Old West: Shotgun pellets and missed targets

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

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.

What I'm saying is that we sometimes can't draw descriptive conclusions from the mechanical results. If 3/9 pellets hit, the spread might have just clipped the edge of the target, or it might have hit dead-center but 6 of them weren't "significant". I'd still roll for the Vitals hit, and use that to inform my description. GURPS is far better than D&D in that each hit has significant effects, descriptively and mechanically. This is just one of the cases where it's not completely precise, leaving it up to GM interpretation.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Aww, 4e RoF is kinda a Dead Horse even for me by now. I was one of the first ranting about it, but by now I just accept that it was invented to fix the problem of 3e RoF, which it kinda did. Better luck in 5e. :)

Yeah, I have problems with it too. However, for the small arms that typically show up in my games, the current rules are suitable. Just so long as I take the results lightly.