So, which way do you rule when the book explicitly says one thing, and the FAQ just as explicitly says the exact opposite? And if you don't think this can ever happen, see the question on technomancer threading.

I know. Then which is more important - the written rule in the book or the stated intent? If you tend to simply run things from the book and do not check online, then perhaps simply RAW might suit you better. But if you value the writers' intent higher, then you use the FAQ.

Personally, if it was up to me, I'd split those kind of answers into 2 parts, the RAW position and the intent position. So that you can choose your own poison.

I like the suggestion that +ve AP modifiers should not add more than the rating of the armour. I also like the idea that the choke settings should not change the AP, since they already change the DV. I'll run with it and see how it goes.

That's what I do. It keeps flechette useful.

Hmmm, much discussion of shot, little of slugs. Slugs fraggin' rock! Don't take my word for it. Check the Box o' Truth.

http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot3_2.htm (Through drywall--a better sequence seen all the way through, but i cut to the "money shot.")

http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot6_3.htm (Through "bullet proof glass"--ditto.)

http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot5.htm (Shooting locks off--all the way from the beginning.)

And now for a vid:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=s13Y7SKrFls (It's practically a Beretta commercial, but good for recoil and rate of fire reality dose.)

And this doesn't even touch the AA-12
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhstuvzMiB0&NR=1 (At 2:24 is when the 5', 99 lb. model fires it on full auto. Now imagine a troll.)

Pax,
stormcrow

I've seen that video before. My guess is that he is shooting something like Remington's managed recoil target loads. Those would be cake to shoot in any 12 gauge, but certainly not the load you'd want when hunting people. It would be a whole different ball game if he was pumping 3.5" 00 magnum buckshot through that piece. No over the shoulder/one handed shots with that ammo.




If you make a shotgun heavy enough, and chamber the right ammo (again, 2 3/4" shells != 3"/3.5" magnum loads), recoil become negligible. Same thing goes for centerfire-cartridge loading rifles. Basic physics here, folks.

And yet more proof that the SR game designers, through all 4 editions, know 6 pounds of dick™ about how real firearms work.

Or maybe that's just how much they care about how real firearms work, seeing as how they're trying to create a game where guns are deadly, but not instant undodgeable death like in real life. After all, Cyberpunk's Friday Night Firefight claimed to be based on extensive statistics taken from law enforcement gun battles and was supposed to simulate real gunfights, and it was probably the biggest turd of a firearms system I've ever seen. Maybe it's better to have a playable game than a realistic game.

Not so. They're smoothbore so they can fire their AP rounds at higher muzzle velocities because the in-barrel friction is lower than in a rifled tube. You can fire case, beehive, HE and APDS from a rifled barrel just as well.

Well that's not saying much...CP2020 was pretty much a big steaming turd of a game in every aspect (although I do admit to an odd fascination with the CyberGeneration stuff, at least as far as the background goes).

@stormcrow: I must have been spending way too much time over at NerfHQ and HerfHaven recently—when I got to the part of the video where they're stripping down the AA12 I had two thoughts:

1. that looks easier to take a part than some of the Nerf guns I''ve been working on lately, and
2. I'm curious to see how much functionality the outer plastic case has other than functioning as a basic shell, and how hard it would be to mod up a customized case for it.

Part of that has to do with my fascination at how the AA12 has supplanted the Pancor Jackhammer as the ubër-shotgun du jour among gaming geeks. The Pancor at least had looks going for it, even if it never made it into production. The AA12 is so utilitarian it's approaching boringly ass-ugly.

Hey, that is something I'd been interested in doing. Making things based on real world stats, I mean. Do you know how I'd be able to take a look at those rules?

Ostensibly find an older edition CP book. The latest edition uses some wackiness that nobody likes, which is funny because the original is pretty bad. I'm not sure what edition I played with though. There might be pdfs floating around as well, I dunno. But it's a waste of time. Whatever statistics they might have used are obliterated by the fact that it's all based on D10's, and a 1 always fails. I don't know where they found statistics that said 1 in every 10 shots always jams the weapon or makes you shoot yourself in the groin, to be honest.

I am suprised that I hadn't read about this in this thread... but shotgun flechettes are entirely different than shot. They actually have armor piercing capability, being little darts, and not lead balls.


From Wikipedia: Flechettes
________________
Flechette rounds were developed for small arms for a number of reasons. Being very small and light compared to traditional jacketed lead or steel bullets, flechette ammunition weighs less per round, and thus an infantryman can carry more. Second is the issue of recoil — for the same amount of kinetic energy, a lighter bullet (with a higher muzzle velocity) produces less recoil, and thus less shot dispersion in automatic fire. The last reason was the emergence of lightweight, flexible body armor for the average infantryman. A very high velocity, small diameter projectile is able to easily penetrate body armor. Also its mass-to-piercing-area ratio was much better than that of regular bullets.

However, the flechette has a number of weaknesses that limit its effectiveness as small arms ammunition. They tended to penetrate heavy armor less deeply than heavier, higher momentum rifle bullets. Their extreme light weight caused them to be deflected extremely easily; a single leaf, or even a raindrop, could destabilize a flechette and cause it to tumble wildly. Because of the hard nature of the flechette, it does not deform on impact, and while it penetrates extremely well, it produces very little tissue damage. The last issue with small arms flechettes is accuracy. To fire the finned flechette out of a smoothbore requires the use of a sabot. Since flechettes do not achieve sufficient stability when spun by rifling alone, the main source of stabilization is the fins. When the sabot separates, it can disturb the effectively unstabilized flechette, and cause deviations in its flight. Experiments to reduce problems associated with sabot separation have been performed, such as placing the sabot on the forward portion of the flechette, rather than the rear, and by fitting a sabot stripper in the muzzle to remove it with less disturbance to flight.
________________

I think we were glossing over that fact (at least I was) simply because Mr.Gibson portrayed them in his novels as they are currently: massive tissue damage, poor armor penetration. The fact that they are basically the polar opposite IRL is... well... irrelevant. His fiction and by extension this game use them as a futuristic stand-in for 00 buckshot and I'm just willing to roll with it.

If we really wanted to be technical, from a numbers perspective frangible ammo should probably take flechettes place in terms of bullets and flechettes should become a low grade AP round, maybe -1DV -3AP. A bunch of tiny needles cause alot less damage than a single large projectile, especially if it tumbles or fragments inside the target.

I guess it comes down to that as long as the game functions well, inaccuracies and a general unrealistic-ness are forgivable and I really don't care all that much.

And Larme: Thats why dicepool systems are far superior to single die ones. Even the 5% chance on a d20 bugs the hell out of me.

You are making the assumption that you MUST sacrifice realism to achieve playability. I flatly disagree. I have completely revised the firearms and armor in SR4, and my system provides MUCH more realism with zero loss of playability. If you want to be an apologist for lazy game design, be my guest. I won't.

Yeah, that does sound pretty laughable. Can you imagine how pissed off a typical consumer would be if he shelled out the cash for a brand new pistol and it failed 10% of the time? Or if there were catastrophic failure ~10% of the time? Everyone in the military would be, like, dead from practicing with their rifles for more than 10 shots.

Do you have a link to these revised rules? I'm curious to see how they compare in playability (though I certainly can't judge the realism aspect).

DS

I don't have them hosted anywhere. They consist of an excel spreadsheet for the weapons, and couple of text files for body armor and situational modifiers.

I could e-mail them to you, if you'd like.

Or you could make a thread and post them here.

You've got me curious now. Lemme see too!

Call me curious too.

We all want to bask in your beneficience.

TheOneRonin: Is that the spreadsheet you handed out for your PBP game?

To me, realism = bang, bang, dead. No defense test. Bullets are almost always deadly, especially if your armor doesn't cover your whole body. And to me, playability is the opposite -- people get dodge tests, they get to survive being shot most of the time, instead of redoing chargen every other game session, characters live on in spite of the odds to give continuity to the story.

Perhaps there isn't a defense test but there are broader tactical issues like composure affecting accuracy with suppresion fire (which has yet to be well implemented in a RPG, grr...some video games like America's Army do it okay), fragging rooms before entry, and having your squad cover each other properly. It would just change the way that players play the game and they'd probably try to avoid being in firefights unless they have the chance to decisively ambush the enemy.

Which is how people should be playing Shadowrun anyway.

Bah. If I wanted realism, I'd go outside. I spend too much time in real life avoiding gunfights. I want gun rules that lead characters to get into awesome movie-style shootouts.

I want initiative rules that lead to mexican standoffs. I want every bottle on the back wall of the bar to explode into sand while the hero is unhurt. I want shotguns to kick like a mofo but cause monsters and mooks to crumple.

I like limiting the AP penalty to the armor. That seems so reasonable I'm shocked it's not the rules.

As far as I know, it is canon. I am sure I recall reading that AP does not count against unarmored, and doesn't overflow once armor is negated.

no, he means the houserule that you can't have your armor more than double from AP modifiers. for example if someone is shooting you with flechette rounds from a light pistol (AP mod +5) and you are wearing a leather jacket (impact armor 2) you wouldn't gain 5 points of armor, you'd gain only 2 under the proposed rule.

Ah, sorry. Not paying attention.

By this do you mean that AP modifiers only apply to the test to see whether the shot does physical or stun and NOT to the damage resistance test?
If so, can you tell me where it says this? I don't ever remember seeing that.

Not at all. All I was saying is that if a weapon has an AV of -3, but the target is only wearing 2 points of armor, then the weapon only really has a -2, as it cannot penetrate more armor than the target is actually wearing. If the target was unarmored then any AP that the weapon may have is disregarded, as there is no armor to penetrate.

Which is why you should always strip half-naked before fighting anyone wielding a monowhip. I'm a genius, I tell you.

Dude, I'm way ahead of you. I'm wearing armor made out of monowhips.

The real question is ... Would that character do it again?

load up for . . whatever the hell big critter you wanna kill
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/new...ive_revolutions
this should probably do enough ouchies out of a shotgun to ANYTHING *g*

Pfftt... Monowhip armor? I'm wearing dikoted monowhip armor.

With gel packs.

*ducks*

Just as long as it's not the dikoted ally spirit pants...

Here you have it folks...what EX-EX Ammo is made of IRL.

The thing is, Critias is playing a character (Tain in 'The Ancients' game in WttS) that did the very thing he described ... stripped off his armor before a duel to the death with a highly-skilled monowhip-wielding adept opponent ... on bikes ... and won.

Yep, page 152.

Merci.

I've made a few changes since then, but yes, that's what I'm talking about. Did I ever give you guys the rules that went along with it? You know, the body armor stuff, the threshold stuff, etc?

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Spend a little time doing some research and you'll find that is patently false. More people survive bullet wounds than not, and we aren't talking about just combat-hardened veterans. Not to mention the fact that, though is technically impossible to "dodge a bullet" in real life, the actual hit percentages in firefights are abysmally low. And that sort of thing is easy to represent with mechanics like dodge tests, resistance tests, etc.

Basically, you've been brainwashed by hollywood and it skews your opinion about SR game mechanics. You say you don't want realism in firearm rules for Shadowrun, but you very clearly demonstrate you don't have the foggiest idea what is real in the first place.

In my opinion, you can have much better/more accurate firearm rules and STILL keep things cinematic. Realistic/Plausible doesn't HAVE to translate into Boring/Lame.



Me too. Though I think that's more of a psychological thing for the players than plain mechanics.




Based on the RL statistics I've seen about fire-fight accuracy, that's well within the realm of plausible. SR rules just make it too easy to hit your target.




12-gauge 3.5" Magnum buckshot does kick like a fucking Clydesdale, and at close range with no armor, you are pretty much fucked in real life.




It seems to me that the rules you want to have not only do not really exist in any iteration of shadowrun, but are a lot closer to how things work in real life than the rules we currently have. Looks like you agree with me more than you think you do.

Oooh.. I'd like to see these rules too TheOneRonin.

I'm not sure I'd replace the SR4 RAW though, my players would complain about me moving the goal posts.

Apologies if you've already posted them on Dumpshock somewhere.

I'm not even entirely convinced it's possible to have an initiative system that encourages mexican standoffs that isn't at least substantially opaque to the player (translate as: "not usually fun"). If you want to propose one, please by all means do. It can just be an idea, I'll try to develop it, but from what I can think of now I don't think I'd waste my time on it as a developer without some inspiration from somewhere.

~J

There seems to be enough interest, so I'll go ahead and get cracking on turning my rules into PDFs and finding a place to host them.

Yeah, I haven't posted them before, and I think a lot of people won't like them, especially since I use mostly thresholds rather than dice pool modifiers for ranged combat.

I sort of agree. An initiative system won't EVER inspire a mexican stand off. For it to happen, you have to have people draw guns with the specific intent NOT to shoot. If you've committed to shooting, then that's what usually happens. There really isn't time to notice that everyone else has guns pointed at you and that maybe drawing a weapon will just make you a target. Likewise, if I have a gun trained on someone and they even start to draw, I'm probably going to shoot them right then and there.

The only real way to make a mexican standoff happen in an RPG system is handle it like an intimidation test, but both sides need to feel like actually shooting is the LAST possible option. And usually with Shadowrunners/Criminals, it's the first.

Well, there's the "reverse mexican stand off". I once had two aikido masters face off in a duel to the death... by the rules we were using back then (in SR3), Aikido was a defensive and counter attack Martial Art, and not suited to attacking. So, the two stood there, facing each other, and waiting... and waiting...
(A spirit attack finally broke the "duel" up, and the two ended up settling their differences without killing each other.)

God that almost sounds like a bad Buddhist joke