How to make Shadowrun less bad

[Stahlseele]

I'm kind of bummed out that Cyberzombie isn't going to keep arguing from incredulity. "Nobody in my games or the fiction I read actually used these options! How could anyone else think they're possibly a legitimate part of Shadowrun?"

The ONLY reason why NOBODY is running around with a Vindicator Minigun as their Main Gun is the fact that it's impossible to use as a hand held weapon.
Take a look at the Anime Movie Spriggan < = that is how shadowrun could and should be more often than not!

[Aryxbez]

I moreso find it frustrating/saddening that Cyberzombie didn't wish to continue discussion, based on what I felt was a false notion that ones minds can't be changed, and all that. As well that it's kinda insulting that seeks to exaggerate it as "superheroes" and "making Seattle a big crater", just because he personally doesn't want to fathom CORE Archetypes all having their own "endgame" path.

I guess in this case it doesn't, because apparently the style you and a number of other posters want to go with is SR superheroes. I could make some more ultimately pointless arguments, but I'm not going to talk anyone out of what they want to do, which is apparently Scanners versus Gundam versus Raiden from Metal Gear all in the center of downtown Seattle. I personally don't think that fits well with the whole flavor of the setting, but since that style seems to have majority appeal, I'll bow out of this thread and let you guys work on your superheroes game.

You honestly should've probably read back on my post (the first part), and this one, as well. Including your own post, which in regards to me started with ye talking about it not being "in the rules", which in times like 3rd edition, or other such, it in fact DID. Apparently early Shadowrun was pretty Gonzo anyway, so letting everyone go in that direction when the game has hit the "Gonzo-tier", seems only natural and fair part of the game (unless you feel Spellcasters should have all the fun?).

Basically, if those posts, and what been said above isn't registering with you, consider a D&D example. D&D has lvs 1-5th for "Low", and shadowrun about within that range, but its awakened have a "6th+ option". We're talking about how could grant that "6th+" option to ALL the archetypes, and not just Magic. The game doesn't START at superheroes, least, not by default (even if that term applies to dudes like Punisher/Green-Arrow/Batman and so "technically" would be, but I digress), but with enough XP, everyone can reach a satisfying point to that.


Aside, I do like Seerow's idea of a man/machine/spirit-hybrid thing going on. As it fits the Sam's apparent nature of being "Swiss-Knife" who does a bit of everything, as well as that you could "technically" have a spirit go inside of you to gain extra essence for more Augmentations anyway? Plus, it allows Troll Sam's to become a more satisfying extension of themselves, rather replace their big-ol meat body with just a robot (unless they should have own SS-endgame path?).

Miniguns also are supposed to be able to apply to more than just the Vindicator version, but it seemed they never really refined the rules to fully converting a MG into one.

[unnamednpc]

The thing with miniguns is they're conceptually cool and kind of iconic for the genre, but Shadowrun's autofire-rules are a legacy clusterfuck of terribadness so you can't ever really use them. Which is sort of sad.
See, back in First Edition, the mayor of Shadowrun Town decided that firing a gun in full-automatic mode should be as clunky and mechanically unpleasant and unrewarding as humanly possible, so shooting on full-auto meant that you had to roll separately for each discreet round fired (up to a number of rounds equal to your Firearms skill, because being a crack shot means you can squeeze the trigger longer) and adding the number of shots to your target number.
Hence, the dreadful tradition of per-bullet-recoil was born, and even though the later editions introdced sort-of unified firing modes for weapons, that old albatross never went away. So when the Street Samurai Catalogue told you that the Vindicator Minigun had the heavy weapons tag that doubled all your recoil, it basically took all hopes of having a streetsam ever getting any mileage out of a minigun, and poured a huge bucket of sad over it.
Tl, dr: Less bad Shadowrun probably should do something about autofire-rules.

[kzt]

Well, most of the firearms rules in SR suck. However there is a reason why miniguns are typically vehicle mounted. It's that they are very heavy, require an significant amount of electrical power, fire over 5 pounds of ammo per second (hence recoiling like mad) and also have interesting torque/stability issues from the rotating barrels.

[Lokathor]

Yeah but we're not talking about a real person lifting it, we're talking about a half-robot or a 3 meter troll or something like that.

[Korwin]

I moreso find it frustrating/saddening that Cyberzombie didn't wish to continue discussion, based on what I felt was a false notion that ones minds can't be changed, and all that. As well that it's kinda insulting that seeks to exaggerate it as "superheroes" and "making Seattle a big crater", just because he personally doesn't want to fathom CORE Archetypes all having their own "endgame" path.

Man, he bowed out of the discussion. You won.

[Aryxbez]

However there is a reason why miniguns are typically vehicle mounted. It's that they are very heavy, require an significant amount of electrical power, fire over 5 pounds of ammo per second (hence recoiling like mad) and also have interesting torque/stability issues from the rotating barrels.

Shadowrun already has measures for these; heaviness covered via straps or Gyro-Stabilizer, Battery-packs for laser/Gauss weapons already exist so could just do the similar if truly needed, and pretty much the rest is just recoil. So you handle that via various Recoil comps, and/or via just being really strong. However, I totally forgot about the recoil DOUBLING for Heavy weapons....(go-go Frank's Houserules I guess?)

Man, he bowed out of the discussion. You won.

I can assume you're probably just being snarky, but I don't partake in discussions to "win". I find that to be a rather childish notion, as a discussion is an exchange of ideas, and hoping to get what was wanting to be said across. Ideally in a discussion both parties walk away informed in some way, open to new ideas, and don't just shut themselves out to any form of criticism. If you go into a discussion for the intent to "win", I think going into it for the wrong reasons, poor mindset, or otherwise going to be dishonest.

I'd much prefer he had something to learn from his misconceptions, opposed to just making stupid exaggerations because he misunderstood the topic at hand and had poor reasoning.

[Korwin]

Just realized, that I'm off-topic, but since I allready wrote it, lets do it in spoilers.

Man, he bowed out of the discussion. You won.

I can assume you're probably just being snarky, but I don't partake in discussions to "win".

Not snarky.

I moreso find it frustrating/saddening that Cyberzombie didn't wish to continue discussion, based on what I felt was a false notion that ones minds can't be changed, and all that.

But it wasnt clear to me, you wanted to win in an specific way. --> Changing his mind.

It sounded to me, like you where beating on him, when he allready quit... bowed out of the thread.

I find that to be a rather childish notion, as a discussion is an exchange of ideas, and hoping to get what was wanting to be said across. Ideally in a discussion both parties walk away informed in some way, open to new ideas, and don't just shut themselves out to any form of criticism. If you go into a discussion for the intent to "win", I think going into it for the wrong reasons, poor mindset, or otherwise going to be dishonest.

I'd much prefer he had something to learn from his misconceptions, opposed to just making stupid exaggerations because he misunderstood the topic at hand and had poor reasoning.

He did acknowledge that others obviously had other preconception than him about SR and that he is in the minority.
You wont be able to change his taste for what he prefers...

[Whipstitch]

First off, I am pro miniguns on the grounds of "Fuck it, it's sci-fi fantasy." It seemed like a passive aggressive tease whenever they put out a minigun sans vehicle tag but stat the thing out as being unusable. That's just a dick move and should be treated with contempt.

But, with that said, saying "Just" recoil still hits me as kinda funny when talking about miniguns. I mean, in Predator they got Jesse Ventura the smallest minigun they could get, strapped it up, loaded it with only 4 seconds worth of blanks, cut the operating speed by 70%, and operated the thing by literally having the weapons master plug and unplug it from an external power source because they really wanted a backup plan if an actor dropped the god damn thing. Miniguns are crazy.

[OgreBattle]

Should there be a way to make a revolver specialist as deadly as a man with a minigun?

[Stahlseele]

As an up close and personal assassin type, the heavy revolver is better than the minigun. simply because the former can be hidden to actually allow you to close the distance and with the latter you need to do a full scale attack and then still run the risk of simply MISSING WITH THE ENTIRE LEAD STORM by the SR rules . .
It's even useless as an anti vehicular weapon. Because Full Auto does not help overcome hardened/vehicular armor at all.
So all it does is to allow you to flatten more ammo faster against armor, if you can even hit it in the first place . .
SR3 example:
Minigun has 7S Base Damage. (Yes, that's the same Damage as a cheap ass Hunting rifle. Which is better than the Minigun in most cases)
IF you hit and IF your Power of 7 is bigger than the targets hardened armor, you deal 22D Damage. 7+15 because the Minigun only fires in 15 bullet full auto bursts. (yes, that's less than an HVAR, which can go up to 18 bullets . . )
Now if your Target is wearing heavy milspec armor, that's 7 points of hardened ballistic armor right there. That's the maximum a humanoid can have. And immediately, the Minigun goes plink really loudly about 15 times a second.
Vehicles usually have a bit more than 7 hardened armor.
Not sure if you can load up the minigun with different kinds of ammo, or if it is a specialized weapon that only comes with one kind of ammo.

Now, the same armored dude and you are shooting at him with a Heavy Pistol. Power 9. so 2 bigger than the hardened armor of 7. So already he has to roll. TN of 2, granted, but if you have some net hits on your attack test and your target does not have that much body, you will still deal some damage to him. Either load up with APDS or with ExEx and he has to roll against higher than 2 too.
Shotguns start with 10S damage. And there are BurstFire/Full-Auto shotguns. Of course, they use Heavy Weapon unnegated Recoil doubling too.
But negating 3 or 6 points of recoil is very much possible and even trivially easy sometimes. So you go up from 10S to 13D Damage with one Burst of the Shotgun and then substract the armor of 7 and now the guy has to roll 6's to resist the damage. Or you go to 16D Damage and he has to roll 9's to resist the damage. And at least 8+ your net hits to boot.
Add ExEx to the equation and your BASE DAMAGE starts at 12S which is close enough to not make a difference to DOUBLE the 7S BASE DAMAGE of the Minigun. Full Auto? Gratulations, 18D Damage! Panther Assault Cannon Levels of Damage! And you would need 12 hardened Armor to negate it automagically!
And the shotgun more or less comfortably fits under your lined heavy coat and is therefore kinda easy to hide. Hell, if you allow for "non standard" cyber implant weapons, i see no reason why you should not be able to actually have a built in fully automatic shotgun hidden in your arm!
Then you start to get problems with recoil compensation again though, so i would just go for the burst fire capable one.

Seriously, the only thing the Minigun is actually good for is for hunting big awakened animals that hopefully have loads of Body but no Armor to speak of.
And for that, you need to mount it on a vehicle too!

[Username17]

Stahlseele's rant is a pretty good example of how the damage codes of 3rd edition weaponry are not a good thing and should never come back. That being said, even if you fixed the rules so that they worked the way they "should," there would still be cases when the revolver specialist would be more deadly than the minigun user. Against any target that the revolver is sufficient, the revolver is also superior. Because the revolver has better concealability, legality, cost, and replaceability. You can walk into a public building with a revolver that you have a license to concealed carry, pull it out and shoot a dude in the face. For any target that is weak enough to be killed by that (which, frankly, is most of them), that is flat superior to trying to sneak your minigun in with a fake janitor's uniform and a garbage can or trying to fight your way up from the ground floor guns ablazing.

If your real question was whether revolver specialists should do as much damage as miniguns, obviously the answer is "no." If pistols did as much damage as heavy weapons, they would be overpowered with all the other advantages that they have.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

*coughs*Ruger Thunderbolt*coughs*
*cough*Savalette Guardian*cough*
*hack*Ares Viper Slivergun*hack*
*wheez*Ruger Super Warhawk*wheez*

[kzt]

Real world, a minigun is a fucking death ray against anything that isn't an AFV.

[Stahlseele]

And it is in SR too.
Against SQUISHIES.
Everything moderately hardened armored(delivery Van, huge Animal, people in plate armor) will simply shrug it off as if nothing had been shot at them at all.
But it is IMPOSSIBLE for people carrying it by hand to actually hit what they are aiming for.
Because it fires 15 bullets. You can have, at most, i think 7 points of Recoil compensation . . so you are left with 8 points of uncompensated recoil. which gets doubled because it's a heavy weapon. so yes, in SR3 it's by then a flat +16/fuck you to your TN to actually hit what you want to hit.

[Whipstitch]

Minigun has 7S Base Damage. (Yes, that's the same Damage as a cheap ass Hunting rifle. Which is better than the Minigun in most cases)

And that's the problem with tracking added damage and recoil on a one-more-per-bullet basis rather than going with even moar abstraction. Miniguns actually do fire rifle caliber rounds, but that's still missing the forest for the trees given that minigun rates of fire are so far outside of anything the Shadowrun system can even pretend to handle.

[Aryxbez]

But, with that said, saying "Just" recoil still hits me as kinda funny when talking about miniguns.

So...more REALIZARM? Could you explain what this would entail exactly? As in, do you want flat-non-negotiable attack penalties for certain Auto-bursts? (basically minimal recoil penalty must take), Wearer to take damage when firing due to overheating and/or unless they wear special gloves/equipment, for them to make a Str+Bod/Str check or else they drop it and take 1m Falling Damage equivalent?

If you understand game abstraction, then I don't see why folding most of those into "Recoil" (with the exception of now requiring a Energy backpack like laser/gauss weapons that carries 100 cells) as being an acceptable measure? Personally, I don't think that's necessary when it ALREADY has higher recoil via its special Auto-bursts, and takes a simple action to "wind-up" first (I could see a weapon mod for that).

Not entirely sure how they'd roll with Frank's Houserules on Recoil:

Recoil
Rather than equating number of bullets to recoil directly (which oddly punishes machine pistols and boosts assault cannons), a weapon has a minimum strength. The base Strength Minimum of a weapon is the base DV-2. Most recoil modifiers in the book don't apply. The following do, however:
A Shape which exacerbates recoil increases Strength Minimum by 1 (example: Holdout pistols).
A Shape which mitigates recoil decreases Strength Minimum by 1 (example: Rifle)
A Short Burst increases Strength Minimum by 1.
A Long Burst increases Strength Minimum by 2. (not inclusive)
Full Auto increases Strength Minimum by 3. (not inclusive)
Firing from Prone or otherwise braced decreases Strength Minimum by 1.
Using a Bipod or Tripod decreases Strength Minimum by 2.
A Gyromount or Gun Emplacement decreases Strength Minimum by 3. (not inclusive)
A Gas Vent System is incompatible with a sound suppressor and reduces Strength Minimum by 1 (there are no long multiple levels of those things).
Every point that the weapon exceeds your Strength Minimum gives a -1 penalty to firing the weapon and a -2 penalty to all other dice pools you have for the rest of the turn (not just the action). Drones and such use their Body as their Strength, and fall over if their Strength Minimum is exceeded.

Looks like it'd become Str min of 9? (7base -2, +1 shape excaberates, +3 Full-Auto), and could comp it down to 7 (-1 Gas-vent, -1 Braced NO gyro-stabilizers I guess?), making it commonly employed by Trolls, exceptional Orks, Spirit-Hulks, or Sam's with damn good Cyberarms.

[fectin]

In real life, those death rays require a truly fantastic amount of ammunition, often need dedicated cooling, and rip apart any mount which wasn't designed around them from the start. As long as we're fantasizing those issues away, we can also go ahead and fantasize that these scaled-down, man-portable miniguns have any characteristics convenient for game balance.


(edit:DYAC)

[Seerow]

And it is in SR too.
Against SQUISHIES.
Everything moderately hardened armored(delivery Van, huge Animal, people in plate armor) will simply shrug it off as if nothing had been shot at them at all.
But it is IMPOSSIBLE for people carrying it by hand to actually hit what they are aiming for.
Because it fires 15 bullets. You can have, at most, i think 7 points of Recoil compensation . . so you are left with 8 points of uncompensated recoil. which gets doubled because it's a heavy weapon. so yes, in SR3 it's by then a flat +16/fuck you to your TN to actually hit what you want to hit.

In SR4 I am nearly certain it is possible to get more than 7 points of recoil comp. I am pretty sure I remember firing full auto with a high velocity barrel assault rifle (12 shots on full auto) with no recoil.

[Whipstitch]

So...more REALIZARM?

Don't be a dipshit. I said something was funny but should be allowed anyway. Go have an imaginary argument with someone else.

[RelentlessImp]

Everything I've read about Shadowrunners has always seemed to encourage them to be a precise instrument for extractions (data or personnel) or assassinations. I've never really seen any indication that you should be getting balls to the wall, mass destruction missions where you leave half of downtown Seattle as a big crater.

You haven't been paying attention to Kane, then. This is literally his schtick - he is the Ubermensch, High-Level Prime Runner whose runs involve entire cities and mass explosions and sailing away on a yacht full of naked women. This archetype exists in at least one canon Shadowrun character.

[Stahlseele]

@Seerow:
No idea, i never really bothered much with the SR4 rules . .

@RelentlessImp:
And he is pretty much hated and reviled for being a Merc without conscience i think. But it works for him.

[Whipstitch]

In SR4 I am nearly certain it is possible to get more than 7 points of recoil comp. I am pretty sure I remember firing full auto with a high velocity barrel assault rifle (12 shots on full auto) with no recoil.

Somehow skipped this earlier.

Yeah, 12 is doable when paired with a gyro rig or bipod but any higher and you need one of the guns that come with a special just because bonus or make use of the optional strength rules. It's 10 grand and a lot of fiddly bullshit just to run a gun that is still less versatile than the good ol' Alpha or White Knight though.

[Aryxbez]

Don't be a dipshit. I said something was funny but should be allowed anyway. Go have an imaginary argument with someone else.

Maybe ye shouldn't be a dumb@$$ by shutting me out, jumping to conclusions w/attempt at insult, and actually READ what I had said perhaps?

I know you're 'Pro-Miniguns", however, you then briefly went into a bit about some strong actor (who's former wrestler/governor/marine?-etc) being in danger with a minigun or something. In my post, I was genuinely asking what is it that ye were trying to convey with that point (though I suppose sincerity can be poorly conveyed in text), making a set of guesses to what I could vaguely think ye were trying to say. Seems they came off as assumption that may feel trying to box you into a trap or some such, but is not my intent, and my bad if it came off as such. I'm wondering what was to be conveyed by mentioning it, and what idea(s) would want conveyed into Shadowrun rules terms?

Also in official Shadowrun rules for 4th, it helps it only Doubles "Uncompensated Recoil" as I recall.

[Korwin]

You haven't been paying attention to Kane, then. This is literally his schtick - he is the Ubermensch, High-Level Prime Runner whose runs involve entire cities and mass explosions and sailing away on a yacht full of naked women. This archetype exists in at least one canon Shadowrun character.

What book or is he only an Shadowtalker?