Page 197 discusses bodies and barriers. The thought I had is when your shooting through a barrier (Like a wall, or a person) if you plan to shoot through and your damage higher than the armor of the target the bullet passes through doing 1 damage to the barrier ans transfers the damage to the target.

Now in this situation the target is using a living person (Armor 12, Body 4). The target is (Armor 14, Body 5). The weapon in this case is 14P AP -10.

Now the questions, by these rules the shooter can fire through the living person, causing only 1 damage, and the target behind him will get hit like a normal attack. Does it lose any damage from the attack (I am not even assuming number of hits, but if it matters lets go with 3), and do you still get AP.

I personally also do not see this making much sense. If I shot a sniper round through a person I would expect it to do more damage to the person I shot through also. I know it is a game but if the bullet has that much penetrating power, I would not even expect it to really hurt the target. I am trying to figure out how to handle this situation (And give my GM an idea) When it possibly comes up at our next session.

This is a difficult question that many have tried to address over the decades, including the legendary Raygun, who is fabled to be a Texan.

Basically, the problem with trying to implement "overpenetration" (when you shoot one guy and your round exits out behind him and hits someone else), is that there's no realistic way within a pen and paper game to account for how the round would have its trajectory changed.

In the first place, the round can fragment, or deflect off some bone or something, and exit at a different trajectory than it entered. So you can't just draw a straight line from target A into target B and decide the round is going to hit both at once because they're lined up. If you have the idea that people have things like dermal armor and metal limbs, that is just going to get less predictable. Maybe you don't even get an exit wound because the round gets caught on the 2nd layer of dermal armor exiting the body, for example.

Secondly, it would depend what kind of round you're using. Obviously frangible and hollow point type rounds would be less likely to overpenetrate, and FMJ or steel cored would be more likely. But even in the event that FMJ or steel core overpenetrates, how much of the round is left in target one, and what exactly hits target 2? Just the penetrator core? Just a fragment of the original bullet from a FMJ?

So, it's basically really hard to implement, and unless someone has something like an antivehicular round I'm not sure you could reliably set up some trick shot where you shoot two people at once who are lined up and get the same effect as shooting each person once with a fresh round.

Maybe just say that if the second target is in more or less of a straight line from the original target and is less than 5 yards away, there is a small random chance of being hit with an overpenetration shot that has half the power of the original shot, or something like that.

This leads into the question of what happens with near misses. What if you actually missed your first target and a second target was within 5 yards of that first target. What are the chances you hit the second target instead? I don't have a good way to address this, but always thought that SR needed some really solid suppression fire rules, that could be applied both to unaimed fire, but also what happens if you have one or more near misses on a target, to account for how those near misses threaten or effect other nearby targets. The rule would have to be able to handle individual rounds, rapid semi auto fire, and single bursts, besides for handling full auto fire. But this gets into a whole other big discussion...

Only losing 1 damage for shooting through someone sounds wrong. By RAW, that's how it works though. One damage is lost when shooting through a barrier, and also taken by the barrier/body.

You could see it as the shooter intentionally targeting a weak/unimportant part of the intervening body yet targeting an important part of the real target's body. such as shooting a strafing shot in order to hit the enemy's head/torso.

Realistically, penetrating through body armor on both sides as well as travelling through a body which could include the chest area is not very likely unless the weapon's penetration is a lot more than normally needed. I would think even a modern assault rifle round would struggle to do this, even against Type I and Type II armors.

It might be better to handle the situation with the called shot rule, taking a -4 on attack to hit the target and ignoring the armor/body of the intervening person.

Thank you for both the answers, makes sense. I wanted to see what people outside my group thought for this scenario.

The rules probably were designed with barriers such drywall in mind, stuff which doesn't slow down a bullet too much and where a 9mm hole as no further effect than being a hole. Living beings and machines are a bit more sensitive to having a hole punched through them, so clearly the wrong rule for that.

R&G has an optional rule for called shots to ignore armor (negative modifier equal to armor), that sounds about right

Yeah, drywall is easily penetrated, while flesh and blood and especially bone is not. A high caliber rifle bullet can pass through several people, doing almost the same kind of damage each time, but body armor really does slow it down, make it tumble, and ultimately will stop it with enough layers. A possible ruling could be to double the armor bonus of the "cover" for purposes of seeing how much damage is bleeding through, subtracting 1 damage for the body itself and then 24/3= 8 for an armor jacket. That means pistol bullets wont penetrate both, but an assault rifle will still punch through both sides of the armor (an AK would do 10 minus ((12-2)*2)/3) 3 damage plus net hits.


As for the old SR4 rule for called shot, I never liked it. -12 to hit the head of someone wearing an armor jacket? Nope.

The abstract nature of armor leads to weird situations, but IMO in this case it's better than complicated calculations how to split the damage

Problem isthat damage andarmor values arehigher but dice pools are not.
Called shot -4 for +2 damage better represents this, and also worksfor headshots.

SR3 had more detailed rules on this if i remember correctly.
But i am at work, doing the work of 5 people, so no checking.

I would simply treat the Body of the target as additional armor dice.