Yesterday I took a one day class to qualify for a concealed firearms permit. In the morning while we were waiting everyone to get signed in, the instructor popped in some old Paladin Press (infamous for publishing Ashida Kim's books) VHS tape about "stopping power", which went on and on about how apparently some historical cops went ahead and made a big statistical table rating all kinds of handgun cartridges by the percentage of times someone being shot by the cartridge resulted in a "one shot stop".

Was this the body of statistics that had been used for the Cyberpunk combat engine? For the Pheonix Command lethality tables? Because my first thought was, "Goddamn, I have to get ahold of those statistics so that I can make a role playing game with firefights based on those statistics!" Then I realized that's probably exactly what the Cyberpunk and Pheonix Command people had done, and that's probably why the statistics in Pheonix Command are slightly odd, like there being no difference in random chance of killing you whether you're hit by 9mm parabellum or .45 ACP.

Be that as it may, I still think we totally need a RPG system where every time you're shot it's a random chance of killing you, or else being a non-debilitating wound, with each subsequent shot raising the probability a little bit due to rising levels of trauma.

It's a damn fine line to walk between making it a realistic but not overwhelming possibility on one hand, and avoiding having to make a new character every other session on the other.

Yeah it is a fine line.

Congrats on going for the Conceal Carry though. What is your heavy pistol of choice?

I qualified on both a Kimber Custom TLE 2 1911 and a Ruger P97DC. The Kimber 1911s already have an excellent reputation but I feel that the Ruger P97 is totally underrated. It's easy to use, really fast to reload due to large size, and seems to be nearly infallible. It's also very rugged and durable, and will probably last forever even if you practice a lot with it. For all intents and purposes it's probably the best kind of thing to actually carry for these reasons, even though people who shoot competitively might fault it for a mushy trigger pull and the double-action first shot.

iirc, the cyberpunk 2013 rules where based of FBI work of some sort, 2020 toned the rules down tho as they was proving a bit to lethal.

I give credit to Paranoia for figuring out how to operate on the other side of that line and still have a lot of fun

Actually I rather like SRs way of being easy to "stop" but somewhat tricky to "kill".

On that note, as I understand it those statistics are a bit skewed because they were looking at the odds a round "stopped" someone. It's all they had, so it wasn't a bad idea to take a look at it. But, especially in regards to one shot stops, stopping is more psycological than physiological unless you're talking about a hit to the central nervous system. Even a shotgun blast through a lung won't stop someone instantly if they're high enough on drups or adrenaline. They'd eventually die, but odds are nobody is going to wait for that, and there will be follow up shots so it wouldn't be a one shot kill.

I wonder if in practice having more muzzle flash and report increases the odds of a one shot stop.

One of my hobby is writing new RPGs, usually by adapting and modifying extensively existing ones. Shadowrun is no exception, and upping the lethatly of weaponry without screwing up the game "consistency" is a challenge. In fact, I have lots of challenge with that one...

I might post a thread asking for advices, but from experience, I know it doesn't work.

On the lethality note, I kind of liked how Deadlands did things (in the earlier edition I played).

Not neccesarily the whole system mind you. But part of it was that damage was deadly and could kill you fast, but, in a manner similar to SR Edge, you could burn "chips" in order to negate damage.

However these chips turned into something like karma/experience if you didn't burn them. So you got the tension and gritty feel, without rolling up new players.

Actually I find many players are much more worried about getting shot in their XP than in their lung!

Pretty easy, really. All else being equal, just up the damage level of each weapon up one notch.

If you feel the problem is skilled people rarely make deadly shots, decrease the TNs for shooting by one notch.

I wouldn't mess with power rating overall for MOST weapons, but in my game we say that long guns all halve any non-hardened armor (to represent the penetration factor), which makes them FAR deadlier and gives you an actual reason for using an AR-15 rather than an Ares Pred.