Numion said:
I remember trying the GURPS combat system with a friend, duelling with some characters (one made by us, and one from the book).
Character A empties a shotgun in the chainmailed Character B (from the book) at close range. Result: character B is unhurt.
While I don't have the 3e books with me, this is a rather unlikely (though theorethically possible) result in GURPS 4e.
A shot from a pump shotgun does 1d+1 small piercing damage ("small piercing" means that all damage that passes through armor is reduced by half, to a minimum of 1 point). Since chain mail has a Damage Resistance of 4 (which is substracted from the damage), this means that there is at least a 50% chance that an individual pellet from a shot will do damage.
But because a single shot from a shotgun releases
multiple pellets, it is treated as an autofire weapon, with a Rate of Fire of 9 and a Recoil modifier of 1. This means that the target suffers 1d+1 of small piercing damage
for every point the attacker suceeds at his attack roll. Unless you hit just barely, chances are very good that you will at least injure your chainmail wearing target.
But you mentioned that you want to shoot the target from
up close! At really close ranges (up to five yards for a pump shotgun), the individual pellets haven't seperated enough from each other to count as autofire - instead, they count as a
single hit, doing 4d+4 small piercing damage! That means that the chainmail-wearing target suffers a
minimum of 2 points of damage. The
average is 7 points - a serious wound, though the chainmail
does offer some protection...