Printable Version of Topic

Click here to view this topic in its original format

Dumpshock Forums _ Shadowrun _ Deep thoughts on revising SR firearms + engine

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Jan 30 2006, 03:56 AM

So, reading this thread caused a wave of bittersweet emotion, remembering the joyous days back when I used to GM SR3 and when I used Raygun's firearms in order to kill off the PCs more quickly:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=11651&st=25

After reading that thought, the following things occured to me:

1.) Raygun had a pretty good adaptation of various firearms into SR3 rules, including consistient caliber/barrel length damage, rate of fire, and lack of dodge tests.

2.) Raygun also said that he was "accepting" a certain amount of un-reality, such as having to-hit percentages be way higher than they are in the real world (SR hit % are higher than real world ones from, say, police records), since he didn't want to alienate the vast majority of people who played SR with a system that was too much departed from the original SR3 system.

3.) BUT, now SR3 has gone the way of the dodo and instead we have SR4 with even less firearms detail. Therefore, the original reason that anyone would want to limit firearms realism in their game for the sake of being comprehensible to the rest of the people who play SR3 is pretty much gone.

Therefore, wouldn't it make sense to, using the relatively statistically sensitive SR3 rules, sit down and make an extensive "patch" of SR3 that is heavily focused on firearms realism?

The focus might be on:
1.) Consistient gun statistics, a la Raygun, including non-wonky rates of fire
2.) No more dodge tests, a la Raygun; instead have Reaction make you harder to hit
3.) Hit and miss percentages in fights comparable to statistics recorded by the military and the police. Perhaps calibrate a skill of 3 to "police" and a skill of 6 to "military" and try to arrange TNs so that the respective skill levels are statistically likely to get the "correct" number of hits versus misses.
4.) Fix those crazy suppressive fire rules, making it more dangerous
5.) Fix recoil
6.) Fix the armor, so that most of the armor isn't a wonky second chance vest, but so that some armor actually can comfortably stop rifle cartridges, like in real life.

The reward, of course, would be a method for statistically conscious SR3 players to keep playing with the SR3 system, but also have a pleasing degree of firearms realism in their games.

Does anyone thing a project like this would be worthwhile?

Posted by: Crusher Bob Jan 30 2006, 06:32 AM

The low hit ratios IRL are due more to psychological and physiological factors that are not easily replicatable in ‘range shooting’. The problem with representing this by ‘realistically’ high target number for combat is that its, well, not realistic. A stone cold killer (whether they be human or machine) will not suffer as much from these problems, meaning that they will find shooting their targets almost as easy as ‘range shooting’. This is, in part, why the majority of small arms casualties are caused by a very small number of shooters.

The problem with game systems is that they tend to model ‘shooting on the range’, but then fail to model all the factors that make shooting in combat so much more difficult.

As most game books do not have many pages to devote to the psychology of human conflict, they simply assume that all PCs are stone cold killers, and find shooting some poor chump in the face just as easy as shooting a paper target.

Posted by: mfb Jan 30 2006, 06:37 AM

to an extent. SR3 actually incorporates the psychological aspect fairly well (or, as well as a game system can) by making 2/3 of your combat pool based on Int and Wil. i think the way i might handle that is to raise combat TNs in general, then insert a modifier or modifiers that represent range conditions.

Posted by: Crusher Bob Jan 30 2006, 06:57 AM

More stuff:

I think your 'test skill' levels are also considerably inflated, at least, by today's standards. 'Beat cops' should have 1/3 or 2 in their weapon skills, with veteran cops adding maybe one point. 'Green' military guys would have maybe 1/3, with 'Regular' military guys have 2/4 or maybe 3/4. SWAT and specops guys would start at 3/5 or 4/6, depending on how high standards are, although there would be plenty of guys much better than that.

Admittedly, virtual training may tend to increase skill levels, but as starting PCs are capped at 6, those skill elvels shoud like reasonable places to start.

Posted by: mfb Jan 30 2006, 07:01 AM

i'll add another point: fix shotgun spread rules. fix blast radii so that someone 16m from a grenade is in no danger of taking damage, while someone 14m away can be seriously injured or even killed.

Posted by: Crusher Bob Jan 30 2006, 07:06 AM

You might as well ask for oral pleasure, mfb. You might actually get that.

Posted by: mfb Jan 30 2006, 02:39 PM

so, Crusher... you busy? you gots a purty mouth!

i don't think those two items are that hard. hell, SR4 did an okay job of fixing shotgun spread. for blast radius, you just need to scale down the damage level in addition to or instead of the damage power.

i think the shotgun spread rules are a pretty good basis for suppressive fire, btw.

Posted by: Austere Emancipator Jan 30 2006, 03:03 PM

I believe there are several quite reasonable house rules for shotgun spread on this forum. Most just have a TN modifier and reduced Damage Code at the standard range intervals.

The first thing that I thought of to fix blast radii is to make the explosive device roll some kind of attack, but that is just too cumbersome. Making both DL and Power scale could work just as well, and would be far simpler to boot.

QUOTE (Wounded Ronin)

non-wonky rates of fire

Would it be adequate to divide the cyclic RoF per 3 seconds by the total amount of initiative passes that occur in one CT and allow all characters to fire a maximum of that many rounds per init pass? The only problem here is how to rule slow people going FA through several init passes -- most likely, a slow character's FA would still be resolved during the initiative pass where the bullets fly, regardless of whether the character has any actions in that pass. You should probably allow a slow character to cut short FA fire in the latter init passes as well, even if he has no actions.

Or were you looking for something better?

Posted by: Pendaric Jan 30 2006, 06:22 PM

Slightly off topic but the thing I'd change is the ammo weights, minor I know but it has ramificatoins on the current rule system realism. Carrying hold out and light pistol rounds weighing the same as 50 cal rnds is a little perplexing. Another paradox minor.

Posted by: Taran Jan 30 2006, 06:30 PM

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=8620

Posted by: Austere Emancipator Jan 30 2006, 06:57 PM

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=3842&st=18&#entry104047's a little something I wrote about ammo weights 20 months back.

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Jan 30 2006, 10:15 PM

QUOTE (Austere Emancipator)

Well, that sounds like the most reasonable way of handling it I can think of. I mean, if you wanted to try and be more realistic you could argue that a character with slower reactions has the trigger held down for a shorter amount of time since it takes him more time to push the trigger, but I think that that would be way too clunky to deal with.

I think the kind of thing you propose is probably the most practical way to do it. Did you have a better idea you wanted to share?

Posted by: Austere Emancipator Jan 30 2006, 11:31 PM

Nope, unfortunately not. That's how it worked in my modern/post-modern SR games.

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Jan 31 2006, 01:38 AM

QUOTE (Austere Emancipator @ Jan 30 2006, 06:31 PM)

Nope, unfortunately not. That's how it worked in my modern/post-modern SR games.

Hmm. Okay, well, let's think about this.

So, with a normal person, it takes them some time to react to stimuli. That's why a cop who is shooting often squeezes off one or two extra rounds after the perp goes down; it takes him that long to readjust to the stimuli. That's a physiological fact.

Just pressing the start and stop buttons on my wristwatch here, I see that the fastest I can tap the buttons as a normal person is at 0.22, just under half a second.

So, maybe we could say that based on a Reaction of 3, it takes you half a second to react in the combat turn, and so if you wanted to spray full auto it wouldn't be 3 seconds worth of full auto, but rather 2.5 seconds worth of full auto.

Perhaps we could link the Reaction time to the amount of seconds sheared off of your first combat turn for the purpose of how much lead you can get out that turn.

So, a Reaction of 3 loses .30, or half a second. A reaction of 2 loses .40, and a reaction of 1 loses .5 getting only 2.2 seconds worth of spray.

Better reactions lose less. Reaction 4 loses only .20, reaction 5 loses .10, and reaction 6 or better dosen't lose any time.

Problems with this set of rules:
*Diminishing rewards after Rea 6, which don't necessarily make sense.
*What happens if a slow character does nothing but spray full auto for 2 consecutive combat turns? Should he lose time in the second turn if all he was doing was just holding the trigger down the whole time? I might argue that he could still be penalized to represent the time it takes for him to acquire the target and steady his weapon.
*Current example may have actual differences between Reaction scores be really really minimal, like in terms of .2s of seconds.

Might be too clunky. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

EDIT: So, the point of this is that you could treat the bullet flights as instantaneous. The slow guy uses full auto, but he only gets 2.5 seconds of full auto because he's slow. You can treat the effects of his full auto all during his action, and it's sort of logically balanced by how the amount of rounds he threw out was a bit reduced.

Posted by: John Campbell Jan 31 2006, 07:46 PM

QUOTE (Pendaric)

The encumbrance mechanics are so fundamentally broken that fixing the ammo weights (or, indeed, even the weights of every item in the game) wouldn't really help significantly. I suppose it'd give you a better number to apply common sense to, though.

Posted by: Pendaric Jan 31 2006, 10:43 PM

Yes, once again the ref has to step in if a player whats to go for five hundred clips for every gun they are carrying *sigh.*
This only really starts to get to the stone in the shoes irritation for me when the large vehicle capacities comes into the equation.
Being 0.2 CF equals 2000 LMG or smaller rounds or 200 MMG/HMG rounds ergo
200kg and 20kg respectively. A some what vulgar disparity.
I think its the salt in the wound of having yet another sum to perform with every vehicle and their load capacity or a least, the presentation that I should, that goads me.

Posted by: Austere Emancipator Jan 31 2006, 11:24 PM

QUOTE (Pendaric)

Being 0.2 CF equals 2000 LMG or smaller rounds or 200 MMG/HMG rounds ergo
200kg and 20kg respectively. A some what vulgar disparity.

The standard NATO LMG cartridge, 5.56x45mm M855, weighs 12.31 grams, while the standard NATO HMG cartridge, 12.7x99mm M33, weighs 114.2 grams. Looking at those two figures alone, the ammunition CF rule almost makes sense. Unfortunately, the standard NATO MMG/GPMG cartridge, 7.62x51mm M80, weighs 25.4 grams, and several pistol cartridges weigh well over 20 grams each.

If you really care about the ammo weights, I list RL examples of all the common ammo types in the post I linked above.

Posted by: Pendaric Jan 31 2006, 11:50 PM

Only when its a headache to my gaming realism...
Thank you for the link it gives great comparisons in that regards, I think this may be a job for the Rigger garage......