first, that's how I understand it:
There are no direct rules for slowing a projectile down when penetrating one or more barriers. I assume this is instead modelled by granting the target additional armor dice.

one example is in the core book.
a 2nd example: I can shoot through armored glass (armor with a Walter MA-2100 (7P/-3) and APDS granting the target 1 more dice to resist the damage.
3rd example: I cannot shout through concrete (armor 16) with a Walter MA-2100 (7P/-3) and APDS , because the modified armor rating is still higher (16-7=9) than the DV. The DV is unmodified as I aimed at the target behind.
4th example: I can shoot through infinite layers of concrete with an Aztechnology Itzcóatl Gauss Cannon (18P/ -half -10) without granting the target any additional armor dice.
5th example: I can shoot at a target in a blast bunker (armor 32) with an Aztechnology Itzcóatl Gauss Cannon (18P/ -half -10) granting the target 32/2-10= 6 additional armor dice.

-do we assume a projectile leaves behind a projectile-sized hole?
-what happens, when the projectile is explosive?
-when shooting bursts, do we assume all bullets fly through the same hole? is this relevant?
-will the barrier never collapse no matter how many bullets I shot through it instead of at it?

-do you like the rules?

I personally find the barrier rules pretty stupid. They work passably for lower end damage and armor penetration values, but as you've shown above, add enough penetration and damage and you can shoot through infinite layers of certain materials.

Damaging barriers is even worse.

A troll with 8 strength kicking down a door deals 4 base damage, + hits. The same troll firing a Rating 8 bow with a damage code of 10P into the door deals 1 base damage, + hits, because projectile weapons have a fixed damage value (presumably intended for things like throwing knives?).

Firing a single round from a sniper rifle into a door deals 2 base damage, + hits, but firing a short burst from a holdout pistol into the same door deals 6 base damage, + hits, because guns also have a fixed damage value based on number of bullets.

Punching a door is typically preferable to hitting it with a fire axe, because all edged weapons must contend with a doubled barrier rating, regardless of weapon design.

And the very paragraph detailing how edged melee weapons double the barrier's rating is actually a part of the "Shooting Through Barriers" section, which would suggest that you can hit someone through a wall with a melee weapon at the cost of increasing the target's armor.

What.

~Umi

For shooting through barriers, I would use the Barrier Armor to decide if it penetrates, and then add that barrier armor to the armor of the target to decide what it does to said target. I would not apply the penetration of a round to each armor encountered, but against the stacked armor. AFB, but I believe there is a reason I would do this. My guess is that it has something to do with the combat rules from the vehicle section.

As to bullet holes, sure, but then you get into caliber fluff and "how big is laser" etc and it's all subjective GM stuff. Regardless of any of that, it's probably really useful for tamping explosives. Stuff a bullet hole with plastique for hott-hott DVx4 action.

If the projectile is explosive, and it breaks the barrier, it uses the breaching rules. Flechette style damage. etc. Arsenal has this covered.

Bursts group. They don't duckrow. And, irl, different bullets from the same burst penetrate the same structure to differing degrees based on the smallest random effects. Kind of mirrors how in game 1 BF shot != 3 SA shots. Basically, how DV stacks implies that not every bullet in a burst accomplishes the same effect. Still bulletholes. Still GM-determined fluff.

The 2DV from fire doesn't stack in a burst such that a HV burst hits a wall with 24DV. It's just a straight 2DV+net vs (armor)2. As such, you could just treat each attack that goes through a wall as an attack on the wall, and eventually it might accrue the DAM = structure necessary to make a hole, or not, depending on the material. If you really wanted to mesh it with the other rules though, it would only work with FA or AoE effects like in the vehicle rules. Either way, this is a house rule. As it stands, an attack is against one thing or another.

Where are you getting this? The "Damaging Barriers Table" on p. 166 of SR4A clearly shows: "Bullet | DV of 2 per bullet" (emphasis mine).

If you fire 12 rounds in a HV full burst, you deal 2 DV per bullet for a total of 24 DV. A minigun firing 15 rounds deals 30 DV. It's pretty cut and dry.

EDIT - I somehow missed the bit about that being your house rule. Carry on.

~Umi

Now it's not explicitly stated but I would say that the same rules that apply for the structure rating, would also apply for the barrier rating.
So with the blast bunker example it would add 32 armor for every 10 cm of thickness you're trying to penetrate. Given that a blast bunker generally have like 0.5 to 6 meters of reinforced materials surrounding it... that's a lot of bloody armor.
Rules says treat blind fire as skill+intuition, but if you have no way of determine where your target is... I would probably treat it as scatter.

Also I would treat the minigun scenario as 2 DV per bullet + net hits, if the individual bullet doesn't pierce the barrier rating, it does no damage.
That way a vindicator loaded with APDS would blow a wooden building to smithereens, but face issues trying to do the same to a brick (or heavier) building.

This is usually a sign that the game is not designed for the power level that you are playing it at. Try another game system, or another power level.

The game allows you to easily shoot a man sized hole in a drywall wall with one shot from a pistol. What this should really produce is a wall with a very small hole in it. So yeah, the rules are pretty dumb.

So you're saying that it is irrelevant that I personally wish the system could be more robust and scale better across the ranges of powers that are present and inherent in the game itself, and that if I don't like the system I should just GTFO, or shut up and only play in the limits of the working portion of the rules.

This in a thread where the OP was explicitly asking people if they like the rules.

...

I'm not even gonna respond further. Waste of my time, effort, and brain cells.

~Umi

I'm not sure that's exactly right. The problem is a lack of rules or examples covering shooting through multiple barriers. Barriers are most definitely described only as 10cm thick objects. So you should treat the situation as though instead of a 30cm thick barrier you are shooting through 3 10cm thick barriers.

So let's say you're shooting at a target inside a room that's across the hallway from a room on the outside of a structure. That's three barriers. Outer wall, outer hallway wall, and inner hallway wall. What would the situation be if the outer wall is concrete (16 armor), the outer hallway wall is hardwood (6 armor), and the inner hallway wall is drywall (2 armor)?

So you would add all the armor ratings together for 24 then apply the weapon AP (-half/-10) leaving 4 armor for the target. Since the AP doesn't exceed the target, you can't penetrate it. Even someone in the hallway would be left with 2 armor and you couldn't shoot that person.

So now let's go back to 30cm of concrete. If we treat that as 3 concrete barriers (16 armor apiece for 48 armor) the target behind it would be left with 14 armor after penetration which is woefully short of being able to hit him. In essence, your gauss cannon cannot hit anything that has more than 20 armor of barrier between you and him because he will always be left with at least 1 armor so you could penetrate 10cm of concrete but not 10cm of reinforced concreate.

-half then -10 would be an armor of 2 for them, not 4, and in the hallway they'd be hit normally.

Not only that, but you're only a Called Shot to take their armor as a dicepool penalty to your attack and a Long Shot from ignoring their armor altogether and hitting someone with a sniper round through a building.

but the weapon's DV is 18, which is larger than 14, therefore penetrates...

Woops.

Inner room would be 2 armor. Hallway would be 22 armor leaving them 1. You'd be able to hit them in either case because I was thinking the AP needed to surpass barrier armor rating and not the weapon DV.

--



Woops. So what I'm comparing to is off. That doesn't particularly matter to whether or not you treat 30cm of concreate as 3 10cm concrete barriers or 1 10cm concrete barrier.

So 18P weapon would penetrate any total of barriers whose combined armor rating does not exceed 56. So 40cm of concrete (64 armor) would stop that weapon.

Again, Called Shot/Long Shot.

I think you should reread the rules regarding called shots and shooting through barriers because they do not act like how you think they do.

Called Shot to Ignore Armor
"Target an area not protected by armor. The attacking character received a negative dice pool modifier equal to the target's armor."

Shooting Through Barriers
"If the weapon's modified Damage Value does not exceed the barrier's Armor rating, then the weapon is simply not strong enough to pierce the barrier, and the attack automatically fails."

So to use my previous 40cm of concrete which has 64 armor and a target with no armor.

For the purpose of shooting through the barrier, the target's armor is 64 and the barrier's armor is 64.
You call shot to ignore armor on your target. The target's armor is now 0 and the barrier's armor is still 64 since the barrier is not your target.
Since you have a -64 dice pool, you roll your edge dice with no exploding sixes. Your weapon deals 18P/-half -10 AP and since you just rolled edge dice you got one hit.

Now you might get really lucky if you have 6+ edge and roll 6 hits. That would make the weapon damage 23P which would be just over the 22 armor the barrier has after applying the AP.

Actually, let's try that again, but remembering all the rules. For example: SR4A, page 166, Barriers, Shooting Through Barriers, first sentence - "If a character wants to shoot through a barrier to hit a target behind it, add the barrier's Armor rating to whatever armor the target already possesses."

Additionally, Armor is how tough the material is, and Structure is represented by each 10 cm of thickness, so your 40 cm of concrete is actually 16 armor and 52 structure.

So it would go like this:
I want to shoot target.
Target is behind 40 cm of concrete, which is +16 armor.
I do Called Shot to take armor as a penalty to my roll.
My dice are now in the negatives. I Long Shot.
Rolling only my Edge I shoot my gun, doing X physical damage against resisted by target's Body. Since the armor is ignored completely the barrier cannot stop the shot (the weapon DV of X is higher than the Barrier's effective rating of Null Set), so you have a squooshed target.

for cineastic reasons, I'd allow Neraph's proposal. It's like you found a bullet-sized hole in the wall
In a more realism-driven group: No

RAW it is completely legal, and the way it works.

RAI, however, is potentially open to other interpretations...

Doesn't say DV stacks, and, as a rule, DV doesn't stack.
So, each bullet from a burst does DV2 +net, and is resisted by its own soak roll.
The damage, if any, which is incurred by a bullet does stack as regular, and the final damage done is compared with the structure rating to figure out the size of the hole created.

In this way, if one bullet can never hope to do anything, then 20 more of the same bullet will still do nothing.
However, if one bullet does damage, then 20 more of the same will do lots of damage.

It's sensible, and it's a strict reading of the RAW.
Would be way better still if it accounted for the weapon's base DV...

I've not ignored any rules and I did account for the rule you mentioned. Called shot explicitly states that the target's armor is ignored for the damage resistance test. That means that only properties of armor that apply during the damage resistance test are ignored. It does not state that the target's armor is ignored. The check to see whether or not a shot even penetrates the barrier is performed after the attack roll, since it uses the modified damage value of the attack to determine if the attack penetrates, but before the damage resistance test. If the attack fails to penetrate then no damage resistance check is ever made. Using called shot in this manner will always make it harder to hit the target since even though it is a blind fire attack (intuition instead of agility and a -6 penalty) you still can add edge dice and get rule of six on all or some dice or even reroll the dice that do not generate hits. When it's a longshot, you're using your point of edge to just make the test.

As for whether 40cm of concrete is 16 armor or 64 armor is not defined in the rules. The rules only talk about shooting through a single barrier and barriers are only described as 10cm thick. Every example is dealing with a 10cm or less thickness barrier. Thinner or thicker levels of material as far as barriers go is defined for only structure rating in so much that the structure rating applies to a single 1mx1mx10cm section of that material. The rules certainly give no guidance on how to handle a target that is behind multiple barriers of identical or separate materials.

1) Nope. The check to see if your shot goes through the barrier is like this: DV of X versus modified armor rating of 0 because you're ignoring the armor due to a Called Shot. It's very simple.

2) It actually is defined in the rules quite explicitly. Concrete has an armor rating of 16 and it's Structure is determined by thickness. If I have a 100 cm thick piece of glass it is Armor 1 and Structure 100. Structure is "the number of 'damage boxes' required to destroy a section 1 meter square and about 10 cm thick (approximately the typical wall thickness for a residential or office building)" (SR4A, page 166, Structure Rating). So the rules state that Armor Rating for a barrier is dependent on what material it is, Structure Rating is dependent on thickness, and then most barriers would be 10 cm thick because that's the average for homes and businesses. It does not "only state" that barriers are 10 cm thick.

It is simple but you're not reading Called Shot.





Called shot applies a penalty to you and the benefit is only applied if the attack hits because the benefit is only applied against the damage resistance test. The check of weapon DV against barrier armor is made as part of the attack test after the dice have been rolled in order to determine if the attack penetrated the barrier and succeeds (hits). Since called shot explicitly states that you ignore armor for the damage resistance test and not for any other test or check, you are still comparing against the barrier's armor rating modified by the weapons armor penetration since this check is not part of the damage resistance test. If that check succeeds, then the attack is a hit and then barrier's armor rating, and any other armor the target has, is eliminated for the damage resistance test. Of course, that completely disregards the absurdity of the statement "I ignore the armor even though I'm shooting through it".

Now, if you want to bring up the part "Target an area not covered by armor." Then I would simply counter with the fact that shooting through a barrier forces a blind-fire test. If you cannot see a target you cannot call a shot on the target. Simple as that. The part you're targeting does have to be accessible as determined by the GM.

Curiously enough, a literal interpretation of called shot to ignore armor also states that any damage resistance dice from a source which is not armor and does not provide the dice by increasing your body will not be used on the test since you only roll body.



If I have 3 concrete walls with 1 nanometer of air between them. What's the armor value? They are three separate barriers. If I have concrete wall, with a tree behind it, what's the armor value? If there's a 1nm gap between the tree and concrete, what is the armor rating? There rules don't cover these situations at all and that creates the problem. As far as the rules should be concerned three 10cm thick concrete walls should behave identically to one 30cm thick concrete wall and the 3 walls of differing materials should behave identically to three barriers of the same material. If they don't the rules are worthless and inconsistent.

Interesting interpretation. I can still put up an argument against it, but I don't think it's worth it.


The rules are only "worthless and inconsistent" when you try to bring hyperbole examples to the table.

Having 1 nanometer of air between barriers would not be enough in my book to call them separate barriers, especially since all the barriers in your first example are the same material, so your "3 10cm barriers or 1 30cm barrier" example is ridiculous.

While I see your frustration on shooting through thick barriers, please remember that the rules of Shadowrun were specifically designed to be streamlined for quick gameplay. Overcomplicating issues often does lead to problems with the rules.

Well, the mechanical effect of calling the shot and when the apply is defined within the usage of the ability. Further, the GM has a discretion on whether the vulnerable spot is accessible which means that it's very well within a GM's purview to rule that someone standing behind a barrier that forces a blind-fire attack is not an eligible target for a called shot since you can't actually target a vulnerable area since all line of effect to the target passes through the barrier and consequently covered by armor. Even in the cases of fully transparent barriers there is still armor blocking all line of effects to the target.



I may have presented 1 exaggerated example, but three 10cm concrete walls spaced 2m apart is hardly hyperbole, nor is the situation involving shooting multiple barriers of differing materials with each barrier 2m apart. This is a very really situation that you could encounter and the rules do not provide any guidance on how to handle it. Every example and every line only references a single barrier. Nothing indicates if you can shoot through multiple barriers or what happens with it.

There's three ways to handle that scenario with the rules.
1. Do not permit it. No matter what you cannot shoot through more than one barrier. The rules would need to put this limitation in place.
2. Craft rules for shooting through multiple barriers. Example: Each additional barrier adds its barrier armor rating for each barrier in front of it, including itself, to the target's armor.
3. Define the rules for shooting through multiple barriers by establishing barrier rules on a thickness basis. Example: Round the thickness of each barrier shot through up to the nearest 10cm and apply its armor rating for each 10cm of thickness to the target's armor rating.

The rules being streamlined is not an excuse for poorly written rules since poorly written rules cause anything but a streamlined experience.

Or, you know ... Just don't make such a big deal of this.
It's not that the game explicitly needs to have perfect rules for shooting through 3 barriers of variable materials.

I had shooting through or at barriers happen ... maybe a dozen times. Since ... 1991.
Doesn't make the rules worthless.


Yes, ridiculous examples can occur, if you really want them to be there.

The game has no rules about shooting through three barriers. Full stop. It doesn't matter if they're identical or variable materials.

Between UWBR, railgun weaponry that halves armor, and other items, all the ingredients are there that make shooting into interior rooms from outside a build plausible and the rules simply do not cover the situation in either a permissive or forbidding sense.

The thread was made with the intent to see if people like the rules regarding barriers. I do not, I've laid out the reasons why I dislike them in detail.

Yes. I got that. I just disagree that there's a NEED to have such a rule. At all.
I also don't think, that it's entirely necessary to even tweak shooting through one barrier.

The existing rule is not worthless because a fringe case makes it break.
It's in place and it works (maybe not fine) for most situations.

Maybe I should have been clearer
I am indifferent about the rules for shooting through barriers. I.e.: They've worked for every situation I've encountered in-game so far and as such they are sufficient, but they are not a particularly important part of the rules set that I'd consider writing up more than a paragraph about them. If a situation arises that I feel they are not working in, I'll fiat it, secure in the knowledge (from experience) that it'll probably not come again for the next 15 years. If it's something a player regularly wants to do, well ... then I'd probably consider giving more thought.

Something I found odd.
Vehicles are described as not being subject to stun damage, barriers doesn't mention it.
You use barrier rules for shoot someone in a vehicle. Fists are listed not once but twice as an example for damaging barriers and shooting through barriers.
Do barriers take stun damage or not?
If they do, why doesn't vehicles aren't they essentially moving barriers?
If they don't... You can't ever hope to break a glass window by throwing your entire body weight against it, but you can easily break it with a baseball.

The SR rules really, really suck, but your point is factually incorrect. That isn't how things work in the real world. It was shown back in the 19th century, before high capacity rolling mills were widely available, that two or three layers of armor bolted together are far less effective at stopping projectiles than a single layer equal to the sum of all the layers.

Fists deal damage to the barrier because there is no stun or physical damage against a barrier - there is only damage. I refer you to SR4A, page 167, Destroying Barriers, fourth paragraph, first sentence. That sentence specifically states that you apply any remaining DV from the armor soak directly to the Structure rating.

And no, vehicles are not "essentially moving barriers" - they are explicitly unique constructs of the rules who's armor just happens to follow a similar rule as shooting through a barrier when compared to the passengers inside. It does not refer to the Barrier section at all, making your analogy sub-optimal.

So you can punch through a window attached to anything but a vehicle (even a plexiglass window if you're good at it) But you cannot punch through a car window without having fists capable of physical damage, ever?
I need to put wheels on the house so it to can have magic anti-fist windows.

Oh, I still use SR4 for the record, with the doc.

And yet, modern body armors only function because the rely on multiple layers of very thin material to effectivly catch projectiles like a net.

The main advantage of soft body armor is that it is flexible, so tradeoffs are made. There is a reason why rifle plates are not just extra thick layers of kevlar and instead are rigid plates. It's not because you can't stop a rifle bullet with layers of kevlar, it's that it takes a LOT of layers to stop rifle bullets and it would be far heavier and thicker than a rifle plate. Similarly, enough pages from the newspaper will stop most anything, but a couple of feet thickness of newspaper is not a terribly useful armor for most people worried about being shot.