#RPG – Cyberpunk RED/2020 and firearms to hit chances

In running my 2020 in 2020 campaign I’ve noticed something. Even accounting for the relative levels of expertise amongst Player Characters, shooting people is profoundly easy.

This simply doesn’t marry up with what I know from the statistics, regarding soldiers and police forces (police situations being closest to Player Character situations).

American police, who are habitually armed, trained and prone to resort to using their weapons, have a typical shot-to-hit percentage around 30%. That drops to around 18% if it’s a two-way firefight.

If we take the base scenario of these police firefights to be close ranged (0-12 metres) using a pistol, without fire being returned, then our average member of the plod should be hittin 30% of the time. In d10 terms, that would be needing an 8-10 on a d10. If we assume a standard copper has Reflexes 7 and a Handgun skill of 6 (Protect and Serve p22), that gives them a base of 13 as their total score.

Currently the base difficulty for a close range pistol shot is 15, which means our beat cop is going to be landing 80% of hits, not 30%. Something they typically only achieve while straddling a target with their body-cams off.

The easiest way to fix that is simply to raise all the difficulties by 5, which would reduce the 80% to 30% right away.

This still assumes certain things, like that the target is moving, but not returning fire, so you can still alter things on that basis (-2 difficulty for static targets, +1 difficulty if under fire), and all the other legacy modifiers from CP2020. It also makes the accuracy of truly hardcore, cybernetically boosed Solos, genuinely impressive.

Still, if you’re after something a bit more like gritty realism, +5 to the base difficulty seems to be the way to go, which also makes melee more of a compelling option.