Fair enough. Scrap that idea. With regard to the blow-through, that's already reflected in their ability to load "Shock-Lock" rounds that other weapons can't.

Now the pistols question. Ugh. Anyone else want to chime in on this before I come to a preliminary decision?

~J

I still think AR's should do more damage than a pistol. The velocity the round is spat out at seems like it should. I don't know, maybe I am off on this.

I think the velocity would be a factor more in penetration than in damage. Raygun said a few pages back that he applies an armour modifier to high velocity rifle rounds.

I was really following the (apparent) consensus among the respective firearms gurus round here that, versus an unarmoured opponent, a single rifle shot and a single heavy pistol shot would be similarly effective, but that rifles penetrate armour better.

I'd personally prefer just a higher Power if we're changing at all.

~J

Here's the the version I'm gonna playtest if I can get a group back together.

All Heavy Pistols will be dropped in power from 9M and 10M to 7M and 8M respectively and Assault Rifles will have their power upped to 9M.
However, if the players still want 9 and 10M hand cannons they can have them since the police/sec will too, but it will cost.

Firepower Ammo: High power ammunition designed for heavy pistols. Adds +2 to the power of of heavy pistols, and +1 to all recoil modifiers. Availability and as per explosive rounds, cost 70 nuyen a box.
However all that added power puts too heavy a strain on a pistol and requires that it be heavily customized and reinforced, the cost of this reinforcement after manufacture doubles the cost of the weapon. Pistols modified to handle firepower ammo can fire regular ammo as normal. Attempting to use this ammo in an unreinforced pistol will warp the handgun giving it a permanent +1 TN to accuracy with each shot fired up to +4 when then gun will explode in the users hand from the stress.
Only a few select pistols are manufactured specifically to handle this ammo, The Ruger Thunderbolt, and the Ares Predator II and III.

Also thinking of allowing suppressive fire with a semi-automatic weapons. The max number of shots = to Quickness attribute to a max of 10.

Horses for courses. I favour ARs and HPs having similar Power Levels and halving the armour. To each their own.

However, a higher power also makes the round harder to resist for an unarmoured target, which - according to the forum experts - shouldn't necessarily be the case.

Then what is the interaction between rifles and APDS? Quartering? That seems excessively powerful to me.

~J

I'm in favor of dropping the power of heavy pistols by 2-3 points in order to bring their power in line with rifles and leaving light pistols and holdouts alone.

Regarding armor piercing rifles, I think that it is a sound idea but would make assault rifles very powerful, which seems like a reasonable idea given their various drawbacks (concealibility and legality). If the armor piercing rifle is implementd I would rule that APDS is redundant when fired from a rifle to prevent sniper rifles from completely ignoring hardened military armor much less anything smaller. (12/12 would go to 3/12 if a sniper rifle with APDS were fired at it, making the human wearable tank shell little more effective at stopping bullets than armored clothing.)

On a side note, part of the reason I'm not thrilled about the idea of applying an armor modifier to certain classes of weapons is because part of what I consider "simplicity" isn't just ease of calculation, but also making things act the way one would expect them to act. Granted that this is at times contrary to the way they actually do act, but (and keeping in mind that I'm heavily tainted by knowledge of the SR3 rules) I might expect a Power difference while I would not expect an armor modification. I'm still considering it, though.

Maybe I just need to find someone who hasn't played Shadowrun and ask them what they'd expect.

~J

I don't like the idea of making ARs armor-piercing by deafult, but that's primarily because I think changing anything to "make more sense" or be more "realistic" when said change affects several other game mechanics is a bad idea.

Are you going to re-design armor to reflect this? Will availability be adjusted? Do you actaully want to increase the default lethality level of the game by making changes like these?

I think these sort of rule changes are detrimental to the game when implemented piecemeal, and since, as far as I know, there's no plan to implement something like Raygun's gun system...

The question that needs to be answered first is whether we want to change some of the basic definitions of the game - like a gun being defined by Power and Damage Level - because if we do, simply patching things by introducing a lot of exceptions to existing rules is probably not the best way to go about it.

If you make assault rifle fire APDS by default, then what do you intend to do about the hardened military grade armor? It's obvious that the hardened military grade armor should be able to stop most standard assault rifle ammunition, yes?

I guess make it halve non-hardened armor? This would have the extra bonus of making gel-packs more useful; as it stands right now, you can only muster enough armor in gel-pack form to stop holdout pistols and the weakest light pistols. That's not very valuable.

But if rifle rounds halve all non-hardened armor, all of the sudden, gel-packs make a lot more sense. You can probably reasonably layer as much as 7-8 ballistic without gel-packs, and maybe 5-6 with gel-packs. Normally, the 7-8 sounds better, but if assault rifle rounds halve the regular armor, but not the gel-pack, then it makes a LOT more sense to get the gel-packs.

Obviously APDS rounds should behave as normal against hardened armor.

Also, regarding APDS/AV rounds, perhaps they're the same type of round; however, in the 0-7 power range, they count as only APDS rounds, but in the 8+ range, they count as AV rounds? Not sure if that's realistic, but it seems reasonable to my unexpert mind.

FWIW, gel packs turn regular armor into hardened armor at their normal value, but add some additional penalties related to the added bulk.

And thanks for clearing it all up in one place, it makes it easier to understand.

And, for what it's worth, hardened armor will defeat an attack if its BASE power does not exceed the rating; that means that you don't count power increase from burst or full auto fire (by canon, cc.51).

Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten about that. Cool with the Gel Packs, too. Works out just about perfectly, IMO.

Dragging this back up to the top because I was visited by a muse and have a number of ideas. Some of these ideas/suggestions are more equipment-related then anything, but the changes they cause would impact how we're debating how to change weapon power ratings and such.

1. Assault Rifles still do 8M. However, ARs and other rifle-type weapons are better at shooting through armor and barriers. Refer to the Barrier/Armor Reduction table(below). The first number is how much you reduce the rating of any barrier you are shooting through, the second is how much you reduce the armor of any target you are shooting at
LMG/ARs: -2/-1
MMG/Rifle: -3/-2
HMG/SR: -4/-3
Special: -5/-4
Verra Special: -6/-5
Why a flat reduction? First is my general dislike of multiplying or dividing things except when I know what I'm up to. The second is that I like the idea that some barriers wont even slow a round down. So if you shoot through a normal window with an AR(BR 2), your round doesn't even slow down as it goes through.

2. The following is the list of ammunition types -

• Armor Piercing: This is a catch all category for all rounds that perform better against armored enemies. Armor piercing wounds reduce their damage level by one, but consider your weapon to be two levels higher on the Barrier/Armor Reduction table.
  
• Anti-personell: This is a catch all category for all the rounds that perform better against unarmored enemies. Hollow points, flechettes, glazers, whatever. It ALL works the same in the context of the game. You get +1 damage level, but double the effective rating of any barriers when shooting through them or at them and targets add together their ballistic and impact ratings.
  
• Stun Rounds: This is another catch-all category for any ammunition designed to be less then lethal. Your gun deals stun damage, but double the effective rating of any barriers when shooting through them or at them and targets add together their ballistic and impact ratings.
  
• MAD-Immune: A favorite of assassins, these rounds are immune to MADs but at the cost of power. Reduce the power of the weapon by two.
  
• High-Power: This is a catch-all category for any round with extra power put in it. Explosive, high velocity, whatever. For every +1 power you recieve, increase the recoil modifier by one. Additionally, reduce the TN to hear high powered rounds by one per +1. Example: Joe Samurai has a magazine of of Extra High Power rounds loaded in his SMG for +2 power. He fires a 3-round burst from his SMG. He acts as if he recieved a +5 recoil modifier.
  
• f. Tracers: Loaded every 3 rounds in a magazine, tracers let you know where your bullets are going allowing you to 'walk' your fire over targets. When you fire a burst of 6 or more rounds, you recieve -1 TN per 3 rounds fired. Since smartlinks and laser sights already tell you where your rounds are going, tracer modifiers will not stack with either of those two technologies. Take the better of the modifiers. When firing bursts with tracer-loaded weapons, only increase the power by 2 for every 3 rounds fired.

The Whys: AP rounds serve a role but are not for gunning down unarmored civilians. Antipersonell rounds exist because there are 4 different rounds in Shadowrun for shooting unarmored people and there is no reason for that. Stun rounds are changed for...I don't know why, you could go back to the standard way, this way just felt right. MAD-immune rounds need to exist. High-power rounds are fun but ex-explosive are not. Tracers work almost the same as in canon.

3. It's time to clear up all of that Smartlink, laser, rangefinder, and scope business once and for all.

• The bonuses from a smartlink come from two things. One, you no longer need to pull the trigger, so your firing happens at the speed of thought. Two, you know exactly where your rounds are going. If you have a data cable from your gun to your head or an internal smartlink, you recieve -1 TN. If you have a set of smart goggles on, a laser sight, or a cybernetic eye display you recieve an additional -1 TN.
• All scopes, including magnification vision, tell you where your shots are going with a set of crosshairs. The bonus from laser sights, smart goggles, or an eye display is entirely redundent when you are using a scope. However, the -1 for Speed of Thought still applies. Scopes otherwise work as per canon.
• Adepts may take a 1 PP power called "Zen Shooting". It reflects a zen-like sense of where their bullets will go. This grants them the Know Where They're Going bonus. Adepts may also take another 1 PP power called Speed of Thought that allows them to take the -1 Speed of Thought bonus.
• Cybered characters may recieve the Speed of Thought bonus when using two guns by simply duplicating however they are already getting it(Another datajack or another pad in their hand). Recieving the Know Where They're Going bonus requires either two differently-colored laser sights, two eye displays, or a special pair of Two Gun Smartgoggles. Zen Gunnery and Speed of Thought powers simply Work when you use two guns, no special screwing around necessary.
  
  I realize some people instinctively recoil at the idea of granting adepts the power of a smartlink. When it comes time to look at magic, we're already going to need to re-evaluate the role of adepts and street samurai in the game and what both need to be able to do or not do. I think what we're going to need to change is to give cybered characters a flatter advancement curve, such as by reducing the multipliers on high-grade cybernetics and making the penalty for magical characters taking cyberware much harsher than they are. The above systems are designed to make sense from an in game point of view.
• Smartlink-2's provide you with two bonuses. One, you recieve -2 TN to all Launch Weapons or tests when dealing with a properly linked weapon. Two, the weapons scatter is reduced to 1d6 from whatever it was. I don't like straight power-ups in new books. This is simply a new option that some characters will use and some wont.
  
• Rangefinders can be installed on weapons or in your eye as per normal costs. The only bonus this gives is that as a simple(weapon mounted) or free action(eye or helmet mounted) you can ask your GM how far away a target is. Your GM must tell you exactly how many meters away a target is. I don't know why, this just feels like a useful change.

4. Shock pads, customized grips, and high strength no longer grant recoil compensation. Foregrips, underbarrel weights, gas vents, foot anchors, stocks, and gyro mounts are the only things that grant recoil compensation. The reason for this is to help reign in some of the crazy recoil compensation characters can get without even trying. This allows characters to get by with less armor. I favor taking the Ares Alpha out back and putting it down like old yeller, by the way. I also favor murdering the gun design system in its sleep.

5. The Gunnery skill is banished to a deep dark pit and is never coming back. When a weapon is turret mounted, you use whatever the normal skill for it is. You may specialize in Turret Operations for any weapon. It completely shatters immersion for the worlds best machine gunner to lose all of his skill the moment he mounts his machine gun on a turret.

6. FFBA no longer provides any special bonus for layering. I don't like Shadowrun Underoos.
***********

Some of you may have noticed that I didn't mention AV rounds at all when listing off ammunition types. The reason is that we can't and wont know how AV ammunition will work or if it needs to exist at all until we get around to the rigger rules. The entire system of damaging vehicles will need to be rethought whenever we get around to fixing that. The crux of the issue is that vehicles should not be treated like big, armored characters. They should be treated more like portable walls and be damaged accordingly.

Draft Proposal:

The Power of weapons is unchanged. Only Rifle-class or heavier weapons may use armor-defeating or antivehicular rounds. Light pistols retain their power but the damage code is increased to M. Hold-Out Pistols wait until we address the next question, as follows:

5) Flechette Rounds: what do we do with them?

Do we change them? Remove them entirely? Leave them as is? Leave them as is but rename them?

Open for suggestions on both halves.

~J

Proposal: leave hold-out pistols exactly the way they are. Flechette ammo stays the way it is, though I'm still considering renaming it.

Another suggestion given was giving Shotguns another ammo type, real flechettes, that would essentially combine the abilities of shot with the armor-piercing capability of AP rounds (namely, it would go against .5x Ballistic or 1x Impact, whichever is greater). The question then becomes does it get its staging against armored targets? If the answer is yes, it becomes significantly more powerful and dangerous (and thus needs to be expensive and rare). If not, it's not all that differentiated from AP ammo—it's the sort of thing you'd load if you didn't know if the target was armored or not and needed to cover both sides well.

Opinions?

Also, we need a modifier to dodge TN for the new shotgun rules. Is +1 enough?

~J

1) The problem with lookup tables like this is that while they may be more... "accurate" in a sense, they increase the complexity and decrease streamlining. You may not like simply diviging by two, but it's easier to remember than a table.

2) About AP rounds, what if your weapon is not on the table?

3) New Smartlink rules... no thank you. Just, thanks for the effort, but I have absolutely no love for this system. OK, I do kind of like that there's a way to make SL work with dual-firing (which makes sense) and a coressponding Adept power, but the rest of it... Too complicated for one, although not more so than the totally cybered vs. merely part cybered distinction from SR3 and M&M. Also, I will miss the idea that a called shot bonus can be conferred by cyberware.

4) I would argue that higher Strength for recoil comp can stay, in a modified form. It's not a passive effect, you need to declare that you're "using" it when firing the gun. Roll STR vs. twice the unmodified recoil, every success acts as -1 to recoil. The Ares Alpha can be marked up in price and availability. The gun creation system Must Die.

5) Fine.

6) I'd say the layering rules need to come in for a look-see. Currently, if you're wearing, say, a full suit of plate mail (which has got to be Hardened B2 I9) and have QCK 2 and STR 2, you suffer no penalty. It's insane for the dual reason that Impact armor doesn't count for armor penalties, and STR makes no difference (except in the carrying weight of the armor, but who follows those daft rules either?)

Next post:

Not happy with AP ammo being reserved for rifles and up. Aren't there AP rounds for pistols now?

Light Pistol proposal is good.

Next:

Hold-outs I'd give the same upgrade as Light: same power, higher DL.

As for flechettes, definately limited to shotguns. There should be two versions:

Light flechettes, which fire many small darts, have the scattering effects and DL upgrade of Shot, but treat armor normally (and are thus more expensive and higher in avail.)

Haevy flechettes, which scatter like Shot and increase DL and are AP (very high cost, very high avail.)

I feel comfortable having these two special shotgun rounds given that shotguns should play a bigger role in future CQB.

Wouldn't the dodge penalty be related to choke, or did those rules get sutffed?

GunnerJ -

1. My idea was that this table would be very easy to memorize. Start at AR/LMG at -2/-1, then just add one to each of the numbers as you go up. But Kage has made a decision, so it's probably not in(It was designed as a compromise between the half-armor for ARs that Raygun advocated and saner things).

2. It'd be as if an MMG(None->AR/LMG->MMG), unless we were inclined to do something crazy like REDUCE the penetration of certain weapons. Which we aren't. Otherwise, see #1.

3. Beyond just fixing what's actively broken, I think one goal of the project was to clear up things that are not clear. What does/does not/ stack with smartlinks has always been a long-running argument on dumpshock. It's no "Hey, I just found these called shots rules in M&M, can I use them to bypass the armor on a tank?" or "Do elves suck or what?", but it's up there.

4. I'm not sure how much I like the idea of another roll in combat. I really, really don't like the Ares Alpha. That POS is chosen by 90% of Sammys because it's just BETTER than every single option out there.

5. W00t!

6. Yes. My issue with the current armor laying rules isn't that they're broken(Although they kinda are), it's that they result in characters that look stupid. I've got a dwarven samurai in one of my groups with a quickness of 9. He wears -FOUR- layers of armor. I don't like rules that encourage characters to look stupid.

---------

I advocate taking every single one of those unarmored personnel rounds, from shot to flechette to everything in between, and lumping them into one "Anti-personnel" round. You can describe your anti-personnel rounds however you want, but from the standpoint of the game, they're all the same.

We could probably make some sort rule for "Combo Rounds" like your heavy flechettes. Maybe add together the price of both then double that, with an increased SI and availability to boot.

Though it should probably be in a different topic, proposed layering rules: as canon, but explicitly only the highest two layers count. This may not be the same two layers for both ballistic and impact armor.

Regarding Smartlinks: Smartlinks stack with Shot/Shotgun Flechette/etc. (but have their effectiveness reduced by 1, so it isn't really an additional benefit). They do not stack with laser sights or magnification.

Suggestion: remove the ability of magnification to stack with laser sights. This closes the hole whereby a laser sight+vismag is better than a smartlink at Long and greater range.

Incidentally, I don't entirely agree with you about turret-mounting, but at the least it should probably be defaultable. That will be covered more thoroughly probably when we get to vehicles (or if and when I have particular inspiration about it)

~J

One of the problems with addressing armor stacking is that I'd prefer not to make wearing light armor overly punishing, but by the same token would like to preserve the practical upper limit of about six points ballistic that currently exists.

Any proposals for how to go about this? I'll be muddling it over during Abnormal Psych…

~J

I think designing a sensible encumberance system and then simply enforcing "realistic" armor weights would be one way of addressing this problem.

You should have something relating to body and strength (which generally reflect mass). After all larger people (which are usually reflected by having a larger body or more dense, are less encumbered by weight.) If you have more weight than str + body in kg's then you suffer from encumbrance. -tn's for dodge and combat pool.

That all makes sense. However, it dramatically increases bookkeeping—in my experience no matter the system encumbrance is usually among the first things to get dropped by groups, and there's a reason for that. That said, any thoughts on a good encumbrance system?

The other problem is that we'd have to completely redo the masses of just about everything, as well as making some up where they currently don't exist…

~J

it would be really cool if we just added a stat for encumbrance index for objects.

It would also be something that we could put into gear.... ie, webbing.
Something that is often overlooked. say 4 pockets have the following
encumbrance allowances. 1,1,2,5. It would prevent the troll from carrying
the backpack of many things.

Some objects do not weigh alot but are a pain to carry, ie a plastic table.
and it just simplifies things. Clothing would also have a capacity.

Valid point about groups dropping encumbrance first. But it helps with
characters that try and carry everything, and stuff panther assault cannons
into their backpacks.

Just typing off the top of my head here...

How about having layering cause a detrimental effect on Combat Pool, to reflect the clumsiness inherent in wearing lots of stuff? I know when I'm wearing my motorcycle jacket, the one with the plastic armour in it, I lose some mobility.

This could come in one of two ways. In the first, for every piece of armour after the first, you lose X Combat Pool dice (probably 1, but that could be open to negotiation).

The second would be to have an automatic Combat Pool reduction for wearing armour, and just total it up for wearing more than one piece. So FFBA and an Armour Jacket might reduce CP by 1 dice each, whereas Heavy Security armour could penalise it by up to 3 dice.

Optionally, you could assign an arbitrary "encumbrance value" to each armour piece, and reduce CP by one for every Y that this value exceeds the characters Strength (maybe averaged Body and Strength?).

In either variation, the pros and cons scale in what looks like a decent way; there would come a point where more armour, despite lowering target numbers for soaks, no longer helps because Combat Pool has decreased to the point where you can't reliably soak much more, or else you use the CP for soaking and don't hit as reliably. Ironically, I think you'd see high-Body characters (trolls, orks, cybered samurai of most kinds) wearing more armour as they have the Body to withstand the CP hit, and that kind of works for me, that the big walking walls wear loads of armour while the smaller agile types tend to rely on their reflexes.