This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Part of the problem is that it's a bit difficult to model shotguns, at least with the types of ammunition that tend to be used for antipersonnel work.
The most common antipersonnel shotgun round out there, at least in terms of US military and law enforcement service, is 12 gauge #00 buckshot, with nine .33 caliber (call it 8.5mm, for the metrically inclined) spherical lead bullets inside the cartridge. Once fired the pellets leaving the muzzle will tend to diverge at a rate of approximately 1" per yard, or, alternately, 3cm per meter. Past maybe 15-20 yards or meters this means that some of the pellets won't hit a standing man and past 50 yards or meters the random diverging trajectories of the individual bullets raise the increasingly likely possibility of a man-sized gap in the pattern. There are other sizes of pellets available, of course. With smaller pellets there are fewer, smaller gaps in the pattern at that range but the small lightweight pellets lose significant velocity and energy to air friction, and the tradeoff just gets you a different problem, possible failures to penetrate light cover or penetrate sufficiently in living tissue to do the damage required, etc.
It is possible to get improved range, at least for purposes of hunting whitetail deer and similar creatures, by means of "slug" ammunition
, or, as the old-timers may call it down south, "pumpkin ball," possibly for its distressing way of making pumpkin-sized exit wounds in deer and ruining a lot of meat. The velocity is relatively low and the blunt, fat projectile loses kinetic energy rapidly to air friction, and so anything past 100 yards or meters is a bit of a stretch even for skilled marksmen, because the arc of the trajectory begins to descend steeply at that point and the shooter is at 150m very nearly lobbing slugs into the air to drop them on target like mortar shells, requiring extremely precise estimation of range to hit anything at all. Slug ammunition, incidentally, is becoming more common for hunting in the US for various reasons having to do with urban sprawl, and there are even shotguns made specifically for slug ammunition which have rifling inside the barrel to improve accuracy—but this sort of stuff does not tend to be featured in games.
And there have been other ideas as well. Never mind the flavor text, which is from a science fiction pen-and-paper RPG. Look at the picture. The ammunition was real, though the company that tooled up to make it in anticipation of military contracts went bankrupt when the Vietnam War ended. Yes, it's a shotgun shell loaded with a stack of fourteen flying razor blades.
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Azaram: Where did people get the idea that a solid piece of lead half an inch across has less penetration? Tests with the Box o' Truth show it'll go through 12 half inch pieces of drywall, equal to six interior walls. Stand at one end of your home and point an imaginary shotgun at the other end... how many walls are you going to go through there? Where I live, that would be two apartments, aside from my own, until it hit the brick fire wall. Heavy buckshot only makes it through half the sheets of drywall, if you read backward from that page.
