Bullet Ricochet, As seen in action movies Options

[Drraagh]

This is something we've seen in action movies before. Look at the second Robocop movie where Robocop was in the drug plant and one guy was using the baby as a hostage. By using his cybernetics, he predicted an angle to shoot the metal fridge or whatever to shoot the guy in the head from the rebounded bullet. Another example is Alien Resurection where one guy shot up and hit one metal pipe which hit another and then came down right through the top of a soldier's head.

I've been considering how to apply it to Shadowrun. I mean, it's easy to call it a called shot, maybe add a +2 to the TN or something, maybe even a bit more for firing around cover to try and hit someone sort of like a double bank shot in pool. However, I'm wondering what people think about this, both mechanics-wise and from a combat perspective.

I've never fired a real gun (only ones in video games and toys), but I have studied the science of it for a while. On any given object, the angle of reflection is equal to the the angle of inflection. Of course, some surfaces allow for almost instant reflection where as others have give. Some also have the chance to 'eat' the bullet (bullet digging into the brick instead of rebounding off it). Even without those factors, it sort of turns Shadowrun into a high school class rather than an RPG if you're calculating angles and materials.

A general system breakdown I have is that to reflect a bullet off a surface counts as a +2 to a called shot (reduced to +1 for SLs). I was thinking +4, +3 with a Math SPU, +2 with a SL, +1 with an SL2 but then it can be a bit confusing. Now, if your target is hiding in a room on one side of a doorway and you're on the other, it would be considered full darkness, though I can see ultrasound or possibly thermo giving you a bonus there. As for having some sort of point of reference, like a mirror on the wall, I would say minimal light, maybe partial. Either that or consider it like cover.

One thing that just came to mind is perhaps have object resistence play a factor into it. If you want to rebound, make a check against the resistance. If your result is lower, the object rebounds off it, otherwise it gets stuck in there. Reason you want it to be lower is that, IIRC, simple objects have a lower TN. So you want it to reflect off, not go through. But that is just something the GM could factor in as a chance for failure, especially if you're dealing with people who have like an SL-2, pistol skill of 8, CP of 8. They're rolling 16 dice at a low TN.

What do you people think? It's an unrefined system, just to add a few more options to combat, both for your players and your NPCs. That way they don't have to be like cannon fodder, running out and shooting at them or doing the standard shootout where they hide behind a wall and shoot at the other guy hiding behind a wall. I figure it might be fun to give a try in combat.

[Shrike30]

From a purely realism point of view, trying to deliberately hit something with a significantly deviating ricochet is extremely difficult. Bullets are not round, they spin in flight, they deform on impact, they transfer kinetic energy, they break up, they tumble, and they tend to punch holes in things.

About the closest I've heard any kind of reference to deliberately ricocheting when firing at a target is "skip-firing" buckshot off pavement so that it loses a lot of energy before hitting someone in the legs. This practice, even, is way out of date, as most police agencies have access to non-lethal shotgun ammunition like "beanbag" rounds for crowd control. Bullets become so unpredictable when they bounce off of something (including the possibility that they'll come back at the shooter!) that trained shooters try to avoid firing at things that have a high likelihood of ricochet.

[Fix-it]

Shooting is an art, not a science.

[James McMurray]

If you do allow it make the modifiers ungodly high, for the reasons Shrike mentioned. You're not just lining up a pool shot, you're lining up a pool shot using a ball that spins randomly and can break, partially penetrate, or completely ricochet off what it hits depending on angle, surface strength, and where that spinner happens to be when it hits.

[mmu1]

I never thought of SR as having an action movie feel - and given that, I'm not sure having rules for ricochets makes much sense. Still, to each his own.

And from a realism standpoint, it's just a lost cause... Bullets behave nothing like the pool balls they're portrayed as in the movies even when fired against a perfectly flat, smooth, hard surface. Hell, a lot of the time, the stuff they do ends up being completely counterintuitive...

[hyzmarca]

Playing billiards with bullets isn't wise. There are simply too many variables that must be known. Unfortunatly, those variables cannot reliably be known in most situations.

[SirKodiak]

In addition to the near-impossibility of knowing just where to shoot to produce the desired ricochet, actually making the shot would require a level of precision in your shooting beyond that required to shoot the guy while missing the baby.

So, yeah, not really practical, particularly when you consider how little armor a baby would provide your target...

[mfb]

[Drraagh]

I know there was a ton of science involved in shooting, and in dealing with trajectories of bullets. What I posted was a grossly oversimplification of it, I agree. And as for Shadowrun having an action movie feel, that depends on your groups. In my TT games, generaly the group is smart enough not to run into huge firefights all the time like actors in movies are likely to do. Makes good movies, but tends to be time consuming with games and such.

However, when I play online, I tend to see people playing it pretty much just that way. Charging into a room full of bad guys and using their large KP to take them out and also keep them alive. On one of the games I play online, some people have KPS like 25+, all sorts of betaware and they even have a consent policy. Player run plots generally can't kill players unles before the run begins player and GM agree that it is a possiblity. So, basically, they just get shot to hell, maybe knocked out but not killed. That's when you see people running through like its an action movie or an FPS. It's not like they're going to die, so they don't have to fear death.

Mostly for those people but also partly to allow for some more interesting things in games, I figured I'd look into this and see what could happen. I have seen some games such as playing baseball with grenades or having a D&D version of the 'toothpaste effect' someone described here with 'transmute rock to mud' and then reversing it as an enemy army was crossing.

Ideas for characters and games tend to come around from stuff we experience. Movies we see, books we read, so forth. Like I know there were a few people designing Gun Kata for Shadowrun after seeing Equilibrium. I had a friend designing a Samus Aran style character out of cybernetics after playing Metroid Prime. This was something that interested me as a little side project. I tend to take tangents off after running into something, like one SR decker character of mine in the early days had a 'Power Glove' computer gauntlet because I had thought it would be cool, and it also fit the cyberpunk style of wearable computers. This is just the same sort of extension as that, much like the porting over of the Chromebook stuff from CP2020 to give Shadowrun more style, more punk to fit its cyber.

Edit: As for the baby applying armor to the guy, that wasn't it. In the scene the guy was using the baby as a hostage. If they didn't let him go, he would kill the baby. So, by rebounding the shot, the killer didn't have any chance to shoot the baby because he didn't expect the shot.

Second Edit: By my comments on Shadowrun getting more style is not to say it specifically needs such an infusion. Especially with the various armors and 'casual wear' covered in Cannon Companion and books like Shadowbeat and the SOTA books, they do a good job on their own. It's just a different version of ideas that may not have made it to SR yet, or different applications of similar tech. Like CP2020, IIRC has holograms, but SR doesn't. Could be interesting to encounter a holographic scientist 'telecommuting' to work. Especially if that's the guy you're paid to extract and someone just overlooked the fact he decided to stay home today.

[hyzmarca]

[Drraagh]

[Austere Emancipa...]

If you choose to rule ricochet shots in a way that makes them possible, or even relatively easy (modified TN<10) for highly skilled characters, then you should tell your players of this. If they know how firearms really work, they will probably not attempt such a shot, because there's just no fucking way it'd work IRL. You'd need perfectly smooth adamantium walls and perfectly formed adamantium bullets fired from a perfectly manufactured firearm with propellant that's packed grain per grain to exact measurements to be even theoretically capable of calculating the angles required for it to happen.

All RL applications of intentional ricochets, like the buckshot "skip shot" mentioned above, rely on a very large amount of projectiles ricocheting very close to the actual target, and none of them provide any degree of accuracy or reliability.

[SirKodiak]

hyzmarca was correct as to the intent of my joke.

Moving on, the hostage situation example, particularly with something as small as a baby, is one where the ricochet makes some of the least sense. The hostage-taker is going to have to, at least momentarily, expose parts of himself to fire, particularly to be able to see. If you're accurate enough to pull off the ricochet, even with the kind of perfect information it would require, you're accurate enough to hit them during that moment.

I understand your desire to add more options to combat, and add options with dramatic flair, but this really doesn't feel like the way to do it, to me. In particular, you're going to have to start thinking about whether appropriate surfaces exist to do the bounce and whether they are at the right position and angle, and it's going to be a huge pain. It's going to add a whole extra level of description to the scene, and one which is only useful for doing this rarely-done act.

It feels like a lot of work to add something unrealistic and that would be rarely used. If you really want this to show up in the game, I'd suggest having it be one of your descriptive options if a shooting task only received any successes because karma pool was used. Those sorts of situations, where someone succeeded only because of the power of luck, are where I tend to use that sort of outrageous action.

And I will say, at a gut level, when I'm watching movies, the Errol Flynn kind of swordplay you describe I respond to as cinematic, but purposeful bullet ricochets I respond to as ridiculous. They don't work for me in movies. I haven't seen Robocop 2, but that was definitely my reaction to it in Alien: Resurrection. Even if I have a fair bit of suspension of disbelief going, it still takes me right out of the movie. On the other hand, I know a lot more about physics than I do about sword fighting, so that might have something to do with it ;)

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Drraagh]

I do agree with the fact that bullet ricochet isn't a realistic application of firearms in combat, because of the all the factors involved in it and the fact that realistically it is impossible to predict if or where a bullet will ricochet.

However, what I do find funny about this is that there have been times that I have discussed other rules with people or that I have seen them being discussed (both for Shadowrun and for other games) and one argument I see regularly is:

"But that's not how reality is."
"Yes, but this isn't reality, this is a game."

There are many times I've seen that being used, ranging from the discussion on why everything was hardwired for the trix (back at the beginning of SR3), how people could get hit with a grenade and still be running around like a madman (with some wound, especially like S wounds, some thought perhaps movement should be slowed some) And the list goes on to almost anything that doesn't mesh with how the real world functions.

As I said, it's not just Shadowrun that suffers this, but I suppose games like it get more scrutiny because they are based in a world we know, one we deal with every day. In the extras on the movie Titan AE I believe it was, they talked about making sure the humans moved realistic because we all know how humans move. If we see someone moving in a way that isn't 'humanlike', then our suspension of disbelief could be shattered. Aliens, well, they can move in any way because we don't know how, we just want it to be consistent so that we don't have to question that issue. The same sort of applies to game in some ways. We want to apply a model of 'this is what we can do' to it, but in a world where people can do extraordinary things by the use of magic or cyberware, for example, sometimes even simple things are different than what we know.

[James McMurray]

It all comes down to suspension of disbelief. If your group wants to play in a John Woo / Wachowski (sp?) Brothers movie they'll be much more forgiving of oddities like bullet ricochets and similar illogical but cinematic occurrences. If they're looking for a gritty and down to earth sludgefest they'll probably want grittier and more down to earth rules.

"But this is a game" is a perfectly valid response to "that's unrealistic." Of course "I prefer my games realistic" is a perfectly valid response to "but this is a game."

[Austere Emancipa...]

[X-Kalibur]

I always thought loading a shotgun with a white phosphorus "shot" was amusing. Moreso when fired, hehe.

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Edit]Oh, right, Big D's Temper rounds. Well, at least one out of the 5 shotgun ammunition options in the Cannon Companion makes sense -- and no, BDT is not it...[/Edit]

[KarmaInferno]

I prefer the grim n gritty for Shadowrun.

If I want cinematic combat I'll play Spycraft, where it's an expected part of the game.


-karma

[James McMurray]

I think most people here prefer the grim and gritty, but that just means it's popular, not that it's best.

[Drraagh]

[Shrike30]

[Austere Emancipa...]

There's a real life equivalent to the bola rounds too. Both are crap, to the degree that neither should exist in the CC, and certainly neither should work as well as the canon SR3 stats would have them work.

Real "dragon's breath" shells are, AFAICT, pretty much guaranteed to stick in the chamber and fuck up your gun with that one shot, and will spray burning, smoking material all over the fucking place, setting everything between you and the target and everything within 2 meters of that line on fire. And that's assuming they work properly. Ie. about as feasible as "rubber buckshot".

I was wrong, though. Both the flare rounds and the shock lock rounds make sense, even if their described effects don't: who knew breaching rounds had a more lethal terminal effect on humans than standard slugs?

[Slump]