So, I was just thinking about how common bodyguards are in the world of Shadowrun, and then I realized how ineffective they are by RAW.

I mean it doesn't really matter how good a bodyguard is, all a person has to do is target their package with a ranged attack and its over. There are no rules that allow a bodyguard to 'take a hit' as it where.

Only real thing I can think of that a bodyguard could directly do to make their package harder to kill is standing between package and attacker, thus granting some level of cover bonus. Of course in order to do that the bodyguard would have to give up any attempt to dodge an attack, because dodging would mean his package is hit instead.

Now, I know that bodyguards are supposed to be more of a deterrent and to beat the crap out of people while the package hides, but I can't help but feel it would be very very easy for someone to draw a gun, unload two shots, and kill the package without the bodyguard being able to do a darn thing about it.

So, any ideas on how to fix this? Perhaps allow a bodyguard to 'take a hit' so that any attack at his package hits him instead. Perhaps he could dodge to get it lowered to 1 net hit, but never less because that would mean it goes to his package?

"Friends in Melee" and "Shooting Into Melee" are two modifiers that should come up very often any time you're dealing with those kinds of scenarios, just off the top of the list. Cover is also not limited to walls and vehicles; a metahuman body can make for just as much cover as anything else.

It's also pretty hard to one-shot anyone in the game with a traditional weapon. So even if you do get that one perfect shot off, it's doubtful you're taking your target down. Especially if he has an entourage of bodyguards and, doubtlessly, armored gear on. Once you've made your presence known, standard cover modifiers enters the story and you now have at least one if not more bodyguards looking to eliminate the threat that is you. And a good bodyguard (as in the archetype-level bodyguard) is going to be a pretty hardcore badass for doing precisely that.

Most of the time they're basically just walking drones. Monitoring the situation, keeping an eye on everything going around, watching for suspicious activity... you name it. That's a lot of tricked-out Perception Tests for you to sleaze past. If the target is particularly worthwhile to protect, at least one or two of those bodyguards are likely magicians, too, covering with target with Counterspelling dice at the very least and most likely Shielding or Absorbing instead. So even magical assassinations will be more difficult. All because of the presence of bodyguards.

I don't think they're useless or ineffective at all.

There is no "Shooting Into Melee" modifier. Attacker in Melee only applies if the person with the gun is in melee range of a hostile.
Friends in Melee is a melee-only modifier.

Body Guards are deterrents. Nothing more. They have never been more. If someone wants another dead, & can get within range, no amount of body guards are going to help. Assuming the attacker does not manage to kill the target with the first attack, they may be able to keep him alive via cover, but that is about it. Nothing has changed in 2070.

Yeah, kinda what I figured. If it ever comes up in my game perhaps I'll make up some kind of 'taking the hit' rule. Perhaps something like do a full defense, if you get net hits down to 0 or less, you take the hit instead of your package. Treat as 1 net hit for purposes of damage.

That sounds good off the top of my head actually.

The original Judge Dredd RPG used a bodyguard's Dodge skill to "dodge" into the path of an attack, taking the hit and saving the person.

Short of a 360 degree forcefield, a target always has the potential to be hit...
...But since most gun combat occurs at relatively short range, being surrounded by people is usually sufficient to be protected.

Hence the Pope riding in his bulletproof "Pope-mobile" and G Bush preventing all civilians getting near him when he goes to conferences...
...And that's why a good sniper is valuable and isn't just a "guy with a long range gun", and why assassination is a risky business.

Magician bodyguards can directly assist with Counterspelling (and later metamagic enhanced versions) and hacker/TM bodyguards can directly assist with bolstering electronic/matrix security. For physical security, we get...

Tactical software? If the bodyguards and the mark are all using it with sufficient sensors/senseware, this provides defensive bonuses to the target too, right? I havn't really picked Unwired apart, but this seemed like a great bodyguard thing.

Haven't really read unwired much yet either. That does sound like it could be quite useful. I'll have to look into it.

You could decide that the bodyguards are already in "combat mode" in anticipation of an attack, and have been holding their actions to deal with any attackers that appear. Tacsofts can also be useful.

Over all, bodyguards can help, but don't make you totally safe.

The most important role of the bodyguard is to minimize vulnerability via careful planning and preparation. Planning and preparation can greatly limit the possible modes of attack that might be successful. In practice, this means seemingly mundane but extremely important things like planning travel routes, erecting opaque barriers to block LOS to the subject's route (thus blocking LOS to the subject), vetting chefs, and other such things. Some of this requires making special arrangements with businesses and governments, thus requiring some face skills.
The second most important is identifying threats that could not be defeated by preparation and neutralizing them before they have a chance to strike. This means sweeping for explosives, counter-sniping snipers, counter-ambushing ambushers, and generally being perceptive. It works best if you have a team.

Bodyguarding is tedious boring work for somewhere between 99% of the time and 100% of the time. If it stops being boring for a very few seconds, then you've made a huge mistake.

One problem that you will need to look at is the willingness of the attacker to be caught. If the attacker is willing to be captured or killed in exchange for completing his objective, she will be harder to deal with than an assassin who is unwilling to take risks that increase her likelihood of capture.

A lot of the issue comes down to situational awareness on both sides and controlling the operational area. Before the UCAS President sets foot on the ground, her Secret Service will have spent days or weeks clearing possible attack routes and coordinating security. Private bodyguards and security, such as for celebrities focus more on deterrent and awareness. They watch for actions that will telegraph an impending attack and body language that is out of place from the rest of a crowd.

If also depends on the willingness of your employer to accept accidental civilian fatalities. If one errs on the side of caution and just kills anyone slightly suspicious then the subject is much safer than he would be if you had to wait for confirmation of a threat before using deadly force.

You can go for initiative and use your action to get your client into cover or at least on the ground.

By the time the attacker shoots, your client can enjoy modifiers for partial cover and movement (use the "Defender running" +2 mod to account for the sudden movement of the target).

An amendum to Rad's comments, the street sam credo of," be faster than the other guy!".
Applies to body guards with held actions. Planning and prep first and max out initiavtive for when the drek hits the rotary air con.

I also imagine bodyguards might tend to use edge for the "go first regardless of initiative" rule. Not as viable with mooks, but a sufficiently valuable target should probably have prime runners for bodyguards.

There are some interesting oddities in SR4's combat rules where the system just doesn't work well.

The idea that you can draw and shoot several shots at someone a significant distance (more than contact range) away without having anyone able to act is one of these. Even really good shots take about a second to draw, aim and shoot at someone 20 feet away, significantly longer the farther out you go. And it's OBVIOUS that they are going for a gun. A second is enough time for someone to do lots of stuff in the real world.

On of the issues with most RPGs is that they essentially have the rest of the world standing there while one character acts. People don't do that. They start reacting to what you are doing as soon as they perceive it. The actual effectiveness of guards (or many martial arts) relies on acting to counter the threat between the point where it is clearly a threat and before it can actually strike.

An obvious fix would be, as suggested earlier, to have the guards holding actions.

Excellent info here and an actual decent representation of what you might do for a more realistic game. The #1 weapon for bodyguards is situational awareness. The ubiquitous "shot out of the blue" is a very rare thing indeed in the world of assassination attempts or kidnapping attempts. There is almost always some indicator that something is wrong before the target is attacked if you have trained bodyguards doing the protective detail.

An excellent example is the Regan attempt. If you watch the video of the situation just before the attack you will see that the Secret Service was totally asleep at the wheel on that one. A slow pan from one TV camera clearly showed all of the media-types smiling and laughing and right smack dab in the center of the group is one guy not smiling, not laughing, and looking really fucking tense. Guess which person there had the gun and the will to use it?

Same thing goes for real attempts. The old movie cliche of the cool as ice assassin casually walking up without any indication of intent, doing the deed, and casually walking away is an almost complete fallacy. Yes, there are a few people with the training, mind set, and will to do that but they are so damn few and far between as to be all but a non-entity unless you decide to send the (insert random AAA here) CorpSec top-dollar hitter after your group in which it's gonna be their ass anyway, right?

That really depends on where and what you are bodyguarding. Presidents of major Western democracies are generally safe from everything except crazy people and CIA conspiracies that frame crazy people. Crazy people don't make very good assassins. On the other hand, if you're bodyguarding a rich corporate official or relative in a major third world country with a booming kidnapping industry, then it is more likely than not that you'll face trained experienced professionals. When you're dealing with people who kidnap and ransom for a living, who've done one or two a week for the past several years, you can't expect them to be tense or obvious.

Of course, such professionals also know that it is easier to grab an unguarded target, and so the deterrence factor of a bodyguard is likely to send them in someone else's direction.

Of course the fact that someone is rich/important enough to -have- a bodyguard makes them a juicer target.

Yeah, but its usually safer to grab 10 $5000 targets than it is to grab 1 $50,000 target. Stupid amateurs may go for the quick big score and fail but people who know the game know to go for the low-risk long-term.

Ultimately, it depends on the assassin, too. Does he plan on getting away? If so, it's easier to stop him, because he's going to be more cautious about how he goes about his task, and is going to be willing to give up if succeeding means he won't get away.

The crazy suicide assassin, on the other hand, is going to be a lot harder to stop because his life doesn't mean anything, so he'll be willing to charge at the target with bombs strapped to his chest, ignoring the guys with guns around him just to make sure the target dies with him.

Things like Kinesics help with the 'show no intent' angle. Make sure that Judge Intention Tests are actually being used to give the bodyguards their chance to notice a (non-concealed) problem.

The best use of a bodyguard in shadowrun is as a doppelganger. Which is far more viable with magic and appropriate masking abilities to prevent people seeing the spells.

Simply employ a mage to make the bodyguard look like you when out in public and to make you look like someone else.

Then anyone who happens to try assassinate you puts a hole in your hired help!

Edit - Keep in mind the ice cool assassin is actually /really/ easy to get. You simply use a PAB or a persona fix chip and data filter implant upgrade to create your own. With skill wires too you can turn anyone in the world into a fairly reliable assassin... Or if nothing else a disposable one.

If you want to go way out like that, have the target just sit at home and rig an anthroform drone that looks just like his fleshbody. Now the most important bodyguard is his TM/hacker.

That basically sums it up. Bodyguards jumping in front of the bullet is a hollywood thing. An assassin who wants someone dead just needs one chance - the trick is to not give it to him.

A seemingly interesting book is "Just 2 Seconds". Which is sitting on my to be read pile.

I realize it is largely a hollywood thing, but I also realize that if you notice someone pulling a gun to shoot your package, you likely won't have enough time to pull your own gun and fire, but you may have enough time to plant yourself between threat and package. And sometimes you would only have enough time by literally throwing yourself in the path (Because stopping makes you slow down considerably before getting to where you want to stop, it is why baseball players slide)

This is accurate, though disingenuous. While the time between the first shot and the last is only a very few seconds, many of these assassinations required many hours or days of effort to execute. Between gathering intelligence, planning, obtaining equipment, and positioning, killing someone important is a time-consuming task.

The dance of death is performed in silence, with the guardian blind to his partner; but the wise master can feel his partners breath and warmth and moves in anticipation. And as both glide through the white sands, each leave prints and trails for the other to see if he knows where to look.