Board Thread:Role Plays/@comment-26130256-20170711055926/@comment-26130256-20180715081130

Edom shrugged his shoulders as Cebada droned. Partly because there was no way to stop the boy's blabbering without resorting to violence or rudeness, but partly because he and Bazz were so focused on each other, that neither of them noticed the imposter slowing his gait until they were already on the other side of the room. By the time they had sat down, the other spaces near the back had already filled up, leaving Edom no choice but to sit elsewhere. Eventually, he picked a chair on the left side of the room, mid-way up, between the green-haired sniper from breakfast and an olive-skinned gentleman with a salt-and-pepper beard long enough to make Edom's beard feel sad and inadequate.

Neither one seemed to be in a talking mood, so the imposter set his airline-moded Scroll on the desk and waited for the class to begin, adjusting his monitor to hide his face a little more.

"Pure melee?!?" Trigo looked at Bolton as if his horns had turned green. "Who in this day and age relies on a pure melee weapon?  Unless you have some sort of means to close the distance to your target, you're simply asking to be finely chopped by overwatch fire.  Close-quarters is well and good, but you have to get there first.  I once knew a piratical sort who fought with an enormous anchor.  But the thing doubled as a grappling hook, so he could move around quickly enough to shiver any timbers that needed it.  Or even that Corlyson woman; she can literally phase through cover to stick a blade in you!  Now, she's also intelligent enough to bring a firearm or two, but if anyone in this institute could get away with pure melee, it would be her."

"As for a SMG or shotgun," Trigo began to pace besides the ring, looking almost like a teacher about to lecture. A rather buzzed teacher in a pinstripe suit. "A SMG might be lighter like you said, but then your ranged capabilities become severely lacking, and a savvy foe will exploit that.  If you need to hit a distant target with an automatic weapon, your choices are limited to 'spraying and praying' or taking very short bursts with a machine that was never intended to be accurate.  Meanwhile, my shotgun and I can still simply switch over to slug ammunition, or adjust a choke to spread more or less."

To demonstrate his meaning, as well as catch his breath, Trigo drew Destra and gestured towards the dial that changed the shotgun's choke, from a tight choke that allowed even shot to reach a fair distance, to a full-cylinder suitable for slugs, Dust crystals, or whatever other tricks he had found. "Now, I don't mean to say that SMGs are worthless, far from it, but whether it's a close range or far, I'd rather have my shotguns in hand.  About the only instance where a SMG would have an edge over a shotgun is if the enemy is literally inside the length of your barrel, and that means you have a different sort of problem entirely.  Even in tight hallways, man saw fit to invent the sawn-off."