Infinity 101: Smoke Ammunition, it's not a Dodge!
Today we have a special guest article from Nate, aka NateTehAggresar. Hey reader, sorry it’s been so long since my last article on face to face rolls. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you do, because this article builds upon topics covered in the last one.
Today we are discussing smoke ammunition. Which you can read about on the infinity wiki here. Many players get confused about the ins and outs of smoke, and use the use of the poorly named “Special Dodge” that smoke can provide.
The first thing to keep in mind that when you use smoke ammunition you are using the BS Attack skill, not the Dodge skill. This has a number of important implications, the most obvious is that you use BS (or PHYS with thrown weapons) and it is modified by range.
Other important implications are that:
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In coordinated orders everyone could BS Attack using Smoke (targeting the same point), they don’t use the Dodge skill.
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It is modified by link team burst and BS mods.
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In ARO, the whole link team must decide to BS Attack OR Dodge, you cannot mix “Smoke Dodges” with regular Dodges without breaking apart the link.
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The collariary to that is that in ARO you can mix BS Attacks using lethal ammo, and BS attacks using smoke, in a link team.
Here is where we think about concepts from the last article, how is a BS Attack different when using smoke compared to regular ammo? It is not unique for smoke ammunition to be able to stop enemy attacks, any face to face roll does that. For example shooting a rifle back at the attacker can potentially stop incoming attacks.
Let us look at the requirements to use the “Special Dodge Trait.”
To able to use the smoke special dodge an attack must
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Require LoF,
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The Attack must require a roll (no smoke dodging a flamer),
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And the LoF must be blocked by the smoke template.
Typically to make a roll face to face, model A, must be trying to effect model B, and model B, must be trying to effect model A. What the smoke ammunition does, is it breaks the mutuality requirement for the models to be trying to affect each other.
Attacker is shooting target, target is NOT shooting attacker, instead, target is placing a template to block LoS. Normally this would be resolved as two normal rolls, but because smoke has the “Special Dodge” trait it becomes face to face.
To expand on this concept a little more, smoke can never be used to “dodge” for another model. Say a Fusileer is shooting an Interventor, and a Morlock is throwing smoke to block LoS between the Interventor and the fusileer. In this case the Morlock’s smoke throw is a normal roll. This is entirely consistent with the framework under which face to face rolls work.
Again face to face requires model A to effect Model B and vice versa. Smoke allows one models to sub in LoF breaking templates for the requirement to target the other model back. In this last example we have model A trying to effect model B, and model C is trying to break LoS between them. Model A is not trying to do anything to model C, therefore the basic requirements for a face to face toll are not met.
Anyway, I hope this helps to clear up some confusion about the use of smoke, and maybe expand some conceptual knowledge.
-Nate