I came up with this for SR3. I hope someone can make use of this and find it useful.

I've always been told that the success system is basically telling you that you got hit in a more vital area. Then if you add in hot location it seems to tell you something different. I thought that it would make more sense if the damage level worked out to be a hit location. After you figure out the damage level then roll for location.

Moderate (3d6)
3 Head
4 Hand
5-6 Arm
7-8 Shoulder
9-11 Chest
12 Stomach
13-14 Hip
15-16 Leg
17-18 Foot

Serious (3d6)
3-4 Head
5 Hand (gone)
6-7 Arm
8-9 Shoulder
10-12 Chest
13 Stomach
14-15 Hip
16-17 Leg
18 Foot (gone)

Deadly (2d6)
2 Brain (gone)
3-5 Head
6-8 Chest
9-10 Stomach (gone)
11-12 Vitals

This varies the general hit location penalty.

Location - Penalty
Brain +4
Head +4
Hand +4
Arm +3
Shoulder +3
Chest +2
Stomach +3
Vitals +4
Hip +3
Leg +3
Foot +4

If you're going to do this, you need to redo armor as well. A helmet shouldn't add +1/1, it should add 6/6 to the head.

tis true!

You'd also need to revise the deadly wound recovery table, unless you want to double dip on limb loss, which would be funny.


Also note that the "brain (destroyed)" result makes it a lot more likely that a PC can randomly die, whereas under the old system he'd either need to take massive overflow or bleed out at a box per round until he reached a certain negative number of boxes derived from his Body score.

That's all cool with me. I like exploding heads and instadeath. But people who are really into character development may cry.

I have a great pdf that someone made up a while ago. If you want it also breaks armour down by different locations. I just need someplace to upload and store it.

true enough ... but I am looking for something a little more longterm and that makes sense.... I just found a quick spot for it.

Shadowrun-HitLocations.pdf

BTW ... I stumbled across this ... but didn't make it up.

cool Thanx!

These might be useful as flavor text, you take and resit damage as normal, then roll on the table to see where you got hit. There's no real need to fiddle with the damage resistance and armor values.

But then why take extra time to roll in the first place? Just have the GM make it up.

No, the joy of hit locations is head-exploding instadeath and six packs of characters.

Personally I like hit location for the gruesomeness of it. I like the thought of a street sammie with his legs and arm blown off dragging himself at high speed across a floor to kill you, screaming all the while, "Do you know how much that costs?!??"

That's exactly right. I think that would make the game better.

It's like Soldier of Fortune II. One of the few games that correctly portrayed how a shotgun blast at close range can sever an arm or a leg.