I'm working on my own system for Shadowrun, and I've got some trouble finding the right numbers for the shooting thresholds.
My only experience with shooting real guns is in video games, so besides what I read here and there I don't really know how difficult shooting a target really is. From what I gathered, they are a few people here with some experience, so maybe you could help me.

What I'd like to know is how good you need to be in order to be able to reliably hit (by which I mean that you'll very rarely miss) a non-moving human sized target at different ranges? (I'd like to keep Shadowrun's short/mid/long/extreme ranges, but if you think that it doesn't really apply in real life, feel free to tell me).

Thank you

Solid data on shooter accuracy is a difficult thing to acquire. If you want meaningful numbers, you're going to have to directly contact sources that track these sorts of things, at the varying levels of proficiency.

Hobby/recreational shooter data is probably going to be the hardest to get an accurate number on, since skill levels vary wildly, as do weapon choices, and people typically don't record their hit ratios. The only real source for good data at this level is going to be shooting ranges that bother to track this sort of thing, which most don't.

Police and military level shooting you might be able to get some decent numbers on, but I have no clue how forthcoming such organizations will be with such data. There's probably some aggregate watchdog organizations out there tracking things on state or federal levels, but it might be hard to track down such groups - I'm not having much sucess with quick and dirty google-fu attempts. Honestly it might be easiest to look up a public-relations phone number for the Army and spend an hour on the phone tracking down someone you can talk to for research purposes.

Most modern firearms are so highly accurate at close range that it's safe to assume that where ever you point the gun is just about where it hits all the time, and missing is purely the result of the shooter not lining up a shot properly. Adding distance requires some compensation, both for bullet drop and sometimes for wind, but this varies both with weapon choice and local conditions.

Also note that you'll get vastly different numbers based on amount of time spent aiming, time between shots, recoil factors of individual weapons, quality and manufacture of ammunition, environmental conditions, weapon maintainence, weapon manufacture (some gun made by two different companies or two different plants is not uncommon), whether you're standing still or moving, whether you're shooting down a "range" or while progressing through a shooting "course" with corridors and whatnot, and a bunch of other factors I'm sure I haven't thought of.

Then you have to factor in the type of shooting. Static target shooting is very different than combat shooting, obviously, so that will influence some of the numbers you come across. The military actually has staggeringly low overall accuracy, because combat is hectic and they rely on a lot of cover fire and other forms of non-precise shooting. (For example, some sources place the number of bullets used for every kill in recent wars around 250,000 rounds.) But then you have the flipside of snipers and designated marksmen, who have very, very high accuracy rates.

It's all terribly complicated.

That said, I'd say even a novice shooter can reliably hit a given static target the vast majority of the time. If you're taking the time to aim, it's pretty easy to hit decent sized static targets at most ordinary ranges. I'd almost recommend you take a trip to a gun range and shoot for an hour or so, and see for yourself how accurate you are as a complete novice.

~Umi

Credentials:

I'm a farmer who shoots bad critters of varying sizes at varying ranges under conditions ranging from snowy nights through bright sunny days. I'm also a competitive shooter with pistol and long arms, up to high powered silhouette shooting ranges (which, in case you didn't know, is 500m, standing, offhand, unsupported).

I'll be happy to answer your questions as to what is possible, reasonable, and likely under various constraints.

So feel free to get specific, and I'll do what I can.

For introductory points, I'd say that a number of serious constraints hold:

What is your position? Sitting? Standing? Prone? Supported? Unsupported?

What is the range? More significantly, do you KNOW what the range is? Do you know what the characteristics of your firearm/ammunition combination are at that range?

Can you estimate the effect of the wind at the range, under the conditions which obtain? At 25 feet; irrelevant. At 500m; highly significant.

Even the bullet profile you are using alters response to the wind.

Do you care if you wing your target, or do you have to make a central shot?

Is your target moving? Are you moving? How is your heartbeat? Your adrenalin? How about your palms? Are they sweaty?

Is your gun a good fit for you, ergonomically? How is the length of pull? Is the trigger the right distance from the palm swell?

What sort of sights do you have? Red dot? Green dot? Patridge? Buckhorn? Ghost ring? Aperture? Laser?

What bad habits do you have? Do you snatch the trigger? Do you flinch?

Are you shooting around a corner? With your weak hand? Do you have to sight with your nondominant eye?

Is there frost on your scope's lens? Fog? Rain droplets?

How well can you see your target? Is there fog? Foliage? Is it night time? Is the sun glaring off water?

I have missed clean shots in bright light at nearby targets. I have hit half-hidden targets at night in snow from awkward positions after running around, panting and sweating. But my odds are better in good conditions. The same holds true for anyone.

I understand that there are many factors, some will be handled with modifiers others will just be ignored.

What I'm interested in is the difficulty of a hitting a non moving human-sized target (no matter where) in a shooting range with good conditions from a standing position when not taking all your time to carefully aim.

To give an example with a topic I know more about: difficulty of driving/parking a car. All examples are in good conditions and consider the ability to succeed on the first try (or soon after) with a basic modern European car (of course, this is just an example, not something I'd ask my players to roll for in a game)

- Driving on a empty road : Can be done by a complete beginner (as long as he knows how to operate the gear stick) (skill rating 0)
- U-Turn : In good conditions, anybody who's done some driving (skill rating 1) can do it
- Perpendicular parking (front first) : Anybody who's comfortable with driving (skill rating 2) can usually get it right
- Perpendicular parking (back first) : People who drive regularly (skill rating 3) have no problem doing it
- Parallel parking : Experienced drivers (skill rating 4) can get it right on the first try, less experienced drivers might need several tries

(The skill ratings are the ones I'm using for my rules)
I'm sure some people will disagree with this but it doesn't seem totally absurd and should be ok as a base for the GM to set threshold.

The problem is it's all so wildly variable. In controlled conditions, essentially anyone can hit a static target. In panic situations or urban combat, most people actually miss most of their shots - even trained police can go through whole magazines in shootouts without hitting anything.

A lot of what a person needs to know about operating a firearm aside from proper shooting technique is actually maintenance and upkeep. Any idiot can point a gun and pull a trigger (ideally you squeeze it - but remember, we're talking any idiot), yet they may not know how to turn the safety off, reload properly, clear a jam, et cetera.

If we're strictly talking about "the difficulty of hitting a non moving human-sized target (no matter where) in a shooting range with good conditions from a standing position when not taking all your time to carefully aim", then the major determining factor is actually going to be where the target is. (Yes, I know you said "no matter where".)

Basically if pressed, I'd break it down chiefly by distance.

Skill 0 - can at least hit a target somewhere at short range
Skill 1 - can at least hit a target somewhere at medium range
Skill 2 - can at least hit a target somewhere at long range
Skill 3 - good accuracy and grouping at short range
Skill 4 - good accuracy and grouping at medium range
Skill 5 - good accuracy and grouping at long range
Skill 6 - pinpoint precision and tight grouping at any range

But again, that's just standing someone at a range, handing them a prepared gun, and telling them to throw lead at paper targets.

Unlike the "driving a car" comparison, where you need to control your speed, change gears, gauge distances, and manage your turning radius, there's very little involved in just pointing and shooting.

~Umi

Ok, thank you.
When I said no matter where, I meant no matter where you hit the target, not no matter where the target is. I was already thinking of setting the base difficulty on the distance, so it's good to get this choice validated.

What I was particularly interested in was if there was a gap in difficulty (for example if it hitting at long range was much more difficult compared to hitting at medium range than medium range compared to short range).

OK, so the term you're searching for is MOA - minutes of arc - as a measure of precision. If you break down your circle into 360 degrees, and you then break each degree down into 60 minutes, that gives you some idea of how
fine precision that is. At a range of 100 yards it is (roughly) 1 inch of proximity to the point of aim.

Now, first things first: your shooting platform induces some variation. There's no getting away from that. Very fine shooting platforms give you very close precision, but not perfect. Sloppy ones can get you way off target.
Like, with a bad combination of gun and ammunition, forget about reliably hitting anything smaller than a bison at 100 yards. They can get that bad.

But let's assume you hand a shooter a pistol at a pistol range, and the pistol is a finely tuned, well maintained, properly cleaned and lubricated pistol using high quality ammunition, with a laser which has been calibrated to the range to the target. Then it pretty much comes down to the steadiness of the shooter, and the proper trigger technique. At 50 feet (typical pistol range for competition) I would expect any halfway competent shooter to put the bullet in a target the size of a pie dish every time.

However, I have seen very skilled, accurate target shooters completely go to pieces under the pressure of competition, to where they missed their shots, fumbled their reloads and failed to correctly operate their weapon. Stress is a huge factor in shooting.

Anyone who thinks for a moment it works the way Hollywood shows you is completely off-base.

And those people don't even have other people shooting at them.

The accuracy rate of trained soldiers and police in actual combat situations is pretty darn low for a reason.



-k

In the case of many police, it's very low for two reasons. The second is generally an almost complete lack of regular training, which is the result of budgetary constraints. Not many PDs will pay for every officer to spend two hours a week and two hundred rounds on the flat range with their sidearm. The ones who get in regular time with their duty weapons generally do so on their own time and on their own dime.

In short, the base mechanic for hitting a man sized target at 10 meters should be pretty simple for a user with a minimal amount of training. However, the environmental factors that increase the difficulty of that task should be extremely potent.

Also bear in mind that hitting someone in the leg might be an inconvenience (depending on your load, depending on their pain threshold, depending on circumstances) or could be lethal (hello, femoral artery!) whereas sending a bullet through the spinal cord will pretty much take the fight out of them every time.

If you want to discuss the finer points of self defence shooting, you'll hear people talk a lot about stopping, rather than killing, shots. Why? Because someone dying three hours later in an emergency room is irrelevant to your combat environment, in which you nee the bad guy to stop doing what he's doing right now. Or for farmers, you need the varmint to stop destroying your crops or livestock right now, rather than dying and rotting in a gully sometime later.

And the reliable stopping zone on an adult male human is roughly the size of a bowling pin. In combat, that is what you need to hit.

Granted, there is also the factor of the psychological stop.
"Ow, shit, that really hurt! OK, enough already!"
"Holy crap, that's a gun, whatever you say, man. You want my wallet? My shoes? You got them."
"There are fifteen of them. I'm screwed. Maybe I should try to live through this."
But we were talking about when the shooting has already started.

This is why I'm a fan of abstraction. If you're playing a tabletop game, it bogs things down terribly to get into the ultra detail of determining if a dozen different modifiers might apply, or figuring out whether a shot to the leg hits a major artery or not, and do that for every single dice roll.

If you like the extra granularity, house rule away I guess. But the more complicated a system becomes, the more moving parts it has, the easier it becomes to break, and the more difficult it is to balance.

Plus, if managing to hit the femoral artery becomes a factor, people WILL build their characters to be crackshots with perfect anatomical knowledge just to be able to reliably get that extra power. At a certain point, making things more "realistic" actually makes the game less believeable - and certainly less interesting, as people tend toward the most "effective" and "efficient" mechanics and builds.

~Umi

Umi hits it on the head, and without modifiers!

You will suddenly have gun adepts one shooting folk with a head shot or similar called shots because from the player POV it is more efficient use of shot and the game will devolve into SniperRun.

Plus if you overhaul the targeting methods, you will have to rework armour as well as a helmet would be a lot more armour that the small +armor mod it currently is, meaning you will have to break down armor values by locations and the added math and bookkeeping that results.

In addition to slowing things down, my concern with going for real-world shooting difficulty is that...well...in the real world, people really kind of suck at shooting. The end result is going to be lots of misses, lots of "wasted" actions, lots of combats dragging on longer, lots of players feeling worthless, lots of extra rolling, and -- ultimately -- lots of grenades and/or mages doing all the killing.

I'm a fan of the more cinematic, "fuck yeah, I'm awesome at shooting," action movie balance SR traditionally has.

I hasten to point out that I was merely trying to answer the original question honestly and fairly comprehensively. What mechanic is ultimately chosen is up to the original poster, after all.

If you want Shadowrun to be shadowrunny as opposed to magicrunny, and you want a solid answer to the real world difficulty of shooting, then may I recommend that there be a huge, massive bonus for smartgun cyberware justified by the fact that as cyberware it integrates a number of perceptual channels which are not available to smart goggles, and consequently tells the shooter with fair accuracy where the shot will land under various conditions, including allowing for things like grip strength?

This would make dedicated shooters vastly more lethal and precise and consequently more valuable.

The action films I've seen have hundreds of bullets in the air, and the important characters almost never get hit.

Should shooting damage be more random? Maybe a street punk can take you out with a lucky shot while a trained sniper might not make a kill shot.

One thing I've yet to see is a good game mechanic, in ANY game, that models the character's psychological state impacting their numbers.

A "holy crap that incoming fire nearly hit me" reaction throwing a shot off, for example. Or getting a bad injury perhaps making a character a little more cautious about sticking their head out again. Closest thing we have in SR are damage modifiers, and those are really more physical than psych.

Like in video games, threats to the life and health of character being played are usually abstracted and marginalized.




-k

The closest thing I ever saw was the COOL stat for Cyberpunk where your combat rolls took a penalty modified downward by your Cool stat and even this would go down over time the more fights you were in.

Its hard to say. Generally it would seem irl sniping with a decent power rifle is going to be instant ko/dead. You don't really get dodge checks or damage resistance checks irl.

And yeah the game doesn't make a great difference between 'guy who shoots paper really well' vs, 'decent marksman, unruffled in chaos of firefight'.

Uhh, okay?

I wasn't attacking what you were saying. I agree with it, in fact, and it lines up with my own training and experience. I'm just saying I don't necessarily -- me, personally -- think it makes for a better game experience. Unless the difficulty of other attacks is similarly ramped up, I think any substantial increase to the difficulty of shooting rolls would lead to player frustration and a metagame shift even further away from mundane shooters.

I'm not saying your post is bad, or that you shouldn't have made it. I'm just sharing my thoughts on the potential fallout of implementing anything close to "realism" into one aspect (and just one aspect) of the game.



Yeah, but in most action flicks, the important characters hit back really often, right? That's how you know they're the important character, most of the time; the guys they shoot at fall over and die, while they wade through storms of bullets and never meaningfully get hit. The problem with implementing realistic shooting stuff in SR is that, well, everyone misses all the time. One statistic I recently found was an overall 34% accurate rate. Do we really want all the mundane shooters doing nothing literally two-thirds of the time, in this game?

In a game where combat is already as clunky and multi-roll as SR is, and especially in an edition with a hard cap of "one attack per round," do we really need to make it harder for the Street Sammie to contribute to a firefight?

I mean, if you want more realism, knock yourself out. Just be prepared for characters to either min/max to hell and back to get around it (super tricked-out Adepts with all the bells and whistles, to have a decent chance at landing a shot), or for them to give up on being mundane trigger-metahumans altogether (and go for slinging mojo or punching as hard as a sniper rifle or whatever else).

A few years ago I used to compete monthly in tactical shooting comps and I have several certificates in tactical handgun and carbine training. I used to hire an instructor weekly and train every weekend in tactical firearms usage as well. I'm not currently training firearms but I used to be a huge enthusiast, and I also like role playing games. I've wondered myself about good ways to handle stressful shootouts in games so maybe my musings can be useful.

Before anyone thinks I'm being an internet tough guy I'll make clear I was a hobbyist and enthusiast. There were many competitors who had been at it for years who did better than me in tactical competitions. So, I'm not Rambo nor do I claim to be. But it is a fact that I spent thousands of dollars in training, competed monthly for a couple of years, and have a few certificates from various training programs.


So, my first comment is that if you want to be realistic, I think any game system has to take into account stress level. I used to be able to shoot out a pushpin with a handgun at 50 feet. (This is not a superhuman feat; anyone can do it with practice.) However the first time I competed, I was so nervous and/or adrenal that my hands were shaking. I fired at a man sized target that was maybe 30 feet away and hilariously I shot the target in the nuts a bunch of times instead of center mass like I was supposed to.

Why? Because I was so stressed that when I started shooting time seemed to slow down. I was firing 230 grain factory .45 ACP cartridges out of a Ruger P97 DC, which is a top heavy gun, as it has a steel slide but a polymer grip. This meant that I had significant recoil after firing and the top heavy weapon system accentuated this. Because my experience was in slow motion it felt like it was taking forever for my sights to re-align on target after I'd fired. Even though I kind of knew it was wrong, I freaked a bit and forced my gun back down, fighting the recoil, and actually forced it too hard so that instead of hitting the heart I demonstrably shot the nuts a bunch of times.

(To be clear, advanced competitors can actually fight the recoil for faster follow up shots and do it right so the sights land right back on target. This was a skill I eventually started practicing, but the story above came before this point in my journey, so I only knew how to let the sights fall neatly back on target before firing again.)

So, had you asked me to demonstrate in an relaxed situation, you would have seen a neat grouping in the middle of the target at 30 feet. But add a little bit of stress and the result was really different.



One time, I was out in the desert with friends and I fired at a steel plate we had set up, I want to say, like 200 or 300 yards away or something, with a .45, a Kimber TLE2 Custom, firing cheap Russian S&B 230 grain factory ammo. I compensated for bullet drop by aiming really high and "sensed" what I couldn't see, feeling that my windage was just right from the familiarity with my weapon that was deep in my belly. I didn't hit the target but we recovered one of my bullets maybe within 10 or 20 feet of the target from the desert rock. (We were mostly firing at it with rifles, so the 1 .45 ACP cartridge out there was quite distinct.) I kept the bullet itself in a ziplock bag as proof to myself that I can accomplish even the impossible if I put my mind to it.

The point is, in a relaxed situation, maybe someone who practices with heart can achieve a near miracle. Even if my bullet hit somewhere like 50 feet away, bounced, and landed near the plate, that's kind of giving me goosebumps. So for your role playing game, there is always a place for miracle success rolls, but maybe in relaxed situations, and not stressful combat situations.

I don't feel that a miracle shot like that would have been remotely intentionally possible in a stressful situation if my hands were shaking like in the first example.



After I had competed for a while, while I was by no means ever the best competitor in my community, I felt like I had gotten pretty good with handling competition stress. I hit my target, most of the time, and my hands didn't shake anymore. In some trainings with some stress and movement versus paper targets, I was rocking headshots at 30 feet or less. At over 30 feet I would do 2 to the body but within 30 feet I knew all I needed to do was put one in the head.


One day I had the opportunity to participate in a pilot training program for civilians using Simunitions. These are dye filled bullets fired with primers alone. They hit hard and they hurt and are very realistic training.

In the simunitions training, I had a Glock in a CCW holster and was in an active shooter scenario. The students including myself were sitting in a room in rows meant to simulate a town hall type situation. In the scenario the shooter went and shot someone who was addressing the group.

I could smell the primers which I had smelled so many times before in competition and training. Somehow it made the scenario feel extremely real to me. I ran for cover and hid behind a wall. Again it seemed like forever but was just a few seconds. I think the other students, being unarmed in this scenario, were fleeing, but I can't be totally sure.

I drew and attempted to engage the active shooter but it was all wrong. In the first place we were wearing protective gloves and other gear for training purposes so my grip felt all wrong. I drew my Glock but I guess my grip wasn't high enough. As I tried to point in at the active shooter, I felt this nightmare scenario where I had a rear sight picture but I couldn't see my front sight. "Where is my front sight!" I thought to myself, as the active shooter started to point in on me.

His arms holding is Glock turned towards me and it seemed to move slowly and with the terminal gravitas of a tank turret. I watched his muzzle move towards me, inexorably, slowly, like the reaper approaching. Frantically I stared down my sights waiting for my front sight to appear but it never did.

Finally I felt I had no time left and opened fire. I fired maybe 5 or 6 times. I missed most shots and hit him once in the right arm. Interestingly he also fired on me but only grazed my ribcage, so I think the freak-out works both ways.


So, consider how in competition I would be hitting small plates at like 30 feet, hitting man sized targets at 50 feet, and engaging while walking. All that went to shit given just a little stress.

I realized all my examples above are pistols examples. That's fine. Although I trained and fired rifles many times, I always liked pistols the best and felt the most comfortable with them. Not to say that in a real fight I'd pick a pistol over a military pattern rifle, but that in terms of my personal comfort level where I felt like the weapon was almost a part of my body, and in terms of enjoyment in sports, somehow I seem to have an affinity for pistols. Also, they're less of a pain to clean.



To answer your question, I think hitting the target is easy. Hitting the target while you're stressed is hard.

One of the things I loved about tactical marksmanship is that it's like looking into your soul. You can always lie to yourself about how you're feeling at a given moment. But the gun does not lie. If you are perturbed, it WILL show up in your shooting. You can train to reduce the extent to which your shooting is jacked up, but in my personal experience, there is no hiding the truth of your soul from the gun. This is why to me, the combat firearm represents Truth and Purity. The combat firearm represents Honestly and the self-reliance that occurs once you can be totally honest with yourself. I feel that in society and in the world the combat handgun and military pattern rifles are the tools by which, through meditative introspection and training, we can become more than consumers or overgrown children, and transform into responsible, actualized men and women.

It is my sincere hope that you are able to enjoy shooting real firearms as much as I have. Especially classic .45 caliber handguns.



In game terms, I would say that when totally safe and relaxed anyone with a significant training in firearms should be able to hit "close" targets 100% of the time, "medium" targets 85% of the time, "long" targets maybe 60% of the time, and "extreme" targets maybe 15% of the time.

But the moment you add combat stress, those probabilities can maybe be slashed greatly. For example, in my simunitions example, the active shooter was maybe at "medium" range for a heavy pistol in SR terms. If I hit him with, say, 20% of my shots (1 out of 5) it means my accuracy was downgraded from 85% to 20%. If I weren't stressed there would have been no question in my mind that for me given my level of practice at the time it would have been 100% to hit but the stress made a huge difference. Before the scenario, I was wondering if I would pull of a stylish headshot, because I was confident that given a second or two to aim I'd be able to headshot anyone in the room.

Basically, to be realistic, your rule can start with whatever the default probabilities are, and rather than mess with those, just apply significant penalties for combat stress. Anyone shooting in combat should get at least a small penalty with the biggest penalties for people who are actually taking fire. A good suppression fire mechanic would be key. It would make combat more tactical as well as the game would favor having flankers or designated marksmen who are not taking fire versus every firefight being an even free for all focused on who is fastest on the draw.

From what I gather from many posts here, stress is a big factor. But do you think it still holds true for people who regularly get in firefights?

As a combat vet... Yes, to some degree everyone is affected, trained or not; some are more affected than others but no one can claim to be truly and totally cool under fire.

Yea and Amen.

Lying down on a shooting mat, taking aim at a tin can a hundred yards off, I'm relaxed. All the time in the world.

Taking aim at a varmint like a skunk or possum raiding my poultry, I'm hurried. They move around, and I'd prefer to get a head shot (especially on skunk for reasons I'm sure you understand).

Taking aim at a fast-moving predator which might want to take a bite out of me? I won't lie. That's stressful. And I don't see myself ever getting used to that.

I don't imagine that physiologically speaking a person can take a large adrenaline dump and then not get shaking hands.

Lots of modern combative firearms techniques specifically minimize use of small movements requiring fine motor control because there is the assumption that the ability to do these kinds of movements will be lost.

When I was training weekly with my AK47 and AR15, I was trained to never release my firing grip. Pulling the bolt was always done with the left hand without releasing or changing the right handed shooting grip. Originally the weapons were designed thinking the person would use their right hand to do these actions. But today, recognizing the impact of adrenaline, the technique has come to reflect the idea that you don't want to risk losing the proper firing grip by taking your right hand off the grip and trigger. So I think that everyone is going to be significantly impacted, even pros.

HOSTAGE RESCUE SHOT!

The thing about stress is that it can help inspire performance, or it can degrade it. Look at seasoned professional athletes in high stress situations, what happens in play-offs or clutch moments, where occasionally they’ll do things that seem impossible, but often choke up.

Just one example: in hockey (let’s just feed the stereotype about Canadians always talking hockey, I guess) some games go to a shoot-out to break a tie (each team has three shooters break in alone on the goalie and try to score—the teams taking alternating turns. If it is tied after three each, they go into rounds of 1). Once one team has scored, statistically the other team has a lower chance of scoring. It has to come down to stress, knowing that your team is behind and needs to score. These are people who have spent years playing high stress situations, who obviously generally cope well enough with stress or they would not be playing at that level, who practice these things and who probably even know about that statistic….and yet it is still true.

Now ramp that up to life or death, and for that matter it is not just your life or death, it is also the life or death of someone in front of your sights. Most of us are reluctant to kill, so totally aside from technique, stress management, and all that, in the split instant when you have your shot can you go for the kill? From what I’ve read, that can be issue for a lot of people—even if you do shoot, maybe it slows your reactions or makes you second guess yourself.

Which is why a pretty random dice mechanic works for me for that sort of thing.

So, I don't know later editions of the game, but in SR3 terms, I'd basically apply TN penalties for degrees of stress and/or suppression.

Base +1 TN for anything with pressure, either competition, or a real situation where the shooter is a kilometer away and picking off a target while in no immediate danger and with no risk of hitting a friendly.

+2 TN simply for being involved directly in a firefight

+3 or higher for being suppressed, or being in a stressful nightmare firefight.

I have had the idea that to reflect the coolness of experience, someone can roll dice derived from their total unspent karma to try and reduce the TN penalty. Since you burn karma in stressful situations, the idea is that over time you get worn down and lose your composure with prolonged exposure to stress, so combat stress affects you more.

Which would have made me hate combat in SR3 even more, since our average TN for Firearms combat tended to fall in the 8-10 range more often than not, and sometimes even higher. This with just the standard modifiers involved. Hours upon Hours of wasted time and ammunition in fruitless pot-shooting at the opponents. Just Say No!!!

Thank you all for your inputs. It's been an interesting conversation with good points, I already had a mechanism to make actions done without time/pressure easier, but I might have to add one for actions requiring fine control (shooting, hacking, lockpicking, casting spells, summoning, etc.) done in stressful situations like combat, with probably another additional modifier for doing stuff while getting shot at.

I'll think about it...



The problem with unrealistically high hit ratio is that it makes many things absurd or difficult to handle. For example, the clip/magazine/bullet-thingy size doesn't really matter anymore, most of the real life tactics also become irrelevant: flanking becomes mostly useless and why go for suppressing fire/covering fire if you can just shoot everyone instead?

I'm fine with combat taking more than 3 seconds in-game, it might make tactics other than (make sure to be the first to shoot) be useful, leading to non-combat monsters character to actually feel less worthless. Extra rolling and slower combat won't be a problem with my rules.

Making combat more difficult will not enable combat maneuvers... it will just frustrate people. I am all about reality in the real world... in a game, most people are trying to escape the real world. They want to be something they are not.

Also, in my experience, higher hit ratios do not invalidate combat maneuvering at all. We tend to see a lot of covering fire, suppression fire and ground maneuvering in our games. It just makes good sense. Of course, we rarely see combat end in 1 turn... so, I probably am a bit biased here. Helps that many of us are military vets, too, so we do a lot of those things by rote anyway because getting shot sucks, even if it is a game...

I guess your group does introduce quite a bias.
Sure it's possible to maneuver and use covering fire, but in most cases it's just easier and more efficient to just stand there (or at worst go behing the closest cover) and shoot first.
Every time I've tried (or seen another player try) to spend some time to maneuver, the combat was over by the time the character was in position to do something, because the rest of the group had just stood where they were when combat started and mowed down the opposition with bullets and spells.

Possibly, yes.

My problem with what you describe is that it is a Metagaming convention (because, you know, the player's life is not on the line), not what someone would do if confronted with the situation (as if the character actually existed). NO ONE just stands there and trades bullets until the opposition drops. EVER. So... Why would a character in a game do so?

Because ..... action movies?

Well, for me, part of the appeal of a role playing game was always simulationism. For me it's less, "let me be something I can't be," but rather "let me learn about something I am not in the position to directly experience through well researched statistical models."

Supposedly during the Vietnam War the ratio of rounds fired to enemy killed as 50,000 to one, right?

So I would see the game more about (if you want to kill someone) making sure you suppress the enemy and that you have at least one guy not suppressed who can make the shot, or have the game be more about breaking contact if you do end up in a firefight.

Which I imagine would be more realistic for a small unit without support on a special forces type mission anyway.


So I actually think the next logical thing would be to raise rates of fire for automatic weapons and then make some house rules for suppression and breaking contact. The logistical strain of needing to carry more ammo would be realistic in my opinion as well. In practice with regular SR3 rules characters rarely had to reload their firearm because the shot to kill ratio was so favorable, but in reality people want to carry at least 210 rounds of ammo if not more on them if they think they're going to get into a firefight.


The other thing is that since we have laptops, tablets, and smartphones now it should be faster and easier to have more complex rules. Just code them up. So for example if you wanted to do some SR1 thing where each round fired in full auto had a certain discrete chance of hitting the target, you could do that and have it be fast by making a computer do the calculation.

Because... Stupid?
There are plenty of action movies where the protagonist does not stand and deliver in the open while being stupid. I see no reason to have a character earn a Darwin Award.
The movie "Aliens" is a perfect example of how it should work.

I play tabletop games to unplug, not to further immerse myself in electronic noise.
No, I do not use a laptop/tablet when I game, nor do I even own a Smartphone (or any cell phone for that matter).

Apparently the fantasy that appeals to you is having maximal realism, or at least the minimum of things that bump up against your suspension of disbelief. It sounds like part of your enjoyment of the game is working through believable tactics to achieve your objective. Which is awesome--obviously you enjoy the game or you wouldn't have been around long enough to accumulate your post count--so you are playing it right, because you are enjoying what you get out of the game.

That won’t be the appealing fantasy for everybody who plays the game, however. There is no right or wrong way to play role-playing games, so long as much fun is being had. Obviously understanding table culture is important, and if I came to your table to game of course I’d be playing with much care, cover, and tactics. But if another group has a blast playing trolls wearing bandanas and carrying medium weight machine guns charging lines of opposing shooters, and it works for them, and they are having fun….then I’d say that they are also playing the game ‘right’ in that they are getting what they want out of the game.

As for me, given my druthers, if anyone pulls a trigger then the plan obviously failed. If it has to go to combat, meh, whatever works, gets the job done, creates some cool moments, and doesn't take all day to resolve.

But I will grant that Aliens should pretty much be mandatory viewing for anyone who is going to play ShadowRun

Agreed...
I have had some pink Mohawk moments, but they are not my meat and 'tatoes.

Well, that's actually kind of my point. If you make a game where guns make 1 damage and most characters have 10 hit points, you'll have players rig 10 guns together. If you want realistic behavior, you need realistic rules.

If the rules make standing there and trading bullet be the most efficient way of winning a firefight with minimal risks, it makes sense for characters to do so. You can say that "this is due to a rule constraint, but it's not actually the case in the game world" and have a gentleman agreement so that players play their characters in a "realistic" way, but it's better if you can have rules that actually support the expected behavior.

Any game that models real world combat activities to that degree are mostly unplayable. The issue is that there is no Life or Death investment in a piece of paper, so players will not act the way a real person would in the same situation, for the most part. Has nothing to do with rules per se (since any character is perfectly capable of seeking cover and performing combat operations), but with Player actions. Game being what it is, they player just metagames (piece of paper and all that) and so acts that how he wants to with no regard for what would really be going through that character's mind. And I can guarantee you that no one thinks he is indestructible in the face of Automatic Weapons Fire. You may get heroic acts contrary to that (check out Medal Of Honor Descriptions sometime), but it is not out of a sense of indestructibility.

A looonnnng time ago, in my original gaming group, the older brother of one of our friends made his own game system. I forget his exact rankings, but he was highly trained in judo and even more so aikido and had delved into the root art of the two of them (the combat art rather than the sport versions), and had some melee weapons training, and he drew on all of that to come up with as accurate and evocative combat system as he could. The system he came up with was in fact pretty amazing in its ability to make you feel everything that went on.....and was indeed well nigh unplayable. We did play it, but let's just say that the combat made SR combat seem lightning fast in comparison. (a typical attack action could involve four dice rolls, two charts, and a couple of pieces of multiplication involving numbers with decimals...). I'm not saying that you can't make a fair simulation system that would be more streamlined than his was, but I think that unavoidably the more detail you want to reflect, the heavier the system gets.

These days my game system preference, in the abstract, is extremely light rules -- however the SR rules and game world are so closely melded that it would be a challenge to port the world to a massively different system without losing some of the feel, I think.

To be fair, there ARE cases where it's absolutely more awesome when everyone DOES just stand and deliver (and hit nothing but air), even despite (or perhaps because of) how stupid that is.

The above clip pretty much perfectly sums up the preferred playstyle of one of my occasional players, and when he's with us the group loves him for it.

~Umi

Don't get me wrong - I Like me some Pink Mohawk from time to time, it just is not the norm that I prefer to play. Sometimes, having a Troll who can shrug off all but the most devastating military hardware is fun. But it gets old really, really quickly.

My goal is not to model everything. Actually, my system is designed to be lighter and faster than the SR4/SR5 system. But that doesn't mean the rules can't give a good approximation.

I disagree with the idea that just because a PC is made of paper, players will feel indestructible, and I think that the rules have a big impact on that. If characters can shrug off light pistols shots (as in SR3), they will feel indestructible when a punk points a light pistol at them. If they can die from that shot, they won't. (Of course, the game should still allow some characters to be actually able to shrug off light pistol bullets, but a normal human should not)
Likewise, if PC can reliably act first and kill the opposition in one IP, they will stand there and shoot. If the rules make it harder to pull that off, and makes it likely to get badly hurt when you stand in the open in a firefight, then players will go for cover and be more tactical.

I remember a SR game where my character entered a room and faced someone who was about to lay down suppressive fire. I decided to have my character jump for cover and not leave until the suppressive fire died down. It was a purely roleplay decision because the rules made it a better option to dodge and/or soak the suppressive fire and then proceed to mow down the opposition. Good roleplaying should not make the game harder for me.

One could just as easily say that playing nothing but Black Trenchcoat gets old really, really quickly too.

The key is variety, I think. Both playstyles have their place, even within the same campaign and with the same characters. Not only is the world of Shadowrun complicated and crazy enough to justify it, but so is real life.

I know you in particular see the world through the lens of your military experience, and that pushes you toward more "professional", by-the-books running, but the reality is there are an awful lot of people in the world who actually would just stand out in the open during a firefight and unload. Amateurs and idiots are everywhere, and they do crazy, irrational, stupid things - and surprisingly often, it still mostly works. Just not as reliably or predictably as professionalism.

So in SR, my group tends to play either Trenchcoat or Mohawk chiefly depending on the current situation. When interacting with the more professional and corporate side of the world, our gameplay does tend toward cloak and dagger, smoke and mirrors, all that. But there's this whole other (in my opinion far more interesting) half of the game universe - the weird and wild and unprofessional places and people and -things- that flesh out the world beyond and between the skyscrapers and suits.

The world of SR is this insane, convoluted place full of magic and weirdness. The corps are always at the top, trying to bend it to their will, but ultimately they're trying to herd cats. Yeah, the megas are hugely powerful and have massive control over the human world. But the human world has been invaded by the weird world. Stray even just a little way beyond the pockets of "normality" and you come across the craziest of drek.

~Umi

No arguments, you do have good points.

I guess SR3 and before as written, with the power of high initiative, is more like the OK Corral. You can have 2 teams of combatants approach each other directly and the guy with the fast draw wins.

I guess as far as realism goes, there's a reason that that's how rowdy gunslingers from the 1800s fought, but not really how anyone wants to fight today.

TJ likes his shootouts to go down like Way of the Gun.

I don't play golf, but I expect shooting is rather like golf. Golf is famous for the idea that if the golfer is stressed his fine motor control and refined golfing skills go to shit and he plays poorly.

Way of the Gun?
Not sure I have seen that one. Will have to look it up.

EDIT: Looks good... will have to see it.