The movie itself is... okay. But the shootouts are surprisingly well done.

wow I came late to the party and I know you want just straight numbers but there are just too many variables even for one shooter on the same range changing weapons.
I've been shooting for years, don't ask a lady how many, and like to think I'm good. guys at the range were impressed tha
t I could hit a target reliably with a S&W airweight with a 2 inch barrel at 30 feet. they thought it was only good for 10 feet and they see shooters every day.


Personally for shooting I prefer a .380 using a Berretta or Sig equally well. at the same place a 9mm browning or Berretta 92f a more powerful gun than the .380 is not as good in my hand
because I'm not comfortable with it.

I can be pretty good with a S&W .357 but the same load in a mataba uniqua is going to be amazing.

even the same gun held in different hands is different. I usually use a two handed teacup grip but sometimes will stand in profile, one handed shooting like a duelist. even using the same weapon this gives different results.

The problem is if you have a system for all the variables, it becomes unplayable. that's why the combat has to be far more flexible.

Re: Way of the Gun, I think I remember hearing somewhere that all the fight choreography was done by the director's brother (or cousin, or whatever), who was a combat vet. It explained a lot.

But yeah, it's a solid flick. Very Shadowrun, if you squint a little it's a couple of 'runners, a couple of Company Men, etc, etc. It wasn't a smash hit and there were some pacing issues, but all in all it's not a bad movie.

Most people don't get in a lot of practice or a lot of actual shootouts, so they suck. Their base skills are low and then you throw in stress... Cops have gotten into shootouts in what almost amounts to a phone booth and both the cops and the criminal have emptied their guns without hitting. Look at the average street gang driveby, in which they miss their target with 27 shots but hit their kid sister with them, the old lady on the porch, and someone 3 blocks away stopped at the light. However people who are both really good and experienced are very deadly.

I knew a ranger who mentioned that the 1st day of Afghanistan he had 12+1 mags, by his last rotation in Iraq he was a running 3+1 and had never had to go to the last magazine. The shooting scene in Collateral, the one in the alley, is perfectly reasonable if you are skilled AND are capable of performing under stress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEZeb5lKPkk

Sykes, the Hong Kong police man who taught shooting to the British Secret Service in WW2 knew from fights on hong kong docks, that most shoot outs with criminals took place at less than 20 feet. he trained people to shoot from the hip at close range.

There is a lot of really crazy stuff that people used to do, much of it is really not a good idea. "No Second Place Winner" has all sorts of crazy stuff that clearly worked for Jordan, but is absolutely nuts to do today. For example, cutting the holster away so you can have your finder on the trigger in the holster. With mere mortals, this results in people shooting themselves in the legs and if it is faster, it is such a minor amount that it certainly isn't worth the risks. But Jordan could hip-shoot quarters at 50 feet, I know a guy who saw him do it. That is not a skill that can be taught to most people in a reasonable amount of time. But you can teach them to use their sights, which is fractionally slower but results in hits.

Afghanistan and Iraq are bad examples - most troops out there spend their days hiking through mountains on patrol with absolutely nothing happening, being bored and exhausted. Then every few days they get shot at from long range by enemies concealed who are hard to find and shoot back at, and then nothing again for days.

They were both conflicts of attrition employing hit and run tactics and making use of defensive knowledge of the land to wear the enemy down, waste supplies, and deplete morale. You just don't tend to shoot off a lot of rounds when dealing with that sort of thing.

~Umi

He was a Ranger. Not a guy with a ranger patch but part of the 75th regiment. IIRC, at that point with a detachment attached to the 160th special operations aviation regiment. I tend to think that he had some idea about shooting people after doing it for the better part of a decade.

But again... Context Matters. When I was in the Middle East, most of the ammo I carried was excess (much like your friend, I carried 12+1), because there just weren't very many valid targets. Not that I would have chosen to carry less ammo, but it just was not used in the same quantities as someone who patrolled the jungles of Viet Nam or the fields/islands of WWII.

One thing I think I realized that is a real life factor, but which is not handled well in RPGs, is situations where someone is going to go down in a few seconds or a minute due to blood loss, shock, or whatever, but keeps going before collapsing, somewhere between a non-incapacitating injury, and extreme trauma.

There was some kind of study done involving the shooting of goats that logged a time until incapacitation, meaning that there was a delay between when the round hit and when the goat went down. I'm sure you've all seen boxing matches where one fighter goes down several seconds after a good liver punch.

Thinking it through to be really realistic there would be a statistic that measures overall physiological integrity and when it gets into certain ranges there would be a turn by turn chance of incapacitation, rather than the incapacitation necessarily being linked only to immediate instances of trauma.

I added a Willpower roll to the end of both the Stun and Physical sides and have the Physical side (@Deadly) perpetually checked each Combat Turn (i.e. representing ~3 seconds).
They have a lot of odds stacked against them if they remain conscious, but they can remain conscious when they should be on the ground - sometimes that pays off.

This mixes well with the blood loss rule in the core, which states that after Deadly every (Body rating) Combat Turns, you gain one more Physical Damage box up until your Body rating in Physical damage boxes beyond Deadly is exceeded; at which point you are no longer mostly dead, and are now fully dead (mostly ).

So a Body 6 has 10 to Deadly, roll Willpower check + modifiers to remain conscious, check Willpower every Combat Turn, and every 6 Combat Turns they gain an additional box of damage up to 16 total boxes of damage done (10 physical boxes + 6 from Body rating = 16 total).

Sometimes it can be a bit to keep track of, but generally it's pretty smooth.

Oh, and I let players roll to consciousness from unconsciousness using the same method. At the top of the initiative rolling, they do a Willpower to fight to wake up - if they do, then they can roll Initiative and whatever the result, it is cut in half (after all other modifiers) for this Combat Turn. If they remain conscious into the next Turn, then they can get their full initiative (less natural modifiers) without the cut-in-half penalty.

Keeps folks engaged and adds a bit of drama to being taken down while the battle continues around you; who knows...you might wake up and be able to pop one off in surprise on someone before they hurt a teammate.

Since I happened to pass through to respond to Ronin's post, I might as well toss my two-cents into the OP.


Don't bother.
SR just isn't built for accuracy in that fashion, and really - it's a dice game; it doesn't matter.
This isn't a shooting simulator at an indoor range that you are making for someone to use - you don't have to make sure the 'code' is perfectly representative of reality.

Instead; what matters only is a two-fold question:
A) How often do you want your players to hit things?
B) Does your mechanic metaphorically represent some physical analogue; as opposed to strictly being arbitrary means-to-an-end?

Have a bit of fun, shuffle around some numbers and ideas until you hit something that you like the feel of and go with it.
It's not supposed to be real - SR's native position on Firearms and Melee loudly pronounces that it is a vague summary system with ad-hoc post-success/fail reasoning.
You make up a reason that handgun did deadly damage instead of medium after it happens; not before..."you hit him somewhere vital".
Same goes with Melee; '...it represents several volleys and not just one strike...'; so you make up descriptions like, "You nailed him in the throat and crushed his windpipe" because the damage level was raised so far that it killed the combatant.

It's somewhat like Risk (the board game) - those dice rolls represent an entire skirmish of battles, but no one demands that Risk be more realistic in its portrayal of cannon fire to infantry discrepancies.
That's just not what it's for - that's more something you find in Axis & Allies; not Risk.

SR, in comparison to reality, is like Risk; a gross level representation.
But it's not a finite level simulator...and boy does it start to kick back if you try to bend it to being that.
Try shooting ballistic gel in SR using SR's mechanics; you'll never get the empirical data you need to measure caliber lethality.

So, again...just have fun!

Actually, Iraq and Afghanistan are very distinct from each other. I have buddies who went to both, as well as a patch from a no-shit mujhadeen who fought for Massoud. In Iraq, it was much more conventional guerrilla, with emplaced roadside bombs being a bigger threat than the (in)accuracy of Iraqi moojies. In fact, the constant thing I've heard from and about the Iraqis is that they can't shoot for shit.

In the 'stan, the Moojies made very good use of PK machineguns and Dishkas to stage ambushes on coalition targets. And were pretty good about it.

But in Iraq, there was more mechanize/motorized elements, while 'Stan was a light infantryman's playground.

How does someone participate in an insurgency going on ten years and still not learn how to aim???? It's not like the fundamentals of marksmanship are like the fundamentals of organic chemistry.

Inferior quality and badly maintained equipment. Ancient surplus Soviet era ammunition. Piss poor training, if at all present. A habit of firing on full automatic whenever possible. Firing from the hip constantly. Little to no healthcare to correct vision problems. It's a wonder they can hit anything at all, given the observed marksmanship practices they generally seem to employ.

There's a possibly apocryphal story of fighters taken prisoner, when asked why the range settings on their rifle sights were set to max range, responding that they set the dial to "maximum power", to kill their targets better.



-k

Well, Arabs make bad soldiers. For the last thousand years, they have been fairly incapable as a military power, hence their penchent for paying foriegners to fight for them. See the Ghulams/Mamelukes, and the current relationship with the USA. This is one reason why I believe ISIS/Deash/whateveryacallthesefucks has made such progresss: they operate outside of Arab cultural norms, and that helps them.

Saudies can shot their tanks real well, but they can't fix them. They rely on the meskeen("beggars", immigrant workers) to do logistics. Tell me that system ain't broke.



Sure, these things remain constant for both groups, but Afghans fought harder. Osama Bin Ladin wanted to fight in the mountains of afghanistan, and it makes good sense. Helicopters have limited endurance, fast movers have limited presence, mechanize troops are restricted to the valleys, and can't come up into the hills. And they knew those hills. They used more ambushes from heights, withdrawing before air support could reach them. Mortars were invaulable in this sort of environment, as they could respond quickly and effectively to requests for fire.

On the other hand, in Iraq, there was widespread use of explosives, sometimes disquised as curbs or part of the road. And then maybe a few RPGs or some machine guns. But mostly roadside bombs and snipers.

Is Reaction + Intuition really the primary means of avoiding getting hit and reducing damage?

Can you make the decision to go on "Full Defense" in response to someone shooting at you? Does it have anything at all to do with your Willpower?

Probably not. You can move evasively, etc, when getting shot at, but honestly, the best thing to do is hunker down behind something. I've never been shot at by real bullets, but I have played some paintball and airsoft. Airsfot is stupid, as those little bbs don't hurt enough to make you take cover. But paintball? Yeah, you learn quickly that cover is what keeps you safe, and that's with projectiles that are moving slow enough to be visible to the naked eye.

Reaction would only make sense if you were observing someone aiming at you and in response dove behind something. What else could a person do? Go prone? Start sprinting laterally?

"Serpentine, serpentine! Squiggly squid maneuver!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqYuSrHLfo8....be&t=7m15s

Generall, by the time you are aware of someone pointing a gun at you, it's too late to really do anything about it, generally speaking.