Desparate Circumstances, What have your characters survived? Options

[Critias]

[Fortune]

[Fortune]

[Cthulhudreams]

I figured it was just obvious that explosive ammo made a noise - presumably at the point of impact. Thats probably a fairly resonable GM decision, I'd make the same one and call it a houe rule if pushed. I wouldn't give anyone a bonus to pin point the shooter though, 'shots being fired' would presumably be obvious.

[Critias]

[Fortune]

Really? I swear I have had this same conversation for all 4 editions.

[Critias]

I don't believe so. I modded out all my guns so much in SR3 I may be misremembering, but I think the Smartgun -- while still quite a solid purchase -- in SR3 just came with a smartlink, a suppressor, and a folding/retractable stock. No gas vents.

[Kagetenshi]

[Ravor]

Fields of Fire describes EX-Ex as having a denotation, albeit a tiny one and talks about the bullet's "load", so yeah, the Ex series of bullets do use mirco-explosives.

However, I don't believe there has ever been a bonus to hear them in RAW, although I agree that it's perfectly reasonable to assume that there is one, smart Runners simply don't bring EX-Ex when they are trying to be ghosts, and RAW be damned. (Same reaction I have towards 'Turn to Goo' flipping off Sixth World Magical Theory without every Mage and Researcher scrambling to be the first to get a new Magical Law named after themselves and usher in a new era of magical spell design.)

Now with that said, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the pop from a EX-Ex load would be any louder then say, a very small firecracker, but I found the story to be ironic and fun even if at my table I'd give the player a "do-over" the first time and allow him to assume that his character knew enough to load some quieter ammo.

[Kagetenshi]

[Critias]

And it's not like the sound of a bullet striking flesh -- or anything else, for that matter -- is all that silent an affair in the first place. If you start handing out bonuses to hear EX rounds based on the fact they make a sound when they hit something...well...every other gunshot in the game, silencer or not, should do the same.

[Ravor]

[Nightwalker450]

(SR4)
Overplanning for our group turned a simple data grab into a three ring circus. We had to do a simple data grab from a compound in the middle of a strip mining area. Well we didn't want to operate under complete radio silence in order not to be picked up by scanners so we decided to go the other direction. Fill the airwaves with so much data that our team will be the least thing of notice.

My character at the time was a professional courier (basically from "The Transporter") but also played in Street Racing. Had the skill to outdo pretty much anyone, but hadn't built up the cash for a big time racing machine. So I start pulling my contacts, and my team sponsors and organizes a demolition derby race through this strip mining compound. About 25-30 participants, all driving vehicles armed to the teeth, include roto drones flying all over the compound to film the event as well as hackers jacking the compounds visuals to get all the footage from every possible angle. I've got my racing car in this, with some minor artillary and my groups got my taxi with more artillary sitting at the other end of the compound(yah, forgot to mention arabian cab driver for part time job).

Race starts and for the first lap its just dealing with each other, but by the second lap we've got the attention of all the earth spirits that have been working in the quarries and their adding more to the mayhem. Team goes in does have to deal with security on the inside and raises an alarm that gets attention even with everything else going on. I can't remember exactly what happened inside, but while racing I also patched into my cab so I could act as lookout for them outside the building while at the same time participating in the race. Authorities show up and start cordoning off the building, completely ignoring the car sitting there.

This company was fairly small potatoes, and no way equipped to deal with the professionals are character were. A short while after this cordon is set up, a man comes running over the hill towards them. It's their mage who's been watching astrally everything going on inside, and tells the guards to just clear out theres nothing worth staying here for, the team will just tear them apart. The mage then declares he's getting the hell out of there, and takes off back up the hill. I couldn't help it I've been jacked into the car picking all this up on the sensors, and I have plenty of unused weapons on the car. I unload into the mage as he's heading up the hill (GM gives me a karma penalty for the unnecessary kill). Results in 2 grenades being tossed at the car, which basically drops half its damage capacity. Peel out to the otherside of the building where the team blows a hole and loads up.

Unfortunately GM wouldn't allow me to win the race as well. So it was the first race I'd participated in that I didn't at least place. He figured I'd be too distracted driving two vehicles to maneuver for position as well as I usually do. (FYI the car that only had half its hits left I was still rolling 15 dice on driving) We still made more cash out of the race than we did for doing the run, since we were collecting registration fees, the bookie we lined up had to give us a percentage of his profit, and we had our own bets placed on participants.

It was by far the most insane run I had been a part of.

[Cthulhudreams]

[Kagetenshi]

Um, as you point out, those are grenades. When bullets start being that size, they start calling the thing that fires them a cannon. Lemme see if I can find a size comparison somewhere.

Edit: ok, there's a few layers here. First, a size comparison between a 20mm round and some .50 BMG rounds. Note how large it is in comparison, and in particular how wide the actual bullet is; grenades are shaped differently to increase explosive volume, but we'll start with this.

Then, after letting that sink in, take a look at a size comparison between the .50 BMG and some other rifle calibers, including the common assault rifle calibers. See how dramatically larger it is, including in that all-important (for internal volume) width, and then consider stacking the difference you saw between the .50 BMG and the 20mm round on top of that.

You do probably gain some volume going down to pistol-round size, as bullets tend to get decently wider, but not much; what you can usefully put into a cannon round does not in any significant way indicate the ability to do a similar thing with a standard rifle or handgun round.

Also, the forums apparently do not parse LaTeX. How sad, if expected (and this paper is going to eat my brain. Or my brian. One or the other.)

~J

[Fortune]

[Cthulhudreams]

I know they are bigger! I even said that ;P

My point was it's probably pretty reasonable for someone to sit down with SR4, see that the bullets are 'explosive', mentally benchmark against an OICW and say 'well the bullets probably aren't silent then.'

I mean a grenade is really really loud, even if they were capgun loud (which doesn't entail very much black powder at all, and makes a nice crack, this is using sci-fi explosives) that would undo the good work of you sound suppression - i'm assuming in the really quite case as listed we are talking something like those silenced WWII sten guns that are bizarrely quite.

Edit: Thats pretty much the line of logic I'd employ if the question came up in a game and I had to make an off the cuff decision.

Doesn't seem particularly unreasonable.

[Fortune]

[Cthulhudreams]

Yeah, thats probably a pretty reasonable look at it too. I suppose I think of that sort of thing (like safety slugs and stuff) as hollow point rounds, though I know hollow point rounds are deforming rounds.

Heck, I'm not the only one, global security on frangiable rounds.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/sys...s/frangible.htm

[Serial_Peacemake...]

Well we did have one run that ended in a small war in a South American company. Mostly due to an outbreak of a highly virulent strain of Ghoul. Which was kind of sort of our own fault, but we did get the antidote. Too bad you had to take it forever, and our Adept decided it would be cool to go off it, and start passing it as an STD.

[kzt]

[Kagetenshi]

No, I'm pretty sure the issue is that rules were written for them once upon a time which had them explode, and then later on someone realized that was silly and changed the description, but didn't think to change anything else about them. The mechanics, as noted earlier, fit the idea of a high explosive round perfectly (minus that whole practicality thing), while the description covers something totally different mechanically but much more sensible.

It's sorta like how in the Decking rules for dealing with security tally for multiple deckers, in some places everything assumes that tally is a property of the host, while in others it's assumed to be a property of the decker/connection. Either one is at least internally consistent, but somewhere along the line it got forgotten which one was actually being stuck to.

~J

[Falconer]

Nothing wrong with having Explosive rounds make a firecracker sound when they hit. Assuming they have some kind of really nifty futuretech explosive, that's gotta have more report than BLACKPOWDER in a firecracker.

They were quiet when they were fired... not where they hit :). It's not as if there aren't a fair number of good ammo loads which would be quieter options such as APDS.

Anyhow, loving the stories...

[imperialus]

[Glyph]