Full Version: Alternate firearm skill rules
Wouldn't pistols have been replaced by PDWs by the time SR rolls around? The fact that everyone wears armor would make standard pistols pretty much outdated, so I'd imagine that most sammies would carry PDWs than pistols.
I am not convinced that enough people would be routinely wearing body armor in 2070 to drive full caliber pistols off the market.
Sure, _more_ people would be wearing body armor, but I don't think even 50% would.
RL PDWs are really unimpressive _unless_ your opponent is armored. Then they are only mostly unimpressive. They just don't have the velocity for the cool effects rifles of similar caliber have.
A 5.56mm, 4 gram bullet at nearly 1km a sec is in a whole different universe of hurt as a 5.7mm, 2 gram bullet at roughly 720m/s.
Today's PDWs still won't penetrate the plates of military body armor...
Given trends in today's firearms, if anything vanishes in 2070, it will be the SMG. Nearly every niche the SMG used to fill is now better served by a short barrel assault rifle.
Sure, _more_ people would be wearing body armor, but I don't think even 50% would.
RL PDWs are really unimpressive _unless_ your opponent is armored. Then they are only mostly unimpressive. They just don't have the velocity for the cool effects rifles of similar caliber have.
A 5.56mm, 4 gram bullet at nearly 1km a sec is in a whole different universe of hurt as a 5.7mm, 2 gram bullet at roughly 720m/s.
Today's PDWs still won't penetrate the plates of military body armor...
Given trends in today's firearms, if anything vanishes in 2070, it will be the SMG. Nearly every niche the SMG used to fill is now better served by a short barrel assault rifle.
| QUOTE (Asheron) |
| Wouldn't pistols have been replaced by PDWs by the time SR rolls around? The fact that everyone wears armor would make standard pistols pretty much outdated, so I'd imagine that most sammies would carry PDWs than pistols. |
I would doubt very seriously that "everyone" wears body armor, despite what SR fluff might say to the contrary. Today, modern Class IIIA body armor will stop just about any hand-gun threats up to and beyond a .44 magnum, and still police don't always wear vests 100% of the time.
Security professionals MIGHT wear body armor on duty, and Combat Arms Military personnel will probably wear armor as well, but you just won't see it that often.
And "PDWs" aren't the only small arms capable of firing 5.7x28mm or 4.6x30mm ammunition. FN has a pistol called the "Five-SeveN" that fires the same cartridge as the P90.
I too think it's rather unlikely that everyone's going to be armored all the time. Even the weakest attack from a pistol is at least 5P damage code (4DV+1 Net hit), so your standard of the rack comes-in-any-style Armored Clothing isn't going to prevent a gunshot from dealing physical unless you're a troll or they're using flechettes. This makes me think that Armored Clothing will be most commonly worn by rich execs for whom the cost of using a few Sci-Fi armored materials is a tiny portion of the overall cost of their fancy ass garment. I'm sure most normal people would simply try to avoid rough neighborhoods like the plague instead.
That said, I'm not sure it matters that much; Security Guards are probably required to wear the light weight flexi-wrap armored vests (which can "stop" light pistols but not a Predator) by corporate policies at least when responding, and midranked and higher gangers in an established outfit like the Ancients likely wear Armored Jackets and Lined Coats as a macho status symbol as well as for practical reasons, so even if there's a relatively small percentage of people wearing armor all the time, it's quite likely that the people you get in shoot outs with will be a part of that group. It's also a good thing to remember that drones are unaffected by stun too; a Nissan Doberman may very well laugh off a shot from your light pistol if you don't score very many hits and a Steel Lynx can shrug off quite a few different weapons unless you're a good shot or have at least an Ex-Ex loaded heavy pistol.
That said, I'm not sure it matters that much; Security Guards are probably required to wear the light weight flexi-wrap armored vests (which can "stop" light pistols but not a Predator) by corporate policies at least when responding, and midranked and higher gangers in an established outfit like the Ancients likely wear Armored Jackets and Lined Coats as a macho status symbol as well as for practical reasons, so even if there's a relatively small percentage of people wearing armor all the time, it's quite likely that the people you get in shoot outs with will be a part of that group. It's also a good thing to remember that drones are unaffected by stun too; a Nissan Doberman may very well laugh off a shot from your light pistol if you don't score very many hits and a Steel Lynx can shrug off quite a few different weapons unless you're a good shot or have at least an Ex-Ex loaded heavy pistol.
| QUOTE (TheOneRonin) |
| FN has a pistol called the "Five-SeveN" that fires the same cartridge as the P90. |
Heard pretty much nothing but good things about this pistol. Anyone have personal experience?
The ballistic profile looks like a .22 LR hollow point.... It's lucky it has a large magazine, because you'll need it.
| QUOTE (Fortune) | ||
Heard pretty much nothing but good things about this pistol. Anyone have personal experience? |
Frosty NSO liked the one he head. Alas, we can no longer ask him about it.
Why wouldn't armor be more common than not? According to the fluff, the Sixth World is really dangerous, what with gangs armed with grenade launchers and animals that can spit fire, and armor is incredibly advanced. You can wear a t-shirt made of kevlar, and a jacket that is pretty good at stopping bullets.
As for the PDW rounds, I was thinking more of the high velocity shells ala Ghost in the Shell.
As for the PDW rounds, I was thinking more of the high velocity shells ala Ghost in the Shell.
| QUOTE (Crusher Bob) |
| Frosty NSO liked the one he head. Alas, we can no longer ask him about it. |
I know he hasn't been around for a while. Did anything happen to him?
| QUOTE (Fortune @ Jan 25 2008, 03:24 PM) | ||
I know he hasn't been around for a while. Did anything happen to him? |
Fuck! I didn't know! 
| QUOTE (Asheron) |
| Why wouldn't armor be more common than not? According to the fluff, the Sixth World is really dangerous, what with gangs armed with grenade launchers and animals that can spit fire, and armor is incredibly advanced. You can wear a t-shirt made of kevlar, and a jacket that is pretty good at stopping bullets. As for the PDW rounds, I was thinking more of the high velocity shells ala Ghost in the Shell. |
Alas, Shadowrun's body armor fluff/rules just goes to show that the developers know even less about body armor than the know about firearms.
An advaced "kevlar t-shirt" MIGHT prevent the bullet from actually breaking skin, but the blunt force trauma would be like getting hit by a truck. Oh, and it wouldn't help you one bit if your assailant had a knife.
I really enjoyed GiTS, but the "High Velocity Ammo" crap was just that...crap. Here's what I'm talking about:
Nominal handgun projectile velocity hovers somewhere around 1100 fps...with a range from 850 fps to about 1300 for big automatics (faster for heavy revolver carts). Something like a 10mm Auto is about a 180gr bullet leaving a 4" barrel at 1200 fps. The recoil is really stinking sharp on that round as it is. But you would need to almost double it's muzzle velocity to get it into the range of rifle ballistics. Basically you end up trying to fire the equivalent of a 7.62x51mm (.308) cartridge from a handgun frame. Back in the Korean war, the Army was issuing the M-14, a .308 caliber rifle, to it's soldiers. The universal complaint was that it was totally uncontrollable in automatic fire. A pistol or small SMG weapon would be useless if firing something like that. Not to mention that if your weapon is built to fire cartridges with certain ballistics, firing double velocity cartridges will seriously fuck-up if not irreparably damage your firearm.
The PDW cartridges I was speaking of (FN 5.7mm and HK 4.6mm) represent one method of trying to achieve rifle-caliber ballistics from a handgun-sized cartridge. Their bullets are fast (2000+ fps), but small and light. They punch neatly through soft body armor, and have relatively light recoil, but really don't do much tissue damage.
| QUOTE (Asheron) |
| You can wear a t-shirt made of kevlar, and a jacket that is pretty good at stopping bullets. |
And if the average person put on said armored clothing and an armored jacket, they would fall to the ground, unable to get up, completely paralyzed by the crushing weight of their armor, and no amount of super strength would help them get up.
Oh, am I ranting again? The armor encumbrance/layering rules bother me. For the record, I use Bod+Str instead of Bodx2 when calculating armor penalties, but that's just taking the problem from worse to bad.
Yeah, you are ranting again. The armor rules work fine as long as people don't start bellyaching about wanting layered armor for some dumb ass reason. And for what it's worth, it doesn't say anything about people ever being paralyzed by armor, since that's a mechanic that's only mentioned in reference to debilitating spells and toxins; it just reduces your agility and reaction scores. A low body character can do the vast majority of daily tasks just fine in a full suit of body armor, they'll just stumble around like morons when trying to do anything remotely out of the ordinary and super strong characters can actually climb, sprint and lift just fine in the stuff. I'd actually rather drop the strength attribute from the game entirely than try to rework the armor rules.
Wow, thread topic shift... perhaps we should just have an always-open SR4 Gun Rules Thread.
Anyways, the rule that layered armor doesn't add at all does seem silly to me. Yes, I don't want munchkin PCs claiming 14B for Armor Jacket over Armor Vest. But I also don't see a bullet going through a lined coat and then an armored vest, quite as quickly as a bullet going through a lined coat and then bare skin. If the combination is super unwieldy and restricts movement, then that's the better rule. That covers situations in which a character might really want to pile on armor and not care about mobility... for example, if their role in a situation is bait.
Of course, game designers have to write rules for two very different kind of players: those that have a video game approach, and those who have some real world experience and want to apply common sense to what characters can do easily, can't do at all, and can do with luck and skill.
Anyways, the rule that layered armor doesn't add at all does seem silly to me. Yes, I don't want munchkin PCs claiming 14B for Armor Jacket over Armor Vest. But I also don't see a bullet going through a lined coat and then an armored vest, quite as quickly as a bullet going through a lined coat and then bare skin. If the combination is super unwieldy and restricts movement, then that's the better rule. That covers situations in which a character might really want to pile on armor and not care about mobility... for example, if their role in a situation is bait.
Of course, game designers have to write rules for two very different kind of players: those that have a video game approach, and those who have some real world experience and want to apply common sense to what characters can do easily, can't do at all, and can do with luck and skill.
I wouldn't pull the real world experience and common sense card; it comes across as freakishly arrogant. Shadowrun is a game played at a table with a bunch of dice and some notepads; abstraction is an inescapable reality of roleplaying games and whether someone leans more towards a simulationist style of play or not is largely independent of common sense or personal experiences.
Whip makes a good point. I think what most people are looking for (at least in my case) when they pull the Real World™ and Common Sense™ cards is rulesets that give the player many, many choices, with none being optimal in any given circumstances.
For me, over the last 10+ years, it's been a struggle of trying to bend/modify game rules to reflect Real Life™ because that's what I THOUGHT I wanted. Thanks to the discussions on these boards and my personal growth and maturing as a gamer, I've learned that's not exactly what I was looking for.
I've learned that the important thing is not "are damage codes scaled properly based on the terminal ballistics of each cardridge fired by said weapon systems" but "how do I want the rules to influence each player's decision in terms of what guns they bring along.
If I want my players to largely rely on handguns as their primary weapons, I can implement house rules to make them just slightly less powerful than rifles (or use SR4 RAW), and maybe do a few other things that makes pistols more appealing. If I want Pistols<SMGs<Shotguns<Assault Rifles, I just have to tweak the stats to make it so. It doesn't really matter if 6P is WAY off for what actual damage a 5.56mm M855 round fired from a 16" barrel does in Real Life™, as long as it properly represents what I want it to mean in terms of how it relates to the damage codes of other weapons.
I think most people get lost in their reasoning by thinking that bringing the game closer to Real Life™ is their goal, when really their actual goal is something else, but they think making the rules more "realistic" will get them there.
For me, over the last 10+ years, it's been a struggle of trying to bend/modify game rules to reflect Real Life™ because that's what I THOUGHT I wanted. Thanks to the discussions on these boards and my personal growth and maturing as a gamer, I've learned that's not exactly what I was looking for.
I've learned that the important thing is not "are damage codes scaled properly based on the terminal ballistics of each cardridge fired by said weapon systems" but "how do I want the rules to influence each player's decision in terms of what guns they bring along.
If I want my players to largely rely on handguns as their primary weapons, I can implement house rules to make them just slightly less powerful than rifles (or use SR4 RAW), and maybe do a few other things that makes pistols more appealing. If I want Pistols<SMGs<Shotguns<Assault Rifles, I just have to tweak the stats to make it so. It doesn't really matter if 6P is WAY off for what actual damage a 5.56mm M855 round fired from a 16" barrel does in Real Life™, as long as it properly represents what I want it to mean in terms of how it relates to the damage codes of other weapons.
I think most people get lost in their reasoning by thinking that bringing the game closer to Real Life™ is their goal, when really their actual goal is something else, but they think making the rules more "realistic" will get them there.
It's all about balancing cognitive dissonance and suspension of disbelief with speed and reliability, really. My goal is to make the rules do their job as quickly as possible with as few people as possible thinking "Hey... this doesn't look quite right." That can be tangentially related to personal experience, of course, since someone who knows about guns is more likely to notice when things with the gun rules go awry, but even then, I'm still more interested in easy to use rules that work quickly for the majority of people in my group than whether John M. Browning would think I'm rather misrepresenting the M1911.
| QUOTE (Whipstitch) |
| I wouldn't pull the real world experience and common sense card; it comes across as freakishly arrogant. |
I'm shooting for a mundane level of arrogance.
Cf. the current Panther Cannon thread: I prefer a game in which only characters with higher than 3 STR use the Panther Cannon... actually, I prefer a game in which the Panther Cannon doesn't exist, but a heaver version of PJSS does.
I think the ol' Panther essentially amounts to a legacy weapon these days. Frankly, I can't get myself too worked up about it though; it's a tremendously expensive one trick pony of a weapon and there's no way around the single shot limit or the fact that you're basically setting 45¥ on fire every time you use it (although that's not so bad once you consider how much a full burst of Ex-Ex from an Ares Alpha costs...). It's not good for much of anything but taking out hardened armor from a distance, really, and the complete and utter lack of concealability is a bummer. Then again, I don't worry much about carrying capacities in my game, and my players know better than to try abusing that, nor do I have issues with my sci-fi/fantasy characters wielding comic book weapons. I think the next time my group rolls new characters I'll just do away with strength entirely.
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.