The goals of a war vary, most are turf disputes and natural resources are generally involved. Look at RL China today to see this. They are rattling their sabers at India, Tiawan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and the Phillipenes for control of all of the south china sea and its resources. One of the hot spots to watch in the news. Some are religious, some are ideology, some are control issues.



Take a look at FARC, the Mujadeen in Afghanistan, Hezbollah and the various guerrlla groups in the Phillipenes. They have cntinued to survive despite the military of those countries trying to wipe them out. Though in the case of Hezbollah, they eventually became a defacto military force rather than guerrila force.

The point of guerrlla warefare is to make your opponent bleed resources using hit and fade tactics. Ambush a check point here, raid an airbase there, attack a convoy there, blow up/plunder a supply depot, eventually sapping your opponents will to fight or get enough local support and resources that an uprising would happen and escalate things to a civil war or war of "liberation" against foreign oppressors. Sometimes this is successful (Vietnahm vs the Japanese, French and U.S.).




True, but I'd further define this as support from somewhere, not necessarily the local populace. FARC was/is in bed with drug cartels, as is the Taliban in Pakistan/Afghanistan, they get support from the drug gangs in return for protection and muscle. Vietnahm got its support from the allies vs the Japanese, and used that against the French, and got Soviet support against the U.S (but also had significant local support).



And the bad PR that results from using such weapons in populated areas. Sure you can kill the 10 guerrilla fighters in the village by wiping out the village, but at that point the famlies/relatives of those villagers become more likely to fight against you.

BTW-The US has all those toys available to them, other countries may not have those capabilities. SDBs (250lb bombs), and artillery (155mm or less) are preferred for these things since collateral damage is minimized. The US has also been the most successful at defeating guerilla forces (Indian wars, Civil war, Phillipenes Insurrection, and others), with VIetnahm being the exception rather than the rule.

Sorry for the OT post.....forgot which thread I was in and posted before reading all the replies since then.

I'm thinking more 9M. Since the M1 carbine reputedly had poor stopping power and was seen as inferior to the AK.

Wow. Great thread to read into. With recently acquiring 5e I remembered this place called dumpshock that I used to post on so long ago. Lo and behold I seem to have missed quite the happening with Frank and others. Nice to see familiar names are still around. Anyway, I guess I'm just sticking my neck out to say Hi and hopefully I'll be posting some more in the future.

Welcome back

Would you say an AK is 6S?

I believe the last time we discussed this, the conclusion was most rifles have high penetration (9s), but not inherently great stopping power (M), at least until you put well-aimed or poorly-aimed but many rounds into the target. However, handguns are way over-statted, and their damage levels need to be dropped.

Rifles bullets that penetrate really well shouldn't do huge damage until you get into crazy big guns. Hunting bullets do a whole lot of damage, but don't penetrate well. Pistols are just absurdly effective in SR.

The biggest problem with SR3 pistols, to me, is that 1) The damage jumps up massively when you go from a light pistol to a heavy pistol, and 2) They have heavy pistols that have similar concealability to that of light pistols, making light pistols a suboptimal pick, to say the least. While a lot of things didn't port over to SR4 mechanics very well (such as social skills), I do think the simplification of damage codes helped keep light pistols, heavy pistols, and heavier weapons scaled more reasonably with regards to each other.

Agreed... I never really liked the L/M/S/D system at all.

I was thinking about L/M/S/D the other day. It's basically free successes that don't count towards hitting. At close ranges, it all balances out, but at extreme range it leaves something to be desired. I imagine a more graceful solution would be to set all weapons at M (or perhaps S), but fuss with the number for staging down damage. So I shoot Tymaeus with a light pistol because he's grumping. 3 successes, it stages from M to S. He rolls dodge + body and gets 4 successes. Light pistol down-staging is 1, that reduces it to nothing. If I did the same with an assault cannon (down-staging 9), he'd basically be out of the fight.

Well, there's the difference between a 2mm bullet and a 2cm anti tank grenade O.o
if the outcome were any different, i'd call shenanigans on that one . .

also:
dodge is against your net hits.
if he has more hits on his dodge than you had net hits on your attack, you miss and the staging doesn't matter . .
and under SR3, you roll only combat pool dice for doding. body only comes in if you are hit in the first place.
and then you are in a whole world of pain, if somebody is shooting at you with higher power niveau weapons.
damage is irrelevant at first, because the target number to stage down the damage is power-armor.
so the PAC has 18D Damage.
Your TN to stage down that Damage IF YOU WERE HIT AT ALL (which, in your example with your 3 net hits and his 4 hits on dodge he clearly wasn't) is 18-worn armor.
And that you roll Body for then. So, if you are a massive Troll, like Tymaeus can be sometimes, you probably wear about 8 points of armor and have a Body of 16.
So now you need to roll 10's. with 16 dice. and you need eight 10's to stage the damage down to nothing. Exploding dice, of course, because that's how SR3 worked.
so you need to first roll eight 6's and then reroll these eight 6's and get 4's on these eight dice again to stage down the damage. This is on ONE NET HIT ON THE ATTACK AND NO HITS ON DODGE!
IF the Attack has MORE NET HITS THAN DODGE, then you add the Hits on Dodge to your Body Roll.

I'm not sure who specifically you're addressing here. Are you saying the current method makes sense? My method does not make sense?

Absolutely HATED Staging ala SR1, which is close to what you are describing... *yuckkkkk*

reading through SR1, variable staging worked in both directions. So it was a lot of fuss, but the only real result was the guy with more skill always did more damage (which is generally the case anyway). Bi-directional variable staging like that adds complexity but no benefit.

I'm curious though specifically what you had an issue with.

Not exactly. The original MP laser was something like 6M8, which meant you were just about guaranteed an M wound every time. It was impossible to stage down, but it was equally impossible to get a one shot kill with it.

The very thing you describe. HATED It with a passion. Not a fan of the staging rules in SR2/3 either.

At least with SR2 and SR3 (iirc), they removed the weapon dependent staging. All you needed was 2 net successes to stage up. I liked it, made combat deadly. SR4 and even more so with SR5, was very lenient in terms of damage from extra successes. Especially since TN 2 for smartlink at short range in the open would mean insta kills even with with a light/holdout pistol. In SR4 and 5 light pistols will be lucky if they scratch the paint (due to the change to TN5 and 1 point per net success).

Yeah, if you have no interest in staging in any form, I don't think there's much I can say.

I do like staging, but the jump from L to M in handgun damage is a big break in the system, as well as how hitting at range is frequently an all-or-nothing deal, that rifles and handguns have identical performance characteristics (excepting range), and that an unskilled person or an accidental discharge can generally be shrugged off without a second thought.

By saying 'hey, this gun will leave a big hole, you can't stage it down' vs. 'this gun makes a small hole', would seem to fix a lot of that. An Ares Predator is 6M damage, 4 to stage down, while an AK is 9M, 4 to stage down. They both make the same sized hole, but the Pred has less penetration.

Well, in my mind, in SR3 out of the box the rifles were nerfed and basically all the rifles should have started at 9S type damage codes instead of 6S.

My logic is that the BBB armors resembled 80s era soft body armors, and so could more or less counteract normal handguns (6L light pistols) but would be defeated by .44 magnum handgun rounds and rifle rounds. So the Heavy Pistols were like .44 magnums and up, and then all the rifles would be at least 9S. Plus, since the Heavy Pistols were all basically super powerful novelty weapons, they'd be subject to the double uncompensated recoil rule for Heavy Weapons, in my mind.

So basically burst fire with rifles would be really really deadly and long bursts even more so but again that's sort of how it should be. What do you think would happen to someone, even wearing soft body armor and being as tough as nails, if you dumped 10 rounds into him at close range from a M4? I didn't feel like on the whole I liked the effect of making individual rifle rounds oddly weak just so that burst fire from a military pattern rifle could be only slightly better than individual Heavy Pistol shots.

I kind of feel like the system was "balanced" by someone deciding to make individual rifle rounds weak, but then the system was subsequently jacked up and distorted in a later sourcebook by allowing the possibility of creating a rifle with enormous amounts of recoil comp.

Why not just leave recoil with the original TN penalties but let it long bursts from a rifle be really effective against point targets if they hit, instead of the elaborate divergent advanced rules later?

From my reading, getting a rifle frequently suffers from overpenetration, so I'd be happy to leave it at an M. I also assume that something like an armor jacket is a mix of hard and soft armor, so walking off a rifle shot should be at least managable. A 9M or 11M rifle seems reasonable to me. However, a handgun won't ever have that sort of penetration. It would be closer to 6M (and yeah, with the double recoil).

It varies. FMJ rifle rounds might do a through and through wound, where the target is not going to be severely injured unless the bullet path intersects a bone, major blood vessel or other important structure. Oh the other hand, soft point bullets are a whole other issue. One of the comments to a wound profile of a .308 SP hunting round in a medical publication was that the surgeon will almost never see this wound in reality, as it's almost always rapidly fatal. Rifles rounds do hugely more damage the the same size pistol round, because the bullet is moving much, much faster, typically at least twice as fast, often more then that. Energy is based on the square of the velocity.

So basically, I could go with Nezumi's interpretation of FMJ rounds and use that as a basic starting point, but then go for more detailed or realistic rules for the use of JHPs, JSPs, and frangible ammunition. Maybe one impact they could have is that they're bad against armor but for a hit that gets through the damage code is easier to scale up. That would make JHP rifle rounds considerably more dangerous than JHP handgun rounds due to the improved Power.

Personally that would make the game feel more satisfying than more of a focus on fantasy type rounds as is default.

I think this is Dumpshock's version of Godwin's Law: Any thread that goes on long enough will eventually turn into a discussion of firearms rules

I feel kind of mentally refreshed on the subject of SR firearms. I haven't played in years, and in the intervening time, I had lots of practice with firearms. I used to compete once a month in local-level tactical competitions and developed a nice gut feeling about what I like and what I don't like with regard to weapon handling, particular firearms, and how easy or difficult it is to hit various types of targets at various distances.


Looking back on it all, if I could re-write or re-tool the SR firearms rules, besides for adjusting the damage codes and focusing on real world bullet types as alluded to a few posts ago, I'd balance out the ability to trick out firearms with reliability.

I can't tell you how many times during a USPSA competition you see someone with a completely tricked out competition gun get a stoppage which seems to require a cleaning rod to clear. These handguns have funnels on the mag wells, holographic sights, recoil comp vents, minimal holsters, optimized controls, match grade barrels, and typically hand loaded ammunition. When it works it's a sight to behold but for some reason my most vivid memory is some guy tugging on his slide and cursing in the middle of the course of fire. And then a few minutes later he DNF'd on a stage of competition and his hunching down by his range bag ramming a cleaning rod down his match grade barrel.

I always felt like the firearms customization rules got a little bit silly by allowing the creation of improbable Excaliber type super guns. But I feel like I know in real life that when you trick something out to the extreme you sometimes introduce other problems.

Basically, I'd do it so that a typical out-of-the-box firearm doesn't have any recoil comp or any other bonuses, but is very reliable. It will fail only at GM discretion, i.e. the shooter is defaulting to Quickness so might be limp-wristing a handgun, or the firearm was just dropped in the mud, etc. Even then the GM would roll a dice or something, and not just declare that there is a stoppage.

To the basic out-of-the-box firearm, you can then add things. Gas vents, Smartlinks, biometric safety, whatever. But each device you add that impacts the mechanical workings of the firearms has a certain reliability penalty. You add up the total reliability penalty for the firearm and arrive at a % value for stoppages. I see this % maxxing out at 5% for a horribly unreliable weapon, with 1-3% being more the norm for a tricked out mechanically complex firearm.

Next, I would in general convert non-mechanical recoil compensation (e.g. "adjustable stock", "barrel weight") to a general "weapon handling bonus" which would add a small amount of dice when using that firearm. Making a weapon easy to handle is a bit more amorphous than just counteracting recoil, after all. The adjustable stock helps you get just the right head position on the rifle for longer range shooting or helps you maneuver the rifle more by collapsing it for closer range shooting. So my solution is to let the total of all your ergonomic bonuses add a small amount of dice when you attack.

Finally, the firearm would have a base weight and all the stuff you add to it would add to the weight and bulk. A very heavy weapon might get an inherent point or two of recoil comp, but might penalize the user a dice or two due to unwieldliness when fired unsupported. Small weapons like pistols and submachineguns might start out with a small dice bonus due to being easy to maneuver whereas rocket launchers and "sniper rifles" which are large and heavy might start with a small penalty due to being inherently bulky and unwieldly.

I feel like on the whole this would result in a more satisfying and realistic firefight experience. I kind of got tired of how back in the day in many cases all the PCs would end up running around with rather silly uber-guns. It felt like there was no sense of realistic advantages and drawbacks, but rather just power inflation with the advanced sourcebooks.

And then, tying in with the enhanced JHP/JSP rules, I'd get rid of Called Shot, but instead would modify staging as follows...once you stage past D damage, the next step isn't +2 Power, but rather bypassing armor, so it's kind of like simulating you pulled off a head shot.

For special situations where it's impossible to bypass armor for some reason, then the bonus reverts to +2 Power.

The only flaw in this rule is that it would be harder to "headshot" with lower damage code weapons whereas in real life that wouldn't inherently be the case. You could "headshot" with a .22 as easily as with a .44 magnum.

I suppose we could rationalize that the .22 LR "headshot" really has to be in the sino-occular cavity whereas with the .44 magnum anywhere in the head, neck, or upper torso where the armor stops is for all intents and purposes going to take someone out of the fight. So we could argue that the low damage code weapons require even more precision, even for a headshot, whereas high damage code weapons have a more forgiving range of places they can hit and be an almost guaranteed incapacitation.

While I miss the standardization of firearms and the resulting uber guns. It has kind of already happened in the US military with soldiers outfitting their guns with the accessories they need for the mission (Laser sights, scopes, flashlights, etc, etc).

Flashlights, laser pointers, and optics on top of the weapon are one thing. Those shouldn't inherently make the firearm less reliable, although if you go overboard you could add to bulk.

Stuff that complicates the mechanical workings of the firearm are a different thing. Think about a smartgun system. If the gun can now do all of its functions with a mental input from the user, this means there now has to be a parallel electronic mechanical system that can do everything the user used to do by hand. This means there's a lot more parts and components that can fail.

Just look at power windows vs. hand roll windows in a car. Have you ever seen someone take apart a power window system in order to service it, clean the electronic connections, replace burned out motors, and so on? It's amazing how many components are added to the window system just by adding power windows.

So another thing that keeps coming and going through my mind is a suppression fire mechanic.

As I read more and more Vietnam war memoirs I get the impression that for small elite units use of suppression fire was key for breaking contact, as was smooth execution of "leapfrogging" type break contact manuvers. That's not the only thing or only appropriate course of action when there's sudden unexpected contact of course but it was an important thing that many teams used often, based on my reading.

So you would think that in Shadowrun the situation would be much the same. You have a small team who are (hopefully) elite and platoons of corporate security who can be mobilized against them. You'd think that a key part of what a team of shadowrunners would want to be able to do would be this kind of break contact maneuver.

So it would seem to me that for quality tactical gameplay you'd want a really good suppression fire mechanic that allows not only strictly individual suppression fire but allows you to handle it well if, say, three team members all suppress while their three buddies fall back, or something like that.

And then you'd want to smooth out the movement rules, so that there is a satisfying and consistent way to determine how far someone falls back, whether they got hit before they made it to cover or not, takes into account lateral movement versus back and forth in terms of direction of fire when running, and all this kind of thing.

Another thing I've come to appreciate from my reading is the role of "friction" in allowing a smaller group to escape a bigger group. From my reading, I've got the idea that theoretically if a larger group ambushes a smaller group and they execute it well the smaller group should be annihilated. And yet as harrowing an experience as it is there are real world examples where the smaller group survived or escaped. And part of this has to do with "friction"...there are gaps or delays in the consecutive action of the larger group, due to poor coordination, lack of drilling, terrain problems, weapon stoppages, etc. and these gaps are what allow the smaller group who has their shit together to get an opening to fire back and escape.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'd also consider is adding some variance in NPC initiative scores maybe based on professional rating or something. Have it so that the less professional the group the more likely they're going to have more dispersion in their initiative scores which leads to "friction" in the combat turn. Or maybe below a certain professional rating you're not allowed to delay your action in order to act in perfect concert with your teammates or something, your turn just happens when it happens.

All this would add to the importance of encumberance rules, carrying more ammo (which would be more realistic), and also, if combined with rules for stoppages, would also incentivize realistic carrying of back up weapons as well. If you're suppressing with a rifle that has a 1% stoppage rate you're going to get some stoppages, much more so than if you only shoot at a few targets on an individual basis.

The thing is, your random group of RPG players often gets the benefits of instantaneous communication between its members, instantaneous assessment of shot accuracy (and to a lesser degree, a good indication of the damage caused) and at least one or two minutes to gather and integrate these information for every three seconds of action.

It take weeks if not months of drills for a SWAT team to be able to open a door and enter a room with their weapons readied, without bumping into each other, while checking every corner for hostiles. That is done casually by any PC team, without breaking a sweat.

Suppression is hard to do effectively in a game where the players get to make choices. Real world you get poorly trained troops suppressed by fairly ineffectual fire while the better trained troops around them continue to fire and maneuver. But crossing the FPL of a properly set-up tripod mounted machine gun is a whole other thing.

Yeah...

Thinking about it this could simply be tied to professional ratings. To keep things simple, player characters aren't affected psychologically by suppression fire (though of course they can be hit by it) however characters that have professional ratings increasingly take penalties across the board if they're being suppressed.

Psychological effectiveness of suppression fire could be tied to the noisiness of the weapon and the size of the impact it makes and the scariness of the sound it makes as it flies past you, so basically it could be tied to base Power rating of the weapon.

This is so very true...

Having thought about this overnight I think the solution is abstraction. Instead of having separate advanced rules for tactical computers and specialized communication rigs, just assume that the PCs have this stuff, and this explains their super communication ability. Then get rid of the advanced rules.