The thing about stress is that it can help inspire performance, or it can degrade it. Look at seasoned professional athletes in high stress situations, what happens in play-offs or clutch moments, where occasionally they’ll do things that seem impossible, but often choke up.

Just one example: in hockey (let’s just feed the stereotype about Canadians always talking hockey, I guess) some games go to a shoot-out to break a tie (each team has three shooters break in alone on the goalie and try to score—the teams taking alternating turns. If it is tied after three each, they go into rounds of 1). Once one team has scored, statistically the other team has a lower chance of scoring. It has to come down to stress, knowing that your team is behind and needs to score. These are people who have spent years playing high stress situations, who obviously generally cope well enough with stress or they would not be playing at that level, who practice these things and who probably even know about that statistic….and yet it is still true.

Now ramp that up to life or death, and for that matter it is not just your life or death, it is also the life or death of someone in front of your sights. Most of us are reluctant to kill, so totally aside from technique, stress management, and all that, in the split instant when you have your shot can you go for the kill? From what I’ve read, that can be issue for a lot of people—even if you do shoot, maybe it slows your reactions or makes you second guess yourself.

Which is why a pretty random dice mechanic works for me for that sort of thing.

So, I don't know later editions of the game, but in SR3 terms, I'd basically apply TN penalties for degrees of stress and/or suppression.

Base +1 TN for anything with pressure, either competition, or a real situation where the shooter is a kilometer away and picking off a target while in no immediate danger and with no risk of hitting a friendly.

+2 TN simply for being involved directly in a firefight

+3 or higher for being suppressed, or being in a stressful nightmare firefight.

I have had the idea that to reflect the coolness of experience, someone can roll dice derived from their total unspent karma to try and reduce the TN penalty. Since you burn karma in stressful situations, the idea is that over time you get worn down and lose your composure with prolonged exposure to stress, so combat stress affects you more.

Which would have made me hate combat in SR3 even more, since our average TN for Firearms combat tended to fall in the 8-10 range more often than not, and sometimes even higher. This with just the standard modifiers involved. Hours upon Hours of wasted time and ammunition in fruitless pot-shooting at the opponents. Just Say No!!!

Thank you all for your inputs. It's been an interesting conversation with good points, I already had a mechanism to make actions done without time/pressure easier, but I might have to add one for actions requiring fine control (shooting, hacking, lockpicking, casting spells, summoning, etc.) done in stressful situations like combat, with probably another additional modifier for doing stuff while getting shot at.

I'll think about it...



The problem with unrealistically high hit ratio is that it makes many things absurd or difficult to handle. For example, the clip/magazine/bullet-thingy size doesn't really matter anymore, most of the real life tactics also become irrelevant: flanking becomes mostly useless and why go for suppressing fire/covering fire if you can just shoot everyone instead?

I'm fine with combat taking more than 3 seconds in-game, it might make tactics other than (make sure to be the first to shoot) be useful, leading to non-combat monsters character to actually feel less worthless. Extra rolling and slower combat won't be a problem with my rules.

Making combat more difficult will not enable combat maneuvers... it will just frustrate people. I am all about reality in the real world... in a game, most people are trying to escape the real world. They want to be something they are not.

Also, in my experience, higher hit ratios do not invalidate combat maneuvering at all. We tend to see a lot of covering fire, suppression fire and ground maneuvering in our games. It just makes good sense. Of course, we rarely see combat end in 1 turn... so, I probably am a bit biased here. Helps that many of us are military vets, too, so we do a lot of those things by rote anyway because getting shot sucks, even if it is a game... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I guess your group does introduce quite a bias.
Sure it's possible to maneuver and use covering fire, but in most cases it's just easier and more efficient to just stand there (or at worst go behing the closest cover) and shoot first.
Every time I've tried (or seen another player try) to spend some time to maneuver, the combat was over by the time the character was in position to do something, because the rest of the group had just stood where they were when combat started and mowed down the opposition with bullets and spells.

Possibly, yes. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

My problem with what you describe is that it is a Metagaming convention (because, you know, the player's life is not on the line), not what someone would do if confronted with the situation (as if the character actually existed). NO ONE just stands there and trades bullets until the opposition drops. EVER. So... Why would a character in a game do so?

Because ..... action movies?

Well, for me, part of the appeal of a role playing game was always simulationism. For me it's less, "let me be something I can't be," but rather "let me learn about something I am not in the position to directly experience through well researched statistical models."

Supposedly during the Vietnam War the ratio of rounds fired to enemy killed as 50,000 to one, right?

So I would see the game more about (if you want to kill someone) making sure you suppress the enemy and that you have at least one guy not suppressed who can make the shot, or have the game be more about breaking contact if you do end up in a firefight.

Which I imagine would be more realistic for a small unit without support on a special forces type mission anyway.


So I actually think the next logical thing would be to raise rates of fire for automatic weapons and then make some house rules for suppression and breaking contact. The logistical strain of needing to carry more ammo would be realistic in my opinion as well. In practice with regular SR3 rules characters rarely had to reload their firearm because the shot to kill ratio was so favorable, but in reality people want to carry at least 210 rounds of ammo if not more on them if they think they're going to get into a firefight.


The other thing is that since we have laptops, tablets, and smartphones now it should be faster and easier to have more complex rules. Just code them up. So for example if you wanted to do some SR1 thing where each round fired in full auto had a certain discrete chance of hitting the target, you could do that and have it be fast by making a computer do the calculation.

Because... Stupid?
There are plenty of action movies where the protagonist does not stand and deliver in the open while being stupid. I see no reason to have a character earn a Darwin Award.
The movie "Aliens" is a perfect example of how it should work.

I play tabletop games to unplug, not to further immerse myself in electronic noise. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
No, I do not use a laptop/tablet when I game, nor do I even own a Smartphone (or any cell phone for that matter).

Apparently the fantasy that appeals to you is having maximal realism, or at least the minimum of things that bump up against your suspension of disbelief. It sounds like part of your enjoyment of the game is working through believable tactics to achieve your objective. Which is awesome--obviously you enjoy the game or you wouldn't have been around long enough to accumulate your post count--so you are playing it right, because you are enjoying what you get out of the game.

That won’t be the appealing fantasy for everybody who plays the game, however. There is no right or wrong way to play role-playing games, so long as much fun is being had. Obviously understanding table culture is important, and if I came to your table to game of course I’d be playing with much care, cover, and tactics. But if another group has a blast playing trolls wearing bandanas and carrying medium weight machine guns charging lines of opposing shooters, and it works for them, and they are having fun….then I’d say that they are also playing the game ‘right’ in that they are getting what they want out of the game.

As for me, given my druthers, if anyone pulls a trigger then the plan obviously failed. If it has to go to combat, meh, whatever works, gets the job done, creates some cool moments, and doesn't take all day to resolve.

But I will grant that Aliens should pretty much be mandatory viewing for anyone who is going to play ShadowRun (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Agreed... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
I have had some pink Mohawk moments, but they are not my meat and 'tatoes. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Well, that's actually kind of my point. If you make a game where guns make 1 damage and most characters have 10 hit points, you'll have players rig 10 guns together. If you want realistic behavior, you need realistic rules.

If the rules make standing there and trading bullet be the most efficient way of winning a firefight with minimal risks, it makes sense for characters to do so. You can say that "this is due to a rule constraint, but it's not actually the case in the game world" and have a gentleman agreement so that players play their characters in a "realistic" way, but it's better if you can have rules that actually support the expected behavior.

Any game that models real world combat activities to that degree are mostly unplayable. The issue is that there is no Life or Death investment in a piece of paper, so players will not act the way a real person would in the same situation, for the most part. Has nothing to do with rules per se (since any character is perfectly capable of seeking cover and performing combat operations), but with Player actions. Game being what it is, they player just metagames (piece of paper and all that) and so acts that how he wants to with no regard for what would really be going through that character's mind. And I can guarantee you that no one thinks he is indestructible in the face of Automatic Weapons Fire. You may get heroic acts contrary to that (check out Medal Of Honor Descriptions sometime), but it is not out of a sense of indestructibility.

A looonnnng time ago, in my original gaming group, the older brother of one of our friends made his own game system. I forget his exact rankings, but he was highly trained in judo and even more so aikido and had delved into the root art of the two of them (the combat art rather than the sport versions), and had some melee weapons training, and he drew on all of that to come up with as accurate and evocative combat system as he could. The system he came up with was in fact pretty amazing in its ability to make you feel everything that went on.....and was indeed well nigh unplayable. We did play it, but let's just say that the combat made SR combat seem lightning fast in comparison. (a typical attack action could involve four dice rolls, two charts, and a couple of pieces of multiplication involving numbers with decimals...). I'm not saying that you can't make a fair simulation system that would be more streamlined than his was, but I think that unavoidably the more detail you want to reflect, the heavier the system gets.

These days my game system preference, in the abstract, is extremely light rules -- however the SR rules and game world are so closely melded that it would be a challenge to port the world to a massively different system without losing some of the feel, I think.

To be fair, there ARE cases where it's absolutely more awesome when everyone DOES just stand and deliver (and hit nothing but air), even despite (or perhaps because of) how stupid that is.

The above clip pretty much perfectly sums up the preferred playstyle of one of my occasional players, and when he's with us the group loves him for it.

~Umi

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
Don't get me wrong - I Like me some Pink Mohawk from time to time, it just is not the norm that I prefer to play. Sometimes, having a Troll who can shrug off all but the most devastating military hardware is fun. But it gets old really, really quickly. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

My goal is not to model everything. Actually, my system is designed to be lighter and faster than the SR4/SR5 system. But that doesn't mean the rules can't give a good approximation.

I disagree with the idea that just because a PC is made of paper, players will feel indestructible, and I think that the rules have a big impact on that. If characters can shrug off light pistols shots (as in SR3), they will feel indestructible when a punk points a light pistol at them. If they can die from that shot, they won't. (Of course, the game should still allow some characters to be actually able to shrug off light pistol bullets, but a normal human should not)
Likewise, if PC can reliably act first and kill the opposition in one IP, they will stand there and shoot. If the rules make it harder to pull that off, and makes it likely to get badly hurt when you stand in the open in a firefight, then players will go for cover and be more tactical.

I remember a SR game where my character entered a room and faced someone who was about to lay down suppressive fire. I decided to have my character jump for cover and not leave until the suppressive fire died down. It was a purely roleplay decision because the rules made it a better option to dodge and/or soak the suppressive fire and then proceed to mow down the opposition. Good roleplaying should not make the game harder for me.

One could just as easily say that playing nothing but Black Trenchcoat gets old really, really quickly too.

The key is variety, I think. Both playstyles have their place, even within the same campaign and with the same characters. Not only is the world of Shadowrun complicated and crazy enough to justify it, but so is real life.

I know you in particular see the world through the lens of your military experience, and that pushes you toward more "professional", by-the-books running, but the reality is there are an awful lot of people in the world who actually would just stand out in the open during a firefight and unload. Amateurs and idiots are everywhere, and they do crazy, irrational, stupid things - and surprisingly often, it still mostly works. Just not as reliably or predictably as professionalism.

So in SR, my group tends to play either Trenchcoat or Mohawk chiefly depending on the current situation. When interacting with the more professional and corporate side of the world, our gameplay does tend toward cloak and dagger, smoke and mirrors, all that. But there's this whole other (in my opinion far more interesting) half of the game universe - the weird and wild and unprofessional places and people and -things- that flesh out the world beyond and between the skyscrapers and suits.

The world of SR is this insane, convoluted place full of magic and weirdness. The corps are always at the top, trying to bend it to their will, but ultimately they're trying to herd cats. Yeah, the megas are hugely powerful and have massive control over the human world. But the human world has been invaded by the weird world. Stray even just a little way beyond the pockets of "normality" and you come across the craziest of drek.

~Umi

No arguments, you do have good points. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I guess SR3 and before as written, with the power of high initiative, is more like the OK Corral. You can have 2 teams of combatants approach each other directly and the guy with the fast draw wins.

I guess as far as realism goes, there's a reason that that's how rowdy gunslingers from the 1800s fought, but not really how anyone wants to fight today.

TJ likes his shootouts to go down like Way of the Gun.

I don't play golf, but I expect shooting is rather like golf. Golf is famous for the idea that if the golfer is stressed his fine motor control and refined golfing skills go to shit and he plays poorly.

Way of the Gun?
Not sure I have seen that one. Will have to look it up.

EDIT: Looks good... will have to see it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)