Consider having difficulty to hit a target not be static

[MockingbirdME]

Currently, the rules set a base difficulty of 6 with one required success to hit a target with an attack. There should be certain times where the difficulty or number of successes should be increased, this issue is going to detail what I believe to be the most important of those circumstances with a few suggestions.

Situational ways to become harder to hit: some non-action non-character-specific situations should make that character harder to hit.

• cover - a character behind cover is going to be more difficult to hit.
  suggestions:
  • have a few levels of cover with progressively increasing difficulty modifiers, something along the lines of:
    • light cover: increase threshold by one to hit the character.
    • heavy cover: increase threshold by two to hit the character.
    • full cover: the character cannot be targeted.
      Potentially consider the cover taking damage or adding soak dice to simulate attacks passing through it if the threshold added is what caused the attack to miss.
  • alternatively, a more complicated option would be to figure out what hexes of the character's body grid are covered and have the normal deviation effects provide a possibility that the attack hits the cover instead of the character.
• concealment - some fights happen in a forest thick with foliage or in a field obfuscated by smoke or dust.
  suggestion: increase the difficulty to hit a concealed character by between 1 and 3 depending on how thick the concealment is.

Passive ways to become harder to hit: Some characters, by virtue of skill or attribute advantage over their opponent should be harder to hit

• dodge/block/parry - ok, so we know that you can't dodge a bullet but slower projectiles and melee attacks that the character is aware of should have a harder time hitting a character more skilled at dodging/blocking/parrying/etc.
  suggestions:
  • have the difficulty set by the difference in character skills if the defender is both more skilled and aware of the attack. Starting at a diff of 6 and increasing by the difference between the attacks attribute + ability and the defenders if the defender's skill is higher. this would mean an untrained librarian with an appropriate attribute of 2 and no melee skill would be nearly incapable of hitting a karate master with a 7 in the appropriate attribute and a 4 in melee (6 + 5 = diff 9 two threshold) but that a fighter in training with an appropriate attribute of 3 and 2dice in melee still has a reasonable, though not high, chance of landing a blow (6 + 2 = diff 8). note I am not suggesting that a higher skilled character gets a lower difficulty than 6 to hit a lower skilled character.
  • allow a character to spend a willpower to ignore a number of successes equal to their appropriate skill rank from opponents attacks this round. So the karate master in the above example could discover he's been hit by the librarian and spend a willpower to ignore the one success from the librarian along with, potentially, three additional successes from other brawling attacks made against him this round.

Active ways to become harder to hit: There are some actions that characters should be able to make that intrinsically makes them harder to hit.

• moving erratically/defensively - there should be some way to take an action to move in such a way that attacks against the character have a higher difficulty. maybe all attacks for simplicity of action types and maybe have a melee and ranged specific version of this action
  suggestion:
  • defensive action: reflexes + dodge/melee/brawling depending on what you're defending against. Each success achieved increases the difficulty to hit you where the used skill may come into effect by one until the beginning of your next turn.
  • dodge: only usable as part of a held action in response to a specifically waited for attack. reflexes + dodge. increase the difficulty of the specified attack by 1 + 1 for each success rolled (reduce the difficulty by one on a botch). note this ability should not be viewed as an ability to dodge bullets but as specifically looking for the attacker to show signs that they're about to shoot and to move away from the spot they're aiming at before the trigger is pulled.