SRV, V stands for Verisimilitude Options

[Koekepan]

If we're going simulationism then calibre would need to be introduced as the primary factor for determining damage, scaling upwards with semi-auto weapons working up to fully auto.

If simulationism is the concern, let me hasten to add that calibre is most emphatically not all there is to it. Bullet construction is key, loading is vastly important, and you can actually have different bullet designations which are nominally equal in calibre but have different power levels. For instance, the venerable .30-30 uses the same bullet as the NATO 7.62mm (.308 bullet) but has a lot less case capacity, different pressure and all that good stuff. Guess which one does more damage?

I hope never to be shot, but should I get shot I'd rather be hit by a round nosed .45ACP in full metal jacket which will probably push a smooth hole through the tissues than a modern jacketed hollow point out of a .357 Magnum, which is probably packing more muzzle energy (or the same ballpark anyway) and which will develop to a jagged moving blender, tearing a lot more tissue on its way through. Size isn't all that matters.

But then you get into problems where sometimes the largest weapon is all you need because it does the single largest amount of damage. Sniper will be using .50 cal barrets because in simulation, it will do more than a Garande.

Actually, I don't agree with that. Just on the face of it, there are some major reasons. Here are a few:

.50 bullets are more expensive, and heavier, and larger. Carrying them is a pain.
.50 rifles are correspondingly large, heavy, and expensive. Carrying them is a pain, and carrying them concealed is a massive pain.
.50 takes more trouble to deal with the recoil, and has a larger signature (visual and auditory) which means more trouble dealing with the gun and shooting.

I could carry on, but these are all very serious considerations. If the GM just wants to say: "It's a sniper rifle, I don't care, use whatever has the most pluses." then fine, at that table, but most players can identify with a situation where they have too little time, money, space and all the rest of it, and will take whatever works and gives the least amount of trouble.

[Sendaz]

mn

[Irion]

The elephant in the room is, that the better you make the system from an objective point of view the more people will be angry with you.
Why? It is simple human nature that we are more afraid of loosing something than we are exited about getting something.

If you just look at the discussions here most were not about "Oh, that is not really good from a game design point of view" they were "why can't I get this bonus anymore, why do I now have to do X for this bonus, why was this nerved".

You have to go really far in the "overpowering" corner untill people complain. See mystic adepts (even if you just introduce the change in the german version increasing Karma costs from 2 to 5 a lot of people think that this was enough and do not really care about it beeing proken in general "getting two cakes for the cost of one").

Because: Lets be honest about it: Most GM are more likely to introdue restricting houserules if there is abouse than they are to allow additional stuff.
So people fear that in a "good" system they lost their safty-zone against the GM or they are affraid that a character they could have gotten past the GM is now banned by the rules (reasonable or not) and the GM won't allow it.
(Which is of course silly because if the system works most GMs are more compfortable to allow additional stuff, because well it is less likely to break the system. But if sytem depends on strictly keeping some minor rules because they were put in place to patch up major loopholes...)

[binarywraith]

.50 bullets are more expensive, and heavier, and larger. Carrying them is a pain.
.50 rifles are correspondingly large, heavy, and expensive. Carrying them is a pain, and carrying them concealed is a massive pain.
.50 takes more trouble to deal with the recoil, and has a larger signature (visual and auditory) which means more trouble dealing with the gun and shooting.

I could carry on, but these are all very serious considerations. If the GM just wants to say: "It's a sniper rifle, I don't care, use whatever has the most pluses." then fine, at that table, but most players can identify with a situation where they have too little time, money, space and all the rest of it, and will take whatever works and gives the least amount of trouble.

I was going to say, I don't think the above poster's ever seen a .50BMG long-range shooting rifle. They're about five feet long, thirty pounds, and hold 10 rounds at a time. Designed to be fired solely from the prone position.

There's a whole stack of very good reasons actual military snipers generally use the M24, which is based on the Remington 700 hunting rifle and chambered in 7.62x51mm NATO or .300 Winchester Magnum.

[Koekepan]

Ok, so let's put some kind of boundaries around this. In the context of a tabletop RPG, there's a limit to how much can meaningfully be simulated, in the context of firearms.

I propose that the following can, and arguably should be provided for in a game where combat features meaningfully:

• Size (including weight) - which influences concealment and carrying capacity
• Normal power level - which influences typical damage profile
• Accuracy potential - in the form of range modifiers or similar
• Customised features - alterations we already see to modify signature, recoil management and so on
• Ammunition choice - because penetration and wound profile matter

The first three items are typical for a platform, and can be taken right off a gear list. The attributes of ammunition can similarly be taken off an ammunition list. Custom features can be ignored by the team's mage, and the player of the street samurai can print them out and rub them all over his naked body.

Missing anything?

[ShadowDragon8685]

I was going to say, I don't think the above poster's ever seen a .50BMG long-range shooting rifle. They're about five feet long, thirty pounds, and hold 10 rounds at a time. Designed to be fired solely from the prone position.

There's a whole stack of very good reasons actual military snipers generally use the M24, which is based on the Remington 700 hunting rifle and chambered in 7.62x51mm NATO or .300 Winchester Magnum.

Those snipers also don't have to shoot intelligent, armored foes the size of a bear and capable of returning fire. Nor do they have to shoot at supernatural entities which can bounce .300 Winchester Magnum and laugh at it.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Those snipers also don't have to shoot intelligent, armored foes the size of a bear and capable of returning fire. Nor do they have to shoot at supernatural entities which can bounce .300 Winchester Magnum and laugh at it.

If the Sniper is doing it correctly, the Armored Bear of which you speak will never see the shot coming, nor will he be able to return any meaningful counter-fire. *shrug*

[Nath]

Missing anything?

You would also have to account for LMG to be heavier yet in some way superior to assault rifle, in spite of firing the same ammo, so as to justify their existence (as far as I understand, IRL heavier barrel reduces recoil and withstand heat better, maintaining a better accuracy over time and reducing misfire).

[Sendaz]

If the Sniper is doing it correctly, the Armored Bear of which you speak will never see the shot coming, nor will he be able to return any meaningful counter-fire. *shrug*

Indeed, because if you don't take it with that first shot the bear gets a chance to do just that. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[kzt]

Ok, so let's put some kind of boundaries around this. In the context of a tabletop RPG, there's a limit to how much can meaningfully be simulated, in the context of firearms.

I propose that the following can, and arguably should be provided for in a game where combat features meaningfully:

• Size (including weight) - which influences concealment and carrying capacity
• Normal power level - which influences typical damage profile
• Accuracy potential - in the form of range modifiers or similar
• Customised features - alterations we already see to modify signature, recoil management and so on
• Ammunition choice - because penetration and wound profile matter

...

Damage should have a limited number of tiers, with nothing on given gun that would cause it to change tiers.
Essentially you have something like:
1 small pistol
2 service pistol/smg/knife
5 assault rifle/lmg
8 rifle/mmg/shotgun{vs unarmored}/sword or axe
10 hmg (highly but not inevitably lethal)
25 totally and completely lethal against anything that isn't an AFV.

I'd ignore crazy stuff like .600 nitro express pistols.
No explosive ammo, that's just dumb. AP trades off damage, extra damage (HP/SP) trades off armor penetration. And it's a minimal change.

[Koekepan]

You would also have to account for LMG to be heavier yet in some way superior to assault rifle, in spite of firing the same ammo, so as to justify their existence (as far as I understand, IRL heavier barrel reduces recoil and withstand heat better, maintaining a better accuracy over time and reducing misfire).

Easy enough with relative qualities. That said, machineguns are generally suppressive fire weapons, which assault rifles can be but generally are not. Select fire introduces flexibility. Most shadowruns, the assault rifle would be the better choice unless you intend to fend off waves of charging attackers.

[Koekepan]

Damage should have a limited number of tiers, with nothing on given gun that would cause it to change tiers.

Cannot agree.

I'd rather take a .45 to the lung than a .22 to the brainstem.

I'd rather take .50 BMG to the foot than .22 to the brainstem.

I'd rather take a narrow hole than a wide one, and so on.

Better to handle guns by attribute than tier. It's more flexible. A bullet piercing the trachea is an annoyance. The exact same bullet piercing C3 a couple of inches away is a stopper. I know that hit location isn't an attribute of the gun, but a nonlethal hit by a .45-70 is entirely possible, as is a lethal hit by a .22lr.

Also, if you want to strictly speak about gun attributes, what about rechamberings? Conversion options? The same rifle handling subsonics with a suppressor and switching to barrel burners for maximum effect? I can fire a .45 from the nineteenth century in a .454, or a smoking hot up-to-the-minute beast with vastly more energy and momentum.

It's too big a topic for that kind of blanket statement, in my view.

[kzt]

Way too fiddly and detailed. SR players are really not interesting in the endless damage charts of Phoenix Command or Living Steel.

[Koekepan]

Way too fiddly and detailed. SR players are really not interesting in the endless damage charts of Phoenix Command or Living Steel.

I guess you could mark it `optional', but you surely know some very different players from those I know. As I said above:

Custom features can be ignored by the team's mage, and the player of the street samurai can print them out and rub them all over his naked body.

I know quite a few who would not surprise me if they licked the pages to pick up the gritty gun rule flavours.

[binarywraith]

Those snipers also don't have to shoot intelligent, armored foes the size of a bear and capable of returning fire. Nor do they have to shoot at supernatural entities which can bounce .300 Winchester Magnum and laugh at it.

Actually, that'd just make most snipers' jobs easier. They're already used to shooting intelligent foes in armor. Bigger targets just mean easier shots, and even a troll's skull isn't going to do much more than slow down a 180-grain bullet that's still doing over 800 m/s at 200 yards. That's about 2800 foot-pounds of energy, and the human skull only needs about 300 foot-pounds to be penetrated.

In short, I think going into full ballistics discussions is a bit more complex than any rule system really needs, and don't mind representative damage values at all. I do think that they were much more plausible when the damage codes were based on light/moderate/serious/deadly wounds, with the category representing the average wound from the weapon and the damage code providing a number for how hard the weapon's shots were to resist. The more finely you simulate damage values, the more variables you have to take into account, and it just gets unworkable and clunky.

See also the SR5 explosive rules for a present example of overly clunky rules for this sort of thing.

[Koekepan]

I tend to agree.

I'm willing to go as far as some LMSD by body region table in terms of damage granularity, with a quick resolution based on a precalculated damage pool.

Here's a hypothetical example:

At chargen, Max the Mage and Sally Samurai are working their respective purchases out.

Max doesn't care about silly greasy bang-bangs, so takes Generic Plastic Pistol number 5 and loads it up with whatever's cheap. It does 6M damage with that ammunition, and has a range increment of, oh, let's say 8m.

Sally on the other hand likes the design because of all the customisation she can do. She also gets a GPP5, but adds a high power modification to handle hot ammunition, long barrel, high visibility sights as a backup to an internal smartlink, high capacity magazine, ported barrel, flared mag well, coated bearing surfaces and PixieDust™. She then loads up with high power fragmenting hollow points for soft tissue targets, and ends up with a range increment of 15m, doing 9S to unarmoured targets (or 3L to armoured), a faster reload time and reduced recoil modifier but reduced concealability. Then she prints out her gun's specifications and rubs them all over her naked body, while Max looks on in bafflement.

The drek hits the fan, as it inevitably will, and Max, reeling from Drain, points his gun at the middle of the three rentacops he sees, and pulls the trigger. At 12m distance he has a reduced chance to hit, but the damage is pretty much normal. Sally on the other hand hangs from the ceiling, does her best mohawked howler monkey impression, and lets fly with three rounds at the same range. Her pistol gives her a better chance to hit, has less of a recoil penalty, and she accepts some difficulty modifier to aim for a head shot.

Max's bullet dents the rentacop's body armour at about the same time as Sally's bullets chew up his cortex and spit it out the back of his cranium.

[Irion]

Damage should have a limited number of tiers, with nothing on given gun that would cause it to change tiers.

Advantage: Easy!
Disadvantage: Lesser variation.

An other advantage would be, that it would be swifter to introduce your "own" guns without endless discussion.



The major issue is always where to go with the abstraction and where to leave it be.
For example: Adding net hits do damage.
This seems to be reasonable for shooting a person or any target with internal structure. But shooting a stelle plate, well I guess it kind of does not matter how skilled you are, either your bullet benetrates or it does not.

The point is, to what other kind of targets do you apply this rule?
Spirits? Spirits using possession? Vampires?
On the first look it does not seem like much, but net hits can easy go up to 5 (espacially if you are unaware).

If you now say: Attacks agaisnt those targets matter for melee (hitting harder), they matter for magic (hotter fire) but they do not matter for guns it has two results:
1. Guns get weaker against those threats.
2. Those threats get stronger.

I am not saying that simulation would be a bad thing, but you need to balance it.
For example: If possession spirits get net-hits applyed and normal spirits don't this would be a good thing for it would give normal spirits an edge.
To use the base damage code to see if it penetrates cover would also be a good thing, because it has not really often an effect and when it does it kind of breaks immersion.

@Koekepan
The major issue I have with two much modification madness is, if modifications do not have drawbacks.
A smaller gun should have an advantage.
For example if all your active actions are only with a small pistol you have your ini reduced only by 8 after your turn.
Using longer barrel might increase the loss by one for more precision and damage. Modification should NOT be no-brainers. It should always be a little tradeoff.

[Nath]

I'd rather take a .45 to the lung than a .22 to the brainstem.

I'd rather take .50 BMG to the foot than .22 to the brainstem.

I sometimes wonder if the more realistic approach wouldn't actually be near-complete randomness, except for the most precisely called shots ; something like 2D6+0 for 9mm, 2D6+2 for .228, 2D6+4 for .50 BMG. I mean, even the worst shooter in the world has a chance of hitting right on the femoral by random chance, while even the best sniper can sometimes get not better than a shoulder at long range.

[binarywraith]

I sometimes wonder if the more realistic approach wouldn't actually be near-complete randomness, except for the most precisely called shots ; something like 2D6+0 for 9mm, 2D6+2 for .228, 2D6+4 for .50 BMG. I mean, even the worst shooter in the world has a chance of hitting right on the femoral by random chance, while even the best sniper can sometimes get not better than a shoulder at long range.

Eh, you can make some pretty good generalizations though, and really Shadowrun's gunplay is more designed to simulate an action movie than realistic gunplay in the first place. After all, an unarmored runner in SR can generally take a round or two from a holdout pistol directly to center mass and shrug it off. Less so for most people in the real world, where a couple rounds from someone's ultracompact 9mm holdout will put down damn near anyone.

[Koekepan]

@Koekepan
The major issue I have with two much modification madness is, if modifications do not have drawbacks.
A smaller gun should have an advantage.
For example if all your active actions are only with a small pistol you have your ini reduced only by 8 after your turn.
Using longer barrel might increase the loss by one for more precision and damage. Modification should NOT be no-brainers. It should always be a little tradeoff.

As I suggested above, many modifications raise signatures, reduce concealability, add mass and so on. My larger point is that as long as you have the options there for the players who want them, and the relevant numbers are precalculated so that crunching them isn't an issue during the run of a game, you keep the flexibility (which is after all relevant in-game, especially for some character types) while still being compatible with a flowing style.

One gaming system which does this well is Hackmaster 5th Edition. You precalculate your combat stats by weapon, write up your combat rose with those numbers, and combat passes surprisingly smoothly for all the crunchiness.

As for smaller guns having advantages - things like concealability are huge if you're trying to infiltrate somewhere, signature is very important if you want a quiet takedown. These things do matter to everyone except the pink of mohawk.

[Koekepan]

Eh, you can make some pretty good generalizations though, and really Shadowrun's gunplay is more designed to simulate an action movie than realistic gunplay in the first place. After all, an unarmored runner in SR can generally take a round or two from a holdout pistol directly to center mass and shrug it off. Less so for most people in the real world, where a couple rounds from someone's ultracompact 9mm holdout will put down damn near anyone.

Agree on the generalisations, and I'll grant that Shadowrun's gunplay has its cinematic elements. Still, in earlier editions where net hits could rapidly push you up the lethality chart, it wasn't that darned cinematic in this respect. Sally Samurai had to wear armour, or show some respect for incoming fire. Many a promising chromed career met its end because of a mook with a simple, standard predator.

As for the ultracompact 9mm holdout, I half agree with you, half not. A couple of FMJ round nose rounds will push a couple of pencil-thin holes through abdominal tissue which someone flush with adrenalin might not even notice until the shouting is over. A couple of high expansion modern hollowpoints through the ribcage and lungs will start to introduce complications of their own pretty darned quickly.

This introduces another reason for location hits, by the way. Getting hit in the femoral artery is a big deal. Getting hit in the right cyberthigh might cramp your style for a while, but mostly means that a trip to the mechanic or the cyberdoc is in order.

[Stahlseele]

No Hitlocations for SR.
Hitlocations are stupid.
Especially in a game that ALREADY consists of basically Glass-Cannons and Paper-Tigers . .

[binarywraith]

As for the ultracompact 9mm holdout, I half agree with you, half not. A couple of FMJ round nose rounds will push a couple of pencil-thin holes through abdominal tissue which someone flush with adrenalin might not even notice until the shouting is over. A couple of high expansion modern hollowpoints through the ribcage and lungs will start to introduce complications of their own pretty darned quickly.

Yeah, but if you're not loading frangible hollowpoints in your carry gun, you're just being irresponsible. Remember, every bullet's got a lawyer attached, so don't put them into anything they might keep going through afterwards. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

No Hit locations for SR.
Hit locations are stupid.
Especially in a game that ALREADY consists of basically Glass-Cannons and Paper-Tigers . .

Here, Here... I have to agree on that one. There is absolutely no need for the granularity that Hit Locations provide.

[Draco18s]

I have seen a system that does hit locations well--not in actual usage, but designed to be quick-to-use and accurate--the designer said that one of the most common questions he gets about it is "how the hell do you hit someone's BACK (i.e. the spinal area) when you're attacking from the front with a sword?" The answer is "Real easy: it goes over their shoulder."

Supposedly didn't add that much resolution time to the combat, though I never got the opportunity to witness actual play. But in general I am not in favor of them.