So on and off and little by little I'm working on my personal project "80s Run", where I'd use the framework of the SR dice system to make a game for role playing in the 80s. Since there wouldn't necessarily be magic I figure that firearms would be more important and I can go about trying to make firearms as realistic as possible for the purposes of a tabletop RPG or tabletop strategy game.

I figure that a good point to start would be police firearms accuracy statistics. This would give me at least a vague idea of how often people with basic levels of training should be able to hit their targets in a real combat situation. By analzying statistics I could come with a certain range of ballpark probabilities that should be hit by the rules under what would be considered average conditions with average participants.

However, I was having a hard time finding official police hit/miss stats on the internet. The only thing I found was New York Times article that had a few stats, but they're all rounds fired rather than hit/miss stats. I'll post the article text FYI here but the question I wanted to ask the enlightened ranks of DSF is if anyone knows where I can find police hit/miss stats.

Anyway, here's the article. It's actually kind of amusing and quaint (it's from 1995) because apparently some people were suggesting that a 15 round magazine in 9x19mm was too much firepower for the cops. It makes me sad. Note also incorrect use of term "clip" instead of "magazine".

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...&pagewanted=all

OK, when I narrowed my queries and searched for NYPD stats I found some commentary/news but still no dry list of statistics which is really what I'm looking for.

http://www.gunatics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1988

Cop's are generally not that accurate. Spray and pray is their method of shooting. Why do you think a suspect gets 90+ bullets fired at them for 2 cops (it happened in California about a year back) and only gets hit 9 times. Each cop reloaded his gun twice. So out of 45 bullets fired 4.5 hit on average for each cop. That is 10% accuracy.

A 70+ year old women down in one of the Carolinas was served with a no knock warrant and when the cops busted down her door she grabbed a revolver and fired 6 shots, she hit 1 cop with 2 shots and the other with 3 with 1 miss. Both cops were doubled tapped in the heart. They only lived because of the trauma plates in their bullet proof vests. The 2 officers fired over 50 shots and hit her 3 times.

These were cops knocking down the door of a 70 year old grandma who had fallen asleep in front of the TV. It was a drug bust and the cops had the wrong house. The women grabbed the revolver from the table next to her (which she had gotten recently because of a large number of break ins) and hit both cops.


The vast majority of police officers in the US can't shoot. And all but the ones military trained empty the clip at the target. Which is a terminally stupid idea, what if the guy you just put 15 bullets in has a friend? Your stuck reloading while the friend shoots you.

That's very interesting. Does this suggest that police training actually makes you LESS accurate than you would normally be with a firearm (i.e. double tapping granny)?



Also, I found a Post article that had the following stats:

Percent of hits by cops involved in gunfights
2004: 20%, 2005: 8%

Percent of hits by cops shooting in defense of themselves or others, where perpetrator doesn't return fire
2004: 34%, 2005: 30%

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05232007/news/...ed_robinson.htm

Saying "lol cops can't shoot" is something of an overgeneralization, just as much as it would be to say "every granny is a stone cold hitman."

There are cops that are into guns, and there are cops that only ever go to the range to requal once a year. Just like everyone else, there are those who practice and get very, very, good at shooting, and there are those who don't. Also just like everyone else, there are those who are heavily affected by the physiological side of a combat experience (tunnel vision, blood pressure shifts, shaking hands, etc) and those who are less affected or aren't affected until afterwards.

*shrugs*

That's just life for ya.

The hit ratio for soldiers isn't any better, but they've got the old "we were suppressing them, not actually shooting at them," fallback position. When in doubt, though, from various trainers I've always heard that about 10% is right for most combat shootings outside of touch-range, whether the shooter is LEO or military or other.

I don't have any actual statistics for you, but I can say a couple of things about police firearms training. I work for the local Sheriff's department, (No, not as an officer.), and we got to go down to the range with our Sargent and lieutenant for their quarterly recertification. They're not trained to empty the clip into a target, they are trained to put three shots into him. Two to the body and one to the head. They are also trained to use cover and angles to get the best shot quickly with the least amount of exposure.

Now, that said, I've been told the story of one of the lieutenants, who retired recently, who was going into a house on a drug bust. They knew the guy inside was armed and dangerous. The lieutenant in question went in, and confronted the guy in a small room in the back of the house. The guy was behind a file cabinet and waiting for the officer, about 5 feet from the door. Both men emptied their clips, and the lieutenant was not hit, and the guy was hit twice. From five feet apart. Surprise, fear, and adrenaline make for shaky hands and reactionary thinking, even when when trained. You have to be stone cold to pause and aim in a firefight. And if you want to say that the lieutenant wasn't all that good of a shot, he was a former marine who'd done three tours in Vienam, had been in the DEA doing work out of the country, and on the SWAT team. Which is why, afterwards, he said that it was exhilarating...

So if I'm trying to stay within the general framework of SR3, and typical, say, Pistols skills are going to be from 1-6, it would seem like there not being a huge difference between 4, 5, and 6 in a firefight would be pretty correct.

And it looks like I should be going for a typical to-hit rate of around 10%.

Looking quickly: (I couldn't get access to "Police Quarterly")

http://www.policeone.com/writers/columnist...rticles/117909/

During a 13-year span, the Baltimore County PD, which Aveni regards as one of the best trained in the country, achieved an average hit ratio of 64 percent in daylight shootings - not ideal, but clearly much better than commonly believed. In shootings that occurred in low-light surroundings, however, average hits dropped to 45 percent, a 30 percent decline. The data from Los Angeles County (LAC) reveals a somewhat comparable 24 percent decline.

"Until this research," Aveni says, "performance has never been accurately matched to lighting conditions," even though as many as 77 percent of police shootings are believed to occur under some degree of diminished lighting. Some departments tally "outdoor" versus "indoor" shootings, but most appear not to precisely differentiate between low-light and ample-light events, despite the preponderance of shootings during nighttime duty tours.

A multiple-officer shooting, in which more than one officer fires during a deadly force engagement, has an even greater influence on hit probability, Aveni discovered.

According to the LAC data, when only one officer fired during an encounter, the average hit ratio was 51 percent. When an additional officer got involved in shooting, hits dropped dramatically, to 23 percent. With more than 2 officers shooting, the average hit ratio was only 9 percent - "a whopping 82 percent declination," Aveni points out.

Multiple-officer shootings, Aveni told Force Science News, are three times more likely to involve suspects with shoulder weapons than single-officer shootings. This tends to "increase the typical stand-off distance," he says. Many of these confrontations also embody fast-changing, chaotic and complex circumstances. These factors, Aveni believes, help explain the negative impact on accuracy.

Aveni also discovered a correlation between multiple-officer shootings and number of rounds fired.

With LAC shootings involving only one officer, an average of 3.59 police rounds were fired. When 2 officers got involved, the average jumped to 4.98 rounds and with 3 officers or more to 6.48. "The number of rounds fired per officer increases in multiple-officer shootings by as much as 45 percent over single-officer shootings," Aveni says.

Again, he judges distance to be a likely factor. "A higher volume of fire may be used to compensate for the lower hit ratio as distance increases," he speculates. He believes the highly violent nature these events often present may be influential, too. Anecdotally bunch shootings appear to encompass "many of the barricaded gunman scenarios, drawn-out foot and vehicular pursuits, subjects experiencing violent psychotic episodes, gang attacks and encounters involving heavily armed suspects," such as the infamous FBI Miami shootout and the North Hollywood bank robbery street battle.

Here's some stuff for the NYPD:

NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT ANALYSIS OF POLICE COMBAT SITUATIONS (1981) (executive summary?)

NYPD SOP 9 2000 FIREARMS DISCHARGE REPORT

and:

NYPD GUNFIGHT STATISTICS
1990-2000

Honestly, Combat Pool notwithstanding, the core rules for Shadowrun would work pretty well for real-life firefights (not in terms of full auto, etc, but simply in terms of the sliding TN method) -- if your GM tallied up all the appropriate lighting, range, movement, and cover modifiers appropriately, and you kept it "real" by having at best a laser sight.

Without smartlink II's and Adept powers and Centering and cyberoptics (or Adept senses), and snipping Combat Pool (IE, "double your dice when it counts") out, you'd probably find yourself with a fairly realistic hit/miss ratio, with the basic system as written.

Take beat cop with a Pistols of 3, and have him shooting at someone outside of short range, in low light conditions, as the guy's running away (down an alley, let's say)? Odds are good it is going to take him a magazine dump to get the guy off his feet.

Keep in mind, there are more factors to consider. A really good source showed me that right around the early 80's we saw the availability of actual bullet resistant kevlar vests. These would successfully stop .32 and 9mm bullets. Hence, some police departments upped the caliber of their guns. There was also a gradual move from revolvers (where you have to really pick your shots) to semi-automatics (where you can spray more). Both of these would decrease accuracy, comparing say 1980 to 1989 (depending on the office).

More recently, we've seen police officers having a lot more trouble hiring qualified officers. I seem to recollect reading something recently that something like 10% of all officers on the street in a part of Canada had actually failed the minimum shooting requirements. Presently we're grabbing as many people as we can for the military, risks of wearing a badge are going up, and the pay continues to be terrible. So they're under a real crunch for qualified people, and standards in some places are dropping.

So what am I getting at? Don't expect a cop in 2007 to necessarily measure up to one in 1980. Unfortunately, the 1980's cops also tend to be less likely to beat the tar out of someone, which is probably a knock for your game.

That said, I'd love to watch your work and help proofreading and so on. You're a great writer and maybe I'll learn some of your 80's secrets. Don't feel compelled to take me up on that, but definitely, if you need help, don't hesitate to give me a buzz.

Well, the 70's started with the CHP-Newhall Shootout. In which 4 CPH officers were killed by two ex-cons in a multi-minute shootout. IIRC, The ex-cons who only took effective return fire from a civilian who shoot back using one of the downed officers guns, the cops who shot back totally missed.

This caused come serious changes in how police were trained to shoot.

The 1986 FBI Miami Massacre caused more.

And if you think cops were less aggressive in the past you are simply wrong. Tennessee v. Garner was in 1985. Prior to that cops could simply shoot a fleeing felon. Use of force rules have become tighter over time, not more relaxed.

The difference is in 1980 they'd shoot people running away. Now they beat the tar out of 'em.

The limits on accuracy in combat are largely physiological and psychological, not physical. People in combat miss their targets so much because of things like the stress (fight or flight) response making their hands shake, not because hitting the target is actually that difficult.

So note that the fight or flight response reduces accuracy from around 80-90% accurate on the range to around 10-20% accurate in combat. (Was it you who was asking about Grossman?)

The stuff from Grossman about violent videogames is that they reduce the stress response to combat like stimulus, not that they actually teach you to fire a weapon. But as we see, the stress response, not the quality of ‘range’ training is the main limiter on combat accuracy. This is why training for police and soldiers over the last ~50 years has striven to be as close to combat as possible, to reduce the effects of the stress response. (See work by S.L.A. Marshall and the responses to it.)

So, it’s not that stone cold granny had a firearms skill of 15, it’s just that her TNs were around 3 or 4 (just like the firing range) while the cops TNs were 6+ (suffering from fight or flight reflex). (And this is why the adrenal pump is a terrible idea from stone cold killas. Adrenalin makes your hand shake. Would anyone still want the pump if it gave you something like +4 str, +2 damage resistance, ignores stun, but also gave you something like +4 ranged combat TNs?)

Note also that the ‘amount’ of stress response is also important. That’s, in part, why retreats and ambushes tend to result in many more casualties, the guys doing the killing are under much less stress, so they shoot much better. (Note that a large part of this may be related to physiological factors, since people seem to really dislike killing other people.)

So, if you wanted to model combat, you could try having a ‘stress meter’ that went from 1-6. Every point on the stress meter you have increases your TN by 1. So, stone cold kill-bots don’t have really high level firearms skills, they just don’t have shaking hands. This also lets you implement supressing fire and the effect of close misses. Since they jack up your stress meter, they raise your TNs to shoot back.

I’m pretty sure I wrote all this before, since I remember pointing out how comparatively deadlier this would make drones, since they don’t suffer from stress; just another day on the firing range for them.

[edit]
Also note that this encourages kung-fu fighting. The fact that your hands are shaking does much less to your ability to grab the other guy and rip out his spine than is does your ability to shoot him right in the face.
[/edit]

Before you get too worked up by SLA Marshals work that was built upon by Grossman, find a current version of "Men against Fire" and read the introduction. Where they admit that he basically made up all the stuff about firing rates.

http://www.theppsc.org/Grossman/SLA_Marshall/Main.htm

The point I was attempting to make here:

Crusher,

I've heard of what you mean by the adrenaline making you stupid. It's the tunnel vision people always talk about in conjunction with a combat situation, right?

Perhaps if I were to implement the "stress meter" in addition to the stress meter raising your ranged combat TNs it could also lower your Int score, which would affect combat pool, Reaction, and perception tests.


EDIT/addition:

I have been mulling over some thoughts on ways to base the firearms combat on SR but also make it more realistic/tactical. Here are some thoughts. Since I'm only an armchair warrior any and all comments are welcome. In fact, this is really just a draft, so comments and revision would be mightily appreciated.

Hit locations and cover:

If someone makes a ranged attack and misses but some of the dice rolled were only 1 less than the TN the attack counts as a "near miss" which would affect hand shakiness.

If someone scores a hit with only 1 success the hit is randomly determined to be an arm or leg. If someone is behind cover such that the arm or leg hit was actually impossible to hit the attack misses. The damage level of the weapon is reduced by 1 level.

If someone gets 2 successes the hit is to the torso or waist but not the lungs and heart. If the target was behind cover such that the torso or waist was covered up the attack misses. The damage level of the weapon is as written.

If someone gets 3 successes there's a nice center of mass hit over the heart or lungs. The damage level of the weapon is boosted by 1. If the heart and lungs are behind cover it's a hit to the cover instead.

If someone gets 4 successes or more the target was hit in the head. If the person was wearing a helmet it would be a hit to the helmet. The damage code of the weapon is boosted by 2.

If someone gets 5 successes the target is hit right between the eyes. Helmets that don't have ballistic visors (did those exist in the 80s?) don't do shit and the damage code of the weapon is boosted by 3. I suppose that if the shooter was behind the target (i.e. sniper) this puts a round right where the spine enters the skull or the spine right below the helmet line.

A character may choose to "downgrade" the hit he gets on an opponent to a hit which requires less successes. So someone with 5 successes could choose to hit as though he only had 1 success. This would eliminate the +4 TN called shot rule.


A thought on automatic fire:

For the purpose of suppression fire and other applications it would make sense to imitate Raygun and allow automatic weapons to fire at their real-world rate of fire. There are a few questions that arise:

1.) Each round that's fired should have a higher TN than the round before it since the weapon shakes a bit as you fire it. However, I think it's important that each round has a chance to hit to be more realistic. The question is if the per-round cumulative penalty should be more modest at close range (say +1 TN per round) than at longer ranges (for example +2 TN per round or +3 TN per round), since the weapon being perturbed would have a much bigger impact on where the rounds are going to hit at longer ranges.

2.) How could I model someone using a burst fire weapon such as a M16A2 for suppression fire? I couldn't just use the cyclic rate of fire since the number of rounds sprayed would also depend on how quickly the shooter can work his trigger finger. Perhaps allow 2 Burst Fire actions to merge into 1 Complex Action of Full Auto which produces 6 rounds? It seems like that might make the ROF for suppression with burst fire very very low.


Running and breath:

Perhaps if a character runs or uses the Athletics skill to perform a physical feat he gets a point on his stress meter to represent how his breathing is messed up and could affect his aim. The character then gets to roll his Athletics dice each turn to get his breathing relaxed again which would make Athletics more important. Would this work in the context of the SR system or is the SR system too...what's the word...granular?

I don't know if I'd decrease Intelligence, since it requires a lot of record keeping and is open to abuse (on the one hand, you only see effects every other 'hit', but combat pool gets harder to constantly recalculate. On the flip side, low-int characters simply don't care.)

There's one out there that does decent spreads, but I don't have the link—search for "Shadowrun probability calculator" or something. I'm working on one that's good for in-depth comparisons of various TNs, thresholds, and die quantities, but I apparently forgot basic combinatorics when I wrote it and just haven't had the time to figure out where I went wrong.

~J

OK, I found it.

http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~bcd/SR/dicerollcalc.html

It seems like if we're rolling 6 dice (let's say the NYPD cop has Pistols 3 and adds his 3 combat pool since he's totally focused on trying to shoot the perp) the TN we need in order to make the hit probability ~10% is 15.

Of course, according to the SR3 rules a TN of 15 would be something bordering on the impossible. It would seem that if I wanted to simulate reality a little better with the combat rules, though, that things would have to work out with TNs at close range coming to around TN 15 after visibility mods, stress, and those factors.

"Suspect", please, unless they've been convicted.

~J

To give an international perspective to the comments about 'gun culture' in the police force, let me offer up some commentary about australia.

In Australia the use of firearms by criminals is mostly confined to a few 'bad' suburbs, and other than that, it's not really an issue. Many cops would prefer not to carry their service pistol and instead move to a british model with no guns.

there has also been a demographics shift in the Australian population, which means for most cops (probably the majority especially at more junior levels), the only gun they have ever seen or shot with is their service pistol.

Completely different look at things for a police force that carries 9mm pistols like they do in new york!

unfortunately i don't have any information on accuracy, but I have every reason to believe its quite high from purely anecdotal evidence. Conversely because most cops are not shooting at people with guns, usually knives and other weapons, accuracy rates might be different in a real 'gunfight'

or "person of interest", used hereabouts. "Suspect" may perhaps be seen as prejudicial.
POI = PC

Well, in the case of the man who at the time was suspected of having killed Deputy Vernon Matthew Williams in Florida, and who was shot at 110 times and hit 68 times (because "that's all the bullets we had", according to the Sheriff, always a man for respecting due process), we get something like the following:

Range: Short or Medium

Recoil: presumably fluctuating between 0 and 1

Other mods: Target Stationary for -1

We have a TN fluctuating between 3 and 4 or 4 and 5, with an overall hit rate of just under 62%. At Medium range it's not actually possible to get that close to 62% expected hit rate, but the closest I can get with the time I have is 54.17%, which means that the cops have Pistols 1 and spend one point of Combat Pool on their TN 4 shots.

Edit^2: further investigation suggests that they may actually have been using submachine guns, which changes the math drastically. I need to get back to work, though, so no modification here from me.

Edit: well, "suspect" does carry a negative connotation, but it's an implicit one that will only be transferred to any replacement term via the euphemism treadmill, so I'll stick with it. "Perp", however, is explicit: the perpetrator is the one who perpetrated, no question about it. I suppose there's a certain degree of vagueness as to whether criminality is implied, as in some cases it can be clear that someone performed an action despite it not being clear that they are criminally culpable, though I'd still prefer to leave that question to a judge in cases of police involvement.

~J

Another interesting point about firearms accuracy. In WWII less than 1% of bullets fired actually hit anything. Lots less than 1% if I remember correctly i think it was less than 0.1% (It could very well have been 0.01% or 0.001%)

Which probably has more relevant to the shadowrun milleu, because lots of that would have been suppressive fire, which has been undermodelled in every RPG ever.

To put it in perspective, my longest-running character has acquired ~2,000 MMG rounds, 400 MMG tracer rounds, and 100 sporting rifle rounds over the course of the game, and has fired 363 of those rounds (and some grenades and ATGMs I'm not going to try to count). Granted, there's been some use of the bumper of the van as a weapon, and we've been in ammo-conservation mode for over a year out-of-character because of Bug City, but even with the occasional use of suppressive fire we're going through rounds far too slowly to hit 10k in any kind of reasonable timeframe.

I guess it makes up for ¥2-a-pop bullets.

Edit: for more perspective, consider that the ammo load of a Strato-9 is 500 rounds, or about 137 more than I've fired over the entire campaign.

~J

And to cast THAT in perspective, a british operator of a Bren Gun in could expect to be carrying 700 rounds into battle between him and his fellow assistant, and another 300 rounds carried by everyone else in the squad, or in the APC.

But that is a different type of fighting than SR, I suppose the closest numbers would be vietnam. I dug around - small arms fire was a much bigger killer, and the US estimated it was spending several thousand rounds to actually hit someone - my source for that isn;t that great though.

Weapons are much more comparable to SR to boot.

IIRC, in Vietnam the amount of small arms ammo expended per kill weighted more than the average soldier. It's a huge number of rounds. Some of it was due to things like "Mad Minutes" and recon by fire, but a lot of it was due to the fact that people under great stress typically can't shoot worth a damn. Even at silly close range I've known people who got missed.

The main modifier that is missing from pretty much all RPG is some universal negative when your character would feel like he is in great danger of being killed or severely wounded right now. So it wouldn't apply when you ambush someone (because they are not shooting at you) or if you are a police sniper, but it sure would if you are shooting it out in an alley with some thug.

This would allow for the great shooting people do at the range, and the crappy shooting most people do on the two-way range.

Typically it seems the more times someone gets shot at the better they are at handling this, so there might possibly be some sort of mechanism to reduce it effects.

But that's because, in most games focused on combat, not many people feel like role playing the guy that pukes up his lunch at a near miss, or the guy with the sweaty palms and the shaking hands. Folks want to play the steely-eyed veteran, for whom a two-gun shootout is just another day at the office; Bobby De Niro from Heat, not Sean Bean.

Which is part of why it's so difficult to find "realism" in an RPG. So many of the things that make for wildly inaccurate fire IRL -- the physiological responses to danger, all the little quirks that go into good shooting, the weirdness of recoil, even the deeply ingrained idea that killing someone else is wrong (thought to be responsible for quite a few of those WWI and WWII misses) -- don't come up in most RPGs any more than they come up in most action flicks.

Even for folks that know that stuff exists and worry about it, it's not really fun stuff to deal with.

Just because some cops get their handguns mixed up, etc, doesn't really mean diddly squat about "Australian Police" taken as a body. Some people, even in law enforcement (or the military, for that matter!) just aren't gun guys! That doesn't mean most cops or soldiers are eager to turn theirs in, by a longshot.

And, please, let's move the conversation away from gun control laws and their supposed effect on violent crime. Else I'm liable to get myself banned again by replying.

I don't think you can really worry about accuracy- it will vary from unit to unit. I think you have to be more aware of what the police are carrying. For example look at the first two terminator movies- in the first one, most police are carrying revolvers. By T-2 most had semi-auto's.

In the mid 80's the LAPD did not have long arms-the infamous case of bank robbers with body armorand AK's causing police to run into a gun shop to borrow weapons, by comparrison at the same time, when an NYPD officer standing guard at a witness' house was murdered, ther NYPD turned out in full body armor carrying Steyres.

You could also look for when leagally thingsl ike assault rifles dissapeared from the world where they could be legally bought.

The other big thing is communications- I mean I remember back then the fin antenna on the back of limos that had car phones (Remember the Crocadile Dundee bit?) now my cell phone can fit into a pocket so I don't even need a bag to carry it. when was the last time you saw a pay phone in the US? They were big then.

CD's and DVD's? Heck, is the VCR VHS or Beta?

Laserdisc.

~J

Atari and only real geeks, whom I would never even think of dating, knew what the hell to do with those big floppy discs. No PC's but you got time at the school lab.