No no no no no no no. When intermixed with standard SR3 guns and rules, Raygun's weapons are even more horribly broken than the monstrosities that can come out of Cannon Companion. Used alone, they can be cohesive, realistic, and fun, but don't just toss someone a link and say "here's good additional firearms for Shadowrun", because they aren't.

~J

Welcome to Dumpshock.

Please feel free to ask about anything you want. You might want to use the search feature to find any previous discussion on particular issues, some of which you'll notice pop up more often than one might think.

Don't let anyone discourage you from experimenting! A lot of us have been playing and GMing for many years, and sometimes forget the thrill of first cracking a book and making their first weapon(s). Just try to keep in mind the overall feel of the game when designing things for your game. Come up with a realistic reason why a company would mass-produce any such weapon.

Like what?

The ERASe has traumatized me for life. No insult was intended, merely emphasis that your guns tend to be significantly more deadly than canon ones, even a lot of the Cannon Companion-created ones (though yours are at least physically possible).

I perhaps should amend that to: throwing those guns into a game where some of the group are still thinking in terms of (and using) canon weapons is a good way to get an unhappy group quick.

~J

It has come up in conversation here before hat SR holdouts need some juicing up just to be relavent against anyone save a blind, comatose, retired librarian. So frankly IMO they get to stay on those grounds. However for the rest they are really a different system of weapons that aren't overly compatible with the canon ones. To take them piecemeal into an existing game is not good. To take and use them across a game, much better.

And that's a bad thing?

Again, depends on where you're sitting. They actually bring more balance to the game because that's how it really is. A .454 is really going to fuck up your day.

How is that?

That's "balanced" by a standard 2x recoil modifier.

Considering that there aren't any HMGs on my site, I don't see how you can make that comparison.

Exactly. You gotta recognize what a Troll would be capable of, and that, unfortunately for the smaller beings, is one of the things a troll should pretty easily be capable of pulling off. An HMG to a Troll would be like an assault rifle to you and me.

What is "unbalanced"? You spend your time playing a game that is terribly askew from the start, you're going to see things a bit differently when someone attempts to straighten them out a bit. I admit that my attempt at straightening things out is not as thorough as I'd like it to be, but it's really not that bad at all, in the overall picture.

Well, see, that's only half true, I think. You can drop one of my guns into the game pretty seamlessly, it's when you start tacking canon accessories onto them that the problem arises. Honestly, I don't think it's as big a deal as it's being made out to be, though.

The thing I have to keep reminding people about it is that it's real. It would traumatize me, too.

Again, that only tends to happen when you mix the canon accessories with my guns. You can have a canon gun and one of my guns run in a game together perfectly fine. It's when you go about trying to tweaking my guns with canon accessory rules that things tend to go badly. That's an area in which I wish I had more time to mess around with.

It might. Depends on the group, I think.

True. The "rifle = x0.75 AP" thing is a broad rule that's designed to be used with all firearms in the game. If you're using it with my rifles, you should use it with all of the rifles in the game, including canon rifles.

Right, which is in my experience exactly what will end up happening if someone tosses your site to someone and says "here, better firearms" with no further explanation. Not your fault, I was attacking Kayne's insufficient explanation of what was being given rather than your rules and weapons.

I do, however, want to point out that your statement that your weapons "bring more balance to the game because that's really how it is" is in error. Realism does not of necessity equal balance, as people discover to their misfortune every day.

~J

Let no good deed go unpunished.

Are we protecting the newbies from themselves, now? All I did was pass UPTD a link with a brief description (perhaps with a little praise for Raygun and his hard work). Let him decide what he wants to use in his game.

I think you'd agree that RL is more balanced than SR canon, though. At least as far as firearms and ranged combat is concerned. IRL, it's impossible to categorically say that one firearm is better than another. Everything has a downside. Most things which give huge advantages in RL ranged combat are very limited in their scope, and often royally fuck up something else.

The problem is in making rules for all the tiny little details that make RL balanced. It's just not possible, and even taking a small fraction of them into account complicates the game far too much. For example, there're no (reasonable) rules for making sniping rifles or MGs difficult to properly wield in CQB like they are IRL. The lack of reliability and increased maintenance needs of most new technologies are in no way taken into account.

And because of this, it may sometimes be a good idea to shave off realism in guns to maintain balance. While electronic recoil adjustment might be extremely effective IRL, it has downsides (witnessed by the lack of such systems in common use, I don't know enough about the system to say much more about it). Because rules for why it's not a be-all end-all recoil compensation system are hard to come up with, it might be better to simply reduce its effectiveness by a reasonable amount.

In an abstract system, instead of making the weapons as close to real as possible based on just the few figures and rules the game system takes into account, it may be better to compensate for some of the things that the system does not take into account by tweaking the few things it does.

That said, the Pred3 ERASe isn't quite as bad as I remembered. It's more concealable and definitely lighter than a similar pistol built with the CC rules, but that's about it. Can't be bothered to do a full comparison of a munched-out, BF HP by CC rules now.

Slightly less frightening, yes. But I wouldn't call paying 1,000 for a +2 TN to hear the weapon fired "horribly broken".

Okay. Understandable. But I think your explaination was a bit excessive. That's my problem.

I guess this is just another example of how game balance is a totally subjective thing. To me, the game as it is from the books is no way balanced. Some people are going to be able to plug my stuff right in, some are not. It's just perspective.

There's no harm in people pointing out problems that they have run into, either. You just have to go into to it understanding that not everyone plays the game the same way, and that their problems might not be problems to you. Problems are one thing, and are usually solved by very minor changes. "Horribly broken" is another. Considering what UPTD has come up with using the CC rules, I don't think he'd have any problem using the guns on my site.

I'm half tempted to have you explain in detail how it isn't.

The correct answer here is, again, that it is all perspective. If "balanced" means that the chances of your character dying from a single gunshot are very slim, so that it is possible to pull off great feats of John Woo-type action in your game, then that's fine. That's balanced to you. However, it is in no way realistic, and I personally prefer to play a game in which firearms are not treated in the manner you see them treated in movies, comics, and most video games. Guns come out only when things get very, very serious, and usually someone is going to die in the process of the battle. And I mean dead characters. End of game. More lethality makes better balance to me.

Like Raygun already said, if "balanced" means "people can survive gunshots without too much trouble" to you, then you won't find RL all that balanced, because IRL people do often get killed by gunshots.

That said, weapon technology has been well ahead of armor technology for the best part of 500 years, ever since firearms came into common use. Only now is armor technology catching up. You can currently get a $450 armor vest that weighs less than 3kg that will protect your torso against most common pistol shots.

Yes, you might be temporarily disabled by a shot that has been stopped by soft body armor, because it just plain hurts a lot, like a sudden 2" depression in a small area is bound to -- or you might not even notice that you've been shot, finding the slight bruise and stretched ballistic weaving only well after the shooting's done.

Add two 10" x 12" ceramic plates, at $240 and 2.5kg each, and your vitals are protected against most rifle shots and all pistol shots from the front and back. With these, it would be no wonder to be completely unscathed by a 10-round burst to the chest from an AK at point blank range, as long as all the bullets hit the area protected by the plate and no more than 2 in the exact same spot. The blunt trauma would be insignificant.

Of course wearing that armor also has its downsides -- like all things do in a balanced system. It limits your upper body movements, and it's 8kg extra to lug around. Plus it's not exactly easy to get your hands on if you happen to be a criminal, and you sure as hell can't wear it in public without drawing a whole lot of attention.

You need only look at the immense range of gear found in use by the most elite military units in the world to see that there generally are no "absolute bests" IRL, at least as far ranged combat is concerned.

That's the big point that people tend to ignore around here.

Hell, the much-praised and fan-created FCG rules found on the web is equally-abusable (in fact, more abusable when compared to canonical firearms -- doubly so if you use Raygun's addition), but the same people that tend to chastise the rules in the Cannon Companion tend to tout its merits. The only real difference between the two is the FCG uses meaningless (game mechanically-speaking) terms like "caliber" and offers more (and thus more abusable combinations of) options.

But, as you were saying, the point is that you have to be reasonable no matter what rules you use. Some people just choose not to be, thus you wind up with things like the ERASEr, HK21, and Steyr IWS 2500. Though to give credit where it's due, at least the ERASEr was a genuine attempt at being creative and original.

That would be the mantra of everyone who provides broken/overpowered rules. That and "...a bit more realistic."