Message no. 1

From:	Patrick Goodman <remo@***.NET>
Subject:	Pistol power (was Re: heavy weapons downtown)
Date:	Wed, 14 Oct 1998 22:55:40 -0500

From: Andrew Spurgeon <DragonC147@***.COM>
Date: Wednesday, October 14, 1998 7:51 PM

>> I arrived at these number after watching the whole "Heavy pistols
>> should be choked down because they're too powerful" thread, which I
>> tended to agree with. Having worked with heavy pistols scaled back
>> to 6M or 7M, I can testify that they're plenty deadly. (Am I right,
>> Steve?)
>
>The thing is with Shadowrun is that the difference between heavy pistols
>and SMG's shouldn't be.

Be that as it may...should be or shouldn't be, the fact remains that it is.

>So in shadowrun SMG's should be either 8M or 9M
>damage, or heavy pistols should be dropped to 7M. But making SMG's 9M
>would make them more powerful the AR's, so AR's would have to go up to
>like a 10M, which would make them to powerful, but if they drop heavy
>pistols to 7M it would make them underpowered. So what do you do?

Seems like I put a solution out there in the Guardsman pistol I made up....

Another point I was trying to make was this: A pistol doing 6M is deadly
enough. Having run a couple of games with heavy pistols cut down by 3 in
the Power rating, I've seen that that 6M or 7M *isn't* under-powered.
Flattened a couple of NPCs quite nicely, thanks.

So your choices are:

1. Introduce a medium pistol that takes the same ammo as the SMG currently
in use, making the medium pistols the 9mm equivalents and the heavy pistols
real brutes in terms of ammo size.

2. Scale up SMGs to bring them in line with the heavy pistols, and have to
rewrite damage codes on a lot of other weapon classes to maintain parity.

3. Issue a GM fiat and say that heavy pistols, at 9M or 10M, get their Power
rating dropped by three points.

Option 2 isn't practical, and a lot of people are going to bitch about
Option 3 (trust me on this one; I've already had the discussion with my
group). Option 3 works best if you don't want super-brute weapons handy,
but if you don't mind those, then Option 1 starts looking all right.

--
(>) Texas 2-Step
El Paso: Never surrender. Never forget. Never forgive.