I think I already addressed that, Tymeaus. The M21 is 12lb. Obviously, there is wide variation between battle rifles used for sniping, extreme range sniper rifles, and anti-material rifles. My point is that there *is* that variation.

If rules just have to be made, simply add a note to the individual weapons (Barrett 107, or whatever it's called) that it has to have a bipod, or whatever you fancy. It seems, however, punitive and unfun, especially in a world of Trolls and magic.

Sure... but I was pointing out that even the "Short" barreled Barret is exceedingly heavy... Sniper Rifles run the gamut, no doubt about that... but I would never put an Assault/Battle Rifle in the same category as a Sniper Rifle... can it make some pretty good long range shots, sure (as long as the shooter is good), but not in the same category as a dedicated Sniper Rifle can...

Hell, I have seen an individual (A Marine Sniper back in the late 80's) make some hellacious shots at just over 1000 meters with an M16 with open sights on a man sized target... but no one will ever claim that the M16 is a Sniper Rifle on par with the Barret or HK PSG1... there is a reason that there are seperate and distinct classes for Sniper Rifles and Assault/Battle Rifles... they fill completely different roles...

Keep the Faith

That's certainly true. I'm just saying don't penalize a crazy Shadowrunner.

Oh No... Definitely... let him dig his own grave...

Keep the Faith

The "21 foot rule" is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented concepts in tactical training. The entire, and only, point of the "Tueller Drill" (as it is correctly called) is to demonstrate that a person with a ready edged or impact weapon can close the gap and hurt you badly and/or kill you before (or as) you draw your holstered firearm from a neutral position and fire if they begin their assault from a distance of 21 feet or less. This leads to thousands upon thousands of people incorrectly trying to speed-draw their pistols to "beat the rule" when they should really focus on getting the hell out of the way and/or swapping to a melee weapon/unarmed response that will allow the shooter to attain a position of dominance that then allows them to more safety access their firearm.

Just, FYI.

On another note, please keep in mind that many of the current sniper systems is use are fairly old technology. The Barrett 82 is at least 25 years old, the H&K PSG-1 is even older, and even the venerable M24 is currently being slowly phased out for newer weapons that are replacing them. By comparing the weapons of today in size, shape, materials, etc to the weapons of Shadowrun you're basically comparing the weapons of today with the weapons in common use in WWII and the Korean War. Yes, they're basically the same concept but there has been *a lot* of advancements in the meantime in per-shot accuracy, materials technology, and ballistics. I mentioned the new chopped down and bullpup sniper systems that radically decrease weapon mass and weapon length and you guys still kept on going on about the now-defunct PSG1 and the Barrett which even today has been supplanted by superior designs that are being used today.

Step out of the late 20th century weapons mental box, yo? Like Doc McCoy used to say, "They're dead, Jim..."

One of the specific rifles in the report I mentioned is the Remington ACR, formerly known as the Magpul Masada. It apparently can be accurized enough for the support sniper role, but still be used for CQB fairly well - the 18" barrel variant is 35 inches in total length, and with the stock folded it drops to 25" long. The shooter in that report expressed that it would have been a hell of a lot easier just carrying that thing instead of both a precision rifle AND an assault rifle around the streets in Iraq.



-karma

I suppose it's a factor if the guy with the knife is hidden on the ceiling above the guy with the gun.






-karma

And yet, in the Shadowrun Game World, there are three Sniper Systems that are currently in use today... the Barret, the HK-PSG and the Walther MA-2100... so your argument does not hold a lot of water... and also, just because the system has been in use for 25 years doe not mean that it has not been updated in that 25 years... materials change, weapons become more accurate, but the weapon design remains the same...

Just sayin'

Keep the Faith

In the real world, bullets aren't instant killers either. Even if you do put a few rounds in the attacker's chest before he reaches you, he could still be on his feet for over 10 seconds, stabbing away at you, before he's incapacitated.

It is also little consolation that a knife isn't an "instant" killer if you still die from bleeding out.

I stopped thinking of most of the people who do this as power gamers ages ago; I've simply had too many different people stick to one weapon far too many times to simply write it off as spontaneous min-maxing. Skills are pretty damn expensive in SR4 and there's very little incentive to grabbing multiple firearm skills unless the GM starts inventing disincentives. Many players figure this out pretty quickly, and so secondary firearm skills are one of the first things to go if a player sheets up a concept and find that they need another half dozen BP or so to really make it sing. As such, I kind of find this to be a failure of the system to encourage what I want to see in a game as opposed to players shamelessly min-maxing.

So if it's really just a problem of verisimilitude I would consider trying the carrot over the stick. Talk to the players and see if offering a discount on the Firearms group or maybe even collapsing the group into a single skill would be enough for them to consider a more varied weapon load out. I've found that most players will choose the weapon that makes sense for the job if given the opportunity to do so without paying through the nose with precious BP and Karma. And frankly, the rules are so lacking in granularity that in practice the characters don't really end up all that much more powerful anyway; using the "right" gun for every situation typically just means a extra box of damage or an extra die now and again. The only real drawback of going the "all-in-one" route is that you may find a situation in which the disarmed Face grabs the fallen Samurai's Alpha and goes all Rambo on people despite having a background that previously limited them to using pistols.

Part of the problem here is that Automatics is so versatile compared to the other two firearms.

One solution that's just occured to me is overlapping the groups a little and putting Machine pistol in Pistols and Automatics and Assault Rifle in Automatics and Longarms. Not sure how balanced that would wind up but would give a bit more scope to those not taking Automatics.

I've experimented with a number of weapon group tweaks. Balance has never really ended up being a big problem, honestly. As you pointed out, Automatics are already so good that a player can already get a decent approximation of whatever they need for most situations with one skill anyway if they really want to. The biggest problem with Automatics is that you'd really want a good Palming pool since concealing machine pistols is obviously a lot harder than hiding a holdout, which really hurts for archetypes that may not want to go all in with Agility.

The house rule we've mostly agreed on is, yes, Machine Pistols in (Pistols). There are other things, but that's the biggest deal.

My house rule is that the automatics skill applies when using full auto fire. Other changes Ive made are pistols is changed to short-arms and is used when firing a gun with one hand (SMGs have a -1 DP penalty, ARs -2, and shotguns/sport rifles -4) or double handed (both hands on the main grip, reduces the penalty by 1), and long-arms is used when firing a gun with an elongated grip (standard rifle grip). Heavy weapons is gone, grenade launchers and rocket launchers are exotic ranged weapons (with guided rockets using the electronic warfare skill), and gunnery is unchanged.

However in case of firearms this is the exception, not the rule. Because even if you don't hit something vital, the equivalent of a few solid punches to the chest will give the target some pause.

Knives on the other hand will only affect tissue which is directly in the path of the blade, transfer zero energy to the target, and you need to get uncomfortably close to hit the other guy. Sure, Mister Miyagi or a troll on K-10 can be very effective knife fighters, but if someone has that ammount of skills or raw force he doesn't need a knife

iirc Modern American riflemen are responsible for targets up to 300 meters away, and (if supported thusly) a squad's Dedicated Marksman is responsible for longer targets (out to 800m), as well as "high value" targets (machine gun crews, heavy weapon crews, etc), as well as all the standard duties of every other rifleman (i.e. CQB if necessary) They generally use either a base M4/M16, or something modified with additional optics and possibly a longer barrel. I have heard that they have been reactivating old M14's for this role, which I like since my M1A (civilian M14) is my favorite rifle, hands down.

I'd love for SR to give the old "Battle Rifle" some love, as they are usually somewhere between an AR and a sniper rifle, and have to be custom designed. I generally just say they are a custom sport rifle, with a 20-30 round mag.


I always wonder, in the age of smart links and eye mounted optics, what's the point of even scoping a rifle anyway. Why add that fragile and cumbersome glass when most combat vets will probably have cyber eye magnification and smart links. As long as the smart software is configured correctly, and your eyes haven't been damaged there would be no need to worrying about disturbing your optics during combat.

Yes, we changed the Sport Rifles into Sport/Battle Rifles in my group. We just use things like the G3, FAL, M14 for inspiration.

I assumed that, for smartguns, sniper scoping *means* 'improved smartgun camera', and yes, we consider it (at best) an alternative to having improved eye- vision. Vision Magnification in your cybereyes means you can snipe with that smartgun, AFAIK.

The standard US Marine Rifleman is trained to engage targets out to 500 meters as part of his basic package, and is required to qualify each year... But I do believe that the Army uses 300 Meters and Closer for their standards...

Scopes attached to the Rifle are zeroed to the particular Rifle... that would be a difficult prospect for an Optic mounted in the skull, since each and every rifle has minute differences that will affect the point of aim... that is why you have a dedicated smartgun link for each weapon... cannot get the benefits if there are no components that are dedicated specifically to the weapon in question...

Keep the Faith

It is not the exception. People don't just stop because it hurts. "A few solid punches to the chest" doesn't give the target some pause. Even in something as trivial as sparring, it doesn't work - hurts like hell, and lack of oxygen becomes an issue after a while, but it doesn't prevent you from moving or throwing more punches. With the adrenaline pumping in a life-and-death situation, people will ignore even more pain.

Even a 60 pound deer won't reliably drop from a .308 win expanding hit that takes out heart and lungs, most of the time it'll run quite a distance before dropping. Sure, many humans are weaker than animals and get scared and faint when getting hit, but a determined attacker with adrenaline pumping, you won't see them dropping just because they have a few small holes in their chest, even if they're actually dead.

Indeed... thoguh by the same token, I have seen a dear poleaxed in place from the same fatal shot from a 30-30 Winchester... However, the running is indeed more common... So, the exception becomes immediate succumbing to the wound...

Keep the Faith

How about you do some bare-knuckle fighting with Mr. Valuev and then we talk again

It's not about feeling pain or hitting something vital (or even pushing the target to the ground), just the simple transfer if kinetic energy/momentum at the receiving end of a punch.

So people have some "kinetic energy absorbed" counter, and when it reaches zero they pause? Where did you get this? Kinetic energy doesn't matter one single bit (though there is obviously a correlation between kinetic energy of the attack and the extent of your wounds). If you want to stop someone immediatedly, you can disrupt his mobility apparatus (snap bones, sever muscles, tendons or nerves) or hope he just gives up because it hurts too much. You might be able to find a few anecdotes, but other than that, you're going to have to wait until the guy passes out from oxygen deprevation due to low blood pressure.

The reality is that to stop that guy charging you with a knife, you need a headshot to stop him, which I would think of as very risky. Move sideways so he can't build momentum, get a few rounds in center mass, then handle him as best you can in melee (even if he doesn't just bleed out while you try not getting cut, overpowering a gun shot victim should be doable).

Like I said, do a few rounds of bare-knuckle fighting with a heavyweight boxer and tell me that again...once you woke up from your non-existing knockout.

Or do you want to tell me that a boxer goes to the ground because of the blood loss from a few lacerations?

How many antagonists in Shadowrun are professional Boxers like Mike Tyson? I mean really... fist fights tend to go on a long time... unless someone gets lucky and gets a knock out of some kind... hell, even Boxing matches go on for seconds or minutes (Mike Tyson Fights) to up to 45 minutes/an hour. Most fights do not even end in a Knockout in boxing if memory serves...

Most Shadowrun fights are LONG over before that time...

Even gunshot victims can take hours to actually bleed out if unattended, thoguh it could also happen in a very short time frame if vital vessels/organs have been compromised...

Just Sayin'

Keep the Faith

Yes, I'm quite aware you can knock people out. You don't even need to be a heavy-weight boxer bare-knuckling. I'm 165 pounds and I've knocked a guy out with sparring gloves on (thicker padding than ring gloves).

But the thing is, you said punches to the chest - now you're conveniently switching to punches to the head.

And before you derail this completely, this isn't about boxing - you made an erroneous claim about the stopping power of bullets, then used an erroneous boxing analogy to back it.

Uh, where did I do that?

And the real thing is this: I said "the equivalent of a few solid punches to the chest will give the target some pause". You then claimed that "'A few solid punches to the chest' doesn't give the target some pause.", which of course creates some problems once you want to explain the actual results of a fistfight. If somebody runs towards you and you greet him with a solid punch, the result will not exactly be that he continues to run like nothing happened, regardless of how doped up he is.



Hint: If an anology makes your point look stupid, maybe the problem is not the analogy...

You said punches to the chest here:




Sengir, please try to follow your own arguments.

You said people went down with a couple of rounds to the chest - this is not true. You haven't backed this statement with anything.

You're saying it isn't about pain or hitting something vital, it is about kinetic energy and momentum. This is also false.

You said punches to the chest gave the target pause - I said that it meant pain instantly and after a while oxygen deprivation, but it didn't give you pause except for that.

Now you're trying to dodge around these things - you've started with blows to the head, which is completely irrelevant. You are saying that the effects of blows to the chest in fights have an effect, as if this backs your argument, which it doesn't. Yes, blows to the chest does have an effect, but not what you claimed: it hurts, it can cause spasms in your diaphragm so you have trouble breathing, and rib and muscular damage can also take its tolls. Just like with bullets to the chest, unless the pain makes you emotionally faint, it probably won't have an immediate effect, which is what you claimed.

Not just there, also everywhere else. Not that it really matters, but even your accusation that I switched to blows to the head doesn't hold water.


I do. How about you do the same and explain to me what happens when somebody runs straight into a punch, without invalidating your own claims?

How do punches or bullets *not* 'give pause'? You just got punched/shot!

Yeah, I'm really curious as to what kind of person doesn't fall down when they get shot or punched. Maybe this is just my Body score of 1 talking, but...

I don't know, I don't have any problem with a game in which shooting somebody in the chest a few times stops them in their tracks.

I'm just confused about the apparently weird definition of 'give pause'. It doesn't mean you're blown across the room. But it's absurd to argue that there's zero effect.

There was a pair of fairly recent police-involved shootings where the suspect took six Gold-Dot .45 ACP 230-grain JHP (some seriously premium ammo) to the torso, including a coule of COM shots, and kept fighting. There was another where the suspect, on Marijuana of all things, took a total of 17 shots that where a mix if .223 Remington BHP and .40 S&W 180-grain Gold-Dot JHP (again, some pretty serious stuff here) including several torso/COM hits, and two shots in the neck. Neither one of these guys was particularly huge or trained as unstoppable ninja assassins or anything.

People can be fairly easily stopped (when it happens to you) but also very hard to stop (when you're trying to do it to someone else) and you never know which until you're neck deep in it...

Hey, I saw in a movie that shooting a guy blows him across the room, through a wall and sets him on fire! You saying that isn't right?

on giving pause- i think it would be because the force of the impact is knocking all the air out of your lungs.

I took some judo lessons some years back. at one point my unskilled self was practicing against an unskilled white belt southpaw in a karate gi. he threw me hard, and i didnt have the reflexes to slow the impact against the ground. took me a good minute or so to recover from that, just from being slammed into a padded mat. wasnt hurt, but couldnt breath properly for a moment.

if the bullets hit your kevlar-covered torso, the force may be enough to knock the wind out of you. basically anytime that knockdown applies, it could conceivably happen. thats realistic, although the rules dont really cover it as it would be abstracted into the stun track and knockdown rules.

I think the point is that there are many factors in play, and yes, a significant element of chance. You're right that it's all abstracted in this system, so we really don't care whether it's pain, damage, gasping for breath, or kinetic energy. It's just silly for them to argue that the system's dumb because getting hit does *nothing*. Weren't we talking about sniper rifles?

Falling down when punched or shot in the chest is generally because of emotional fainting. Many people don't suffer from it. Determined attackers and people in fight or flight mode with lots of adrenaline in their blood generally don't.

I talked to a guy at work about it today. He thought that people dropped from a few holes in the chest. He also thought that there was nothing unusual about walking around with an arm ripped off. I guess people trust what they see in the movies too much.

In the context I read it as he meant at least preventing the guy from continuing at you. And I don't think anyone said there'd be zero effect - there will be serious pain, and somewhere down the line (at least 10 seconds), oxygen deprivation could easily cause him to go unconscious. None of things stops a determined attacker from reaching you and taking several stabs at you though.

*shrug* Maybe he did mean 'give pause' to mean 'stops dead', but that'd seem like a pretty weird meaning to me.

...or simply because the force of the impact pushes you over, no emoness involded. No, I'm not talking about flying though the room like in the movies, just toppling over. And before you get to the "action = reaction" thing, the human body is not a statically determinate solid system, where you can simply calculate which forces apply and decide if the structure falls over. To somewhat continue the boxing analogy, it's perfectly possible to shove a person to the ground without sitting on your butt yourself.


@Yerameyahu: With "give pause" I basically meant...well, the stuff that happens if you get a solid punch to the chest while charging towards somebody. It's not going to kill you (most of the time), but you will be stunned/disoriented for a moment and it will make you slow down, stumble, or just fall flat on your face.

And we're in physics fairy land. Throw up a fancy analogy, anything is possible.

The "action = reaction thing" is real. Getting hit by a bullet that doesn't overpenetrate transfers about as much momentum as the shooter feels as recoil. I can hardly imagine what sort of position you'd need to be in to get toppled over by recoil, and the same goes for a bullet hitting someone. The force of the impact really is as low as the recoil.

PS: I didn't mean to imply "emoness", I merely looked it up on wiki today and they used the term "emotional fainting".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stopping_power#Psychological_effects
Emotional fainting is the likely reason for most "one-shot stops", and not an intrinsic effectiveness quality of any firearm or bullet

I wouldn't underestimate how much of not falling down and keeping one's balance can come down to learned behavior, either. In football practice we called learning to more or less ignore minor collisions as "getting religion." Some guys just have a harder time really, truly committing themselves to an action and can be thrown off by surprisingly little. When people go down to arm tackles, for example, it's really often just a simple case of the player not moving their legs for a moment in response to the jolt-- once you lose track of your feet it's all over. It doesn't even really matter where you get hit either if you can't keep on target mentally. I've seen plenty of people essentially trip over their own feet in response to someone slapping a shoulder pad.

I mean, c'mon, nobody's perfect! People trip on cracks in the sidewalk, for cryin' out loud.

Like I said, if any analogy shows tat your argument sucks, the problem might not be the analogy...


Did I claim anything different? Of course not, not another pathetic attempt to save your position...

Your analogy of "you can shove someone to the ground without falling over, so bullets can knock people down" shows that my argument sucks?




Hmm, let's see. You've moved on to someone charging you with a knife getting toppled by the "sheer force of the impact" from getting hit with a bullet, and you think I'm the one with the pathetic attempts?


Sengir, you had some hollywood ideas about terminal ballistics that don't hold up. People don't generally drop when hit in the chest. There's not enough force to topple them, there's little chance of a CNS hit, oxygen deprivation even from a ruptured heart don't set in that fast, and going unconscious from pain is uncommon for determined attackers. That's just how it is, you should accept it instead of digging yourself a deeper hole.

So you're saying getting toppled by a bullet is at least as common as tripping over their own feet? Doesn't sound wrong, but its not saying much either

I don't see why it is not saying much. People don't stand in a vacuum. We're not propped up with a stick. I don't like Shadowrun's knockdown system because it is so binary and doesn't really reflect reality, but that doesn't mean that people always stay standing when someone inflicts harm upon them either. I think of it less in terms of "knockdown" and more in terms of whether someone continues to stand up or not. It's a fine distinction, but it is a distinction; the former requires someone to be hit with enough force that they couldn't remain standing regardless of other factors while the latter is more like a cascade failure in which the person being acted upon matters as much as the force behind the actual attack.

TLDR version: a wussy keeb may not stay standing while the nasty ganger with the scars might just laugh it off.

Guys, some people fall down when shot or stabbed or punched, and some folks don't.

Training sometimes helps, but sometimes it does not.

There have been cases where a totally untrained average joe keeps going after getting hit multiple times, and the brawny professional soldier drops a second after getting hit once.

The human body is simply unpredictable on how it will react to trauma.




-np

This is very true... On the night that my unit crossed the line of advancement in the gulf during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, I had an individual take a bayonet through the back of his calf, severing the achilles tendon, and going all the way through his foot in the middle of his arch (guy behind him tripped going through the minefield)... now, if that had been me, I would have probably immediatly stopped advancing, started cussing loudly and continuously, hopping around before falling onto a mine, killing myself... He, however, never utterred a sound, continued on for the next 300 meters (to clear the minefield that had been blown) and then calmly told the platoon leader that he needed a medic... his boot was so full of blood you could pour it out onto the ground, and eventually he was evac'd to Batallion Aid, where he was sent back to the cantonement areas...

Damndest thing I had ever seen...

Keep the Faith

First, I appologize for not reading all of the posts in this thread...so if I retread a statement my bad.





Full sized shotguns are not ideal for CQB, Benelli's M4 has an overall length of 40" and that is very easy to get hung up in an apartment hallway. Before anyone starts yelling at me, stand the middle of your hallway with 40" stick pressed up to your shoulder (i.e. like you are holding a weapon) and turn around -slowly- so not to put a big hole in your drywall.

A great many people think that the deadliness of a sniper rifle is the high-powered cartridge that it fires. The vast majority of MMG's fire the same (7.62mm NATO round) as most military sniper rifles, potent...yes. What makes a sniper rifle standout is that it is accurate. Being able to put that projectile through the grey matter of a target 800 yards away is absolutely deadly. You are bypassing body armor and going for the command center of the body, game over. True sniper rifles are insanely accurate up to 1/4 MOA, far more accurate than 99.9% of the shooters are capable of making use of.

In a CQB situation you are not going to be able to utilize that accuracy.

This has always been a point of contention but I am going to throw this out there anyway. Sniper rifles are bolt action rifles. I know that they make semi-auto rifles that they tack on the sniper title to and that they are finely made but they just cannot compete against a bolt action rifle. When I pull the trigger on a semi-auto rifle, there is movement inside of that gun before the bullet leaves the barrel, that movement translates into muzzle drift. If that muzzle moves 1/8 of an inch that translates into inches at 500 yards.

There is a reason that the Cheytac M200 is a bolt action rifle (53" long, 31 lbs, seven .408 rounds of nail driving death).

My father operated on that premise, I was present on three occasions when he bagged deer with +400 yard head shots with a Ruger falling block rifle in the .270 caliber. That results in an instant drop.

You run across somebody jacked up on PCP and you could be in for a real rough time.

Somebody talked about movie gunfights...
In my book the all-time worse one has to be the Lethal Weapon (can't remember which version) where they shoot the bad guy...through the frickin dozer blade with 'armor piercing' 9mm rounds! I want those bullets in Shadowrun!