We have a character with "pimped" levels of Agility and Pistols, rolling around 20 dice. When shooting normal everyday people with gel rounds they have an annoying habit of taking enough damage for it to be life threatening.

Recent example guy with 5 boxes of stun damage gets hit with a single Stick and Shock from a light pistol. A pretty damn good roll resulted in the team mage needing to heal the guy after he sustained 16 boxes of stun and was in risk of soon dying.

This character finds it almost impossible to fire a gel round from a heavy pistol (8S) without it bleeding over into physical damage, and if they edge it to ensure the guy goes down, they risk killing them.

Basically, we are finding it really hard in our games to not kill people with stun damage.

How have you guys addressed similar problems?

We typically used stunballs, gas and tasers. The way your gel rounds are working is actually reflecting reality better than the rules deserve.

The reason that things like baton rounds and beanbag rounda are called "less lethal" in the real world by cops is that they can kill you dead if it doesn't work right. Remember the kid, Victoria Snelgrove, who got killed in Boston in 2004 by a "non-lethal" pepper pellet? And the gel round rules. like the rest of SR ammo rules, are pretty silly. Rubber bullets of small caliber are designed to hurt you and make you run away, not knock you out.

What kzt said.

In addition, in reality, there are VERY few ways to reliably knock someone out without killing them. If you hit someone on the back of the head with the butt of your gun, you're as likely to crack their skull and cause a lethal internal bleed, or just annoy them, or genuinely knock them out non-lethally.

Same with drugs. There's a VERY slim line between 'unconscious' and 'dead in 30 seconds from toxic shock'. Just ask an anaesthetist. They get paid a lot of money to knock people out without harming them, and they take a while to properly calculate the flow of drugs according to the patient's weight, medical history, etc etc.

There's a reason cops shoot people with real bullets and not rubber bullets or tear gas or tranq rounds: non-lethal rounds will have no effect a third of the time, kill the target a third of the time, work properly a third of the time. In the first case, the cop might be dead. In the second case, you may as well have used a bullet. In the third case, yay! You win. But frankly, if you're shooting at someone, chances are lives are at stake, so you may as well use real bullets.

It's in the genre for there to be more reliable ways to knock people out without hurting them, and so it's supported in the game; it's good to see it's not absolute, though. It's NOT genre for non-lethal options to be more reliable at taking out the target than lethal ones. I remember the WEG Star Wars rules, where shooting stormtroopers with your blaster on stun would take them out more reliably than trying to kill them. I don't remember Luke and Han doing that, so those rules were simply bad.

Me, I'm pondering rules options to make 'non-lethal' more like 'less-lethal'. But the rules as is aren't broken, from what I've seen, it's just my personal preference, not something I think is wrong with the system itself.

I've always allowed people to use less dice than their pool if they wish. I'm fairly sure I've seen that in the RAW too, but it certainly makes sense. If a PC is capable of shooting the stick and shock down the target's throat (which is what 20 dice represents), then he ought to be capable of aiming for the chest instead. Sure, you risk doing less damage and the target still standing, but that's realistic.

Shouldn't be a problem.

Your players could always simply 'trade in dice' for successes. Even with 20 dice, it is impossible to kill someone.

Guy with 0 boxes of Stun to start out with.
Pistol Shooter using a Heavy Pistol(5) and Gel(+2)=7
At a 4:1 Trade in ratio, that gives him 5 successes.
Random guy in street gets 2 successes on his Reaction only dodge.
5-2=3 Net Successes. 7+3=10 Boxes of Stun.
Armor + Body = 2 boxes resisted at a random guess. 10-2=8
Random guy close to unconcious.

Even if the guy had 7 boxes of stun, aka severely beat up, a heavy pistol w/ gel rounds(7S), trading in for 5 successes, no successes on a dodge roll and only 2 successes on his damage resist, would get 7+2=9 Stun(Unconcious) and 9 boxes of Physical. Guy with minimum attributes would be at 9S/9D => Dying. Guy with normal attributes would be at 10S/8D => Unconcious and Alive.

I think the rules are just fine as they are.

One thing to remember is also that the biggest gun is not the norm. Most security guards and lonestars have light pistols which would probably be 9mm pistols. The gun adept doesn’t NEED to use the biggest guns in the city (.50 gel rounds must hurt like hell.).

In the old times of SR3 you could hardly harm anyone with a light pistol but you either killed people or didn’t hurt them at all with the heavies.

Scale down the calibre of the pistolier and give him light or even hold-outs – he’d be dangerous with a peashooter.

You easily take down a target with two simple actions and gel rounds.

there is another thing i want to mention: even if the that character has like 20 dice in his pool, what about modifiers? bad light, smoke, cover, distance (especially useful when using pistols) and so on?

this stuff can REALLY make a difference.

but i also agree with the others: if he is so exellent with guns, why does he use a heavy pistol, if a light one does the job almost as well, is smaller (and therefor more easy to conceal), less offending for the cops/gangs/..., cheaper and so on.

maybe there is something to compensate SCNR

Tell him to hold his punches, i.e. not roll as many dice. If you aim for the guy's neck (i.e. you roll 20 dice) and you kill him, you've got nobody to blame but yourself.

I do like the Buying option. It makes the damage more predictable and consistent so alot less chance of "oops! I killed the guy, sorry."

The main reason for the Heavy Pistols is because the character specialised in them.

And as for compensating, the character is a young elven girl named Ange who has a split personality of a racist asian girl named Yumi. Yumi is the professional shadowrunner and Ange has the mind of a five year old. Ange does most of the talking, and Yumi only comes out during fights. The line in the title came from her accidentally killing half a dozen people with gel rounds (double tap on each, in the back as they ran), the origanl was "It's all okay, I used gel rounds and Yumi told me that gel round don't kill people. She wouldn't lie to me, would she?"

Reducing the number of dice you're throwing is, IIRC, an option in the book.

A double-tap with gel rounds ... While they were running away Sweet Jebus! You have a homicidal maniac in the body of an elf so it doesn't matter what you have the character do, they will kill. And how can a 5 year old do the talking? "I like chocolate milk" "Yes, yes, that's great but do you want the job?" "I like cookies" "Oh frag it all to hell"

Dice reduction and no aimed shots would limit the killing shots.

Quick sidenote: I'm pretty sure if Ange pronounced after a fight, she would see the bodies and realize what Yumi did. Split personalities aren't really that cool for shadowrunners. Just my opinion though.

Maybe he means she has the innocence and naivete of a five-year-old, but otherwise possesses the complex reasoning abilities of an adult.

Well gel rounds in real life can kill. If the shooter gets a lucky shot, they can kill someone out right with a single shot. Does it happen often, nope. But it can happen. Now on top of that, this game is designed to be deadly. The characters are killers (or hang out with killers depending on your personality). None of the characters are "Angel" or 100% innocent. If they were, they wouldnt be runners.

just my opinion..
dog

If I may jump in here, I think part of the problem is that stun rounds do more damage. Not only do they do more damage but they are also resisted by impact armor which almost always has a lower rating than ballistic. While it is true that they are +2 AP that only allows you two extra dice which I'm sure you know only gives you a 1/3 chance of reducing damage per die.

Just my two cents worth.

gunsnammo

The Background is Humanis parents who sent their elf daughter to be "cured". When they found that they couldn't, they had her sent to a psych institute (They were middle class enough to not contemplate murder). The Corp runnign the institute realised that they could do whatever they wnated to her, since the parents didn't care. The experiment involved high skill sleeper agents in children to young adults. Thus Ange is the "cover" personality and Yumi is the "agent" personality. She escaped the institute, and they just went on pretending she was still there (for the parents payments).

In order to get the cyber she has, Yumi killed another runner, and Ange dragged "the mean man's icky body" to a street doc.

In the case of the bodies, simple denial is what Ange did, since in her world-view Yumi would never lie.

withhold dice. solved.