I was hoping that my fellow runners might have come to some more clarity on this subject. Recently, I was told by my GM (first gaming session) that even though the description of the Smartgun System / Smartlink mentions that it allows you to see around corners for firing solutions, that firing from cover would still incur the penalty of -1 dice pool, even though that description says the reason for the penalty is lack of visual on the target. One thought expressed was that it wasn't 'realistic' to fire from behind cover because you would break your wrist from the recoil, so still get the penalty.

Thoughts? Obviously I disagree and am looking for some support, but will end up agreeing only because I don't really want to get into a arguement about the game and ruin the fun.

It is hard enough in a combat situation to accurately fire from an optimal position. Firing while not in a straight-arm position is more difficult with a pistol. With longer firearms aimed around a corner, the difficulty will only increase given the longer and heavier nature of the weapons.

The penalty is good.

I kind of agree with your GM's call on realism grounds. Don't forget that the smartlink gives you a +2 bonus, which derives partly from the extra visual capability you get from mounting a camera on your gun. Shooting around a corner with a smartgun then leaves you at a net modifier of +1 to your roll when compared to standing out in the open and firing an unmodded weapon. That's pretty good.

One sees a lot more through eyes than from a small camera so I understand the DP penalty. It's like using a scope in close range - you see sharply that small circle but with only one eye open, you don't see what's around making it bit difficult to find the target. And your guncam might not have all the nifty visual enchantments like low light/thermal/etc.

As a GM I'd rule that the penalty stands for two reasons:
--Looking through a camera at a situation is a different than standing in front of it and seeing it with your own eyes. Its most an issue of sight and motor control. Slight movements of the gun could result in radical shifts in vision.
--More importantly, just because you've stuck your hand around the corner doesn't mean you've improved your range of motion from behind cover. Part of the problem with cover is that it limits your perspective, another part is that it limits where you can move a weapon to make a clear shot.

If you ruled that smartguns allowed you to shoot from cover with no penalties, then gun combat is going to rapidly devolve into everyone taking shots at each other from cover (even more than it already does). The cover modifiers are there for game balance. But, as was stated earlier, someone with a smartlink shooting from cover is much better off than someone without.

Ahh, gameplay I am cool with, that I can get behind. 'Realism' on the other hand just puts the hairs on the back of my neck on end, especially considering both the fictional and fantastical aspects of the setting - that's not even getting into the use of dice, which I am pretty sure the book is very implicit about.

So, if I want to have some fun shooting around corners, I will be sure to not be doing dual pistols.

I don't think the camera is meant to be used tu cancel the fire from cover modifiers. If you use this modifier then your eyes are already out of cover, otherwise you would get the -6 modifier for blind fire. What the camera could be good for is firing from complete cover without that blind fire malus.

Malus? Isn't that an apple breed? Or are you spreading new made-up words. God bless the living language. I think the old fashioned word is "penalty." Don't get me started on boni!

/rant

[edit]Yeah, Thanks Doc Chaos. I was thinking after I logged off that rants like these, right or wrong, are useless. My apologies.[/edit]

"Malus" is latin, means "bad" (opposit of Bonus), in the german sourcebooks it is used as translation for penalty.

After talking to all my players, I banned guncams from my game. In our testruns it simply lead to people using nothing but them. And having shootouts where everyone is in cover and has to blind fire (or aim at someone elses hand/gun, good luck) just didnt fit into our idea of firefights.

I solved this by ruling that using a gun cam means that you use the sensor rating of the smart gun instead of agility. which is 1.

It is harsh but they could always upgrade the gun cam.

We found it easiest to simply require a "take aim" (as you would with a scope) to fire a smartgun around a corner while still maintaining "full" cover, using only the weapon's camera. A lot of players aren't willing to halve their effective rate of fire in a gunfight... if for no other reason than hard cover is a hard thing to find.

What I do:

* There's at least the "firing from cover" modifier.
* If the character's firing position makes it difficult to handle the recoil or move the weapon, I might add another modifier.
* Keep in mind that only the vision modes installed on the guncam can be used. So no low-light/thermo if the guncam doesn't have them.
* Keep in mind that it makes you less aware of your surroundings (penalties of perception rolls)
* Use it a lot both as a player (when my character is likely to use it) and as a GM.

I think you mean "explicit." And if the term "realism" bothers you in this context, swap it out for "plausibility." Whatever you want to call it, shooting from a nonstandard firing position and aiming through a tiny video camera just isn't going to be as effective as a proper shooting posture (otherwise, as others have said, that's all anyone would ever do). Shadowrun as a game represents things like this with penalties, so...

Even the use of the word plausible stretches it for me in the augmented fantasy future of SR4. If a cyber eye can provide enhanced sight over a regular human one, I am not really sure how a tiny video camera would be any kind of hindrance with the right triangulation from hardware and software, which the description of the smartgun/smartlink seems to suggest with target acquisition and calculating firing solutions.

Besides, you would be surprised what one could do to shoot from behind cover IRL and hit a target accurately. Position of the arm and a mirror would do just the trick in a pinch, it isn't too different than firing accurately from the hip, you are just rotating your arm in the shoulder from vertical to horizontal, putting your body in a stable position, and controlling your breathing. Unless I am misunderstanding what you are suggesting with "nonstandard firing position", that is pretty much how the best / trick shooters practice is in less than standard/common firing positions, from my understanding of things like the old wild west shows where the shooter would fire from the hip at playing cards shooting the aces out.

Hmm, I wonder what crazy stuff snipers in that Stalingrad movie would have done had they had cameras for their sights that they could view at all times by way of Augmented Reality through the Smartlink... Also, have you seen any of the future warrior concepts for use of drone or satellite imagery to identify and acquire firing solutions on enemy combatants? Very reminiscent of the smartgun/smartlink system.

That reminds me, I gotta get some sort of jamming/white noise equipment for my character, would be good in a pinch to mess up security trying to use a wireless smartgun system against 'im. I wonder if there is anything like that in the BBB...

That said though, I like the gameplay explaination, wouldn't be much fun if everyone was always behind cover and all you had to shoot at was the gun ... though that would make the importance of flanking to take away your opponents ability to have cover much more important.

Well, compare the hardware costs of cybereyes and smartgun systems. Some portion of that is due to the difference in video quality, since cybereyes are intended to surpass normal vision and smartgun cams... aren't. This is a fairly pointless tangent though, so enh.


There are ECM systems in there, but it likely wouldn't do any good. Even if the smartgun is wireless (more paranoid types will probably have it hardwired via fibre optics, which also provides a handy gun tether in the form of the cable), it's got a Signal rating of 0. ECM/jamming serves to reduce Signal strength by its own rating, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible to reduce Signal below 0, so there'd be no net effect. If you need to mess with someone's wireless gear like that, make nice with your team's hacker and get him to do it instead.

Shooting around corners seems not to be all that hard if you are using something like this: http://www.cornershot.com/

How does one triangulate via single camera? A camera can show a small area at a time compared to a human eye. Ever tried using a scope on a gun and find a target that you are unaware of it's location? There's a good reason why spotters are used for that.


Those things work if you have the time to take aim or have practiced zillion times but it's a whole another thing during a combat situation. You can always spend few aim actions to negate the penalty, but no matter what, it's still a lot easier to use a weapon as intended than using it behind a corner or whatnot. The cornershoot system that Stahlseele pointed out does work nicely, but it's still far from being as good as sticking head out and aim carefully. Yes, it's a lot safer and what it's intended it's doing a good job, but it just isn't perfect. The idea of it is to be able to aim and shoot without opponent ever noticing you. Shooting behind cover and shooting blindly are two quite different things.

Also, cards don't shoot back

Was it Tac-net or something what the system was called on SR to be able to use multiple cameras and audio devices to map out the battlefield to get bonus for combat? That's what you need if you want to have your smartlinked guns work behind corners and such.

That's wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-angle_lens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisheye_lens
That is available for any good camera. If you want to go into cutting edge hardware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_camera

Plus the smartgun camera does not come with vision magnification included. The comparison with a scope does not stand.

Why don't we compromise on "verisimilitude".



I like this solution. My group's old houserule was that cover was a penalty you took (up to 3) that gave your opponents double that penalty. So if I took -3 to my shot, the opponent would have -6 to shoot me. (And it was actually pluses to the target number, but whatev.) You could aim it down (so that sneaky people would often be able to get rid of their penalties), but it was easy to keep track of and we liked it.

I never much cared for the corner shooting, because it seemed to me that holding the firearm more awkwardly would incur a larger penalty than simply taking cover. (Off the top of my head, I'd give it a -3-- half what blindfire incurs, and with a smartlink just a little worse than holding the weapon properly and using iron sights.) A big part of the penalty to the shot would seem to be the inability to track on a target intuitively.

Either way, if we're going to be doing a lot of corner shooting, we need to come up with better rules for damaging objects, since it seems like people are going to be making a lot of called shots to the other guy's guncam.

So it means that most of the Shadowrunners shoot like most third world militia: they would just stick a weapon out from around a corner, they wouldn't even take that moment to aim, they just would spray with automatic fire. Shooting from windows and alleyways without actually seeing who they were shooting, women jumping out from behind the buildings, people running a couple of feet down an alleyway. Most of their cover made from corrugated tin and particle board.

Sorry, seems there are a few things I am not fully comprehending aka confuse my newbie mind is. Er, is my SR4 book missing something? I am looking at the firearm accessories table on page 311 since the description doesn't have a, er what was it called, capacity rating like the cyberware tables seem to have, I have Mount, Availability and Cost ... so where does the sensor or device rating come from?

Here is what I am working with:
page 141 SR4

page 311 - 312 SR4


Because of those things I read I put enhancements on the smartgun, smartlinked to some contacts, through the skinlink so as to avoid that accessing via wireless link thing.

So if my sight is overlayed with the Augmented Reality coming from the pistol's smartgun system, wouldn't that be just like sticking my head out around the corner to see without actually having to? And then what would be exposed would be the pistol and my hand holding it and the forearm behind it bent at the elbow like I was firing from the hip, raising or turning my arm as needed to track a target accurately. Then if they get the chance to shoot back, they would be facing a -2, -4, or -6 depending on how good my cover is and the material of the cover might provide the whole barrier thing, so they would be shooting through the barrier or destroying the barrier.

Am I missing something? I think the net +1 if I use one pistol plus the smartlink/smartgun +2 and the -1 from shooting from cover it is still ok, I just hope you might understand my confusion with how the descriptions stack up.

So, how much vision enhancements can I put into the smartgun camera? How about my contacts? The tables and descriptions don't seem to be at all clear on their capacity like the tables with cyber eyes.

To be watching this please.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RaubAtWZQM
Put in InfraDead or LowBlight. Maybe Laser-Pointer too.
Combine with the Radar-Sensor and ultra-Sound and you can shoot everything.
First use the Radar to see through wall if there's someone behind there, then use this to actually shoot AROUND the Wall.

Yes, exactly. And with this you wouldn't even have to expose your hand and forearm. In movies, a version of this showed up in Wanted near the start when there was the shoot out in the drug store with Fox, Angelina Jolie's character, using this while using cover...

If someone wants to argue, shell out 200 bucks in character for this. then show this vid around and tell them that you are using this.

Just remember - the inexpensive camera neutralizer can knock-out a smartgun's gun-cam just as with any other camera. Make it widespread among higher-end security forces and the corner shooting will become a problem of the past.

Ahh, there we go, a counter besides trying to shoot the weapon in question, nice! Er, wait a sec, is that in something other than the SR4 BBB? I am having some trouble finding it, it doesn't show up in the index of my book.

Oh, while looking for it I did find some other stuff here that seemed to suggest shooting around corners as well on pave 324: Mage Sight Goggles ("shooting" spells) and Periscope - "An L-shaped tube with two mirrors, the periscope allows the user to look (or shoot) around corners. Hmm, that Endoscope would be fun to for looking under doors like when playing Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell.

It is pretty important to see/hear/smell/feel the opposition before they see you, yes?

The camera neutralizer is in Arsenal. If you want to have real fun with it, remember that cybereyes are electronic cameras too... but that's whole 'nother thread.

Yeah. The main advantage of things like these and smartguns as regards corner shooting is that you can actually aim to some degree instead of having to spray and pray (i.e., fire blind with the full -6 penalty) like you would unassisted. The specific two you mention above are great for magicians because they can't use any sort of video system (like smartguns) for spell targeting, but purely optical means (fibre optics, mirrors, etc.) are totally kosher.

Put it this way if you take two guys one with a regular submachine gun with laser sight and the other with the cornershot. They go at it in a straight gun fight with no corners. But the cornershot guy can only use his screen to acquire and aim at the target. Would:

A) They are just as effective.
B) The guy with the regular gun is more effective than the guy that has to use the LCD screen.
C) The guy with the LCD screen is more effective than the guy shooting normally.

If the answer is A, then you are right, there shouldn't be any modifiers for using the smartgun around corners.
If the answer is C, then maybe we should make all of our military infantry shoot using only LCD screens rather then their own eyes.
If the answer is B, then yes there should be some kind of penalty when you are using the smartgun around corners.

I'd go with A, but not for the reason you've offered. The smartgun compensating for the guncam-aiming makes both combatants receive a net +1 from their gear. Keep in mind, you can use a periscope or mage sight goggles to peek around a corner without a smartgun, so "firing from cover" being an independent -1 penalty makes sense.

Are you picking A because that is what the rules say or are you looking at the cornershot gun Stahlseele was referring to on the prev page?

I didn't even watch the video. The RAW are thoroughly vague, so we're left with the old standbys of "is this stupid" and "is this fun?" Basically, a guncam being one of many ways to peek around a corner makes sense, as does the smartgun's bonus offsetting the penalty.

You should all check out Future weapons season 3 episode 9, it has Intelligent Optical System Aimfinder that nicely demonstrates how gun-cam can be used to fire from cover.

Unfortunately it seems my Google-Fu is not up to the task, would you happen to have a link to the video? I did find descriptions of the episode however, but they contained little more detail than your own description.

Sadly no, i spent almost an houer looking for a video at youtube bewore posting.
But here's a link to IOS website Aimfinder is descripted in the las paragraph.

Ahh...



Interestingly enough, look at the smartgun description again:



I'll leave out the additional descriptions on Smartlink, (Eye) Contacts, and Skinlink but they strike me as pretty similar. Especially pay special attention to the use of the underlined. Still, if you don't want to have to 'cut the pie' with your arm tracking, thus exposing that limb, the corner shot previously mentioned would be the way to stand back from a corner slightly and still do your thing.

Hmm, unfortunately the Periscope previously mentioned in the BBB that I found says it can be used for shooting around a corner but since it doesn't confer a +2 bonus like the Smartgun system, it still incurs a -1 penalty from shooting from cover? At least you don't get hit with the -6 for Target hidden (blind fire), right? *shrug*

Have you ever used a periscope in real life? It has no targeting software; it just lets you look around corners.

Yup! Periscopes are fun, I recall making them when I was younger. My intention was only ask if it was accurate to remove blind fire in the cases of the smartgun/periscope. I ask only because I want to be sure when presenting my character accurately getting the drop on some security heading for our position or knowing what is going on around a corner without having to expose my pretty elven head. Not trying to argue against rules, just gain a better understanding them so I get on with the role playing of a criminal who shoots things for a living.

OK, a couple of thoughts:

1) You are limited on an INTERNAL smartlink by the capacity of the weapon to no more than six (6) vision enhancements, so the "Thermal/Low-light/Flare-comp/Image-mag" gun with the "improved rangefinder" option only leaves you a single modification space to play with. An EXTERNAL SmartGun has foue (4) slots, per Unwired. Choose your enhancements carefully.

2) The camera neutralizer is indeed another thread, however flare compensation should partly offset that. And we get back to "why doesn't it affect normal eyes?" but that's that other thread again. I think the item is miserably written and statted.

3) The AimPoint system above is a LOT closer to a SmartGun than many people may realize because it takes care of image rotation, which can SERIOUSLY disorient the user in the heat of battle. Another weapon that is approaching smartgun technology is the ballistic computer used with Barrett's new sniper rifle, which takes into account air pressure, humidity, bullet spec, barrel wear, distance to target, cross winds, and planetary rotation. Combine the two and add more sensors to detect things like barrel droop due to heating and now we're playing Shadowrun.

4) The way I have always imagined the effect of a SmartGun was that it compared the view in the user's field of view to the picture in the gun camera and used that as a means to throw a crosshairs in the user's field of view indicating barrel direction relative to sight. Combine with an angle rate sensor on the weapon and you can predict where those rounds will land and shift the aforementioned crosshairs to create a LCOS (Lead-Computing Optical Sight). In other words, it shows you where your rounds will probably impact if you were to pull the trigger at that given moment. So the idea would be to use your hand (holding the weapon) to bring the computed impact point onto your desired target and pull the trigger.

Even with my (very computer reliant) vision mentioned in #4 above, being deprived of the user's field of vision means it is down to "shooting by camera" and that's not as effective. Having the effect of the SmartGun reduced to an effective net +1 would suit me just fine.

Anyhow, that's my thinking.

You know what? I have just realized that the firing from cover modifier has changed from -1 to -2 in SR4A.

Seriously?! Drek. You would think they would have mentioned that one little "minor" change in the "changes" doccument.

They have.

Was wondering if uncompensated recoil shoud also be doubled for shooting around corners as it is easily possible that one would be holding thier gun in a less than optimal firing position.

Sweet, then you could do that with a minigun and get a penalty of 42. You're just as likely to win the lottery as hit anything, so either way you're a winner!

Then you would probably get killed by your own pals who don't want to catch a lost bullet.

First, they'll have to penetrate my sphere of APDS rounds traveling in all directions simultaneously. Mua ha ha.

LLOL! Suddenly I had the image of my can't-hit-a-thing loves-old-movies 2 agility mage casting levitate and grabbing a minigun. Later on, when asked what the hell he was thinking, he'd reply "Dude! Don't you remember the old Starfighter movie? That was my Death Blossom! It was SO TOTALLY AWESOME!"

And if I recall, the consensus in the other thread was that there's no way such an inexpensive piece of gear as the camera neutralizer should be able to blind any combatants equipped with cybereyes indescriminately. At the very least, flare compensation should provide some protection. Ideally, cybereyes should be completely immune from being blinded by the camera neutralizer.



It'd be a houserule, but I wouldn't have a problem with doubling all recoil when shooting around a corner. But as long as you have less than 100% cover, recoil modifiers would work as normal. If you're firing an automatic weapon with the axis of recoil not in line with your shoulder/arm, the gun would get hideously hard to control real fast.

Actually, there is/was some dissention. By RAW, cybereyes are cameras. Many people - including those that normally go for RAW over RAI - still voiced how they felt about this it, but that doesn't alter the RAW that something intended take out cameras can take out cameras mounted in eye sockets. And your ideal treatment of it is nonsensical and inconsistant with how the device operates. I will concede that flare compensation should have some interaction with the system, but I don't fe it should nullify it.