In addition to is what we're dealing with. The muzzle of a rifle or a high-powered pistol touching the skin of a target is going to inject a lot of expanding gases directly into the wound right behind the bullet when the shot is fired. Not only will the wound be affected by heat, but gas expansion can expand tissue (even very elastic tissue like skin) to the point of tearing, which will cause more bleeding. I don't think it would be unreasonable to apply a +1 power rating in some of those cases.

If you've ever seen pictures of people shot in the head with a rifle at close range (suicide) the wound is more often than not much more drastic than one that is sustained by a handgun or by a rifle from much greater distance.

That's how I handle it. I also treat it as a melee attack if the character is aware of it.

Depends on the weapon. The more muzzle flash it creates, the farther away you'll get that effect. For example, a .22 probably isn't going to have a whole lot of effect that way even if you are touching skin. With a Desert Eagle (point five-oh) you could probably be a couple of inches away and still acheive that effect. With a high-powered rifle, perhaps six inches or so. Not very far. Keep in mind that even heavy clothing like denim or leather would negate that effect by quite a large degree.

Got it.

To maximize damage, obviously. No one said it was wise. I don't think we're debating that. The whole point of firearms is to have the capability to affect your target at greater than arm's length. But if you've got the opportunity and are aware of the risks and how to deal with them, it certainly can be done successfully and has been done successfully. The HDMS comes to mind.

My guess would be yes, but rather insignificant. Some of the pressure would go into friction/deformation in the target, but most would still escape. There wouldn't be much of a sonic crack, but that's rather insignificant, too, because there wouldn't be much at 6' either, and the muzzle blast would make most of the noise.

But that's a completely uneducated guess. I haven't done extensive empirical research on the subject.

It would definitely muffle the blast, but probably not by any great amount. In other words, the gunshot would still be recognizable, but the distance at which it could be heard would be reduced somewhat (we're talking hundreds of meters, here). Unless the muzzle was completely inside of an orafice or something...

I'm no professional killer or anything, but if a .22 or some other low-power firearm was all I had, I'd want to be as close as possible. If, considering the circumstances, I determined that physical contact was an acceptable risk, I'd take it. I agree that there are very few circumstances in which contact would be an acceptable risk. But I'm sure you can think up a few in which it would be.

It depends on the blast and the tissue involved. Devil's advocate here... Think of the muzzle of a short-barrreled .308 right up against skin, with a liver or kidney being on the other side of it. Goes a bit beyond surface damage. Gases are going to follow the bullet very deeply into that cavity, and being under pressure, will continue to expand inside of that wound cavity as if it were, say, twelve more inches of barrel. Not pretty.

*Continues screwing the silenced .22 into the targets ear*

"Hang on, I'm sure I can get this a little tighter... Just a few more turns... Would you stop moving about so much and keep your head still a bit?"

I sure can, but not if I were invisible.

Certainly not. However, as the proud owner of that liver, I'd still probably be more interested in that .308 doing somersaults through my torso. Anyway, if I had a short-barreled .308 I wouldn't be aiming at the guy's liver, I'd be aiming at his heart.

I don't buy that. The National Institute of Justice clearly disagrees with this, and I'm with the NIJ over this particular rumor. Even the pitiful type I has to protect against .22LR Lead Round Nose rounds at point blank range at different angles. Anything from type II-A and up has to protect against all kinds of .22LRs. Type III-A, increasingly the most common level of protection for armor vests, should be an order of magnitude more than you'd need against any .22LR threat.

I know there is some basis to the rumors that .22s can deflect off bones to cause further damage in soft tissue. Whether this is truly worse than getting hit with a .357 Magnum and the bone shattering plus a nice 3" exit wound is open to debate, however. A .22 doesn't penetrate more than 36cm of flesh (about the absolute maximum), so it can't bounce around for long. If it hits anything by a dense bone at a large angle, it won't deflect further.

Obviously you can still kill yourself with one. At a straight angle I'm absolutely certain you can get through a human skull with one and put a nice hole in your brain. Obviously you can also kill other people with it, because different .22LR weapons have seen so much use in history.

Note: A .22LR should be considered a "Hold-Out Pistol" round. That's 4L in canon SR. Whether you agree with that damage assessment or not, there's absolutely no point arguing that it should do less than that, 4L is at least pitiful enough if not too pitiful.

It certainly can. The probability of it hitting a major artery after glancing off a bone is not significantly higher than it hitting a major artery without glancing off anything, though. The tendency of the round to deflect at times does slightly offset its complete lack of punching power through anything rigid.

[Edit]Straight thinking not am I. Rest of I the brain acquire must.[/Edit]

Over to you, Kagetenshi. Sword, piano wire or Monowire Loop o'Decapitation, most GMs would still probably make the attacker roll something. I don't think many of those methods will be easier (rolling-wise) for the attacker than an Ares Predator.

A free called shot is one option. Adding that to the numbers I mentioned earlier, Skill-4 mage with a laser sighted Hold-Out Pistol would be doing 4M + 6 successes on average, which still averages Deadly against a Body 5 guy without armor.

If said armor had problems stopping .22 LR bullets, it had problems stopping everything else as well. What you're saying pretty much goes against everything I've ever read about body armor. If you've got references, please post them. If not, read this.

About the best possible place to put a .22 bullet is in the eye socket.

Useful wound ballistics site. Might want to look at the shotgun examples.

It might open some, and it is hard to relate it to a rifle slug because of the -enormous- caliber in comparison, but it does leave a single hole...until it gets to the other side of whatever was penetrated and the hole enlarges due to the area around the shot being ripped out and away by the dispursed energy. Even though bone like a skull it leaves a thumbsized hole and a thumbsized hole in the brain for a bit behind the skull (lot of "pulping" though of course), and then a conish shape on the far side coming out.

EDIT: Come to think of it though, this was with a very tight choked gun (actually a 36" barrel too). Maybe that had some bearing on it too. Anyway i should point out i was talking about slug-like, but not entirely. More like a hollowpoint or some other very easily deformed slug. *shrug*

That's why it's useful to look at the group size, which is 6cm diameter in this case. True, it is not what you'd expect from a shotgun within just a few feet of the barrel. For that, it would be nice to see a few tables of spread with different chokes, barrel lengths, shot sizes, distances.

I suppose that's because of the centrifuge-like forces that occur when a bullet fired from a rifled barrel hits flesh. However, a cloud of shot will not travel in a single clump all through a human body. Although it won't disperse as much as the glazer, it will disperse. The tissue damage is very different and much more extensive than with a single, non-fragmenting projectile.

Flechette ammo in SR doesn't seem to assume anything else than that SR players are morons. The only reason why Impact armor protects so well against flechette is because it's maaaaaagic. Shot rounds will be stopped far more effectively by body armor than slugs are. With a very tight pattern, the difference is already extreme, and it only gets bigger as the pattern widens. Shot pellets quite simply suck at penetrating armor, no matter how close to each other they are. This is sort of represented in the rules by the lower Power at longer ranges, although as written the system is quite fucked up.

Shotguns shouldn't hit multiple targets regardless of range. The kind of spreads the canon choke rules give are insane. I completely agree that at short ranges you should be capable of calling a shot with shot rounds, though.