Depends a bit on the enemy's armor. Really, if you're close range, either they have low armor or you should be using a melee weapon (with their inherently high Pen and SB adding to damage per hit nicely).

Or a flamer if there are tons of them, of course. Flamers are great.

dvang said:

That's not how shotguns work in the real world. Remember, 3 meters is nothing. Even at a distance of 20-25 meters the spread of a shotgun is not very large (try some clay-pidgeon shooting, its fun!). Wikpedia shows that about half the pellets of a shotgun blast hits within a 30" (76m) circle at 40 yards (37m). This would be at a shotguns long range according to DH.

At Short range (less than 15m) the spread is negligible. Ptrask shares his experience of the real-worlds parallell of a shotgun-pistol here:

"Keep in mind, that this is about the minimum length barrel you can have, with no choke. The spread on my gun was approximately 4 inches at a distance of 10 feet.....The spread at 5 feet was less than 3 inches. It opened up to around 8 inches at 15 feet, which is about the maximum distance you are likely to fire a shotgun from in a home defense situation."

The shotgun-pistol has a short range of only 5 m (15 feet), and one would expect longer barrelled guns to have less spread. 8" is about 20cm, so I'd say extending Scatter to include Short Range is reasonable.

Edit: An alternative reasonable house rule would be to grant the shoutguns an additional bonus to hit, as according to the Joint Service Combat Program "The delivery of the large number of projectiles simultaneously makes the shotgun the most effective short range weapon commonly used, with a hit probability 45% greater than a submachine gun, and twice as great as an assault rifle"

I think the idea with scatter is to replicate the sort of total devestation which shotguns are known to do at point blank range. At short and normal range, they hit just like a normal bullet, which could be read as reflecting the fact that they only lose a bit of concentration at short range. At longer ranges, they start to disperse, which only has an impact on the effectiveness of the shot against armor. Even though that spread isn't very large, it still represents a significant loss of the force you'd need to punch through bulletproof material.

Is it perfectly realistic? Eh. I'm sure that operating a flamethrower actually takes more skill than a normal gun, rather than less. But it makes sense in game mechanics to have flamers not use ballistics skill.

Also keep in mind, shotguns are somewhat more accurate than many other weapons already, in the sense that Dodge only negates one hit per point of success against attacks made with them at PBR. Which is purely because of the delivery of large amounts of projectiles! In the game mechanics, pulling off the same feat with a submachine gun in close combat is considerably more difficult.

And if you want to get really into the realism thing, it's kind of weird that most shots in DH are made without aiming...

Actually the RAW is not clear about Dodge and multiple hits due to Scatter. I agree with your reading of the rules, but arguments were put forth that that the dodging of additional hits pr DoS were specifically stated to apply to Semi- and Full Auto fire.

And my point is that a Shotgun is not much more deadly at 3 meters as opposed to 5. The difference is negligible. Once you start talking 15+ meters I agree, but the arbitrary limit of what constitutes "Point Blank Range" is a bit.... forced. I can agree as to the modifier to hit, the rules of geometry rapidly reducing the angle at which you can score a hit as distance increasing, but as to the damage output of a shotgun? Nah.

The scatter rule being 'point blank range' never made sense to me. I mean it's not a fire hose. Suppose 2 people are standing at 90 degrees of you on ether side, that puts both of them within your 180 degree front firing ark so you shoot at one, score a hit on him, and hit the guy who is, essentially, behind you.

Sure adrenalin brings on a sort of bullet time, but enough to spray a shotgun blast over a wide radius?

I think it's supposed to be that the targets need to be within PBR of eachother. in fact as the shot spreads out that would make it more likely to hit multiple targets at medium range than close to you. I also used misses as partial damage hits in confined shipboard environments because the shots were bouncing around (granted this made them rather weak hits, but scary anyways, especially when the lights went out and the guns were the only light source for a few rounds)