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Aimed Shots and Area Fire

by Robert A. Lemos

As soon as there was a pause in the Ingram’s thunder, L.B. drew his katana and rushed through the shattered plywood doorway. Clemente barely had time to shake off his marijuana high and the brutal shock wave from the dying door. L.B. may be mentally slow, but his reflexes were faster than Clemente’s would ever be. In fact, Clemente barely thought to stick his head around the door jam in time to see L.B. miss with his katana and almost began to raise his Predator when L.B. paused for a moment (obviously thinking hard) and, deciding that decretion was the better part of any fight, pulled his pistol, and put a slug into the guy’s upper arm at close range. As Clemente watched in dismay, their only source of information fell to the floor and blood began to fountain from the exit and entry wounds. L.B.’s shot must have hit a major artery. Clemente walked over, thinking maybe he could plug up the wound with his finger…

[What happened when L.B. tried to disarm a punk with a called shot under current rules]

This article discusses two sets of optional rules for the Shadowrun 2nd Edition system. The first covers aimed shots (the term called shot is used to mean the same thing), which in the current incarnation of the rules, always do more damage ‘ as if the creative street samurai had nothing better to do than to shoot at an opponent’s vital areas. The second optional rule discusses area fire in an attempt to correct the current situation, where firing 15 shots or so means that you have almost no chance of hitting. This optional rule is useful for suppression fire and its effects. I would like to thank Mike Montessa for his ideas on both these rules variants and for inspiring me with his GMing. Were it not for the lethality of his campaign, I would never thought up rules for increasing the level of mayhem and distruction.

Aiming Shots for Nonlethal Effects

This is intended to be a very short discussion of the called shot rules for Shadowrun 2nd edition. The main problem in the current game system is that the act of calling a shot is always read as an intention to do more damage. A +4 modifier is added to the target number and the damage level is increased (e.g., from a 9M to a 9S). However, there should be ways of achieving other effects using the system. If you are trying to kneecap a person, you should not have a better chance of killing them when compared to a normal body shot. However, this is the effect of the current rules.

Precision Surgery by Ares Predator’

By modifying the called shot rule the GM should try to do two things: (1) enable a character to hit a location as long as the location is visible (though their target numbers may make hitting very unlikely), and (2) increase the effects of hitting the location when multiple successes are rolled. Note, increasing the effects is not always synonymous with increasing the level of damage. If you are trying to shoot someone’s thumb off, more successes means that you have a better chance of succeeding (a single success may hit the thumb, but the GM might rule that three are needed to blow it completely off), but you will not kill the person by doing so. On the other hand, the effects of a called shot may not always be those intended by a character. For instance, when attempting to shoot a gun from someone’s hand, multiple successes might make the gun harder to hold after being shot, but the GM might also rule that multiple successes also cause more damage to the gun and that a certain amount of damage will cause the gun to blow up (or at least be damaged in some way). In this case, the GM ruled that successes increase damage (to the gun), since the reason the gun has a better chance of being blown out of the holder’s hand is because more force is being delivered (i.e., a more direct hit).

A Full Suit of Body Armor ‘ Don’t Leave Home Without It

The exact effects of a called shot are up to the GM. Usually, players will want to state their intent. This is fine, but the GM should stress that the hit location is what matters, not the character’s intention.

The following should be considered when resolving a called shot:

  • Location: The GM should come up with the range of modifiers to cover target size. A good gauge is the target-number modifiers for partial cover. An example of some reasonable ones are +4 for a head-sized target, +8 for a hand-sized one, and +12 or so for one a few centimeters across (an eye, maybe).

  • Damage: In Shadowrun, the damage is increased by one level by taking a penalty of +4. The GM could use this as a basic rule and let people stage damage for each +4 modifier they take to the original roll (i.e., two levels for +8, three levels for +12, etc.). However, while simple, this approach is weak on roleplaying, since you are letting people choose the effect rather than the location. A better way would be to let the player choose the location and determine damage based on how vital the area is. For example, a shot to a finger (for snipers who have something to prove) could be ruled to do at most a moderate (M), while a hit to the arm might stage one level for every three successes (since it is a nonvital area).

  • Movement: Of course, movement makes targets harder to hit. The modifiers in Shadowrun seem to have this area covered. However, a point to remember for all those knee-cappers is that a person’s knees and feet essentially move at twice their running speed, so the target number modifiers should be doubled. In addition, the target numbers should be increased if the target is aware of the attacker (people tend not to stand still when being shot at).

  • Armor: The GM will have to decide whether to let characters shoot for unarmored areas of a person’s body. This should include any special rulings that the GM has made regarding damage to those locations. In particular, since armor covers vital locations, any noncovered locations hit should kill the person less often (e.g., shooting someone in the leg probably won’t kill them). This can be reflected by staging damage for every three or four successes (as opposed for two). To be consistent, if this rule is used, shots to the head should stage for each success ‘ a good reason to wear a helmet (when style permits, of course). Furthermore, nasty GMs can use this rule to make sure character’s button up their armored jackets before a fight, or risk getting shot in the chest from the front because their coat was open.

  • Effects: The most important aspect of these optional rules is to let the players try to use their weapons creatively (and, no Alex, this does not mean playing Flight of the Valkyries on a minigun). However, the GM should stress that, while the players can express their shot’s intention, what matters is the location. As a roleplaying aspect, the GM may decide not to tell a player the effects of hitting a location before the shot unless the character has a skill that would normally give him/her that knowlegde.

Suppressive Area Fire

Another paradox of the Shadowrun 2nd Edition rules, it that you can fire off 50 rounds into a 10-by-10 room and no one will be worried that you will hit them because you have +49 to your target number ‘ a bit out of hand and a step out of reality (the game’s, that is). There are several problems with the current assumptions in the game. I will discuss each of these and then give guidelines for using area fire in your game.

The Ole Lead Hose

The first problem is one of the most minor, basically being another of declaring effects instead of role-playing. The current Shadowrun autofire rules let players declare explicitly the number of rounds they will fire in an autofire burst. In reality, only smarted runners with associated smartguns would be able to accurately monitor and control their weapons, and even they are usually off by one or two rounds. The normal joeboy will have to settle for relatively timed bursts; that is, 1/2-second, 1-second, or 3-second bursts, or anything the GM feels is appropriate. Considering that assault rifles can routinely fire 60 rounds a second, a 1/2-second burst can easily deplete the gun’s magazine.

The second problem is that different guns have different rates of fire. A minigun may be able to fire a 200 rounds a second, literally cutting through anything in the line of fire, while a modest SMG may have a rate of fire of 20 rounds per second or so. For a minigun, firing just 20 rounds is all but impossible. Basically, the number of rounds that can be fired in the normal three-second combat turn is limited by both rate of fire and by the number of rounds in the magazine. How this limit effects the area fire rules will be discussed below.

The third, and more major, problem with the current rules is that by firing more rounds, you make it less like likely you will hit your target. The flawed reasoning behind this rule is that you are trying to aim at a particular target ‘ thus, the increase in damage and decrease in accuracy due to the recoil from multiple rounds. This is reasonable for the single-round and the three-round-burst modes, but the inherent imprecision in heavy auofire makes it almost exclusively useful for suppressive fire. Essentially, this means that, instead of increasing damage with every additional round, you are increasing the likelihood of hitting someone in the area into which you are shooting.

Keep Them Pinned Down

The rules for using supressing fire are fairly simple, but include changing the base target numbers, increasing the number of dice rolled for the success test, and accounting for psychological effects to those in the suppressed area.

  • New Target Numbers: When hosing down an area only a few factors make a difference. Recoil from full-auto mode tends to make your weapon wander through a certain arch of fire. Widening this arch of fire is less difficult than narrowing it. Thus, when hosing down a 2 meter area from 10 meters away, you are limiting the arch of fire to about 3’ ‘ possible with a weapon having only moderate recoil. However, if you were 50 meters away, the arch of fire narrows considerably, making it harder to be accurate. To reflect this, the normal target numbers for the ranged combat success test are used with a +3 recoil modifier, when covering an area having the following width (depth is up to the GM): short range (4 meters), medium range (8 meters), long range (16 meters), and extreme range (32 meters). For each halving of the covered area, the target number is increased by 2. These modifiers can be partially or completely offset by recoil compensation. However, recoil compensation only affects the additional modifiers (the +3 and the modifiers for halving the area), not the base target numbers, which cannot be reduced below their original values (i.e., 4/5/6/9).

  • Cover: As discussed in the called shots section above, differing amounts of cover result in different modifiers to the target number. The same basic scheme should be used; that is, +2 for upper body visible, +4 for just the head and shoulders, and +8 for a hand or foot left out in the open. In phases other than that of the runner who is providing the suppressing fire, targets who move from cover run the risk of being hit. A success test versus the Firearm skill of the firing runner should be made with modifications for suppression intensity (as mentioned below), but not for the runner’s combat pool (friendlies stay down). If the GM would like to make this less deadly, the success test can use only dice allocated by suppression intensity.

  • Success Test: A success test should be made for everyone in the area being covered with area fire ‘ this means both friend and foe. Each test consists of the runner’s Firearm skill plus any dice from the combat pool. Combat pool dice are essentially being used to concentrate the fire in certain inhabited areas and must be used on a case-by-case basis. Against friendly targets, the combat pool dice can be subtracted instead of added (to reduce the chance of striking your chummer).

  • Suppression Intensity: The number of rounds used in area fire can increase the chance of hitting targets and the amount of damage done to targets. To be effective, the runner must fire 5 rounds per 1 meter diameter every turn (3 seconds). Depending on the number of actions the runner gets, the actual number of rounds per phase will vary. For every additional increment of the number of meters covered (in rounds of ammo) that a runner expends in his/her phase, the runner must add one die to all success tests versus any targets in the area (opponents or chummers). If the minimum number of rounds are not expended (e.g., if the clip runs dry), then the two dice are subtracted from the success test for every round short in a one meter area.

  • Psychological Effects of Being Pinned Down by Fire: Being held down under suppressive fire can be disconcerting to say the least. To simulate the psychological effects of suppression, anyone trying to move from cover while being fired upon must make a Willpower roll versus the current number of rounds per meter (i.e., 5 + the number of additional rounds/meter). If the character makes this roll they can move from cover. Of course, if the GM wishes, he or she can waive this rule for player characters ‘ they can learn the hard way.

  • Other points: The rate of fire and number of rounds expended in a turn should be dealt with as the GM sees fit. Since the number of rounds fired will be limited to the number of rounds in the magazine, the rate of fire will generally not be an issue. For the number of rounds expended, the GM can let smarted runners keep exact score, and let nonsmarted runners used their Firearm skill to get approximately the right number.

Example of Area Fire

Kumagai (a dwarven decker) is providing covering fire for his buddies in Ground Zero who are exiting a warehouse through a 2-by-2 meter loading door. Of course, they are being pursued by the Boyz in Blak. Kumagai jumps behind a car parked out front, and as soon as the runners have gotten out, opens up with his Steyr in full-auto mode. The weapon has a 40-round magazine, and Kumagai has two extra clips. For the first turn Kumagai must expend 2 meters x 5 rounds is 10 rounds to pin down anyone trying to get out of the door way. Since he has two phases this turn (on say 16 and 6), he expends 5 rounds per phase.

Our dwarven friend sees one of the Boyz is already starting to exit through the loading door, so he decides to concentrate fire (an additional 8 rounds = 4 rounds/meter). Unfortuately, the GM decides L.B. (an intrepid Ground Zero member) has not cleared the area of fire, so Kumagai decides to use 5 combat pool die to try and direct fire around his friend. Thus, Kumagai’s target number for anyone in the area is the base of 4 + 3 for general recoil + 2 for halving the basic area (from 4 meters for short range) - 2 for recoil compensation (he could have had a maximum of -5) = 7. Since none of the targets have cover it will be open season. Kumagai get 4 dice for his Firearm skill of 4 + 4 dice for increase suppression intensity (the addition 8 rounds this phase) = 8 dice. Luckily, he subtracts the 5 combat pool dice from the attack on L.B. After rolling, he stages on the bad guy and misses L.B. (now Clemente won’t have to patch him up). Number of rounds used this phase is 13.

If a Boyz runs out the door on his own phase he still has a chance of getting hit. Other Boyz will have to pass Willpower tests to poke their faces around the door to fire at our heroes. If Kumagai burns an additional 12 rounds in the next phase he gets 4 (Firarm skill) + 6 (suppression intensity) = 10 dice for success tests. Total burned in the turn = 13 (first phase) + 5 (second phase minimum) + 12 (suppression intensity) = 30. The mags almost gone!