Take the fun out? It gives you more slots left over to put more fun in!

Phrasing!

I made a slight change for Flechettes.

If the character has armor then Flechettes gives a bonus equal to the worn armor to a maximum of +5.
The more armour you wear the more protected you are and someone just wearing a thin piece of cloth will not be as well protected.

This also ensures that Flechette/Buckshot is more effective against unarmored or very lightly armored targets without just giving a flat bonus.

So, to put it another way, armor counts double vs. flechette/buckshot (up to 5 points) in this variant?

Yes, instead of a flat +5 making even a 1/1 shirt a bulletproof vest.

I still say, if you're changing things, you might as well make flechette a nifty 'light-armor piercing' thing. You might also differentiate between 'slivers' and 'shotgun flechette', if you wanted.

Which is what i did in my game. I thought it was stupid that shotgun "Shot" rounds were so much more expensive than standard rounds, without much of a benefit. Combined with the inconsistencies between rules and RL Flechettes...

So buckshot rounds were same price as standard ammunition with +2DV/+5AP and flechette rounds were priced as in book and at the time for simplicity sake I did original sr4 rules for those (+2DV/+2AP?). In future games I would probably do something else that more accurately represents RL flechettes, ie "nifty 'light-armor piercing' thing".

Yeah. SR4 obviously doesn't have such a thing as 'light armor' or 'fabric armor', but it's probably not too hard to just make a list: 'Flechette gets -X AP against (armor clothing, kevlar, etc. whatever); +Y AP against all other armor'. I'm still not sure if it should be Impact or Ballistic, but probably stick with Impact (because it's 'knife-like'? God knows.).

actually, I toyed around with few different ideas. For buckshot was considering a rule very similar to what the Jopp said. Except the way i worded it was +5 AP but not exceeding their base armor. So it essentially doubled their armor up to 5, and only added 5 above that.

Also had a player that was always taking his Barret Sniper rifle with APDS rounds on missions and frequently he had more AP than the target had armor, so in those cases, any additional AP reduced the DV by the same amount as the bullets would go clean through leaving less tissue damage than if it had not overpenetrated and instead tumbled/deformed/splintered.

He was still one shotting a lot of the time.

Perhaps, for Flechette you can make it work similar to the Physical/stun damage conversion.
No change to DV, -4 AP, if modified DV is less than armor, they get +4 AP? eh, needs some work but could be a good starting point.


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Edit: Clarification/Rewording of above statement.

No change to DV. If modified DV is less than armor (Not modified armor, test before applying AP) than it receives +5 AP. Otherwise, it gets -4 AP.

For the record, I'm already limiting +AP to level of armor worn, thus leather jackets are not very good vs buckshot aka flechette.

As for Slivergun being too easy to get.. well 12F is pretty much top of starting character. Since starting characters can also get access to stuff like machineguns and grenade launchers, I thought a Sliverguns which is not inherently better than normal SMGs and machine pistols (with recoil compensator) firing S&S or even EX-EX. And the F rating makes it less fun to wear on the street where you might get pulled over by cops.

That's kind of the point. It's a concealable, silenced, brutal assassination weapon. Smaller than a machine pistol, easier to get than EX-EX (12F itself, btw). No fair comparing anything to S&S for stopping power, though. Hehe.

Yeah, if the slivergun fired only S&S instead of flechette, it would definitely be broken (though i imagine the cops wouldn't care as much about it then)

Remember that by the Core rules, the Slivergun can't get any recoil compensation. This makes the burst fire like a weak version of called shot, especially for the second burst. That combined with the ammunition restriction makes it weak.

You can probably make it über with Arsenal gun mods, but that can be said of any firearm.

And yes I know it's unfair to compare things to S&S

An important thing to remeber about the slivergun is that it changed over the course of 2nd edition to 3rd.

It was originally a LIGHT pistol with Heavy Pistol Ranges. So it's base damage should have been perhaps 6P +2AP (Flechette) with heavy pistol ranges but someone fouled up and it became what we have today.

It would have been a verey good weapon if it had been a light pistol.
Light Pistol
Supressor
Burstfire
Huge ammo clip
Heavy Pistol Ranges
Flechette Rules (+2P / AP+2)

That would have been the balanced version of a silent assassin weapon with 12F restriction.

I never looked closely at WAR, but apparently there is 'Armor Piercing Flechette' in there, which seems to correspond to 'big slivers'. Hmm.