What would stop the hold out from taking the +1 damage?

Why couldn't you just stick witht he rules as written and avoid the need to decide which guns fall into which category?

Cause it's harder on the GM Chandon's way.
/sarcasm off

The whole thing is an interesting idea, but it should have been easy to predict the vehement negative response on this board. The penchant on Dumpshock is to try and make the rules MORE complicated and sacrifice playability for realism, not the other way around.

The only real problem I have with the ruleset is that shotguns are longarms, and have a range of "far." Shotguns are notoriously short-ranged, more-so than an SMG, but you could give one a scope and then it would have the range you'd expect of a sniper rifle. Simplifying is one thing, but I think you're taking a blunt instrument and smashing the gun rules where a finer touch would produce more palatable results.

Mistwalker -

There's no actual "holdouts can't take the +1 damage option" rule because there's no game rule concept of holdouts - that's a flavor concept. Putting in a rule like that would be bad anyway because it would limit player options - maybe some group *wants* to allow holdout pistols that due more damage (maybe they use a more powerful cartridge).

I had been avoiding being specific about range because I figured that it would be easy enough for GMs to make judgement calls on and would be simpler than using a table. It gives the GM an opportunity to allow a 1,500M scoped shot with a sniper rifle without automatically allowing snapshots at that range.

If you really want specific rules for it, here's what I'd go with:

Ranges: Short (50m), Medium (200m), Long (500m), Sniper (1500m)

Pistol: Base range short, no options extend range.
Automatic: Base range short, option for medium range, allows scope
Long Arm: Base range short, option for medium range, "Rifling" option increases range by one category, option for scope.
Heavy Weapon: Base range medium, option for long range.

A scope obviously extends range by one category if you spend an action sighting in.

Chandon,

I am looking at your rules, and your comments. The more questions that are asked, the more GM rulings seem to be needed, and the more complicated your simplified rules gets.

I think I will stick with the core rules.

If the range is going to be GM fiat every time, you might as well get rid of the Near vs. Far system. As it is, Near apparently encompasses weapons with effective ranges from 20 to 700+ meters, while Far mostly includes weapons useful up to 100-1500+ meters -- the categories overlap so much as to be largely meaningless.

[Edit]Now that you're back up to several different range categories... I feel sorry for the machine gunners in the world. They've just been totally gimped.[/Edit]

I agree with above posters on why this is a bad idea overall unless you go all the way and completely ignore variation between the main gun "types" you've decided on. If the GM has to make several judgement calls and basically create a new weapon every time a new firearm comes up in the game, you've certainly not made things simpler and easier -- quite the contrary.

The example of Colt Manhunter vs Pred 4 is a bad choice. Both heavy pistols, the choice is simply "Do you want a laser sight and 16 rounds or smartlink with 15?".

Lets look at a few categories.

Holdout:
Streetline Special has concealibility penalty and fires standard bullets, nice as a basic hold out or for NPCs in low class areas.
Raecor Sting is undetectable by metal detectors. Also fires flechettes. Means it is more stealthy, and could possibly be more use against unarmoured targets. If you need that much stealth then the only armour to worry about will probably be on guards.

Light pistols:
Fechetti Security: Basic concealable light pistol with laser sight and nice big 25 round clip. Handy all purpose sidearm.
(can never spell this one, sorry) Yahama Sufura Kabuki : Burst fire light pistol. Concealable but a bugger to reload.
Hammerli : Very concealable for something with heavy pistol range, but horrible ammo capacity.

Other heavy pistols:
Remmie Roomsweeper: has option of standard or flechette ammo
Slivergun: Flechette heavy pistol

Machine pistols:
Steyr: Full auto machine pistol with no recoil compensation
Black Scorpion: Only fires in burst mode, but has better recoil compensation

In a lot of cases the weapons have their own specific uses with advantages or disadvantages. It's far more complex than all ahving the same stats, or just being fluff. To me it gives a whole other dimension to the game. "What would fit my character the best? What situations is my guy likely to get into, and what would be the most use?" Because as much as you could be accused of metagaming a character would use what he/she perceives to be the most effective weapon they can obtain for a given purpose. A shotguns specialist wouldn't use the automatic shotgun that fires flechettes only for taking on drones or sec guards, for example. At least not by choice.

You can obviously do what you like in your games, but to me it is far more than flavour or variety for variety's sake. And the lists aren't that huge since you usually know whether you're looking for something in the way of a pistol, smg, assault rifle, etc. It's rare you are looking at the whole firearms section with no notion of what you require, unless you're just browsing for fun and future reference which is nice to be able to do;) Removing this variety is like taking RTS games like Command and Conquer and saying "Okay, you've got one type of tank, one type of soldier, and one type of defence turret."

You get a number of dice equal to the number of feet of distance achieved in a pissing match beforehand.

Since the game is only comprised of one roll, this is the ideal mechanic when you want to play Shadowrun and get plastered at the same time.

And Chandon starts his damage control plan to save face...

Dude, you're great.

edit: SL James, I mean.

Of course I am.

The problem is except for the rules of summoning and a couple of powers Air Elementals and Sky Spirits were identical in basic stats (iirc).

I think that the simplification in spirits is a good thing, it opens up new traditions more easily rather than requiring a new set of spirits for each, and it suggests that spirits of similar concepts (ie spirits of the land and earth elementals) are on some level the same thing. This suggests to me that the UMT theory is true and the adds up to the idea that all mages are doing the same basic things with different trappings, the difference should be in style not substance.

I do think that simplification of some parts of the system would be idiotic, I like big lists of tech for example. The simplifications to the magic system remove dead weight, I never saw a player in SR2 take anything other than a Bolt type spell (S damage).

Except that SR4 didn't exactly gut the spirit rules like a fish. The comparison looks ridiculous when you actually, you know, compare the SR3 and SR4 rules side by side.

Even if the names aren't the same, the mechanics were always the same (except for summoning, which your idiot example didn't and couldn't approximate) and the powers were incredibly common among spirits of similar elemental alignments.

Hey! Waitasec! That's exactly the major difference in SR4! Holy... Wow.

Yeah, they sure abstracted those spirits from the incredibly complex mechanical difference in SR3, except that, you know, they didn't.

True enough but ten spirit types is better than the previous (counts on fingers0
4 elementals
12? nature spirits in 4 catorgories
4 spiritis of the elements
5? loa

thats over twenty spirts many of which were damn near identical, ten is much more managable.

Hell, the spirit types in just SR4 did just fine in eliminating the redundancy that came with spirits which had the same powers but were conjured differently. If anything, Street Magic just made the whole thing that much more diverse than all of the spirit types SR3 ever had. In fact, it added *ahem* complexity and range.

Oh, but wait, I don't think Chandon was done talking out of his ass yet.

The gun rules I suggested didn't necessarily gut the gun rules like a fish. If I had spent the time to finish out optional powers and stuff, you could have built any of the stock guns at similar prices using the rules.

My point is this: The actual names of the guns are an important element to the flavor of the game. The only place where the old spirit names are hinted at in SR4 is a sentence on page 176: "A shamanic spirit of clouds and storms has the same game statistics as an air elemental summoned by a magician."

It's true that ditching Armor Piercing, Recoil, and Ranges was a bit exaggerated for the point, but... the SR4 rules ditched stuff that had game effects too - like the spirit summoning vs. elemental binding and spirit domains.

By not having the worlds: Air Elemental, Spirit of the Skys, Slyph anywhere in the books, something has been lost - Flavor. That flavor is important, and it's loss is worth comment, because flavor is what makes Shadowrun.

Don't forget Ancestors.

And don't forget Ghosts, either. And lets not forget that Wraith are now a type of Free Spirit rather than Horrors.

There is also some discussion on what each tradition sees spirts as on page 169, where several names are mentioned. I feel the point is that what the spirits are is actually quite heavily influenced by the summoner rather than there being an infinite amount of spirits out there.

The flavour is still present, they've just shifted the scope of the setting to a more global scale where just Hermetic and Native american shamanism don't cut it on the available traditions.

But were the spirits really any different than an elemental, other than name and how you summoned them? Sure you say Flavor, but now you can summon them anywhere and create them in any image you like. I sure call that flavor and you get greater utility upon that.
I think you are picking at nits, Chandon...

Yeah on of the minor metaplot bits in late SR4 was that magical theorists were picking away at the limits of magic, by SR4 they seem to have kicked the paradigm everyone uses quite a bit. That seems not just flavour full but actual plot like.

Most of the tradition write ups have names for the spirits types mentioned or at least the class of beings identified. That should be enough really why the hell should Joe samurai be able to tell the tradition of a spirit just by looking at it?

I actually think Chandon may be on to something, so let's try to make this a bit more friendly all around.

Ultimately, the firearms rules need to do two things:

1. Be Awesome.
2. Be Usable.

Now, Chandon's original writeup is insufficiently awesome. But remember, it's a starting point. The concept here is to limit weaponry down to the point where it can be used.

For example: it would be a whole lot easier if weaponry did standardized damage to the point where weapon damage and range could be put into the same table. If a "Heavy Pistol" did standardized damage (say, 5P, -1 AP) rather than wholly arbitrary damage that simply happened to almost always be the same - the range chart could include the damage and then you'd only have to have the page open to one page to do a whole firefight. Hell, that page could be reprinted on the GM screen.

Now, there's room for a lot of flavor out there. And hell, I really like the fact that I've got a modern metalstorm multi-barrel Sakura Storm rather than some old-school automatic pistol. That's Awesome. But if the rules for damage weren't cluttering up the equipment descriptions, you could have more room for that level of Awesome.

Player characters normally only use one heavy pistol: the Predator IV. It's pretty pimp as weapons go, but if the weapons were just a little more rules-light, there could be room for like eight weapons in that size and price range, and that woud really spice things up.

When you find a pile of pistols, it should look like this. And unfortunately, that's not super practical as long as all of the semi-autos have different stats.

---

So yeah. I think Chandon is on to something. We would be well repaid by paring down the weapons to the barest minimum and then building up until they were sufficiently Awesome. I don't think Chandon's specific description would be good, but I also don't think it's done.

-Frank

... and Frank Trollman shows up. And claims that not only is my initial concept good, but it could be used to improve the level of flavor for guns in the same manner that the flavor for spirits can be improved. And it's entirely possible that he's right.

That throws my initial sarcastic troll tactic off completely. *shakes fist*

I don't want an oversimplified, overgeneralized, flavorless set of rules to be my only option, nor do I want decent rules to REQUIRE a separate purchase so as not to make a joke of the core rules. I feel that Chandon's idea is actually better than it sounds, but the presentation suffers from oversimplification, and a lack of polish/editorial talent to the point where I nearly retched.

My opinion is that the SR3 system was a little heavy for some. SR4 is a bit oversimplified, though I like the fact that damage and penetration are two separate stats now. Any simpler and we may as well just reduce the equipment table to "Gun", "Blade", etcetera. However it does seem that there is some redundancy in the equipment table. How many many Assault rifles do we need?

I was always under the impression that weapons had a standard damage code and differed only in their fluff-text and accessories. In that respect, Cannon Companion had it right; pick a frame and some options like you're ordering Chinese takeout. Chandon seems to be trying to emulate that but goes too far.

-Recoil rules could be simpler, but shouldn't be eliminated. Burst-fire and full-auto need a balancing element other than ammo consumption; bullets are cheap.

-Range rules could also be simpler, but shouldn't be eliminated either. Since ranges are usually somewhat fudged anyways, the GM should just wing the mods based on weapon type and situational modifiers. After all, this is an RPG, not a miniatures/strategy game. Four range brackets may be a bit much, but two brackets with no mods to differentiate them is too simple. Somewhere in between is the ideal.

-If we do away with Armor penetration, I am sticking to the current rules or switching systems. I loathed SR1-3 combat rules for this reason. Some weapons put big holes in soft targets but are easily stopped, some put little holes in whatever stands in their way. And what of shaped-charges?

You could base your Awesome rating on how many snacks you bring to the game!

whoah, whoah. that's too complex, you're confusing me.

well Chandon, whether you mean to actually flesh these rules out as house rules for gun design (thats what they are, by the way, and probably workable too), or you are just argueing that the latest edition doesn't provide enough flavor for the different traditions, I'm with you.

I have felt that certain game concepts for SR4 relied too much on you having come in from previous editions. I do not think this is intentional, I just think that the designers are all old veterans and it's easy to forget that your own personal ingrained knowledge isn't common knowledge. I could have easily forgotten that not everybody knows the difference between shamantic and hermetic magic, if I were writing a new system.

What I think might be a useful tool for Fanpro to publish would be an "Intro to SR" type of book that gives you basic setting information deviod of any rules. Simply a Shaodwrun generic setting books that explains some aspects of the world for the perspecive of new players.

This is also a good time to fill out our timeline from 2064 to 2070 without having to worry too much about your page count, so that the latest update to the timeline doesn't consist of a half a page.

I know it's less than glamourous, but shadowrun is one of the few games where the player base will purchase a pure fluff text book. I'd capitalize on that and give GMs a tool for explaining to new players concepts old hats don't need to be reminded of.

The biggest difference between the Spirits, and one that was damaged quite a bit by the unification, is that different spirits come from different metaplanes. A Water Elemental comes from the Hermetic Elemental Plane of Water while a Nymph comes from the Wujun Elemental Plane of Water (which is related but a hell of a lot more Asian) and a River Spirit comes from the River Plane and a Ocean Spirit comes from the Ocean plane.

Its like the difference between Americans and Canadians (in some cases Americans and Chinese). Physiology is so similar that differences can be ignored for the most part, but geographic and cultural differences are somewhat obvious.

And Chandron was onto something, but more options would be nice. Heavily simplified gun design rules with a few examples are always better than a table of guns.

Hell if the freelancers are pushed for time, there are people here (myself included) who would love to right that introduction. Hell i wouldn't want anything back for it, will write for karma.