Not necessarily. An ordinary gunshot can completely ruin a wizard's day, and beating a wizard's initiative usually isn't that hard.
It certainly can--but if that gunshot doesn't take out the wizard, the wizard is going to come back with something much bigger. Hence the need for the pure mortal to prepare more, to try and prevent the wizard from having that chance.
Neither of those has much to do with prep time.
Actually, they have everything to do with prep time. It takes time and effort to fabricate them, and the wizard has to think ahead and bring them--if he doesn't have them, he isn't prepared, and he's in trouble.
Way Of The AK, Flying Pointy Bits, and Archer all provide a flat +1 to hit with a particular weapon type. Actually, the former two are probably broader than I would allow a stunt in one of my games to be. I intended the Weapon Focus line of stunts to be clearly weaker than Way Of The AK.
I'm not familiar with Flying Pointy Bits off hand, but Archer I can see because a bow is a very unusual weapon in the modern day--unlike a firearm or even a concealed knife, you're really not going to be able to take a bow everywhere, and it completely lacks any ability with spray attacks. Those restrictions, I think, justify being able to have a bonus on using a bow, since a bow is inherently inferior in a lot of ways to a modern firearm.
Off-Hand Weapon Training gives +2 stress with any pair of weapon 3s. This is broader than Weapon Specialization. And in certain unusual situations it can give more than +2 stress.
Granted. I will say, though, that it makes a lot more sense to me that being hit with a second sword causes more damage. And it would have to be a
very unusual situation for someone to be swinging something Weapon:5 on their offhand weapon. I can't even think of what kind of weapon would have that, except that it would be prohibitively huge for anything smaller than your average house.
Defend My Tribe also gives +2 stress with an easy-to-meet condition. PCs are frequently defending one another.
I'll have to check this one before I can get back to you. But on this, and Way of the AK, I seem to remember someone going on at length about how the stunts and powers in Our World aren't balanced and shouldn't be taken as good examples.
Lethal Weapon and Target-Rich Environment give equivalent bonuses, but their conditions are a bit harsher.
As you say, the conditions are harsher--and, importantly, not really in the player's control.
Armed Arts can easily give +3 stress if you have the right weapon on hand, but it's a bit of a cheap example.
That's a trapping replacement, not a stress booster.
None of these apply all the time. But most of them apply more often than the Weapon Focus line.
I think this is where we differ. How is it that Weapon Focus won't apply 99% of the time? It's entirely in the player's control unless the GM tosses a compel of some kind at them--they're going to be using those bonuses for every single attack and defense in the vast,
vast majority of their fight scenes.
You keep talking about how things are supposed to be. But for the life of me I can't imagine how you know how things "should" be.
The rules say that you get weapon 3 for your average big weapon and that +2 stress is one of the standard stunt bonuses. Those rules don't make weapon 5 all that special.
They just don't.
Mostly I know from, you know, reading the book, where it says that Weapon:4 is equivalent to battlefield explosives, Weapon:5 is equivalent to being hit with a small car, etc. Weapon:3 is large weapons--hard to conceal if not impossible, things you typically need two hands to swing. +2 to anything is supposed to be the
most that a stunt gives, under relatively rare circumstances. "Every time the character swings the weapon that's central to his fighting ability" is not in any way "rare," in fact, it's going to be the vast majority.
Murphy wins all kinds of head-to-head fights.
Point of fact, she doesn't. In all the books, I can think of one time she wins a physical fight with something with supernatural powers, and she does that by making the fight as
indirect as she can manage--after fighting directly, skill vs. skill and strength vs. strength, gets her arm broken. And she's supposed to be the series' prime example of a pure mortal physical fighter.
A straight Pure Mortal combatant is a legal character and totally appropriate to the fiction. I can't work out why you don't think they should be balanced against other characters at the same level.
As I said, it's the inflation. Effectively, a character is swinging more accurately than Michael, with more power than one of Harry's normal fire spells, for free every single round, and defending on par with Shiro, who's built up to be one of the best swordsmen in the entire setting, a "Mozart with a blade," against whom even 2000-year-old Knight-killer Nicodemus pauses.
Um, no.
See, a PC who's designed to be a badass fighter will have 5s and 6s all over.
But such a PC is a badass among badasses. Even at Feet In The Water level.
I, personally, probably have 10-15 skill points and 4-6 Refresh after the Pure Mortal bonus. And I'm a pretty competent person.
It is normal and appropriate for PCs to be way more competent than most people.
Way more competent than most people, yes. And most people are going to have 1s and
maybe 2s in their physical stats. This kind of inflation makes every PC more physically able and competent than just about every creature listed in Our World.
For all her badassery, the only time Murphy's been able to stand toe-to-toe with supernatural creatures and win as easily as all these skill and stress bonuses would imply is in Changes, when she apparently had an Archangel riding shotgun.
If you have two characters, equivalent except for the fact that one has Weapon Specialization or Defend My Tribe or something, then both will be able to contribute. One will be somewhat stronger, but not crushingly so.
That's just it, though. If I'm playing alongside a character who's never swinging anything less than a Weapon:5 sword at 6, the GM is going to balance encounters to make it a challenge for him. If I'm sitting there swinging Weapon:3 at 4 or 5, I'm just not going to be able to keep up.
To paraphrase you when talking about Shields and the Rune Magic power not terribly long ago: Why would anyone ever
not take these stunts, if they make a character inherently and objectively better than one without?
That generally isn't possible, if we're talking combat wizards here.
Again: Per the descriptions in the book, Weapon:4 and above are supposed to be either massively destructive (grenades), or difficult to use and acquire (prohibitively huge melee weapons and guns that Rambo would need a little help moving around). Wizards, however, can toss that kind of power around, but only by taking stress, and always with the risk of backlash.
What? No.
That just does not happen. Trust me, I've built characters of all types. And with these stunts, mortals don't come out ahead of equal-level supernaturals. Especially since supernaturals can take the same stunts...and maybe even the more-powerful canon stunts if the GM is feeling permissive.
With those stunts, every mortal will not only be outperforming, but
overwhelmingly outperforming every non-named, non-Nobility-level monster in Our World.
Whereas in the fiction, Murphy treads lightly when facing anything supernatural in combat, defaults to her guns, and never engages in straight up fist fighting them if she can possibly avoid it, and when she does, she ends up with a broken limb. The fiction, and the write-up in Your Story, are pretty clear on this: Mortals can't compete with the supernatural one-on-one in a physical sense, they have to gain an advantage through maneuvering, finding weaknesses, and preparation.
These stunts go counter to all that. There's no need to maneuver when you've already got a +3 advantage on the enemy. There's no need to find weaknesses when you're getting Weapon:5 on every attack without any penalty. There's no need to take any defensive action if your defenses are +3 against any attack the enemy's going to throw at you.
It turns the Pure Mortal from a character type revolving around ingenuity and maneuvering to a character type that can just bash its way through fights doing nothing but attack attack attack.
