Pistols, why only light damage? Options

[torzzzzz]

Ok so i have posted a few threads but this one i feel strongly about,

I know i am not the most experience player in the world and i am slowly but surely coming to terms with the millions of rules for this game. but is it me or is the pistol damage a bit week.


Just the other day i was on a run and was horrified to pull out my pistol to see that it only did light damage. ( think it was the Savelette guardian).

So I pulled out the other one (Aries Predator) to find out it did 9M

I vainly tryed to justify more damage you know the drill..... 'oh oh come on I have a level 2 smartlink and they are at close range...... the wind is blowing in their direction, the moon is full...I got a 24 ???'

So i had to resort to pulling out my Remminton 990, which, may i add did the trick.
( fully personalized with embossed down the barrel.......'I'M PISSED AND i've GOT A GUN')

What i hear you shouting is the problem, ??????

well short of walking around with a small arsenal, which is cool but can be abit tricky.......... how can i get more power out of the pistols, as they are good if you cant walk around with a shot gun etc.

At the moment I could hit em harder and do more damage than the gun would!

torz x

[Shockwave_IIc]

This topic has been brought up many times before in realtion to Light Pistols. Try a Search.

P.S. It wasn't a Savelette Guardian. 9M with optional burst, possibly the greatest Hand Gun to grace the game. In My Un-Biased Opinion :D

[torzzzzz]

[Fortune]

The Guardian's drawback is that it requires a Complex Action to use burst fire.

[hobgoblin]

want more power? try flechette ammo if opposision is unarmored or explosive if not.

and yes, light pistols dont pack much on default, but roll 6 successes more then the target and you do D 8)

[hermit]

Shadowrun, for the sake of game mechanics, generally underestimates the danger weapons really pose.

[Backgammon]

If the GM allows called shots to bypass armour, get a Smartlink 2 and load up on some of the speciality ammo such as flechette, hollowpoint (+3 power!) or glazers if you can get them.

Aside from that, remember that a pistol is just the thing you use when your main gun is out of ammo ;) Shotguns are powerful, almost legal and common, while SMGs are well suited for shadowrunner work and assault rifles are always nice to have, if possible.

[Kagetenshi]

Light is correct. Keep in mind that a Light wound is above and beyond anything we would, IRL, call Light; it's big and painful enough to raise TNs. And before you go saying that a punch does more damage, consider that most people are going to be dealing 3M, which a Body 3 individual can expect to stage once.

~J

[Spetulhu]

Use a rifle if you want to kill stuff, that's what real cops and soldiers do. If you're down to a pistol it's best used for throwing a few slugs at people to make good your escape. Or shooting yourself if you're about to be captured by your worst enemies.

[hobgoblin]

[Austere Emancipa...]

The problem with Light Pistols doing L damage isn't that one arbitrary box and +1 on TNs is not enough damage or something. The problem is that one weapon does 6L while another, which reasonably cannot be much more powerful than the former, does 9M. This is then compounded by the fact that an assault rifle does 8M.

If you consider it a problem in your games, there's several very simple ways of fixing it. For example, just up the Damage Level of Light Pistols and Machine Pistols by 1 accross the board, to 6M. And like Shockwave_IIc said, there's plenty of old threads with hundreds of posts worth of stuff on this very issue, which you might find interesting.

[Edward]

Personally I don’t use light pistols at all.

You ether use a heavy to punch holes in the target or a hold out as a delivery mechanism for nurostun.

Everything I have heard suggests that a light pistol IRL is only likely to kill you if the attacker gets lucky or is highly skilled. Especially if you’re waring even basic armour.

Don’t get me wrong, it will hurt but any damage that registers in SR would send most people today for medical attention. That’s not to say that runners are all uber toufe, most teems just have first aiders that can fix these problems.

Edward

[Critias]

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Critias]

Generally speaking I use .22 or so for hold outs, anything else up to 9mm as a light pistol (or light SMG, or machine pistol) description, .40 or .45 as heavy pistol (or heavier SMG), .50 for any crazy 10M pistols people create, and then just fall back on standard assault rifle calibers as needed for bigger stuff.

The problem, of course, is that such descriptions aren't how the game works, and are (admittedly) kind of arbitrary, and don't take into consideration the otherwise metric SR method of measurement (or the fact that all ammo is caseless by default)... but I think they add a bit more flavor to a post or piece of fiction. It's not like you want to write "the 9M base damage pistol round flies true, and splatters the bad guy's head all over the wall," or something, when you can instead go on in great detail about exactly how a hollowpoint .45 round interacts with someone's frontal lobe.

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Critias]

Yeah, but when someone says "heavy pistol" -- but doesn't mean "heaviest pistol you can possibly have" -- I think .45. To be honest, a basic 9M damage code handgun is about the most common thing on a character sheet in Shadowrun... and I hate to assign a .50 to something like that. How many police departments or security agencies (or militaries) do you know that hand out .50's to everyone for a sidearm? And what's more, once applying a .50 descriptor to a 9M heavy pistol, what do you do when someone wants a 10M?

Judging from a purely fluff perspective (in that all the sales pitches, etc, try to show 6L as being the "normal" handgun caliber, and the more popular), I gave the 6L damage code just a basic compact 9mm (from my admittedly limited experience, pretty much the most common handgun caliber). And, as mentioned, for some reason (I blame the 1911), ".45" is what jumps into my head when I think of an "average" feeling heavy pistol.

I'd much prefer it if every 6L firearm in the books did 6M, instead. It'd make things flow much more smoothly. There's a great chasm between light and heavy pistols in SR that doesn't really exist in real life. As it is, right now, try finding a pair of ridiculously common handgun calibers IRL that would jump like they do, with nothing in between, from 6L to 9M, to represent the differences in SR pistols. .38 to 9mm? Not really. 9mm to .40? Not really. .40 to .45? Not really. What would work to be the representations of 6L versus 9M base? Did a few common handgun calibers call off the face of the earth in all the confusion and Awakenings and whatnot?

So, yeah. Like I said, the list I use is largely arbitrary, but I'll stand by it being more fun than just calling stuff by the listed stats. :)

[Kagetenshi]

How many police departments or security agencies (or militaries) deal with nine-foot, bone-encrusted walking tanks?

~J

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Shockwave_IIc]

I personally would rather go with droping the power of the 9M's down by 2 putting them in line with SMG's which use similar if not the same types of ammo in real life.

That way you have the heavy guns do M which is more tissue damage then the smaller rounds. This is of cause my uneducated opinion.

Also with a Power of 7 An armoured vest + Plates, drops it to 3 which as Kage pointed out is very likely to get staged down to a Light by your average human. Take a Swat Member, with higher body and they won't take that much either. While the Lighter rounds will in most case's won't do anything. It also helps with "anti-Vehicleness" of the heavy pistols a little as well.

I Like this way myself though im not to sure if it's represented in real life all that much.

[RunnerPaul]

Light Pistols' Light damage code was slightly less of a problem under First Edition's variable staging rules, because whichever side of the opposed roll had the most net successes could typically get to stage that light damage code upwards/downwards at a rate of one step per net success, instead of one step every two net successes that's the default for all damage from Second Edition onward.

Under First Edition's rules, many skilled shooters gravitated to Light Pistols even with the Light damage code, because they found that the amount of dice they usually threw behind a shot could more often than not result in a Serious or Deadly result.

[Charon]

I always figured a SMG was firing pistol caliber ammunition. I feel an UZI III ought to have the same damage code as a Beretta.

So I just upped the light pistols and hold out from L to M. And a few of the light pistols graduated to 7M, like some of the SMGs. And I upped the concealability of all light pistols and hold out by 1 to 2 points on average.

Even with those house rules you don't see many light pistols in the hands of PCs, but it has happened every once in a while now.

Hmm, I could also cancel the recoil penalty for SA firing of light rounds...

[GrinderTheTroll]