There are many combat situations which just seem very unrealistic unless I put in friendly fire rules. Like when I have 2 characters engaging an enemy in hand to hand ...and then another player from 20 m away with good recoil comp unleashes a narrow long burst at the enemy .....he never has to worry about hitting his friends unless he glitches or critical glitches. Glitches are just really rare on larger dicepools. Say on a DP of 8 (4 automatics, 4 agility)...that's only a 3% chance to glitch.....but I would say there should be some mechanism in place to make him hesitate cuz he might hit his friends....in real life nobody would ever shoot at an enemy who's in hand to hand with a friend unless it was like a hostage situation or something.
Does anyone know any good rules for handling this?
Up to now i've handled it in this way:
If it's SS or SA, then any character who is 2m or less from an enemy must make a Reaction+Edge (1) if the bullet doesn't make contact with the enemy. If it's narrow burst fire, then they need to make a R+E (2) test....if it's a wide burst or FA of any kind, then they need to make a R+E(3) test. If they succeed the test then they don't get hit....but if they fail, then they take the base damage of the weapon and get to do a damage resistance test.

How's that?

There's an app for that.
For the Smartlink OS.

Try it and see, I guess. I'd allow a Called Shot to Not Shoot My Ally, too.

Personally, my runners are *all* always out of melee range, but it can't hurt to have this kind of rule for a grittier game.

Yes, you can use Safe Target, as well.

Personal Opinion.

If your players wanted realism, they simply wouldn't shoot. That's what I do.
If your players want cinema, they simply shoot. Oh, wait, I do that also.

If your players start shooting at people in hand to hand combat, then have their opposition shoot into hand to hand combat as well.

I think you're confusing melee combat with grappling with regard to your perception of how realistic it is....

Couple of options:

1) allow the target to make an opposed reaction roll vs one of the people he's in hand 2 hand with. if he wins, he uses that person as full cover. And that person takes the full brunt of the attack.
2) On a miss, use modified scatter to see who the bullets really hit?
3) Say that a narrow burst isn't that narrow, and equally hits everyone in 'melee range' (treat it like wide burst for the people in melee. They can default to dodge and try to get out of the way, at -9 dv.

Anyone who's within two meters ....or who I deem is in danger by the flying lead has to make those checks....it doesn't matter if they're in melee with the enemy. Grappling is just one possible move that can be employed in melee. Melee assumes a lot of moves are being used that aren't being rolled for....it's just an abstraction that i hit once per IP...i'm really hitting a lot and blocking a lot and doing other crazy stuff.

Those rules exist.... shotgun choke rules.

If you want realism, remove smartlinks and AGI 9 cyberlimbs. Because with them, it works.

I've always been of the opinion that, if they're firing at you, they're not friendly to begin with.

Careful, Canadian. Careful.

Actually, there is one situation where I can see friendly fire rules being useful. Three-party engagements.

Party A is shooting an assault rifle at a member of Party B and Party C that are engaged in melee combat. Party A is hostile to Party B and Party C. I'm pretty sure the guy from Party A, while wanting to hit the member from Party C, isn't going to particularly care if he misses and his the member of Party B.

Depends on who scares Party A more.

That's a good idea...i'll give the innocent bystander a +2 bonus to the role if a smartgun was being used by the friendly shooter.

Heh. I assumed he meant Safe Target, which doesn't do that, but sure.

Safe target when turned on, prevents your gun from firing when aimed at a target that has been specified as 'friendly'

You can override it. In this instance, it just wouldn't let you shoot into the melee.. I suspect.

Right. So it's not a very direct answer to OP. I was just mentioning it. I wouldn't give a flat out Smartlink bonus against friendly fire errors, though, especially given the existence of Safe Target in the game world.

Does SafeTarget work if you still have a manual trigger?
Or do you have gone to DNI interface only for it to work?

It engages the safety, regardless of trigger mechanism.

that's what we did. my troll always storms into close combat. the rigger hates me for that 'cause he's shooting with -4 to not hit me.

Well, the Troll probably would actually live to complain about it . .
But yeha, i meant the safe target thingie, just did not remember what it was called <.<

This is an interesting question for me as one of my players chooses not to use a smartlink on his gun because he knows a hacker can/will mess with it. (Switching what is considered friendly)

Well, that's only if you had a Safe Target system, for one thing. A smartgun is probably the single most important firearms accessory, and there are plenty of steps you can take to make hacking all but impossible.

let his fixer call him:" Hey dude! I know you dont like smarktlink, because you're afraid of getting hacked. But hey, we're friends. I moved heaven and earth for you and I did it. I found a - wait for it - smartgun cable! How great is that?"

sry for OT

It depends on how well the smartgun system is capable of knowing where the barrel is pointing. If it know that, then you can fire into a melee without any complications. There's probably a buffer radius around the friendly target, but otherwise the system should allow you to shoot all around the "safe" individual.

Makes me wonder if you couldn't use that to make yourself out to be a god to really really dumb people. Stand against a wall and tell all your minions to unload on you with strafing fire back and forth over your person. The bullets will strike the wall all around you and you won't be hurt. God status to idiots?

Someone will want to join into the fun, and, like you said, they're idiots. Next thing you know they're all shooting their own guns, or at least throwing rocks.

Much better: hack the opposition and set yourself up as a friendly so their guns won't shoot you.

Or at least have your overwatch hacker doing that.
Also, hack their Tacnet to give misleading information about your team.

2072 combat is.. intricate

If you have advance access. Put in timed databombs, with black out.
replace their 'smartgun software' with one that has bugs in it.

Create modified Blackout, that triggers them into VR if they have a trode, and keeps them there.. mind occupied by some btl you cooked up.

I won't use smartgun anymore....

Meh I can do all that without the smartgun. I just need to pwn your commlink.
I can do it with your tacnet.
I can crash your IC agent running, and replace it with one of my own.

Give a hacker advanced warning before he needs to try and kill you.. and he can cook up some pretty savage stuff.

I'm feeling better about having taken Simsense Vertigo already.I figured I'd need a bucket for mission briefings but this makes it all worthwhile.

Right then, a skinlinked smartgun with a biometric electroshok advanced satefy system. No way to hack the smartgun unless you touch it, and if you do without authorisation, your earn yourself a nice shock

I can still hack your PAN(via your commlink)
But that's significantly harder.

One of my PCs the first time I was GMing was stuck with "Metal-head Mike" the AI. He had a tendency of overwriting everyone's... Everything, really.

"My pistol plays 'Black Sabbath' when I pull the trigger." "Ew. Classical music!"

sabs, in a world where only 3 of 21 dice I throw when using a firearm utilized smartguns or tacnets, I think I could shutdown my comlink and cut myself off from tacnet and shut down my smartgun system and still wtf pwn stuff.

Exept if I'm in a combat situation where I decide it is more secure to operate my PAN in skinlink only. But I guess in that case communication with the team might prove tricky.

So under the hacking rules, what would happen if you had four or five cheap commlinks broadcasting trash the second the bad stuff went down? Would the hacker have to guess which one's the right one, or would he know automatically?

@Inca

For people in melée with the target, or just generally somewhere along the path the bullet is going to travel I tried adding Threshold (effectively subtract successes). If the shot fails friendly is hit by base weapon damage, ignore armor for soak roll. Threshold increase was, generally if I recall, +2 for each friendly engaged or in front of target, +1 for peripheral in front/beside and no penalty for 'backstop' friendlies but the were at risk of missed shots (I'd give the damage to whichever target I felt made it the funniest ). If any of the friendlies had the Friend tag you got +1 die(once, not for each). This ment SL was still very helpful but not garanteed safety.

It didn't feel quite spot on but it was close, and better that not there. Gave players pause, sometimes they still shot, other times (in poor conditions usually ) they would hold fire. Sound about right?

Absolutely
but you can't talk to your team mates.
You can't bring up a local map, unless you alredy have it loaded. And it won't get updated with the location of your teammates and known enemy combatants.
You can't have safe target on.
You can't load new skill/knowledge/lingua softs until you bring it back up.


It's a trade off

Do you have near perfect synchronization with your team, and count on YOUR hacker protecting you from THEIR hacker, and an extra 2-6 dice depending.
Or
Do you shut everything down, and work with hand-signals, requiring free to simple actions for coordination and line of sight.

When you have security teams who have 9 dice or so, before they start adding tacnets and smartlinks.. losing 3 of 12 hurts a lot more.

He would have to do a ew+analyze, maybe decrypt each one if they're all broadcasting encrypted.
each hit gives him 1 piece of information.
so he'd want at least 4-5 hits, to get a basic information on each commlink. preferably more.
I think he would have to guess, but he could potentially do an educated guess.

Like say he analyzes the 5 traffics, and he notices that 4 of them have 0 subs on them,a nd 1 of them has 5 subscriptions.
That's a good hint.
He analyzes the traffic, and notices that 1 of your commlinks is sending data to 5 other commlinks all within his scan range.
That 's another good hint.

I don't think it would be automatic, but I don't think it would stop him for /long/

The problem is recoil is a random process, so there is always an element of chance when firing a gun which a smartlink could only compensate for with statistical algorithms....but statistical algorithms are designed to make it so that you won't hit your friends "on average". Your smartlink could see that there is no friendly in front of the barrel, but then you could misjudge a recoil and the barrel could kick the bullet into the path of a friendly. That's why i would rather handle Safe mode as a DP modifier and not just say it's impossible to hit your friends.

This is really off the top of my head so it's pretty ruff, but...

Nothing wrong with your system, but what I'd do is either impose a 'cover' penalty based on the number of friendlies in the way (goes without saying that a glitch or critical glitch hits an ally). This might be something like BODY/2 rounded down if you like. So it's a -1 Penalty for aiming around a Body 3 Elf and a -4 Penalty for aiming around a Body 9 Troll. Or you could have it be based on metatype rather than Body. Or you could just approximate. Up to you how or if to 'stack' penalties for multiple friendly. Alternatively, you could let the runner use a 'Take Aim' action to negate all Friendly Fire penalties. Should be incompatible with wide bursts.

Alternatively, increase the THRESHOLD (in other words, the hits on the defender's Reaction Roll) by one per friendly in the line of fire. For example, pretend your gun-bunny is trying not to hit his ally, and scores four hits. If the defender rolls two hits, your shooter hits...but maybe not as well as he would have if not for aiming around his buddy. If the defender rolls four hits, obviously your shooter misses. However, if the defender rolls three hits and your shooter misses BECAUSE OF or BY the extra hit, then they hit their ally (for base damage, no net hits).

You could use whichever one you think will ultimately result in less bookkeeping. The main difference between that and the proposed house rule in the OP is that it puts the burden of avoiding friendly fire on the shooter.