With past versions of SR you could downplay the smartgun being used to fire around corners but with SR4 (and even SR3 I think) the smartgun is officially a guncam that players can use to fire around corners. I hate this since it leads to a bunch of jackasses with only their forearms or hands exposed while blasting away at each other. Totally weak.

So now, how do I deal with this crap? Here's my areas of concern:

• Recoil. Recoil has to be factored differently, maybe even doubled, due to the lack of proper bracing.
• Odd perception. I know that it's basically another eye, just mounted on the end of your gun. This still seems incredibly akward to me. Should I impose negatives?
• Is it just a called shot to his someones hand? What's the damage? What is the hand is cyber?

God, the guncam is freakin weak and really takes something out of the game for me. I prefer the reticle overlay only. Oh well, progression eh?

That's always a fun issue to address. It actually came up during my last Cyberpunk 2020 campaign, and I offer that solution for your use. I solved it by having anyone who did that- PC or NPC alike- make an extra set of checks to see if they manage to keep ahold of the gun or if it gets banged into something, dropped, or whatever else, in addition to an accuracy modifier.

To steal an example from a CP session: James gets the ingenious idea to hold his gun "gangsta style" flip his arm around the corner, and use the guncam to hit the thugs trying to kill them. I hit him with a recoil check and a -4 to accuracy, since he's shooting from the metaphysical hip. It works well enough, assuming your players don't do anything overly stupid to try and elminate the check. (Such as, say, hammering the gun into the wall after every shot to adjust their recoil-skewed grip.)

I was thinking a -2 or -4 for perception issues and double the recoil. And maybe another -2 if someone ever tries shooting their gun "gangsta style" in one of my games.

What is the big deal?

Sticking out only your hand gives you 'good cover' (-4). Sticking 1/3 your body out gives you 'good cover' (-4). Both situations apply a -1 on the shooter for firing from cover (using guncam or not).
So, using a guncam to hide all except your hands or showing half of your face and your right arm make no difference rulewise.
There is really no need for additional modifiers.

Have them get shot in the hand. That'll fix that.

a classic case of a problem that´s as much the GM as the players to fix, so I suggest one rule and one way the GM can change his/her gameplay

the rule: double recoil

the gameplay change: make the npc be a more frequent user of grenades, or just let the NPC use a jamming device that scrambles the cam feed.

Or you could just use the rules, in which the shooter takes a -1 and the the guy shooting at him is at -4

Which I am pretty sure is the solution we (Dumpshock) came up with when I brought this up in a thread. Remember the bonus from the smartgun system too still applies. Oh, and isn't the penalty now -2 for shooting from cover IIRC?

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...orners&st=0

But I disagree that it is "cheese", I think it is pretty cool. And yes, they should get shot in the hand if hit, but wouldn't that be a called shot? Otherwise they are trying to shoot through your cover, which has its own stuff in shooting through a barrier, yes?

Other things brought up were matching the AR vision seen in your contacts / glasses / goggles up with what is on the smartgun's camera, so you can charge them twice for any of that, prevent it with capacity and if they don't match up, hit em with the vision modifiers as well because they are seeing through that camera on the weapon.

And even if they don't want to take the penalties, they could always at least use the camera to peak around corners in a pinch, even though one of those camera cords would probably be more stealthy but I guess it would depend on how one uses it, like if they use it close the ground and if they slowly cut the pie to avoid triggering a meta-human's perception a great deal with sudden shape and motion. Then once you know what is there, step/sneak out and go to town.

If you want to put a stop to it, corporate strike teams with RADAR sensors and APDS ammo who just shoot through the PCs cover will put a stop to it right quick. On a less drastic scale, have the good guys do it right back to the PCs. Putting both sides in good cover just prolongs the fight, which gives security or gangers more time to marshall reinforcements.

Or just throw grenades at them.

Why add the stuff in about called shots? Bullets have to hit you somewhere - they are going to hit whatever is sticking out of the cover. It's just like getting shot any other time



Is a good idea.

*Offtopic*

I used to play paintball, at a level where it paid my tuition through university.

When just playing recreational games, I loved to see the suburban wannabe thugs come in, hold their rented guns gangsta style, and then scream that we must be cheating because they were pointing right at us from 20 feet away and we weren't going out. It never occured to them that paintballs are gravity feed, and by holding it sideways they were pulling the trigger 30+ times on an empty chamber...

That would be just before we stopped laughing long enough to pop them once in the goggles.

Paintball players (and cops) actually encourage the use of gangsta firing. Anything that the retards think is cool but just makes it harder for them to hit is a good thing for the rest of us.

This is where the GM should bring up the following:

'OK, so we're fighting at night, and you're using your guncam to shooot... I know you took every vision mod possible for your cybereyes, but did you take them for your gun as well? If not, it's just a normal everyday camera giving you a television style feed. If you want the benefits of thermal or low light you'll have to stick your head out as well. If not, full vision penalties apply.'

This should be immediately followed by the CorpSec team chucking various grenades. Smoke (which won't apply to them, being properly equipped), explosive, etc.

unless they're using skin link, just to prevent hacking of their gun cams. I know I do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C0FQPk5mv0

I'm just saying... Its not a smart gun link but we already are firing around corners...

I had this sudden image of a runner tossing his gun up into the air from behind cover, aiming with a gun-cam, and wirelessly firing the gun when the gun's rotation in mid-air brings it in line with the target.

Yes, highly improbable, but tell me that wouldn't look cool in a cinematic super slo mo.



-np

Very Cinematic... if the Super Slo Mo is slow enough...

Keep the Faith

Do it with an SMG or machine pistol, and give it lots of lateral spin as it goes up...spin-BURST-spin-BURST-spin-BURST... Use the rules for suppression fire.

This, too, is awesome sauce...

The cinematic character better still have his wireless enabled...

The world has changed, omae. You either adapt or die.

Saying that using a guncam changes gunfights would be exaggerating a bit: a good use of cover leads to similar situations. And the solutions are the same: be a sharpshooter and shoot whatever sticks out of the cover or, more efficiently, shoot through the cover, throw a grenade or just use the good old cover&flanking method.

In my game, everyone with half a brain (and a cover) uses his guncam to shoot from behind a cover. The combat might get a little less cinematic (though augmented character can pull off impressive feats) but it's also more tactical and realistic, and that's what I'm aiming for.

The 'big deal' is that a lot of players - or at least Dumpshockers - argued that they didn't have 'good cover' by sticking the gun out, they had total protection and thereby enemies had to use the shooting through barriers or blind fire rules to hit them. But yeah, that's the way I do it. You lean your head and guns out, or you stick just your hand out, either way you get the same cover bonus, so I don't care which you do, as a GM.

^^ Yeah, what Blade said. ^^ Besides, the clunky piece of Israeli... uh... tech above there is also the Land Warrior gun-cam that feeds to the monocle and the built-in HUD from the Future Force Warrior package that will be in use in about 15 years. Shooting around corners in here to stay. Thank god.

Excellent, thanks for the input everyone.

I'm houseruling double recoil for shooting around corners.

I'm not sure how I should handle armor and damage to someone's hand/forearm.

Armor
If someone is wearing armor that specifically doesn't cover their forearms then I can easily rule that they have no armor. And honestly, I can't see a lot of armor on someone's gloves. Enough that would matter anyways. I can see mil-spec armor having some sort of hand armor but even then it'd be lighter compared to their overall. Crap, this is going to take a complete examination of how armor works.

Damage
I'd think that a nice bonus to only exposing your arm to gunfire is that you could only take a certain amount of damage. I don't see immediate fatality from getting your hand blown off. Yes, I understand shock and blood loss. Still, I think there needs to be a max.
Also, at what damage level is the hand/arm simply disabled? And is it completely useless or is there additional negative modifiers when just trying to use that hand (think Deckard in Bladerunner; he could still climb with his busted hand, just not well).
Are there rules governing limb/hand damage? I'm at work; I'll check it later tonight.

Doubling recoil will just result in more Gasvents. Let them have max cover of 6 or 8 for using the gun trick, however they must take a penalty of half the cover they claim. This makes the most sense to me - How much time do you want to spend exposed/aiming vs covered?
Also there should be a defense pool penalty of 1 or 2 to reflect the effect of getting smacked in the side of the head while looking through a periscope.

Losing a hand could easily put someone in an incapacitated state of shock and bleed them out. So start drawing up rules for kevlar hand puppets, cause theyre comin.

Honestly, I'm concerned with properly translating the physics of shooting around corners (recoil) so it makes sense to the players when I slap them with negatives. Fortunately my players don't like the idea of using the guncam to shoot around corners. They don't quite understand how you could due to recoil and they don't want their hands blown off. But I do have to be prepared for the situation to crop up when people get pinned down.

I'm fine with armored gauntlets and with uber gas vents; as long as the problem get dealt with logically. And hands will be exploding if someone tries to abuse this tactic.

Isn't there already a 90 degree prism attachment available?

Could have sworn I've seen it, sits behind the regular scope and lets you aim from the side, flips out of the way when you don't need it.



-np

I use an houserule to deal with this: when a character is hit, I choose the location according to several parameters (what's visible, the amount of damage (you don't get 6 damage for losing a finger), the armor (a light pistol doing a lot of damage despites a heavy armor means that a weakspot/unprotected area was hit), and so on).

I then consider that the limb has 3 damage boxes more than the wound has caused (but I'm thinking of using a table for this to adapt the value to the size of the limb so that a finger will be easier to disable than the body). For example, if a character was hit in the arm for 1 damage box, then this arm will have 4 damage boxes. If the character was hit for 7 damage boxes, the arm will have 10 damage boxes and will probably be disabled.

The "located" wounds have a wound modifier that applies when using the limb. This modifier is cumulative with the general wound modifier (so if he's his hit for 3 damage boxes, which means 6 for the arm, he'll suffer a -2-1=-3 modifier when using this arm).

I'm using this rule in my campaign and it works well.

Again with the Real World Physics argument intruding upon my perfect Dystopian World.... Quit it...

Keep the Faith

Sorry Tymeaus.

I like to play the game RAW as much as possible but if something pops up that I believe merits a house rule I've got to think it out and be able to present it to my gamers in a way that makes sense.

No Problems...

Hehe, I completely forgot about the sideways periscope. Everyone always focuses on the high-tech side of things. Reminds me of the joke about the U.S. spending millions to invent a pen that works in space, while the Russians, facing the same problem, used a pencil. I need to keep Kipling's Arithmetic on the Frontier in mind, "The odds are on the cheaper man."

Gah NM, followed a link and quoted wrong topic. Sorry for the res.