How do you justify any other weapons besides guns in a modern setting?

How do you justify any other weapons besides guns in a modern setting?

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Gun regulation.

You don't, if you're going for realism.
Otherwise, you need not look any further than a lot of stylized action films to gain inspiration on why throwing weapons (like knives/shuriken), melee weapons, unarmed combat, or even archery can have its place. And you can tweak the rules to reflect that.

Explosives and melee weapons are also effective.

I don't need to. Having a gun doesn't make beating or stabbing you to death any less effective.

>if you're going for realism
but people get stabbed all the time in the modern day

plenty get tazed, gassed and hit with beanbags, too

The best way to do that is to remove guns, but how to do that is an entirely different story.
You could say they were never invented or that they are impossible to manufacture anymore, but those methods are kinda difficult.
The best way I've seen is that some new technology or supernatural thing has made guns super easy to counter and therefore useless.

The rise of heavy metal continued without end, now the only weapons considered brutal enough involve fire, large amounts of explosives, and/or are oversized melee weapons.

Add a counter, such as power armor. Can slip a blade through the cracks in close combat, but small arms (especially non-AP) will have more trouble.

Make them less available and lower the scale of your conflicts. So everyone is a civilian or something.

Have it so guns are still top dog but they're rare, expensive on the black market, and illegal. On top of that make swords culturally significant. Like Sikhs. It's expected of you to carry one around.

Alternatively, magic

There you go.

Enchanted weapons, left over from an age when magic was much more plentiful. Some enemies can only be harmed by them.

>Make them less available and lower the scale of your conflicts. So everyone is a civilian or something.
Only in very few countries is it actually all that hard to get a gun. Even in most Euro countries it isn't that difficult if you have a clean record, and that's before you get into illegal means of acquiring them, which is even easier.

It's often easy enough to legally acquire a gun, but you can't just walk around with it everywhere you go. Assuming a modern-day setting where your PCs have some sort of civilian life, it's easy to spring ambushes on them when they're not carrying and restrict the gunplay to specific operations that they initiate.

There's been tests, if the knife wielder is within a straight line of 10 feet he will get you every time with the knife.

Knifegun master race.

>Australia
You don't know the crazy hoops I have to jump through to own and use my semi-auto rifles and handguns.

If the RPG is a tactical combat game there is no other reason.

any other game type, guns are tiny mcguffins

What type of game u runnin?

>Texas
>The America of America.

Magic tends to unbalance things enough that more or less anything is possible.

In my setting, there are lots of races that are so physically tough that guns aren't as effective against them as, say, an enchanted sword. Due to the way magic works, a large piece of metal like a blade can hold much more magic than a small piece like a bullet, so enchanting guns isn't nearly as practical.

Guns still have a place, indeed, are dominant weapons for mortals, but they're not exclusive.

/k/ here

>How do you justify any other weapons besides guns in a modern setting?
If you're being realistic, guns are the best class of weapons in the world, so you'd have to be in a country where they're very difficult to get.

If you don't care about realism:
Super powers
Power Armor
Energy Sheilds
ect.

It does when you get shot from across the room.

It was 21 feet. And that had nothing to do with knives.
It shows the advantage that a prepared attacker has over an unprepared defender.

You guys still have like 2 million illegal firearms floating around.

Paddies, beaners, wops, negroes, and greasers.

Don't forget suburban/ghetto white trash.

>You guys still have like 2 million illegal firearms floating around.
Nah, not that many, the best estimates I've seen around around 250k long arms and 10k handguns floating around illegally

There was a study done very recently (this week iirc) that determined it was actually 2 million.

Just model it on those few countries then.

And/or this Convenience is also something to consider. As long as it's harder to get and carry around firearms people will just stick to shanking and bring out the guns on a special occassion or someone high enough on their shit list. If we have everyone carrying swords like Sikhs then doubly so because they can just gang up on a victim and shank them to death. No weapon concealment needed.

Source it then

/k/ here also, no it was a prepared defender and a prepared attacker, within 10 feet the guy with the gun will go down against a furious knife-wielder everytime, the gunman will go down no more than eight out of ten.

Can't find it.
Sorry.

>/k/ here also, no it was a prepared defender and a prepared attacker, within 10 feet the guy with the gun will go down against a furious knife-wielder everytime, the gunman will go down no more than eight out of ten.
What are you talking about?

I forget who commissioned it, It was not the Mythbusters or some shit, but a study was done to find out the safe 'legal' distance to shoot somebody. If you shoot too early and there is too much distance you are charged with murder as the distance shows there was no clear danger to your life, if you wait too long until he is closer you risk your own life.

So they tried to find out what a comfortable distance was that balances both these, fifteen feet was decieded as a good range to defend yourself within. That is if somebody with a knife is within 15 feet you are relatively safe in putting him down. In which case you administer the djabooti shooti.

>SHIELD, DEFENSIVE: the protective field produced by a Holtzman generator. This field derives from Phase One of the suspensor-nullification effect. A shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds (depending on setting, this speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second) and can be shorted out only by a shire-sized electric field

>In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack ... Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!

Well you're certainly retarded enough to be from /k/

Aww

>Modern

Modern fantasy setting: magic barriers/enchanted items are good against bullets. You can't enchant bullets, but you can enchant big chunk of metal like swords and shit.

"Modern" post-apocalyptic setting: guns and ammo are good but scarce, or really bad and loud and unwieldy or attract zombies.

Modern setting: guns are good, but shooting that maniac with a giant axe will be difficult and super stressful, especially in his dark and spooky dungeon with many tunnels and corners.

If you're in military? Use guns and no need to invent anything fancy.

If you're a simple wage slave who suddenly finds himself between a rock and a hard place and mafia threatens to kill your family? You probably can't find good guns easily (maybe except in Murrica).

You don't always want realism in games, sometimes you need drama/story/rule of cool. Maybe you want a Hotline Miami/Drive game, maybe you want spooky Call of Cthulhu game etc.

Tueller Drill. Based on tests done with the SLC PD in the early 80s. 21ft is the cutoff distance where a knife armed assailant can reach you before you can draw, aim, and doubletap center mass. It wasnt a scientific test so much as hashing out a guideline for when its acceptable to shoot somebody with a knife. It quickly became an informal law taught or at least mentioned in every police academy.

When i was going through MP school, I was told that within 10ft officers were only able to shoot and hit 15% while getting injured over 80% of the time. Dont know where those figures came from, so take it with a grain of salt.

Incorporating the holtzman effect into an otherwise modern setting is no less outlandish than zombies, magic, or any other suggestion so far

While wre'e on the subject of guns and limiting their use in campaigns, remember the "rule of 7s". Depending on who you ask, it's also called the rule of 6s, but I hear 7s more.

Most gunfights are 7 yards apart, last 7 seconds, and fire 7 rounds.

Big action movie firefights are unrealistic, unless you're playing a military campaign. Because getting shot is kind of disruptive to one's day.

Instead of trying to nerf them, try making them more hazardous and lethal - give the players a good reason to avoid having guns come out, and have antagonists who also have a realistic want to avoid being shot at.

It has been shortened, not for practicality but by legality.

Brits still mount bayonet charges. Even clapistanians use them sometimes, just google "marines fallujah"

>How do you justify any other weapons besides guns in a modern setting?+ 0 post omitted.
This is the kind of question only noguns fags ask.

One of the main problems RPGs have is that there is no escalation of force in them.
Typically all a player has is their single "best" kill move and not a whole lot else.
This means when combat breaks out they pull out their axe of +2 decapitation, use their special move of neck rending, and in general try to full out murder someone regardless of the provocation for example so someone is trying to mug them with a pocket knife.
In order to get players to scale back from super murder hobos you need to make sure the situations they are interesting or threatening, but where their death is not the main goal.
That mugger has no real intention of killing the PCs he just wants to get whatever loose change or jewelry the players have and book it.
You also should put in repercussions for escalating a situation far more than it needs to and reward players when they make appropriate decisions.
In this mugging situation some acceptable solutions would be talking the guy down, scaring him off, disarming him of his weapon, pinning him and calling the authorities, running away, causing a commotion so police are called, knocking him out.
Unacceptable solutions would include pulling out an anti-material rifle from your own personal pocket dimension and then proceeding to kill the guy and the building behind him.


A good step to limit guns and stuff is to put players in situations where being heavily armed has major social draw backs.
For example the area in America where I live you can buy and open carry pretty much any non-automatic weapon, and conceal carry (with license) pretty much any small fire arms.
That being said if you walked down the street with that shit people would avoid, and pretty much all private businesses would kick you out, and not to mention that at the slightest provocation someone would call the police on your ass for "brandishing a firearm" in a threatening manner which is highly illegal.

At ATR Lichfield, there was a Corporal who had received the order to fix bayonets, never used them but they thought it was hairy enough to get them attached.

"is it fun?"

If the answer is yes, that's all I need.

what about that US army guy from Desert Storm with confirmed kills with his officer sword?

Was just a myth. The last known sword kill in a conventional conflict was in the second world war.

The enemy cannot fire his gun if you disable his hand

Was a joke, US Marine bought an NCO sword and took it to his deployment and chased off a goat-fucker.

Legality, availability and concealability mostly.
Not every modern setting needs to take place in America, and in most places open carrying a rifle is going to attract a lot of suspicion even if it is legal.

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2 million to 200k.

Obviously they don't know exactly how many, but even 200k is a fuckload

>a knife will go through but not bullets!
We're going for modern not Dune.

Or one could just have the campaign take place in such close quarters, like a tunnel system or trenches, that guns are no longer a practical choice. And a lot of more psychopathic characters in more modern works prefer the more personal feel of going after someone with a dirk or aa axe.

The question is about other weapons, though. Anywhere a rifle would look odd, so would a battle axe.

Having your game set in Japan.

Bees and hornets kill more people than guns.

But knives and arrows will actually penetrate the types of kevlar vests that will stop pistol bullets. (Although there is knife resistant protection available and the kind of body armour that stops rifle ammo will usually have solid plates that stop knives and arrows as well.)

>your game set in Japan.
>Bees and hornets kill more people than guns.

So... we get a gun, that shoots japanese hornets at people!

This. Depending on how the kevlar is woven, it will stop blades or bullets but not both.

> but

Not that hard. Regulation, close-quarters combat situations, being caught off guard, cultural ideas of honour or status... Basically all the reasons people still get shanked these days.

You crazy Americans and your guns and fast cars.

Seffle particles!

When someone's within 30 ft of you, a gun isn't very effective compared to a big knife.

See this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=75RTkGbiJpk

Notice how even after they shot him, which was very difficult at close range and with him running around, he still didn't go down. It took a good 2 or 3 shots to take him down. Yeah well is nice to have a bayonet or something to spear the guy who's charging you.

Also explosives like claymores are great for defense. I like to also look beyond infantry combat and look at bombs, rockets, AT missiles, gun-launched missiles, FUCKING LASERS, and weapons like frag and flashbang grenades.

Firearm carrying laws and licenses. And true that guns are more common, but hey if you make a campaign inside a larp it would have only swords axes daggers and bows :D

Give your PCs access to explosives.

What this tells me is that I can expect to successfully knife to a death a guy with a gun, but I won't be walking away either.

Knives are practical weapons. They're easy to carry, easy to conceal, silent and don't need ammo.

Fuckton of enemies with no guns? As soon as running out of ammo becomes a possibility, you begin to reconsider other means of killing shit.

This nigga.

Stealth. Even with suppressors, guns are LOUD. There are plenty of situations where the PCs most likely don't want to attract attention.

Wait, like realistically? You don't.
Slightly less realistic?
>exoskeleton suits are a thing, users found out It's easier to use melee than waste ammo on each other
>assasination squad doesn't need any guns

fuck realism, yo
>we came to live in the age of gentlemen, and degenerates who use guns make even the baddest motherfuckers gasp
>stupid overpowered martial arts are a thing

For the same myriad of reasons non-militarymen don't always use guns?

I mean, if your campaign is about soldiers, then yeah non-gun is kibda retarded.

If you're a civilian, or especially a low level gangster you might not want to use a gun... street scuffles are not always meant to be lethal and a gun is a severe escalation of force.

Aka : You beatdown a guy, you just had a point to pass. You shoot a guy, and you got yourself marked for death by his gang and relatives.

fights are not to the death. you don't use guns if you just want to beat up someone. assault is one thing, murder is another.

escalation. you don't bring a gun so other side doesn't bring a gun too, and you don't risk your precious life.

close quarters. in windy corridors and stuff melee weapons are superior.

At very close range, it's difficult to hit with a gun (inside arms reach). You can't defend yourself effectively and your mates can't fire for fear of hitting you.

If you close the gap, because of armour, surprise, superior numbers or supernatural fortitude, guns suddenly become worse.

Also, ammo, reliability and noise.

>It does when you get shot from across the room.

That assumes the situation is always in the gunman's favor.

Believe me I understand in a straight up tactical situation a dude running across the room with a sword drawn is going to get gunned down and would rightly deserve it. But close quarters where you would have trouble bringing your weapon to bear against a knife or similar type weapon or someone with strong hand to hand skills you'd be hard press unless you can shoot him before you are either disarmed or injured/killed

Well, when I was in the army, I was told that when surprised by someone with anything other than a gun, you're supposed to smash his face in with the rifle, THEN switch the safety thing (or whatever It's called in english) off, reload and go from there.
I was also taught to react by kicking the opponent, as to push myself down, and shoot from there.
Granted, our superior seemed to be a bit on the crazy side but back then It also seemed to be pretty legit

Play Yakuza games, OP.

Guns are so fucking illegal, the most ruthless motherfucker around is known for having a knife as a weapon. Whenever someone actually brandishes a gun, you fucking know shit just got really fucking serious

Fucking this. Non tg but sleeping dogs does that right for a modern gangster game.

Well if the characters are stealthy criminals or commandos you might wants knives, saps and garrotes for sneakily taking guys out.
Guns really are an optimal weapon but good adventures usually don't take place in optimal scenarios. Just don't make the game all about gear and loot. The players have to make do with whatever tools they have.

They might be farmers in some shit end of the world with only a few crappy shotguns and box or two of ammo. A couple guys will just have to make do with machetes.
They might be under watch by a shadowy organisation and can't afford to carry any suspicious gear. Hell in just a regular city setting you can't go walking around with your biggest dakka and bandoleers of ammo.
And, of course, sometimes players get caught with their pants down and have to fight back up to normal, see: Jackie Chan and most horror movies.

Other than that it depends on how you play your game.

Hotline Miami has you using swords and baseball bats because you're in very close quarters already and your pumped up on berserker, psycho insanity.

Or guns could just be middling crutch for people without SUPER KUNG-FU. After a certain point in your martial journey simple, melee weapons become a better channel for you fighting spirit.

Like others said the world may have super body armour or personal force fields

Put it in modern-day London

So your only weapons will be rocks and sticks

Depends on the weapon and the enemy you're fighting. Generally the fact that guns run out of ammo, but knives and clubs don't, makes at least having a back-up melee weapon a good idea.

Dude, there are tons of stabbings in London. Carrying knives may be illegal but carrying a gun (or something that looks like a gun, or possibly a table leg) will get you shot instead of arrested.

London police officers don't even have guns

MOST of London police officers don't carry guns.

If someone's seen carrying a gun and they're not an officer, 20 SWAT team equivalents bumrush them and ventilate everyone in the area.

Also, there are plenty round the houses of parliment and posh areas with H&K MP5s and the likes.

Table leg guy was Irish so he had it coming

Essentially this
In the UK if you have a knife they send Old Officer Harrison down to talk to you and/or taze you. If you have a gun they send the MP5 deathsquad at you in an armoured van.

>Ork Society

Just try and commit suicide by gun, you'll end up getting shot by a cop here

Like a Dune situation?

Police get a shit sandwich when it comes to dealing with hostile activities-
>Lack of/bare minimum of marksmanship and maintenance of weapons
>Attempt to de-escalate situation at risk of ones own life
>Modus is often to capture criminals alive.

(I have a lot of respect for their bravery)

Life is a lot simpler in the military when it comes to dealing with hostiles, when you spend enough time in there you end up training everything and damn near anything when it comes to self preservation of yourself, your team and handling weapons. While I'm quite a rubbish shot with a rifle, I am extremely nasty when it comes to handguns, carbines and submachineguns, because for about 5 months we ran course after course on marksmanship, kicking in doors, dealing with hostiles and maintaining a very cohesive team that did that day after day to the point it was a reflex action- then when we deployed, we often did that shit day after damn day

So we'd end up with anything from a house full of gun wielding crazies, grenades, harsh language, knives, sharp objects, smoke, fire and heck, I've even had one arsehole bust out of nowhere and try to murder me with a shovel.
Most of that is at ranges of about 5-30ft and it comes down to Aggression, Training and Marksmanship. We're not there to 'detain' or listen to your shit, anyone who doesn't get on the floor in 2 seconds is going out feet first

It also really does come down a willingness to either pull the trigger or engage in the lunacy of stabbing people with sharp objects. Some people have it, most people don't, it is a major mental activity to engage in combat with other people. Lot goes on up there in the ol brain- fear, adrenaline and a fair few other primal emotions. The guy with the cool head- he's the real risk

The magical '30ft rule' doesn't apply to someone who really knows what they're doing with a gun- you will probably die
Untrained and the barely competent people however, will be in the shit.

How many children have your killed?

In addition to the legality, availability, and conceal-ability of firearms, there's also that for other weapons.

There are laws regarding what size blades are legal to carry, and walking around with a big sword could get a similar response (especially from police) as walking around with a long gun, again also depending on the state and/or region.

Fuck, being armed in general tends to draw suspicion.

I'd say for modern settings, just have an in-world reason as to why people would walk around with guns and swords or other weapons.

>Life is a lot simpler in the military when it comes to dealing with hostiles

Kind if a topical problem, too, since most new US sheriffs and police are military drop-outs or vets. It has been often cited as a major cause for the rise in police brutality and unreasonable use of force.

>other weapons besides guns in a modern setting?
Dumping IRL examples

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I don't understand why anyone thinks we don't use melee weapons anymore?

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How about home defense in any country with harder gun restrictions than USA?

I live in a apartment in rough neighborhood in a nordic country and my home defense arsenal consists of:

1x hand-and-a-half sword
1x naval cutlass
1x axe
5x knife

Hand-and-a-half sword on the wall in the bedroom, cutlass on the wall in my living room, axe and three knives stashed in a wardrobe along with my hiking/bug-out bag and the two other knives are at the moment right next to me since i just finished sharpening them.

Closest thing i have to a firearm is a old and worn out one-shot break-action BB pistol that i got from a friend when he upgraded.