Shooting people who are running or on motorcycles, SR3 rules Options

[Wounded Ronin]

kzt raised the point in my police handgun accuracy thread that it's very difficult in real life to shoot someone who is running.

This immediately reminded me of an incident which occured a few years ago in a SR3 game I was GMing. One player character (I'll call "sniper") was attempting to snipe out another player character on the ground (I'll call "target") from a rooftop. Never mind all the interpersonal drama this caused, ha. So the sniper hits the target but does not kill the target.

The target freaks out and decides to hop on a motorcycle and begin accelerating in order to avoid being shot again. The sniper keeps firing. Then the situation melted down due to interpersonal drama. I guess it'd reached a critical mass.

But rules-wise, I wasn't sure how to handle the sniper trying to attack someone who was trying to drive away on a motorcycle. The SR3 rules give flat TN penalties for shooting someone who is "running" but there's no guideline on how penalties would scale for someone who starts at rest, accelerates, and eventually goes pretty fast (like maybe 60 mph). This would actually be a pretty important situation to have a good rules response to for when characters are trying to be like Golgo 13 and snipe out people who are driving vehicles that move very fast such as helicotper pilots.

Is there any official way to handle shots against a rapidly moving target and/or make the TN for shooting at a running target scale with the speed at which the target is running? If not, do you have a house rule you like to use for such situations?

[Kagetenshi]

There is an official ruling, but it's debatable whether or not you use it, since it explicitly applies to vehicle gunnery. My advice would be to extend it across all ranged combat beyond the scope of basic "running".

~J

[kzt]

I think I said it's somewhat difficult to shoot targets that are moving. And it is. It took me a while to be able to do it reliably. The faster they move the harder it is. And if someone was shooting back it would be harder, I'm sure. Target movement has an impact on your shooting if it forces you to change your aim. If some thug with a knife runs right at you it isn't harder to hit due to the movement. It might, in the real world, be less likely for you to hit him due to the fact that he's charging you with a huge KNIFE, but that's another issue.

What really hard is shooting WHILE you are are running. Heck, it's difficult to effectively shoot a cardboard target 15 meters away while walking quickly perpendicular to it. It would be insanely difficult to shoot someone 100 yards away while doing this, much less running.

And, looking at my old SR3 rules, the modifiers in SR3 are more reasonable than the silly ones in SR4 for this. Due to the bizarre statistical weirdness of SR3 I'm not at all sure they are reasonable, but at least the scale of the numbers seem more reasonable.

[Kagetenshi]

Out of interest, what "bizarre statistical weirdness" do you refer to?

~J

[Daddy's Litt...]

Isn't there some target modifier for a moving target?

[BishopMcQ]

+1 if the target is walking, +4 if running. You can extrapolate modifiers based on scale.

[nezumi]

Like Bishop said. I'd basically add an additional +2 modifier for every 10 mph above 'running' (around 15 mph).

[kzt]

[Kagetenshi]