>+17 to hit, roll 10, die explodes, roll a 6, dump my remaining luck to make it work
>max damage, targets torso is now mostly hamburger meat.
>Pull fire alarm
>toss rifle down garbage chute
>blend in with buildings occupants to make my escape
>kick back with beer and the ~$13,000 I made in profit while watching the arrest of the CEO go down on the evening news.

More often than that though, he was relegated to hand-to-hand combat and demolition.

In my first shadowrun game we had an Infiltrator specialising in rifles, fists and driving.
Some things I found can be done with a sniper:
>Run overwatch on meets. Use sensory gear to spot other snipers, traps and warn the party of any suspicious activity, then shoot said suspicious activity.
>Taking down lookout drones or fleeing spydrones.
>Searching for a target over a long area, coordinate with a mage or hacker. The geek swoops around looking for the right ID/cam footage/astral signature, pops back and gives the general area to the sniper.
>Hop on a motorbike and scoot around the barrens keeping the enemies backup busy with long range harassment.
>Hit the enemy with the rifle
>Have other useful skills and weapons for indoor work and not being a bitch about it.