Old West: Shotgun pellets and missed targets

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

Hmm... GURPS' Rapid Fire rules are pretty abstract, so I don't think we can assume that all 6 of those "extra" pellets actually missed, they just did zero damage between them. Consider Birdshot, with 100+ tiny pellets inflicting 1d-2(0.5) pi- or so. Against an unarmored man, the injuries inflicted by a full shotload are probably more consistent with 10 hits rather than 100 (ie, 5 damage rather than 50). I guess this is partly because of the cumulative nature of GURPS damage, which doesn't really describe the complexity of physical traum. But what it means is that you don't necessarily have to assume that the "misses" actually missed, they may have just struck for no effect.

They missed for all possible mechanical purposes. This is the GURPS equivalent of arguing that a successful, damaging attack in D&D doesn't need to actually represent being injured, which never actually worked over there and is even worse in GURPS.