Do Shadowrun weapons ever feel too 'samey'? tactile RP'ing

[OgreBattle]

So in D&D you have different kinds of dice for different kind of weapons, but in Shadowrun everything uses dice pools. Do people ever have a problem of weapons feeling too similar to each other, because the dice they use are all physically similar?

See, for my heartbreaker project I've been looking at using only a d20 roll for attacks/damage/all resolution (based on the SAME system discussed here), but I wonder if removing all those other dice associated with D&D would, at some level, hurt the immersion in some tiny yet significant way.


I see a dagger, shortsword, longsword, bastard sword, great axe, and that high level monk punch that is omg overpowered

[Leress]

So in D&D you have different kinds of dice for different kind of weapons, but in Shadowrun everything uses dice pools. Do people ever have a problem of weapons feeling too similar to each other, because the dice they use are all physically similar?

Well for me in the case of Shadowrun (2nd edition) the answer would be no since the the weapons themselves do different levels (light, moderate, and deadly) of damage as well as types.

[kzt]

The SR stack of guns does nothing for me. Essentially there a few that objectively made sense to use and the rest are just annoying junk that takes out pages and pages of a book that could have had something useful on it instead.

[Surgo]

It's not the lack of dice types that made Shadowrun weapons feel shallow / samey, it's the lack of granularity in the system. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and seems to be more up to opinion. Some people jerk it over the gun mag, some think it's silly and counterproductive minutiae. For the cyberpunk genre as a whole, I tend to lean towards the former, but that's because of genre.

[ishy]

The D&D weapons don't do anything for me.
Just fiddly crap that takes way too much time for too little benefit.

[zugschef]

For DnD I'd probably unify damage dice to d6s. Everything does d6+X damage, where X kann be any number (even negative). At the very least you should get rid of d4s simply because they're very suspect RNGs.

[Voss]

The SR stack of guns does nothing for me. Essentially there a few that objectively made sense to use and the rest are just annoying junk that takes out pages and pages of a book that could have had something useful on it instead.

Agreed. The junk feels 'samey,' but the others are the only things worth using, and some of them do different jobs.

The same honestly applies to D&D, of every edition. There is the laundry list of junk, then things people take.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you want SR guns to feel less samey, why not instead emphasize other potential advantages and disadvantages like concealability, reload time, legality, etc.?

Furthermore, it's neither required nor desired for all of the weapons to be generically useful or even have theoretical situations in which one is the best or even a good choice. Granted, you don't want to clog up weapon lists with too much vendor trash, but having vendor trash is good for the genre and gun porn considerations.

[TheFlatline]

If you want SR guns to feel less samey, why not instead emphasize other potential advantages and disadvantages like concealability, reload time, legality, etc.?

Furthermore, it's neither required nor desired for all of the weapons to be generically useful or even have theoretical situations in which one is the best or even a good choice. Granted, you don't want to clog up weapon lists with too much vendor trash, but having vendor trash is good for the genre and gun porn considerations.

You already have those attributes in SR. And while yes, a pistol is better than an assault rifle if you're trying to not look like you're packing, once the lead starts flying the differences go away.

Plus once you look at the gun list you see guns in categories that outclass entire other categories in every capacity.

[name_here]

I think it's entirely acceptable to have guns that are just worse except for cost. Even if the gap is small enough that the players never use the cheaper gun, gangers and rent-a-cops can be armed with the junk. You do want enough guns with actual trade-offs that gun-focused characters have an actual decision to make, though, unless you're going super-abstract in general.

[shau]

I would say "yes," because in my experience everyone on a Shadowrun team is actually using the same gun, by which I mean whatever has the best damage. I think Ares Predator was the only pistol people used last time I played, but it has been a while.

[Mask_De_H]

Basically what Lago said; unless you want to add granularity via recoil, reload, concealability, effective range and what have you, guns are going to feel samey.

Feng Shui had a solid idea in statting up an iconic for each type of gun and saying "If you get wood from gunporn, you can have this be another gun in the same family and wank all you want".

[kzt]

If you want SR guns to feel less samey, why not instead emphasize other potential advantages and disadvantages like concealability, reload time, legality, etc.?

Roughly comparable guns are roughly the same as far as concealment. Not to mention that people are blind, I've seen people walking around with a big gun clearly visible to me under a white tshirt and nobody else noticed. A decent holster and a mechanics shirt or sweatshirt and you could carry around a desert eagle in .50AE (a HUGE pistol) and nobody would notice.

Magazines all take the same time to reload.

Legality doesn't really enter into a way of separating out one pistol from another, or one belt-fed machine gun from another.

Furthermore, it's neither required nor desired for all of the weapons to be generically useful or even have theoretical situations in which one is the best or even a good choice. Granted, you don't want to clog up weapon lists with too much vendor trash, but having vendor trash is good for the genre and gun porn considerations.

Give me a page total with a list of awful gun models and why they suck, I don't need 40 pages with artwork and stats of crap.

For example, here's the bottom line extracted from an actual review of the Type 94 Nambu:

Aside from its appearance, what makes this thing so bad? The fatal flaw is that this gun has an exposed sear… that when pressed fires the gun. That’s right, if you press the side of the gun it will fire.
overall: Worst pistol you can buy; Underpowered and anemic cartridge; Ugly as sin; Dangerous as can be; Tiny grip; Finding ammo is a problem; Incredibly difficult to take apart for cleaning.

Do you really need more?

[K]

The only DnD weapons that feel different are the ones that have a special ability. The actual stats bit is tough to remember and tends to be meaningless because people always pick the best stats (when is the last time you saw a club or warhammer fighter?).

But the Spiked Chain gets remembered and used.

This means that the way that you'd do SR weapons to create classes of weapons that have a special trick based on future tech and not present tech. For example, maybe "rifles" are guns that fire mini-drones that seek out targets over long distances (1-2 miles) while your basic SR machine pistol uses explosive micro-fletchettes that make your gun effectively ammo-less.