Hello everyone. I've been lurking for a while and thoroughly enjoying these forums. I look forward to arguing with y'all.

I love shooting skeet in the real world so shotguns have always held an attraction to me in video games and any rpg setting that has them. SR4 shotguns I simply can't bring myself to use. My gm has had a total of one PC actually use one in combat, despite having had 20+ sammies wander through town during his career so apparently I'm not alone. I also read the errata for the BBB and it's tweaking of several ammo types including flechettes. I actually like the changes for the most part, but the AP change to the flechette rounds basically makes shotguns useless while using them. I ran the numbers while I was in bed one evening and came up with the following:


FC = Full Choke
HC = Half Choke
OC = Open Choke
MAV = Modified Armor Value
LD = Likely Damagel
* = Marks the lowest armor value that converts the damage to stun

Likely Damage factors in raw DV, +2DV for flechette ammunition, +1DV for one net hit, average hits on armor resistance as well as simply adding .33DV for each die subtracted from the defender's reaction test due to the choke setting.

When used on full choke, the weapon is still pretty effective. It does solid damage and can pierce light body armor up to but not including an armor jacket. With a half choke the gun's effectiveness plummets: it can only inflict physical damage on a naked troll or someone wearing nothing but shin guards. With an open choke the gun is quite nearly worthless: you need five net hits to do physical damage to someone with one point of impact armor! You should consider yourself lucky to cause a wound penalty with this gun on anyone wearing the slightest bit of impact armor.

When used with slugs the shotgun is inferior to an assault rifle due to the general lack of automatic fire, total lack of concealability and much shorter range. Automatic shotguns are problematic because their uncompensated recoil counts double: without heavy modification autofire is damn near useless.

Why is there an AP penalty associated with the choke settings in the first place? A shotgun fires multiple projectiles much like a burst from an automatic. If more rounds hitting the target makes it more effective at breaching armor, why does the extra DV from a narrow burst specifically not apply to the test to breach armor?

Shotguns seem pretty broken to me and I have a couple of house rules that help the problem that I wanted opinions on.

First, let the shotguns use whatever ammunition type they like. I found it very funny that you could load a holdout with gel rounds but not a a shotgun.
Second, ignore the AP penalties for choke settings as the DV reduction and flechette ammo take care of the diminished effect against armor quite well by themselves.

If these two rules are used, flechettes are actually worth using against multiple lightly armored targets. The extra ammo types also give the gun enough versatility to be used as a primary weapon. I might even see people carrying them in my games soon. Sorry this ended up so long. What do y'all think?

Shotguns are there for Intimitade Reasons . . biggest Barrel one can handle with little to no problem and the general Image of Red Mist in the Target Area

you are not alone in your shotgun love. the SR system in general seems to kind of be down on them, but i know a number of enterprising individuals have taken steps to make them a little more powerfull. i forget the guy's user name here on dumpshock, but he's got a website that i've used for revising shotgun ammo rules: http://heavyangel.com/?page_id=43

dragon's breath shells are another item that was inexplicably left out of Arsenal that i've enstated within my game.

also, relating to the shotgun's general use: shotguns also effect enemy's defensive rolls, reducing the number of successes they're able to roll (therefore increasing your net successes). wide/wide shotgun bursts might have low DVs and high AP modifiers, but the target isn't going to have much of a chance to defend themselves.

My problem with firearms in SR is many moder firearms don't really have any recoil issues, such as the AA-12 which can be fired accurately one handed by a 70 year old man. The gun shouldn't have double recoil, or much recoil at all. SR seems to fail at realizing modern firearms are often very good, and getting better all the time at making recoil dampening systems. By 2070 the moder assault rifle shouldn't have recoil issues at all if we keep on the current trend.

i liked that one Shotgun in SR3, Franchi SPAS-22 . . started out at 10S Damage and ended at 13D Damage with SLUGS and Burst Fire . . a true beauty if one could hold her tight enough ^^
Another nice Lady was the Defiance T-250 . .

In SR3 they were hideously powerful, to the tune of "deal 2S damage with an attack at -9 TN"; Trolls could still be a problem, but with some Combat Pool it was pretty easy to roll more successes than anyone else could soak.

~J

depends, ever seen what kind of abuse a Troll with 7 worn and 3 implanted Armor can take? no? be afraid, be VERY afraid . . it ain't that hard to roll a couple of 2's . . and that's what's left with most weapons, even full auto doesn't add much more power to the damage . . and the troll had combat pool too . . 16 Body and 9 Armor or so is hideous in SR3 *g*

Those rules are pretty cool. Ill run some skirmishes and point my GM at the site.

If you're using the dragon's breath shells, I made a gunmod specifically for them. I used the numbers for the heavy barrel mod from arsenal but instead of negating a small amount of recoil it allowed you to fire 2 of the things per combat turn without making the melty test. Any more than that and you would have to test as normal. Availability was much higher since it was a rather niche product.

I remembered that and actually factored it into the likely damage column (what was I thinking? That doesn't make sense with the net hits locked at one). But what good does hitting them do if you can't damage them? Practically the only people who don't wear armor in the Sixth World are unarmed civilians.

well, yeah...a weapon that is, admitedly, designed for hunting unarmored targets doesn't fare well against armored humans. however. a called shot wide-choke shot to the face is a pretty good way to get around that.

the Dragon's Breath rules that i use are:
6P(fire) (overwrites damage code like S'n'S rounds) -1/2 AP, tazer ranges, SS guns only (since they take a few seconds to burn out).

Want to guess how many of the developers have ever fired a gun? Think any have done it more than once? Comics books and movies have taught them everything they "know".

but . . but there are combat-shotguns specifically made for police and military-use, they HAVE to have some good points! x.x
as for the dragon shells, that would basically make the shotgun a one-shot flame-thrower?

aye, thier flexibility is thier best advantage. the smoothbore barrel lets them fire all sorts of crazy stuff like buckshot and rocksalt, and the pump-action means that you can load specialty rounds like dragon's breath and beanbag rounds.

Shotguns are a very good weapon, specially in urban areas.
Here are some links one to a set of combat shotguns another to discussion of chokes
Reddkneck Shotguns
Shotgun choke discussion

WMS

Some guns are just better then others. Some guns have specific purposes. If I was to GM I would say that a shotgun at point blank would do extra damage and fan out to almost useless the longer the range. That being said as a Shadowrunner it would for the most part be better to use an assault rifle or a rocket launcher or a heavy machine gun. Shotguns are cool, but I generally only stock police officers with a shotgun, or one guy on the LS special team will have one as a breaching weapon.

I like shotguns as they add flavor to what kind of weapons NPC's can be packing, but as a shadowrunner I would rather short narrow burst to the head the enemy. I think it's a good bet that this should always be the case.

That's only true because SR has shotguns doing pitiful damage. A shotgun delivers the equivalent of 10 9mm SMG pistol bullets to the head in one shot. They are incredibly effective against unarmed opponents at close range.

that's why most MBT cannons are smoothbore, so they can fire a variety of rounds.

<3 T-250.


the thing you have to remember about Dragon rounds is that they are probably better used against critters, or anything with a natural aversion to fire.

Think about it this way: you are taking a cone that the BBB says is 1-2 meters wide and 'precisely' aiming it at a target that is 1/6-1/12 that size (someone's head). I can't do something that silly. My brain won't let me.

Also, this system is kinda odd about what it considers 'armored'. Take the leather jacket from the BBB: 2B/2I. A shotgun set to open choke wouldn't penetrate heavy clothing? Genuine armor (form fitting body armor and up) I could understand, but clothing? As it stands even a naked troll gets +9 armor dice in tests against flechettes from open choke. Armor ratings in SR4 and in most systems I've seen seem to reflect both the armor's power and it's coverage in the armor rating. Shotguns and autofire pose the question of how do we differentiate between the two, and strangely the answer from the writers came up different in each case. Is this just one of those times where someone is supposed to tap you on the shoulder and whisper 'We don't ask difficult questions around here' into your ear?

I did have another idea for this problem that would work on a much broader scale: limit the AP penalty to the same value as the armor. That way crazy things like troll skin outright stopping buckshot wouldn't happen, but genuine armor would still be as effective as intended. That mechanism of bonus dice being limited by the skill does show up in some other places in the game.

Really? 'Cause it seems to me like that'd just be hard to miss with. Do you always hold your flyswatter sideways and try to slash the fly with the edge, like it's a blade? Or do you let the overly large striking surface area, compared to your small target, do the work for you?

I was referring to Daier Mune's assertion that you could use said area effect weapon to make damage increasing called shots to small, vulnerable body parts. Yes it works as far as RAW, but its patently ridiculous as far as logic. Point a pattern that wide at someone's head and you'll still be hitting them in the thighs. Its like a surgeon using a broadsword instead of a scalpel.

'
Correction the statement is too general, the British MBT's does not use a smoothbore along with other nations. Rifled barrels add range and accuracy to a MBT firing solutions.

WMS

First of all OP, thanks for not making this a poll where both answers agree with you. That always gets my goat when people do that

Second of all, re called shots: they're called clay pigeons. People use shotguns to do what is effectively pinpoint shooting because it's a lot easier to hit the pinpoint with a shotgun blast. If wide choke makes a clay pigeon easier to hit, it makes a face easier to hit. The thing that's confusing people, I think, is that you can't really control where the pellets go. You can't aim a pellet at someone's eye. But, AFAIK, it isn't like a random distribution that can't be aimed. The shot will be evenly distributed within the target area. The difference when you increase the choke is that the target area becomes bigger, but there are less pellets per square inch, so less damage. But the wider your target area, the harder it is to miss it. If your target is a face, on wide choke, you are less likely to miss the face.

Shotguns already can use whatever ammo type they want. They just have to use slugs if they're not firing shot.

That's because the designers know very little about how guns actually work and care less. A shotgun pattern starts at about an inch wide at the muzzle and increases by about an inch per yard. With the right match between a shotgun and ammo you can get better than that, as I've got a shotgun that can generally put all the pellets from a 00 round inside a human torso sized target at 30 yards.

At 10 feet any shotgun will put a 3" hole in someone's face, and it's any easy shot.

Don't get me wrong, you really don't want to use a shotgun loaded with 000 buck at 15 yards to shoot the guy using your kid as a human shield, even though the odds say it should work on any given attempt. The odds also say that occasionally it won't....

yes yes, but the british are the exception to the rule. all the other NATO countries, and all the Soviet armed ones (armed with T-62s or more recent) use smoothbore weapons.

now, whether or not 6th world nations/corps/mercs would be using smoothbore or not is up for some conjecture, as they may have replaced them with railguns or lasers.

back on topic:

Shotguns should hurt, furthermore I would believe at that point that most shotguns would be firing flechette rounds instead of standard round shot for better armor piercing ability anyhow.

I think thats being pretty uncharitable. I haven't actually played SR2 or SR3 but from what I've seen they are packed to the gills with arcane rules and restrictions with lots math structures that are only applicable in a single place. That does a very good job of modeling specific instances but leaves the players totally to their own devices when trying to come up with rules for things the book doesn't cover. The choke rules from SR2 & SR3 are a good example of this, as are those huge skill defaulting trees. SR4's shotgun rules seem to be an adaptation of the automatic weapons rules in the interests of keeping the game's subsystems similar to each other and this can be seen throughout SR4 as a whole.

SR4 strikes me primarily as an attempt to unify the underlying numbers, simplifying and streamlining the rules solely for goal of making the system more approachable and easier to play without your nose constantly in the rule book. This policy of keeping exceptions to a minimum makes the system more flexible and much easier for players to add their own content and even entirely new systems into the game. It also has a side effect of glossing over allot of the specifics of real world machines that result in the logical problems we're discussing right here. I personally think they went too far in a few cases, this being one of them.

I have no qualms about using called shots with a full choke. Making called shots with an open choke on the other hand is just, well, silly.

Today I went shooting at clay pigeons but didn't hit any. I are not physad.

Physics and shotguns work as they do in SR. Do not try to fit your RL preconceived notions about how physics and shotguns should work into the SR framework.

@ Larme

Yeah, the tag-line was suspiciously trollish (yay double entendres) but it was meant to reference the fact that when fired with slugs or full choke, the shotguns are at best redundant as a bunch of other weapons do that better. When fired with half or open choke they are so little damage you could exaggerate and call them useless.

About what to feed shotguns, the only references I can find are combat chapter in the BBB and the descriptions of the 990 and the CMDT. The combat chapter says slugs or flechettes and implies (to my mind at least) that slugs means no special stuff. The CMDT says flechettes only and that is pretty clear. The 990 says slugs or flechettes. I was taking the 'slugs' literally and thinking of them as standard ammo only. It seems bizarre that they can't take anything but standard ammo but thats the way it reads to me. Am I totally off base on this? Is there an official ruling?

Shotguns only have special rules for ammo when firing flechette. Flechette for shotguns = shot rounds = special rules. There are no special rules for slug rounds. It neither says that you can use special ammo types for shotguns, nor that you can't. But guess what other weapons it doesn't say can use special ammo types? All of them. It never says pistols can use special ammo, or assault rifles, or anything... If you say that shotguns can't use special ammo because it doesn't say they can, then no guns can use it. I would prefer the interpretation that, unless forbidden, a gun may use any ammo it wants. Including shotguns.

They wrote rules based on the "It hits everyone in the ENTIRE alley!!!" shotguns from comic books. In the primary way that guns are used in SR, which is shooting people, you can't hit multiple targets at the ranges where a shotgun is effective unless you'd also hit them with a slug from the same shotgun. By the time the patten has expanded enough to likely hit multiple targets the odds of hitting the primary target (or any other) is small as the pattern has holes in it large enough for a person to fit. Typically starts at about 30-40 yards.
(This assumes a 12 gauge, a 120mm shotgun round works a bit differently) It's theoretically possible to kill someone with 000 or 00 buckshot at 100 meters, in that the projectile still has lethal energy, but you can't actually hit them with any kind of reliability. Unlike slugs, which most certainly can fairly reliably hit someone at 100 meters.

There is also the whole issue of flechettes, but I won't kick that sleeping dog.

I saw someone who was VERY good take out a no-shoot (dead center) while shooting at and hitting squarely with the rest of the pattern a target 4+ feet away at 15 yards. Pellet spread is a random thing, eventually you'll get 6+ standard deviations. The other 10 people who shot that course didn't even wing the no-shoot. So I'd advise against taking that shot against the hostage taker if there are better options.

ok on topic the reason why the British use a rifled main gun on MBTs is due to this:
Challenger 2 Wiki


So depending on the using nations warhead selection determines smooth bore or rifled.

Shotgun damage in SR4 is not what it should be, but than many things are not.

WMS

You mean you don't play with any house rules? They spring from things you don't like about the way things are done, whether this is from a realism perspective or a purely gameplay one. I think the RAW for shotguns firing flechettes fail on both counts. I would like them to fit at least one.

Seriously, toturi does not play with 'house rules'. Take his signature literally.

Heh, you think it would be possible for him to be the one in charge of the FAQ then? I would dearly love to have an FAQ that actually plays by the same rules as the books.

Just because he plays by an ultra-strict interpretation of the letter of the rules as written, that does not mean that interpretation is always correct.

Exactly true. The letter of the rules sometimes do not reflect the intention of the writers, which is what I see the FAQ as clarifying. If you simply want RAW, read the books and decide which interpretation you want, if the wording is sufficiently vague.

Another reason lots of MBT guns are smoothbore is that getting high velocity rounds down a smoothbore in a sustainable way is easier than if its rifled.

Shotguns don't really have the 'ultra high velocity penetrating round' thing going on and it seems somewhat bizarre to look at the two in anything resembling the same basket.

Anyway, to me the real ultimate argument against shotguns is - if they are hugely awesome in combat, why don't police and other armed forces use them.

The answer is that they do in a very particular set of circumstances where they are good. But in the general case they are teh suxors, so they should probably be mechanically worse than assault rifles, with particular uses.

SR's firearms rules were always unrealistic. I feel they got better through the editions though, and are now at a point where at least the "it's for a game, so we do it this way" explanation holds more or less up.

I'm OK with unrealistic for the most part. I'm cool with The Mojo, after all. What I don't get is why they even included the open choke in the first place if they were going to make it totally useless. Seriously, 3 stun vs. body dice if they have one armor?

That's where house rules come in. Every game, every group has its special flavor. I'd consider putting in some treshold for the impact armor effect.

*blinks twice, slowly* I've actually suggested two possibilities. One was ignoring the AP penalty to the pattern settings, the other was to limit AP penalties in general to the armor value of the target. The former seems to work for this specific instance reasonably well. The latter would have wider implications that I must study with lots of skirmishes.

Limiting AP penalities to the armor value of the target works best I think.

I actually like that rule. Flechette should be worse and worse the more armor you have. It shouldn't just be an on/off switch where armor clothing protects you just as much as full body armor from a point blank shotgun blast.

Yeah, nobody fiddles with chokes on combat shotguns. It's either cylinder or modified for them, built into the barrel. Putting rules in for them is just silly, it should just be a single value. But then again, it comes down to the fact that they haven't the foggiest idea about how guns actually are used, so they believe the oddest things.

All the bizzaro special case rules do is chip away at the idea that they are doing a simplified and abstract rules system.

That particular part you can rationalize quite easily. 'IN THE FUTURE'.

They have memory metals that can change shape given the right stimulus (which of course they don't tell you what that is). Is it too much of a stretch to think that choke tubes could be made of this stuff and a gun with a computer inside of it could auto-adjust it based on what kind of round is chambered? Or that the user could do it himself by pressing a button on the outside of the gun?

Actually, they protect the head office from suicide bombers. If they got rid of shotgun rules, which have been a part of shadowrun for over a decade, people would be blowing themselves up over it. They have already faced down a lot of criticism over "dumbing down" the system from people who wanted not less, simpler rules, but more more more more more rules! Something like erasing the special rules for shotgun choke would be an insult to the rule hoarders which they cannot afford after making all those changes to the Matrix to make it actually playable in-game.

Also, part of why SR4 is still Shadowrun is because even though the dicing system changed, the rules are still mostly the same. They've been streamlined to a point, but they can't delete too many things before it's not Shadowrun anymore.

Submit before the almighty power of the Principle of Least Surprise. The less a game deviates from real-world behavior, the easier it is for players to reason about it without continual reference to rulebooks; as such, any deviation must specifically and significantly contribute to the game, in order to compensate for the natural detraction it creates.

House rules are only an answer if you remain at a single house, or have an extremely high tolerance for playing multiple games that differ in small but frequently key ways.


So did they fix the bit where EX rounds dealt strictly (or almost strictly) more damage to armored targets than AP rounds?

~J

EX-EX rounds are now approximately the same as AP rounds
EX-EX +1 DV, -1 AP
AP -4 AP

AP could be argued to be marginally better even, since with the 3 dice, someone could negate 1 DV fairly often, and have a half decent chance to negate more.

yes. AP rounds are now equal in terms of boxes of damage done on average (provided the target has at least 4 points of ballistic armor) but are more likely to do physical damage when compared to ex-ex (the new ex-ex rounds are basically like the original ex rounds, in fact).

Not to mention the fact that they don't randomly explode inside your gun. With all these flamethrowers running around thats even more reason to worry.