And on an unrelated note, why wouldn't we have shamans of Tshongololo?

Sort of. Part of the conceit of SR3 was that skill was far more important for actually getting something done, but attributes set cost and bonus levels to apply to those skills as well as power and resistance levels for opposed tasks (like punching or spells). It was far more delicate than the SR4-5 bludgeon of "attribute equals dice."



That was actually part of the point of former system, to get away from a "hit point" mechanic. There's the light wound, the moderate wound (which is three times worse than the light wound), the serious wound (which is twice as bad as moderate wound and 6 times as bad as a light wound), and the deadly wound (which is "you're out"). This was reflected in the increasing effect of wound penalties (+1TN is bad, +3TN is worse than 3 times as bad).

Granularity isn't always a good thing. Let's say you get shot in the arm. It could be a painful graze that distracts you, serious damage to the muscle which is painful and makes your arm harder to use, or it could blast through the bone and make your arm virtually useless. The question here is: "how many painful grazes does it take to make your arm useless?"

SR3 made damage stages spread out so that there was an appreciable difference between being shot in the sternum with a sniper rifle and having a hole blown through your aorta, having a new hole in your chest but miraculously not in anything important, and having the round stopped by a ceramic armor plate that left you feeling like you'd been kicked by a mule but otherwise alive. In SR5 you have to soak 6 damage off a 15P shot to not be incapacitated -- this is more granular, but a lot of the granularity gets wasted on "even more incapcitated."

I admit I'd like to see a combination of LMSD and hit location. Put a chart on the actual character sheet so that it's easy to track. Make it large enough that you can put it in a sheet protector, and use whiteboard marker on the outside.

Even without LMSD, this could work very well. It would require a little more nuance to armor and location (a longcoat might provide its full rating to arms and torso and partial protection to legs, for example, while an armored vest would only provide protection to torso, and an Actioneer Business Suit might provide full protection to arms, torso, and legs), and the inclusion of extra bits of armor like arm guards and shin pads.

Here's a brief possible way of doing it:

Roll 2d6 when struck:

12 - Head
11 - Left Leg
10 - Left Arm
5-9 - Torso
4 - Right Arm
3 - Right Leg
2 - ???

(this puts 66.67% of uncalled shots hitting the torso, 11.12% hitting the legs, 16.66% hitting the arms, and 2.78% hitting the head)
(I don't know what to do with the "2" which is another 2.78% -- maybe some sort of "critical hit" or "re-roll location + critical hit")

Each body part has a full damage track based on full Body, and resists damage based on locational armor and full Body.

The character maintains a single Stun track -- a Stun hit to a location follows locational armor, but all Stun damage applies to a central track.

If a track hits 3, 6, 9, 12, etc physical damage, apply an extra -1 dice penalty (ie, for every 3 damage) to any action taken using that limb, and also apply 1 unresistable Stun damage to the Stun track.

Damage to the head also applies Stun damage at a one-to-one ratio.

If a limb reaches its Incapacitated rating, that limb is considered useless (-infinity dice to any action using that limb) until healed. If it passes its Damage Overflow, it has a chance of being permanently damaged (-Attribute) or permanently cripped (useless) or severed (also useless).

If the torso or head reaches Incapacitated, you're incapacitated.

Leg damage modifiers also apply to base movement (minimum 1m per turn unless both legs are Incapacitated, no running if at least one leg is incapacitated).

OK, let's take another look at this from the top.

Concept:

• Clean slate ShadowRun edition. Everything on the table, from mechanics through systems to background.
• Verisimilitude is the ultimate goal within the assumption of magic returning to the world and technology continuing massive expansion into cyberpunk territory.

Ideas:

• A weapons reset (right now it's rather generic - OK for some, but sometimes it results in weird decisions on the parts of GMs who are not knowledgeable).
• Shift the damage system, perhaps with a return to damage levels, and adding hit locations.
• Rebalancing magic to better accomodate the long game, the intellectual elements of magic, and (as a side effect) reduce the degree to which magicians are interchangeable with other types.
• Recalibrate the expectations in terms of computers and neural interfaces. For those who are interested, neuronal cycle time is of the rough millisecond order, and maximum native neuronal signalling speeds are in hundreds of metres per second, which places a low bar before how quickly DNI or synaptic acceleration has to operate to be useful, although it leaves open the question of the aggregate bandwidth required for DNI - a point which actually strongly argues against the usefulness of wireless unless you have breathtakingly efficient multiplexing.
• Similarly, revise or exclude technomancers as being completely implausible outside technomagic.
• Handwave gibsonian cyberspace as somehow being as expressively efficient as programmable interfaces - or in that it is programmable itself to allow for semantically complex constructs and actions. How this will influence the usefulness of classic terminals is unclear - I don't see that a talented systems geek in front of a terminal with a three week's supply of coffee and a catheter will be terribly penalised. In combat rounds, I could see the VR-linked actor being snappier in response. None of this invalidates how useful AR and tactical management can be in combat. Run with a hacker who amalgamates all the data streams of the entire team to include things like spatial analysis of sounds to locate enemies and combines it into a superior situational awareness map.
• Maybe, as a consequence of the above, take another look at cyberware in terms of computing and power requirements, and look at modified lifestyle implications for cyberware as well as bioware, in some kind of standardised and unambiguous format. On the other hand, possibly find a different answer to 0 Essence = Death, because it seems a little sharp a threshold. What's wrong with cybering until you're a Dalek? Or perhaps death in context just means that you're a partially biological machine from the perspective of magical assaults, but that isn't the end of the character? Or mental problems start to necessarily arise, such as some degree of psychopathy? Perhaps the lifestyle adjustments for cyber/bioware include mental modifications to reflect that?
• Clean up adepts (specifically how is unclear).
• Rework the milieu with a sociological and economic eye. Perhaps the answer is that there are fairly well defined neo-anarchic shadow zones in which runners can openly operate, which are in effect defended free citystates? Perhaps they coordinate, so that if, for an example, Free Lower Detroit comes under assault, likeminded specialists from all over the world take some free time to wreak unholy vengeance on the perpetrators?

Scope:

• A lot of people seem to be concerned with game balancing factors or the relative usefulness of various concepts. This might be a valid game design concern, although with different character types it's heavily dependent on campaign nature, but is not a first order concern for verisimilitude.
• There are some open questions relating to the typical operation of runs. Do the runners typically have weeks or hours to prepare? If the answer is hours, then their down time pretty much has to involve nearly constant preparation for every eventuality, whereas it it's weeks, then legwork is probably the bulk of the game. This isn't really in scope, but is again a peripheral game design question.

This will be a fun one to work over. Using growing Cyberpsychosis to represent the growing shift along the meat to machine scale is not so easy to really play up well and are usually fairly unsatisfactory overall, though some pieces of fluff have to a degree touched on this and a Good GM can keep the pressure of the growing disassociation on the player so it's not a free ride.

Really, though, that whole list reads as 'play SR3' to me.

There are ways to do it within game mechanics, as a GM aid.

Here's an example, off the top of my head:

Shifting social abilities (bonuses and penalties to things like negotiation, intimidation and so on).

Altered behaviour in terms of biologically determined patterns like sleep, as endocrine shifts take place.

Changes to perception, as either concentration becomes easier (fewer distractions) or harder (everyone else moves too darn slowly).

There ain't no free lunch, chummer.

There are some variations with SR3 in that list, though. SR3 wasn't all that good at managing some of the longer term magic ideas, for instance. There could also have been more work on the consistent world environment and society.

I agree it can be done and your examples of how to do it are good ones.

I especially like the perception one. As one assassin/enforcer once said, when all you have is a kneebreaker, everything starts looking like kneecaps.

Given your profession you are going to be subconsciously sizing up everyone, which is fine for a normal psyche, but if you have loads of cyber geared toward locating and eliminating threats, it only takes a brief flareup of temper or being surprised and your systems could be responding before you consciously think.

I was thinking along the basic lines of taking it to the dalekoid extreme. A brain in a jar, loaded with coprocessing systems and rigging multiple drones, will actually have lost, not only the bulk of the peripheral nervous system, but a lot of the glandular and related tissues which provide a surprising degree of (meta)human personality. For example, most androgen sources will be gone, which should probably induce calm, passivity, reduce aggression and so on.

There's a lot for a competent endocrinologist to point at.

Firearms rules were written by people who were clueless about how guns work. You don't need to have spent 15 yeas in Delta, but some passing idea about how shotguns pattern would be kind of useful. Second, the level of detail is silly, at the scale of SR a pistol is a pistol. All the absurd fiddly +1/-1 mods are stupid and result in dozens of guns being written up, of which 3 are ever used by anyone with a clue because all the other ones suck. 3rd, weapon damage should vary significantly from pistol to rifles to heavy machineguns.

Computer rules need to result in hacking that takes one or three rolls and uses the same mechanics as magic or combat. The absurd drone hacking example CGL posted where after some endless number of rolls nothing was yet accomplished is not something to be proud of.

To add extreme detail into the firearms system like that would either make certain classes of guns useless or cumbersome beyond belief. I think what they have now is workable without always eliminating certain weapons.

I mostly agree with you (especially the cluelessness factor) except that I can't agree about the level of detail. In the real world there's a world of difference between some .380 made by a third string manufacturer, with a trigger evidently lubricated by sand, and with 2 inches of barrel to get the slug moving on the one hand, and a tuned .454 Casull with a ported 9 inch barrel and a trigger group breathed on by a competent gunsmith on the other hand. We're talking an actual base ten order of magnitude difference in muzzle energy, a massive difference in sight radius and effective range. With the former, hitting a human torso at 50 feet is actually a challenge. With the latter the question of which button you want to hit is a viable point of consideration. The former's slug might actually be stopped by the sternum of an unarmoured target. The latter will smash the sternum, turning it into so much shrapnel, liquify the tissues behind it and rip out the spine on the way through. However, concealing a 9 inch revolver with a cylinder the size of an ork's fist is very difficult, while a dinky .380 can actually be hidden in a boot.

I'm not suggesting that the entire game should become a gun oil lubricated lovefest, but to say that all handguns are the same is just not accurate.



I do have a significant problem with the idea that all systems can be hacked, all encryption can be broken, and that all network architects are drooling morons only employed as an act of charity. There are quite literally encryption systems which are mathematically infeasible to crack absent the key (OTP springs to mind). I don't care if your quantum ultraputer spawns AIs every morning to help clean its logs of magnificence - it can't differentiate "Fuck the government." and "Vote for Dick Nixon."

Is this a game breaker for hackers? No - there's lots of crackable stuff around, and there are network administrators whose best recommendations are overridden by some dweeb in a corner office, and there are still cube critters who leave their passwords under their keyboards. Moreover, there are some systems which are infeasible to hack from outside, but once you have physical access it's game on. That said, abstracting it all to a few rolls shortchanges what should be a tricky intellectual challenge - more so if you're trying to evade discovery, because systems can (and intelligent administrators use this fact) monitor each other, including each other's security logs, and will be scripted to take remedial action so that, by the time the alarm hits the administrator's ears, the machines are already in a more defensible condition.

I would like to see better systems reflecting these very basic realities, and guidelines for GMs on how to reasonably put them into action.

Duh.

But how big of a difference is there between a SIG P938 and a Ruger LC9, both brand new?

I think there was a suggestion knocking around that one thing that could be done with distinguishing guns in SR (outside of overhauling the entire firearm rules and statistics) was having "gun qualities".

Something like the Vintage and Incompatible feature introduced in the Gun Heaven PDFs, could be a good step in that direction.

(...ok, outside of the fact that a runner would never take a gun that they can't put a smartlink on, but w.e.)

It's not just a shitty gun and a great gun. It's also calibre and conformation. Barrel length matters a lot, as does loading.

Even so, you were picking an extreme example where the two guns differed wildly.

ADD extreme detail?

There is an ABSURD level of detail about guns in the game now. Most of it totally stupid. There should be some sort of difference between a little pocket pistol and what are usually called "service pistol" sized guns, but a little j-frame in .357 magnum is as pretty much just as good (or bad) at stopping people intent on doing you harm as a G21, at least for the first 6 shots.

Real world I've wasted lots of time I'll never get back arguing the wonders of Austrian combat tuperware compared to Croatian combat tuperware vs the disciples of John Browning but on a practical level, the differences don't matter. The things that actually make a person choose one vaguely similar gun over another (besides things like "I was issued this one") are not things you can reflect in a game like SR.

Basically any pistol you can effectively use in a gunfight sucks for convincing people to stop doing things that cause you to shoot them, and they suck pretty much equally. Little pistols with little bullets (which are not "pistols you can effectively use in a gunfight" by my reckoning) suck even more, but a lot of people have been killed with a single shot to the chest from .22LR pistols too, and I've talked to cops who have seen guys shot in the head by .45s who just got a headache.

And Koekepan might note that no agency issues .454 casull to their people. There is a reason for that. Try shooting hammers/double-taps at 7 yards with one, keeping your split times to less than 0.25 and both rounds in the A zone (not hard with any decent service pistol) and you'll find out why.

Yes, but keep in mind that the goal here is a simulation, such as it is, rather than a game. As such, the things that make for a good game are secondary at best.

While I agree with you that pistols are largely used for poking holes in people in Shadowrun, it matters because a lot of the game is involved in combat of one form or another. Choices between little guns and big guns, modified and unmodified, concealable and otherwise matter quite a lot, beyond the simple question of pocket pistol versus service pistol.



I can't agree with this. While hand fit is a meaningful concern in firearms choices, and can not readily be reflected (other than guns being sized for particular metahuman types, or guns being customised for good fit and a bonus being applied) there are crystal clear design elements which make a huge difference. I don't spend a lot of time arguing, but I have used firearms in anger and I am well aware of the difference which even an extra two inches of barrel can make on a pistol, with reference to trajectory, sight radius and mass reducing muzzle flip. If I, not a shadowrunner, care that much about these things, then how much more would a dedicated, informed shadowrunner who probably shoots thousands of rounds a month in practice alone, care?



True, but all things equal, the better designed and maintained gun, aiming at the same spot, will do more damage, within a given calibre and loading. On the other hand, that may balance other factors such as length, cylinder gap (in revolvers), ease of sighting and so on. Ultimately, the choices are about improving your odds when the shooting starts, and intelligent choices by players should surely be reflected in an improved outcome. Just waving your hands really hard and saying: "It's a service pistol! All service pistols are the same! They do equally well!" is not only completely at odds with demonstrable facts (and hence verisimilitude) but probably highly unsatisfactory to those people who do want every possible edge for their street samurai.



I already know why, which is one of several reasons (including cost) I don't carry one. On the other hand, it's a fairly popular choice for handgun hunters of fairly large animals. This may sound completely irrelevant to you until you realise that a troll is roughly the size of a big black bear. Suddenly your Glock 21 which tosses out chunks of (possibly) jacketed lead with a profile restricted by mechanism is less persuasive to someone whose life is on the line than a .454, or even a hot loaded .44 magnum, which is more likely to fully penetrate, develop completely (revolvers have fewer restrictions on bullet profile) and deliver more tissue damage on the way as a result. If you want to just pour lead like a river into your target and hope that something works out well in a heavy target where penetration is the probable deciding factor for a physiological stop, then sure, get a 9mm with an extended magazine and pull your trigger until you see the deity of your choice.

I'm not arguing against some level of abstraction. It may be more desirable to simply designate handguns, not by brand but by feature, and assign benefits and deficits by feature in the system. Just painting them all with a single description (handgun) impoverishes choice and relevant player intelligence.

Now, if you want to have a detailed discussion of the differences between physiological and psychological stops and how those are affected by the appearance of the firearm and the wielder, shot location, bullet profile and tissue damage, I would be delighted to oblige you, but I have a sort of feeling that addressing firearm features, ammunition choice, morale factors and hit locations will do well enough for most players, and for the purposes of verisimilitude, which is the only real element that I care about here. I think it would be good enough, and a defensible choice.

If we're going simulationism then calibre would need to be introduced as the primary factor for determining damage, scaling upwards with semi-auto weapons working up to fully auto. But then you get into problems where sometimes the largest weapon is all you need because it does the single largest amount of damage. Sniper will be using .50 cal barrets because in simulation, it will do more than a Garande.

Yep. Didn't say the consequences lead to a good game - they very often don't.

Full auto weapons don't do more damage then semi-auto weapons. Bullets that hit do damage, and missing really fast is what most people handed an automatic weapon are really good at. As a disgusted instructor once told me "missing faster doesn't help." How fast you can shoot and keep the bullets on target (ignoring things like tripod mounted machine guns) at range is a factor of the skill of the guy on the trigger, the caliber and the weight of the gun and the weight of the shooter. But mostly skill. This is true for both semi-auto and fully automatic fire.

Or so some of the ladies say.

If simulationism is the concern, let me hasten to add that calibre is most emphatically not all there is to it. Bullet construction is key, loading is vastly important, and you can actually have different bullet designations which are nominally equal in calibre but have different power levels. For instance, the venerable .30-30 uses the same bullet as the NATO 7.62mm (.308 bullet) but has a lot less case capacity, different pressure and all that good stuff. Guess which one does more damage?

I hope never to be shot, but should I get shot I'd rather be hit by a round nosed .45ACP in full metal jacket which will probably push a smooth hole through the tissues than a modern jacketed hollow point out of a .357 Magnum, which is probably packing more muzzle energy (or the same ballpark anyway) and which will develop to a jagged moving blender, tearing a lot more tissue on its way through. Size isn't all that matters.



Actually, I don't agree with that. Just on the face of it, there are some major reasons. Here are a few:

.50 bullets are more expensive, and heavier, and larger. Carrying them is a pain.
.50 rifles are correspondingly large, heavy, and expensive. Carrying them is a pain, and carrying them concealed is a massive pain.
.50 takes more trouble to deal with the recoil, and has a larger signature (visual and auditory) which means more trouble dealing with the gun and shooting.

I could carry on, but these are all very serious considerations. If the GM just wants to say: "It's a sniper rifle, I don't care, use whatever has the most pluses." then fine, at that table, but most players can identify with a situation where they have too little time, money, space and all the rest of it, and will take whatever works and gives the least amount of trouble.

mn

The elephant in the room is, that the better you make the system from an objective point of view the more people will be angry with you.
Why? It is simple human nature that we are more afraid of loosing something than we are exited about getting something.

If you just look at the discussions here most were not about "Oh, that is not really good from a game design point of view" they were "why can't I get this bonus anymore, why do I now have to do X for this bonus, why was this nerved".

You have to go really far in the "overpowering" corner untill people complain. See mystic adepts (even if you just introduce the change in the german version increasing Karma costs from 2 to 5 a lot of people think that this was enough and do not really care about it beeing proken in general "getting two cakes for the cost of one").

Because: Lets be honest about it: Most GM are more likely to introdue restricting houserules if there is abouse than they are to allow additional stuff.
So people fear that in a "good" system they lost their safty-zone against the GM or they are affraid that a character they could have gotten past the GM is now banned by the rules (reasonable or not) and the GM won't allow it.
(Which is of course silly because if the system works most GMs are more compfortable to allow additional stuff, because well it is less likely to break the system. But if sytem depends on strictly keeping some minor rules because they were put in place to patch up major loopholes...)

I was going to say, I don't think the above poster's ever seen a .50BMG long-range shooting rifle. They're about five feet long, thirty pounds, and hold 10 rounds at a time. Designed to be fired solely from the prone position.

There's a whole stack of very good reasons actual military snipers generally use the M24, which is based on the Remington 700 hunting rifle and chambered in 7.62x51mm NATO or .300 Winchester Magnum.

Ok, so let's put some kind of boundaries around this. In the context of a tabletop RPG, there's a limit to how much can meaningfully be simulated, in the context of firearms.

I propose that the following can, and arguably should be provided for in a game where combat features meaningfully:

• Size (including weight) - which influences concealment and carrying capacity
• Normal power level - which influences typical damage profile
• Accuracy potential - in the form of range modifiers or similar
• Customised features - alterations we already see to modify signature, recoil management and so on
• Ammunition choice - because penetration and wound profile matter

The first three items are typical for a platform, and can be taken right off a gear list. The attributes of ammunition can similarly be taken off an ammunition list. Custom features can be ignored by the team's mage, and the player of the street samurai can print them out and rub them all over his naked body.

Missing anything?

Those snipers also don't have to shoot intelligent, armored foes the size of a bear and capable of returning fire. Nor do they have to shoot at supernatural entities which can bounce .300 Winchester Magnum and laugh at it.

If the Sniper is doing it correctly, the Armored Bear of which you speak will never see the shot coming, nor will he be able to return any meaningful counter-fire. *shrug*

You would also have to account for LMG to be heavier yet in some way superior to assault rifle, in spite of firing the same ammo, so as to justify their existence (as far as I understand, IRL heavier barrel reduces recoil and withstand heat better, maintaining a better accuracy over time and reducing misfire).

Indeed, because if you don't take it with that first shot the bear gets a chance to do just that.

Damage should have a limited number of tiers, with nothing on given gun that would cause it to change tiers.
Essentially you have something like:
1 small pistol
2 service pistol/smg/knife
5 assault rifle/lmg
8 rifle/mmg/shotgun{vs unarmored}/sword or axe
10 hmg (highly but not inevitably lethal)
25 totally and completely lethal against anything that isn't an AFV.

I'd ignore crazy stuff like .600 nitro express pistols.
No explosive ammo, that's just dumb. AP trades off damage, extra damage (HP/SP) trades off armor penetration. And it's a minimal change.

Easy enough with relative qualities. That said, machineguns are generally suppressive fire weapons, which assault rifles can be but generally are not. Select fire introduces flexibility. Most shadowruns, the assault rifle would be the better choice unless you intend to fend off waves of charging attackers.

Cannot agree.

I'd rather take a .45 to the lung than a .22 to the brainstem.

I'd rather take .50 BMG to the foot than .22 to the brainstem.

I'd rather take a narrow hole than a wide one, and so on.

Better to handle guns by attribute than tier. It's more flexible. A bullet piercing the trachea is an annoyance. The exact same bullet piercing C3 a couple of inches away is a stopper. I know that hit location isn't an attribute of the gun, but a nonlethal hit by a .45-70 is entirely possible, as is a lethal hit by a .22lr.

Also, if you want to strictly speak about gun attributes, what about rechamberings? Conversion options? The same rifle handling subsonics with a suppressor and switching to barrel burners for maximum effect? I can fire a .45 from the nineteenth century in a .454, or a smoking hot up-to-the-minute beast with vastly more energy and momentum.

It's too big a topic for that kind of blanket statement, in my view.

Way too fiddly and detailed. SR players are really not interesting in the endless damage charts of Phoenix Command or Living Steel.

I guess you could mark it `optional', but you surely know some very different players from those I know. As I said above:



I know quite a few who would not surprise me if they licked the pages to pick up the gritty gun rule flavours.

Actually, that'd just make most snipers' jobs easier. They're already used to shooting intelligent foes in armor. Bigger targets just mean easier shots, and even a troll's skull isn't going to do much more than slow down a 180-grain bullet that's still doing over 800 m/s at 200 yards. That's about 2800 foot-pounds of energy, and the human skull only needs about 300 foot-pounds to be penetrated.

In short, I think going into full ballistics discussions is a bit more complex than any rule system really needs, and don't mind representative damage values at all. I do think that they were much more plausible when the damage codes were based on light/moderate/serious/deadly wounds, with the category representing the average wound from the weapon and the damage code providing a number for how hard the weapon's shots were to resist. The more finely you simulate damage values, the more variables you have to take into account, and it just gets unworkable and clunky.

See also the SR5 explosive rules for a present example of overly clunky rules for this sort of thing.

I tend to agree.

I'm willing to go as far as some LMSD by body region table in terms of damage granularity, with a quick resolution based on a precalculated damage pool.

Here's a hypothetical example:

At chargen, Max the Mage and Sally Samurai are working their respective purchases out.

Max doesn't care about silly greasy bang-bangs, so takes Generic Plastic Pistol number 5 and loads it up with whatever's cheap. It does 6M damage with that ammunition, and has a range increment of, oh, let's say 8m.

Sally on the other hand likes the design because of all the customisation she can do. She also gets a GPP5, but adds a high power modification to handle hot ammunition, long barrel, high visibility sights as a backup to an internal smartlink, high capacity magazine, ported barrel, flared mag well, coated bearing surfaces and PixieDust™. She then loads up with high power fragmenting hollow points for soft tissue targets, and ends up with a range increment of 15m, doing 9S to unarmoured targets (or 3L to armoured), a faster reload time and reduced recoil modifier but reduced concealability. Then she prints out her gun's specifications and rubs them all over her naked body, while Max looks on in bafflement.

The drek hits the fan, as it inevitably will, and Max, reeling from Drain, points his gun at the middle of the three rentacops he sees, and pulls the trigger. At 12m distance he has a reduced chance to hit, but the damage is pretty much normal. Sally on the other hand hangs from the ceiling, does her best mohawked howler monkey impression, and lets fly with three rounds at the same range. Her pistol gives her a better chance to hit, has less of a recoil penalty, and she accepts some difficulty modifier to aim for a head shot.

Max's bullet dents the rentacop's body armour at about the same time as Sally's bullets chew up his cortex and spit it out the back of his cranium.

Advantage: Easy!
Disadvantage: Lesser variation.

An other advantage would be, that it would be swifter to introduce your "own" guns without endless discussion.



The major issue is always where to go with the abstraction and where to leave it be.
For example: Adding net hits do damage.
This seems to be reasonable for shooting a person or any target with internal structure. But shooting a stelle plate, well I guess it kind of does not matter how skilled you are, either your bullet benetrates or it does not.

The point is, to what other kind of targets do you apply this rule?
Spirits? Spirits using possession? Vampires?
On the first look it does not seem like much, but net hits can easy go up to 5 (espacially if you are unaware).

If you now say: Attacks agaisnt those targets matter for melee (hitting harder), they matter for magic (hotter fire) but they do not matter for guns it has two results:
1. Guns get weaker against those threats.
2. Those threats get stronger.

I am not saying that simulation would be a bad thing, but you need to balance it.
For example: If possession spirits get net-hits applyed and normal spirits don't this would be a good thing for it would give normal spirits an edge.
To use the base damage code to see if it penetrates cover would also be a good thing, because it has not really often an effect and when it does it kind of breaks immersion.

@Koekepan
The major issue I have with two much modification madness is, if modifications do not have drawbacks.
A smaller gun should have an advantage.
For example if all your active actions are only with a small pistol you have your ini reduced only by 8 after your turn.
Using longer barrel might increase the loss by one for more precision and damage. Modification should NOT be no-brainers. It should always be a little tradeoff.

I sometimes wonder if the more realistic approach wouldn't actually be near-complete randomness, except for the most precisely called shots ; something like 2D6+0 for 9mm, 2D6+2 for .228, 2D6+4 for .50 BMG. I mean, even the worst shooter in the world has a chance of hitting right on the femoral by random chance, while even the best sniper can sometimes get not better than a shoulder at long range.

Eh, you can make some pretty good generalizations though, and really Shadowrun's gunplay is more designed to simulate an action movie than realistic gunplay in the first place. After all, an unarmored runner in SR can generally take a round or two from a holdout pistol directly to center mass and shrug it off. Less so for most people in the real world, where a couple rounds from someone's ultracompact 9mm holdout will put down damn near anyone.

As I suggested above, many modifications raise signatures, reduce concealability, add mass and so on. My larger point is that as long as you have the options there for the players who want them, and the relevant numbers are precalculated so that crunching them isn't an issue during the run of a game, you keep the flexibility (which is after all relevant in-game, especially for some character types) while still being compatible with a flowing style.

One gaming system which does this well is Hackmaster 5th Edition. You precalculate your combat stats by weapon, write up your combat rose with those numbers, and combat passes surprisingly smoothly for all the crunchiness.

As for smaller guns having advantages - things like concealability are huge if you're trying to infiltrate somewhere, signature is very important if you want a quiet takedown. These things do matter to everyone except the pink of mohawk.

Agree on the generalisations, and I'll grant that Shadowrun's gunplay has its cinematic elements. Still, in earlier editions where net hits could rapidly push you up the lethality chart, it wasn't that darned cinematic in this respect. Sally Samurai had to wear armour, or show some respect for incoming fire. Many a promising chromed career met its end because of a mook with a simple, standard predator.

As for the ultracompact 9mm holdout, I half agree with you, half not. A couple of FMJ round nose rounds will push a couple of pencil-thin holes through abdominal tissue which someone flush with adrenalin might not even notice until the shouting is over. A couple of high expansion modern hollowpoints through the ribcage and lungs will start to introduce complications of their own pretty darned quickly.

This introduces another reason for location hits, by the way. Getting hit in the femoral artery is a big deal. Getting hit in the right cyberthigh might cramp your style for a while, but mostly means that a trip to the mechanic or the cyberdoc is in order.

No Hitlocations for SR.
Hitlocations are stupid.
Especially in a game that ALREADY consists of basically Glass-Cannons and Paper-Tigers . .

Yeah, but if you're not loading frangible hollowpoints in your carry gun, you're just being irresponsible. Remember, every bullet's got a lawyer attached, so don't put them into anything they might keep going through afterwards.

Here, Here... I have to agree on that one. There is absolutely no need for the granularity that Hit Locations provide.

I have seen a system that does hit locations well--not in actual usage, but designed to be quick-to-use and accurate--the designer said that one of the most common questions he gets about it is "how the hell do you hit someone's BACK (i.e. the spinal area) when you're attacking from the front with a sword?" The answer is "Real easy: it goes over their shoulder."

Supposedly didn't add that much resolution time to the combat, though I never got the opportunity to witness actual play. But in general I am not in favor of them.