First, what book contains more fire arms, like the cannon companion from v3, if any?

Second, to what extent do you allow your players to modify their weapons, given that they have or hire someone that has, the appropriate skills? In reality, it isn't overly difficult to convert a semi automatic weapon to a fully automatic one. What if I wanted a Predator IV in full auto? What about modifying a pistol to include recoil compensation, since there are real pistols with gas vented recoil compensation?

This kinda brings me to a nit pick about weapons in most rpgs. I wish firearms were handled on a more realistic term for damage. A handgun that fires a 9mm round will inflict basically the same amount of damage as any other weapon firing the same 9mm round. What the different weapon will effect will be rate of fire, accuracy, durability, etc.
A list of fire arms would include name, caliber, rate of fire, accuracy
A sublist would include capacity of clips available.
A list of ammunition would include name, damage, effective range, effectiveness against armor

Beretta 92, 9mm, semi auto
-standard magazine 9 rounds
Glock 18, 9mm, full auto
-standard magazine 9 rounds
-extended magazine 20 rounds

Ares Predator IV, 45 cal, semi auto
-standard magazine 9 rounds
-extended magazine 15 rounds (-1 con)
Glock 23, 45 cal, semi auto
-standard magazine 7 rounds
Colt Python, 45 cal, semi auto
cylinder 6 rounds

9mm Damage X, Effective Range Y, -1 vs armor
45 cal. Damage X, Effective Range Y, +2 vs armor
etc.

Any thoughts? how much would you let players modify their weapons? and when do we get more guns?

New firearms and rules for modifying them will be in the upcoming supplement, Arsenal which is slated for holiday release later this year. Until then, you'd have to house rule it.

As for firearms and realism, if you do a search, you'll find many, many threads here on Dumpshock that discuss those issues in detail.

Check out this site by Raygun. I know it's for SR3, but it should give you some ideas at least.

While I understand your desires, you just have to accept that this is a game based on abstracts for the most part. Firearms don't deserve to be any more realistic and highly detailed than any other item in the game despite your personal expertise in a given field.

For instance, there's a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle differences between a Toledo Longsword and a Fencing Sabre, yet both use the same generic rules for "Sword" and even the same weapon skill. So why should firearms get special treatment when almost everything else in the game works similarly to how they do?

For me, just using a variant name works just fine. Example: "Colt Python (Ruger Super Warhawk)" is exactly the same as "Toledo Longsword (Sword)" or "Ford Americar (Mercury Comet)."

Well I'd just refer you to the cannon companion, which covers a lot of that. You could, of course, simply listen to what the players say they're doing, but they tend to casually leave things, like drawbacks, out.

I think SR deliberatly tries to avoid being too explicit with firearms. If you think DS threads on firearms are bad the ones by people talking about real life get worse. (sometimes we get a taste of that).

Also SR4 is particularily tricky because of the low granularity of damage. +2 DV corresponds to going up to a whole different class of weapon typically.

If you want to houserule stuff I would suggest adding factors that might not be so good. Otherwise you'll wind up with guns that are a lot better and mess with game balance. For example you could add "accurcacy" as a modifier to rolls but additionally add "max hits" to a firearm. The latter becuase if your firearm shoots foot wide groups at 100 yards from a locked bench you aren't going to be hitting someone in the eye at that range regardless of the cyber in your system (edge would probably let you bypass that limit).
By adding max hits you now have something your players can improve, but you effectivly made guns a little worse before they made them better.

My personal bias is to reduce the damage of pistols about 2 points (so holdout, MPs & light does 2, heavy does 3), keep the damage of assault rifles and LMGs at 6P, increase the damage of rifles and MMGs to 8P and HMGs to 12P. But I've never actually done this, as it also needs doing armor hit locations, which is a pain and I haven't found a pain free (enough) system to do this.

In terms of trying to come up with clever gun distinctions and models, they are pointless. At the scale SR is trying to simulate a Beretta M9 and a Glock 19 are the same other then magazine capacity. In the real world it tends to be personal preference and long-term durability that you really see differences, and I doubt that you really care that the Beretta frames tend to break at about 25,000 rounds while glocks don't.

For that matter, a .45, .40 and 9mm are close enough that you can't distinguish them in SR terms. They are all heavy pistols. It's .380, .25 and .22 that are light pistol calibers, if you want to think of it that way.

There are modifications you can make to pistols to make them really cool and spiffy. Go to an IPSC shoot some Saturday morning you will see people pull way cool pistols out of cases. They are called race guns, and using their assorted optical sights, compensators and assorted doohickeys they can shoot astonishingly well. Then they will lock them back up and shove a stock Glock in a belt holster before they get in their car and drive home.

Race guns are delicate and expensive toys used in competition, not what rational people would carry around with them for self-defense. And while a grand master IPSC shooter does indeed shoot measurably better with his race gun than without it, he can still shoot vastly better without it than an average shooter can with the experts race gun.

A factory stock gun doesn't have delicate parts that result in the gun going click instead of bang at an important moment. I'd let someone have a gun that allowed them to shoot a little better or draw a little qucker, but every time they drew it I'd roll to see how it worked this time, or if it had fallen out of his skeletonized super quick-draw holster while he was rolling around on the floor with some punk.

And the magazine sizes in the original post are about 50% too small vs reality.

Yes, I know the numbers were too low, they were just used as places holders since I didn't do any detailed research.

I don't know if I would change damage all that much. Getting hit with a 45 cal. round from a hand gun is usually more deadly than a .223 rem rifle round. The 45 is going to mushroom and do more damage while the 223 is going to just go right through the target. HOWEVER, a 223 is also going to be far more effective against armor. 9mm has been show to penetrate body armor better than 45 as well, even though it isn't as 'powerful' of a round. Against soft targets, though, the 45 has the upper hand.

Erm, yeah, I have to agree with psycho on that one. High velocity rounds tear themselves apart pretty damn fast once they meet meaningful resistance because it's damn hard to make anything that can resist those kind of forces. And if it's a body causing that resistance, it's pretty much goodnight Gracie. Over penetration isn't -that- big of a deal with such weapons either. The reason rifles are a safety concern and not allowed for hunting in some populated areas is more about their effective range than anything else. A typical hunting round generally isn't going to tear through some deer and nail some poor hunter on the other side of the field (mostly because the round may exit the victim, but there's very little of the round left at this point, most of it's torn up and expended its energy on the victim), but you could very well end up hitting someone you can hardly even see if you miss. I don't know crap about -actually using- handguns and couldn't comment on .45s though. I only have personal experience with the weapons used to routinely kill innocent li'l woodland critters.

The problem is that the system doesn't allow much variation without creating a super weapon. Which, I'd argue, is what the predator IV is. It's a supergun, shooting bullets that do as much damage as an short barreled AK, but with armor piercing.

It's also absurd. To make something absurd any more effective would be insane from a game balance point of view.

Other note, pistols should all have negative AP ratings. Pistols suck at putting holes in hard, tough objects. It's just the nature of pistol cartridges and bullets. (The exception are insanities like the various AR and AK "pistols" and monstrous handguns for hunting dangerous game.) That's one of the reason why I feel need the hit location system that I can't yet make work, so you can shoot people where their armor doesn't work.

I've managed to put together a spreadsheet of firearms for Shadowrun that, IMHO, does modern calibers and terminal ballistics justice (within the framework of 4th Ed rules). I'd be more than happy to share with anyone who is interested, though the info does have a few caveats:

1. I have "caliberized" most Shadowrun specific firearms and listed them along with their real world counterparts. Not everyone will agree with my selections, so just be prepared.

2. I have made some significant changes to the damage/AP codes for the different weapons. They do, however, remain largely consistent when comparing the same caliber ammunition when fired from different platforms.

3. The change in damage and ap ratings necessitated an overhaul of the armor ratings as presented in the BBB. I used the NIJ Body Army white paper for guidance. For these firearms to work as intended in a Shadowrun game, you'll need the armor rules too.

4. These rules have been field tested several times by my players. Although they work for my group, they won't always work for yours.


Once I get the files hosted, I would be more than happy to answer any questions about the stats I chose and how I came to those conclusions.

Well, I haven't tinkered around much with damage values and other stats, but I am using some hard and fast pseudocaliber rules just to add a little more depth into my game. So far my players are loving it, so here's the buzz.

SMGs and Heavy Pistols may share ammo

Hold outs, Light pistols, machine pistols and similar guns share ammo.

Rifles share ammo according to damage value, same as shotguns

Assault rifles can share ammo only among themselves.

Additionally, some guns, like the Superwarhawk, Ak 97 or the Sakura Fubuki use different calibers and can't really share within their class. However, in some combat environments it pays off to have the same kind of gun that the opposition has, in order to "liberate" ammo from bodies.

In a current game, a group of runners are in the middle of the Yucatán conflict. Both the rebels and the Aztlán forces use AKs. Three runners are packing FN-HARs and an Alpha, they really must conserve ammo because in the jungle they won't be able to get new clips. [and they lost some of the XX clips when the Aztlaners napalmed their campsite]
A couple of them are carrying Aks and are having a much easier time. Also, I asked them all to roll armorer [2] after a week or so, if they failed their rifles had become dirty and more unreliable [basically gained the Gremlins 2 quality], hits reducing the penalty. Of course, the threshold for the Ak was less, because the gun is well known for its reliability. Maybe I am a fan of Aks! Anyway these rulings are working just fine, sound sufficiently realistic for our game, are not so complex as to require any bookeeping and have added lots of new dimensions into the game.

Cheers,

Max

Now I would like to do something like that for concealability...

I think he might be getting at the need for a system that allows you to potentially hit someone where their armor doesn't count and vice versa.

For someone with an Armor Vest they aren't getting any protection in the arms, legs, and head which means that simply getting hit could result in getting tagged in the arm or something and thus you'd have no armor protecting you.

Called shots are there for intentionally bypassing armor/aiming at a critical location so you can make it a certainty (if you hit) that you rob them of their armor or hit'em where it's least effective or gonna hurt the most if it penetrates.

That being said, a hit location system is rather hard to hammer out because I think it's implied that an unaimed shot is aiming center mass because that's the easiest thing to hit, at least if the target is standing still. A guy walking/running/ducking/diving/dodging/weaving/etc reduces the chance of that happening so...yeah. Still going to be the most likely area you'll get hit, but the probability drops a fair amount I should think.

I think a hit location system could be relatively easy to do if someone is walking into a suppressive fire zone because the whole point of that is to make sure you keep your head down and make it a very bad idea if you don't. You could simply roll a d6 and call it maybe 1-2 is a limb, 3-4 is a torso, and 5-6 is a headshot, or maybe 1 is a limb, 2-5 is a body shot, and 6 is one in the brainbox.

I suppose the same could potentially be said for grenade shrapnel (or just shrapnel in general) but then things start getting way too complicated I think because it's not just bullets it's the shockwaves and whatnot that result from a grenade being detonated that come into play.

While I don't have much experience in-game at all, I think it'd just overcomplicate things. Combat already has things like cover and visibility to keep track of that this could slow things down a bit further.

Regarding ammo compatibility, I bet the security/military field uses the ammunition Ares tells them to.

I can see Ares (or some other AAA) just monopolizing ammo production to the point that you either use 10mmA (for Ares) in your heavy pistol, or you handload.

Speaking of the AK series, I have always pictured the AK97 as the AK100-series, just re-engineered to be smartgun-friendly.

I also think that the AK47 will be alive and well in 2050, made in the machine-shop equivalents of street doc clinics, on cheap CNC machines.

I suppose that, like a lot of things in RPGs, it all comes down to how comfortable you are with the level of abstraction used.

Quite. And what kind of feel you want for your game. And how impatient/hyped up on caffeine and sugar your players (and GM) are.

Whether a semi-automatic can be made automatic is dependant on the action. I could give examples but I don't think the mods would like it. The problem is that kitchen table automatics are usually a little on the unstable side. If the player drops the gun there may be a 1/10 chance that it'll go off.

Or, in my case, how much of firearms rules as written makes the whole gaming table feel like their brains are bleeding out of their ears.

Actually, I can wrap my head around a lot of abstractions. You HAVE to if you are going to play any RPGs at all. What gets to me the most are abstract rules that make things in the game world completely assbackwards from what they are in real life.

Sure, I can deal with the small things, but other shit just kills me. If it really would be as hard to hit shit with autofire IRL as it is in the game, no one would ever use any kind of fully automatic weapon, EVER. If pistols really do more tissue damage, penetrate armor better, and are just as accurate as assault rifles, then it makes no sense to use anything but pistols a majority of the time. Shit in the real world just isn't like that. And I balk at game rules that follow that trend.

I want my game world to be about choices. Instead of:

"Well, if I take my Predator to the meet, I'll have an easily concealable weapon, but I'm fucked if there are more than a few goons in body armor. If I bring my HK 227, I can probably conceal it under my coat, though anyone who checks me out could easily tell I'm packing. Multiple goons won't be a problem, though, seeing as how I have 32round mags and burst/auto fire. Maybe I should just go all-out and bring my Ares Alpha. It screams 'I take no bullshit', damn near ignores armor, and has a grenade launcher to boot. Of course, if the meet is in-doors, I might be fucked trying to maneuver that bad boy indoors. And since everyone will be able to tell I'm expecting trouble, it might turn into a self-fullfilling prophecy."

...we have:

"I bring my Viper Slivergun to the meet. Concealable, 30 round mag, BF capable, and lethal even vs. armor. Why on earth would I carry anything else?"

...or better yet:

"Okay, so the job is to break into the secure corporate compound, extract the scientist, and escape? I'll bring my Ranger Arm SM-4 sniper rifle loaded with ExEx ammo and fitted with a silencer. What's that you say? How am I going to use a sniper rifle in close quarters? Simple...I have 14 dice and a low-light/thermo/image mag scope. Full dice pool, baby!"

Understood, but I think it is worthwhile to know whether the detailed firearms gurus are in the minority or majority, ya know?

I mean, I am techincal by nature and by work, when it comes to electronics and career...so I understand where you are coming from. There are a lot of computer and matrix stuff that don't jive with my personal experience...

I'm one of the guys who gets into it whenever the "realistic firearms in SR" thing comes up, but I'm actually comfortable with the level of abstraction that goes on.

High skill level versus armored target? We've got called shot rules for that, and simply getting more successes helps get around armor pretty frequently, making it so you don't even have to call a shot.

AK97 carbine does less damage than a heavy pistol? I'll buy that... you chop an assault rifle down so short that it qualifies as an SMG, you're going to have issues with the round performing like it's supposed to because of the reduced speeds, whereas a 10mm round is generally okay at doing it's job when fired from a 4" barrel. For all we know, the AK97 starts keyholing at 10 meters.

Autofire isn't too effective? Short/Long bursts make putting down a single opponent in a single action (rather than having to fire several rounds at them) a lot easier, and recoil compensation is readily available.

The short version is, I don't care enough to worry about it, and when something does bug me a little tweak to it's use (be it a change in damage code, a penalty for using it in some situations, or the like) is easy enough to accomplish.

As for medical dramas? Watching "ER" or "House" with a family (including myself) that is mostly in the medical field is entertaining, to say the least. The heckling never stops.

I think SR4 firearms can be "rightsized" fairly easily.

Accept pistol ammo as the base. When we look strictly at the ability to create a wound, SMGs do a little more than pistols, and ARs do a little more than SMGs. That feels right to my head.

The big change is in penetration, or put differently, what it takes to stop that damage. Standard SMG stats feel right if they are using light pistol ammo. AR and up have way too low of a AP mod. I would raise ARs to -4 or -5, then balance LMGs and up from there. Here's why:

Today, standard tactical armor (IIIA for the enthusiasts) will stop cold anything a SMG or heavy pistol can throw at it, leaving you with a painful bruise, and perhaps a broken rib. (please don't muddy the water with freaks like 500S&W mag)

Assault rifle rounds go through IIIA and you with power to spare. Today, you have to double the weight of your armor just to step up from SMG protection to rifle protection. In 2070, armor will be much lighter, but I believe the doubling will still be there.

I have to laugh a bit. ED's comments are pretty much the sort of things I used to say about why I liked 1st Edition's Staging. Yeah, it was more complex, and, yeah, armor was too effective, but I liked how it effectively took into account the difference between small, fast bullets vs. big, slow bullets.

The trick becomes, then, how do you make class III and IV armors ("combat armor" if you want to call class IIIA "tactical armor") work in this system? I can see an arguement for making them Hardened, but that's about the only way I can see it working.

It does create a niche for APDS ammo in pistol-caliber weapons, though...

This is a good question, and one I don't know the answer to right offhand. The abstract nature of SR armor vs location means makes it difficult. After all, an armored longcoat (lvl II, I'd say) has nearly the same protection as an armored jacket (Lvl IIIa/III), because it covers more.

I really wish SR4 used locations. You could always just find any RPG that uses a D6-based location roll (Battletech and GURPS come to mind) and use that location chart. Locations covered by a given armor would be simple enough from the descriptions. If you want locaton effects done easy, limbs do 1/2 number of final points, head double, torso normal.

I am not sure hardened armor is the answer, because you do usually end up with severe bruising (stun damage), just not to the same level of impairment (number of boxes) as if the bullet was not stopped.

The "DS" in "APDS" is kind of suspect.

Of course, they might be talking about "true" flechettes.

EDIT: Well, the SR-1 is pretty good against body armor, supposedly.

As a slight aside, I would rather situations like

I say screw firearms and make yourself a Troll with a Meta-man portable dwarf launching catapult. Maybe some sorta gigantor crossbow (probably bordering on a Crossbow-Ballista hybrid) with lots of whirly gears and shiny parts to make you the envy of all.

Seriously though, I definitely agree with the sentiment that house rules are the way to go if you want "realistic" combat because that way no space is wasted in the book and more people will come to Dumpshock and sample our fine gourmet cuisine of threads such as these in order to guide them in hashing out their own spin on the subject.

Also, I'm tellin' ya this dwarfapult is the way to go. You can even dikote'em (assuming they ever bring it back...and they probably won't...with good reason ) and give'em a pointy object to hold to get yourself a bonafide armorpiercing projectile from hell.

What I mostly find annoying isn't that the rules are not detailed enough, it's that the rules show that the people writing the rules just don't have a clue. It's like writing vehicle rules that have semis accelerating faster then sports cars and pickup trucks carrying more than a semi, while delivery vans are have better off-road characteristics than dune buggies, as well as continually using the word "torque" to mean "speed".

The exact same amount of space in rules and the tables could have been used and we could get a much more sane set of rules that don't add to complexity. And didn't produce two or three superguns and a bunch of clunkers.