Making a Shadowrun 4(ish) lite version

Taishan · Post by **Taishan** » Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:50 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:This is sort of tangential to the thread's point, but, one thing that would be really fucking helpful would be to know the average police response time for certain areas. A thing where the GM had to secretly roll the dice after someone called the cops or alerted the corp's security team would be amazingly helpful. And suspenseful.

I may be misremembering things but the Seattle Sourcebook had police response times in it for the different neighborhoods of Seattle. I seem to recall it being mentioned in other books like Tir Na Nog, but maybe not in the city-stats table but rather in the text itself.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:59 pm

Well, something that had a chart for base population size and then you get modifiers for the wealth of the area, police corruption, their distraction level (such as if they were expecting a raid or if there was a parade going through the city), and then miscellaneous modifiers like 'the Lone Star cops take an extra hour or so before investigation a disturbance at a business owned by Trolls' would be helpful.

Taishan · Post by **Taishan** » Mon Jun 04, 2012 6:16 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Well, something that had a chart for base population size and then you get modifiers for the wealth of the area, police corruption, their distraction level (such as if they were expecting a raid or if there was a parade going through the city), and then miscellaneous modifiers like 'the Lone Star cops take an extra hour or so before investigation a disturbance at a business owned by Trolls' would be helpful.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the Lone Star book had this data, at least on a neighborhood/small region basis. Maybe not down to the street level or the racial component detail but something to give you a baseline.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Tue Jun 05, 2012 10:02 am

There were police response time in some books (can't remember which). They were completely unrealistic (it took a few seconds to get a complete HTR team at the door) in order to make sure the police could arrive before the PC were long gone.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jun 05, 2012 12:03 pm

Blade wrote:There were police response time in some books (can't remember which). They were completely unrealistic (it took a few seconds to get a complete HTR team at the door) in order to make sure the police could arrive before the PC were long gone.

Pretty much this. Shadowrun was burdened with a combat round that was way too damn short. And as a direct result there was basically no chance in hell that any action was going to take even a minute to resolve was basically laughable. That's twenty combat rounds, which means that one side or the other is going to win in half that time even if they are handing out Light Wounds. The remaining time can be spent blowing doors or simply running a quarter kilometer (2 blocks) with no athletic ability at all.

And of course, in the real world 911 response times are over three minutes pretty universally and the actual average is over 10 minutes. Shadowrun desperately needed a combat turn that was two to ten times as long in real time. Because not only did it make fire fights unrealistically short - it made real world events occurring during combat rounds be something that was itself unrealistic.

-Username17

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Tue Jun 05, 2012 1:52 pm

If the combatants really were supersoldiers with computer-guided eye lasers and such, combats typically would be over in like 15 seconds.

While it's true that a real modern firefight lasts closer to 8 minutes, that's because people are squeezing off shots at each other from behind cover at extreme range, with plenty of pauses. When people who are good shots face off in close quarters, fights really are over in like 30 seconds.

Is the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral a single 30 second combat round? That could certainly work.