Cover is a mechanic in Shadowrun. Cover offers protection to characters from attacks. The visual sign for a character who's in cover is the character crouching. However, physical adepts can cast a buff on themselves to give them Light/Medium Cover for the duration of the spell.
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- The effectiveness of cover is represented by a shield:
- An empty shield means Light Cover.
- A half-filled shield means Medium Cover.
- A fully-filled shield means Heavy Cover.
- If a character is in cover, attacks on the character receive a multiplicative modifier to accuracy which is less than 1. In addition, the chance for such attacks to be critical is reduced to 0. Heavier cover provides higher defence bonuses.
- Some spells and attacks (e.g. melee and full auto attacks from rifles) can flush characters out from their cover. AoE attacks (e.g. grenades, mortars from support drones) can ignore cover if launched from certain directions.
- Another countermeasure is to attack in directions where the cover cannot protect the character. This is known as flanking.
- By reducing a character's AP to below 0 (stun), you can force the character out of cover.