Okay, I am a member at a little mom and pop rpg board and a question was posed:

How do you handle attempting to shoot through a meat body to hit something on the other side?

I thought it was a good question and one that is not handled at all in the Barriers section. (I run old 4ed, not 4A)

Anyone have an answer, or barring an official answer, a home rule?

I personally have some ideas but would be interested in what others think.

Vlad

Maybe just use their body (or a fixed value) as armor/structure for a virtual barrier.

For example:

Human dude (body 4), wearing a armor 6/4 shielding his buddy:


You want to shoot through him at some other dude:

He makes an attack roll (maybe modified for cover/blind attack) with a hunting rifle 7/-2 AP and rolls 3 hits.
IF the target want to dodge, he may expose his buddy (who of course may dodge too). Let's say both try to get away and have 1 (shielding) and 2 hits (dude with cover)

The first man resolves damage as usual, than we take a look at his "virtual barrier" It is 4(bod)+4(modifier armor) against 7(DP)+2 (nethits). The damage value is greater, so the attack might pierce him (or just scratch him... depending on his resistance throw). And the second target will be attacked with 7P+1(nethits) and counts the "virtual barrier" minus the AP, of course, to his own armor (+8 ).

This makes piercing attacks with low caliber or high body/armor targets unlikely (maybe a bit too much). But is very viable for armor-piercing weapons (lasers/ rail gun, APDS-loaded rifles).

If you want to use a "fixed value" maybe you could go for: 3-4 normal metahuman, 5 for highly cybered limbs, 6 for massive (troll), 7 for cybered troll.... drones may need some adjustment too (double bod???)

The way I have handled this in the past was pretty much as Summerstorm uses.

But sometimes I just allow the player to use a called shot to try and find the spot in the covering persons armour to get through.

In this case the player in front takes half damage, resisted with body + half ballistic armour and the target behind resists as per normal.

I more or less second Summerstorm's house rule, with the exceptions of: I wouldn't allow the front person a dodge (Getting out of the way would negate the entire point of the maneuver), but I would allow the back person to claim the cover bonus. Also, if the covering person's Armor + Body is more than the weapons damage + net hits then the bullet is caught entirely by the first person, and they take damage as normal. I also like Khadajico's rule for how much damage the front guy takes, though I think that it should be base damage of the weapon (no net hits) halved, and he should get full armor.

The only change I would make is counting the armor twice on the meat shield it does have to enter and exit. Makes a called shot to an unarmored body part more enticing since it is more likely you will get the blow through you want.

If we're just talking about using a body, which I've had happen in more than one of my games I use their ballistic armorX2+ the characters body. Because the bullet has to pass through the armor twice, once in, once out, plus through the body.

As a note, a dwarf sam adept with attribute boost lugging a half dead troll on his back is pretty damn funny.

It's mostly a dramatic trick, so I'd just GM-fiat it.

When this came up in my game I just gave the target a dice pool bonus equal to the meatshield's damage resistance dice pool.