So what's the best way to do gun damage in pen and paper games? Damage by caliber? Damage by 'category' of weapon (pistol, shotgun, rifle, lmg, etc)?
Examples from systems that do it well are welcomed, as are suggestions and ideas. I'm just trying to throw something together for my homebrew because my group's excited for a more modern game.
Guns you can get shot with once, guns you can get shot with twice and guns you can get shot with threeish times. Three ranges, near, far, really far. Ammo counting, and one type of armour that counts as getting shot once for free/with broken ribs.
Well seeing as a 9mm pistol is using a different powder charge than a 9mm rifle, the caliber and cartridge matter.
This is a good start to go off of, thanks bro
Fair enough, I guess we can safely discount caliber type as the primary method of discerning damage.
I like what Unknown Armies does. d100 roll under firearms skill to hit; the to-hit roll spells out damage with max damage determined by caliber (35 for 22lr, 60 for 5.56 NATO, 80 for 7.62 NATO, etc.) For reference, an average person has ~50 wound points in-game.
>Damage by rough equivalent damage
>Range by category
>Burst / Full Auto / Single fire for assault rifles
>Being able to spend time aiming for a bonus
>Leadership and Tactics Skills to boost your initiative
>Dodging and diving for cover as reactions during the enemy turn, but you lose initiative next round only
In Traveller (where the pic comes from) the damage is applied to your physical stats. there are no "hit points", if you take 2D6 damage that damage goes onto your strength or dexterity or constitution (called endurance).
That way if you take damage, you become unable to operate as effectively. If you take a bad hit, you're down.
Traveller is lethal enough that a single shot from a revolver can knock an average guy unconscious - western style.
I do really love Unknown Armies, and I've stolen much from that system over the years
That is... interesting. I like it
By bullet mass and muzzle velocity, a la CP2013 Friday Night Firefight?
Functionality between modern firearms is pretty minimal. The actual difference would be too nitty-gritty for any practical RPG.
Modern bullets make all handguns from 9mm to 45 cal pretty much identical in performance. Even for capacity, doublestack 45s aren't hard to find anymore.
Hence something simple like
is more or less as solid as it gets.
Then it's however you want to model mechanics, such as the actual damage-armor interaction game mechanics.
The one oddball nobody will mention, hence I'll give it here, was in the 2004 Albedo which was pretty streamlined but with armor penetration using d20 pool against a deflection rating, B+Px damage, B base damage plus number times the # of d20's that roll over the armor deflection rating (penetrate) times the penetration bonus, then using wound rating thresholds.
9mm parabellum is 9mm parabellum, regardless of rifle/ pistol.
\its going to do the same damage.
the difference is accuracy at range imparted by the longer barrel, stability of the stock and sight radius.
>my /k/ is showing.
>all 9mm pistols are 9mm para
Pls. What kind of modern setting doesn't have options?
>only talking pistols
C'mon, step it up!
>Modern bullets make all handguns from 9mm to 45 cal pretty much identical in performance
>IMPLYING YOU KNOW SHIT ABOUT 10MM
>CP2013/CP2020
goddamn that beautiful game was fucking lethal
>Implying you know shit about .500
>meme bullets
>meme arrows
>45 cal
o sheet bb
>muh 10mm
this fucking kid
for a pistol a normal, non-autistic person would bring to a gunfight, it doesn't matter whether its 9mm or .45 acp or whatever special snowflake faggot cartridge is the flavor of the month
>bringing a pistol to a rifle fight means you already fucking lost
...
>Not using dual automatic 10mm 93Rs with 100 round drums and Sig braces
FUCKING PLEB
But 10mm is way more fun to shoot than 9mm. Costs more, though.
>Not using dualie gold tiger striped scoped deagles with layzers
git gud nigger
>9mm parabellum is 9mm parabellum, regardless of rifle/ pistol.
>its going to do the same damage.
Not exactly true. Barrel length matters.
If you have a 4 inch pistol and a 16" carbine both shooting 9mm para, the difference will be ~120-140ft/lbs of energy (~+20-30%), in favor of the carbine.
Of course this is probably too much detail for actual game mechanics
...
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I use a vitality/wounds system like in some 3.5 spinoff systems.
Basically you have vitality, which is like normal 3.5 D&D hp
And then wounds, which is a separate hp pool equal to your normal level 1 hp
PCs and such have vitality, which represent near hits and grazing shots.
Wounds are actually being shots, and everyone has those.
Successfully confirmed crits automatically target the wound pool instead of the vitality pool.
If you have no vitality when crit, you die.
As to the actual damage for each round, you're going to have to balance it how you like it, but I had 3d8 for large rifle rounds like .308 and 2d6 for large pistol rounds like .45
Also, there's a really popular meme in the firearms community that kinetic energy has any direct relationship with lethality.
In actuality, it's just a measure of work done on the bullet, and is correspondent to how efficient the bullet is to perform work on, rather than anything to do with lethality.
It's about as relevant as something like rotational inertia.
So anyone who mentions "kinetic energy" or "energy dump" (as if the bullet electrocutes people or something) can be safely ignored.
If you want to measure the relative power of a bullet, just look at the momentum.
Larger bullets disrupt more tissue, but all rounds need to penetrate at least 12 inches of ballistics gel to have a reasonable chance of reaching internal organs.
But user, getting a chunk blown off of your side can still make you bleed to fucking death. Especially if it happens several times. Then there is shock to account for, which can kill you or render you unconscious. Or high blood flow soft tissues, like pretty much any artery, or the groin.
In my system, that would be a wound.
I forgot to mention you had to take a con check whenever you got wounded to stay conscious.
I can't remember off hand what numbers I used though.
The savage worlds stalker conversion mentions that. Basically to hand wave why you can't just saw down a rifle to make it an effective hand gun.
Aside from that everything was listed by calibre (annoyingly since you have to check calibre then check another chart to find out what it actually did)
Making more than two or three damage categories per firearm type is pretty much just masturbation. As far as I'm concerned, you can condense most any common firearm into categories like this:
>Small-caliber/compact pistol
>Standard caliber pistol
>Magnum pistol
There just isn't enough granularity in almost any roleplaying system to justify different stats for closely related calibers. Do you want 2d6+2 for .357 magnum versus 1d10+4 for .44 magnum?
In doing so, instead of increasing the gun options available to the players, you're penalizing them for taking anything other than the caliber you happen to think is most optimal. If you lump most guns together into a few categories, you're not going to penalize either the gun-nut who wants a "FNH FNX-45 with extended grip and customized butt tingler," or the guy who just wants "I dunno, a gun like in the movies."
watefuck
Doesn't 5.56 NATO have some weird thing where if it's moving fast enough or the rifling was spinning it quick enough it fragments when it's hits someone.
Seems like a situation where the gun you're shooting it out of makes a difference. Though more detail than you need for most RPGs.
I like RuneQuest 6's approach. Guns are most likely to kill in 1-2 bullets and cannot be dodged or blocked without diving behind sensible cover before the gun is shot. It also focuses on using suppressing fire to allow allies to get better position.
The bullet will fragment at high speed.
Also, back when the original M16 had something silly like a 1/14 twist barrel, the bullet was unstable as a motherfucker and would tumble all around and fuck you right up.
/k/ommando here
How I run it in my games is that bottlenecked cartridges (think most rifle rounds) have an AP bonus (Think 5.56, 7.62 TOK, 30-06), Straightwall cartridges (Most pistol rounds, and some large rifle rounds like 9x19, .45 auto, 45-70) which give more damage at close range and against unarmored targets
>tfw the difference in flat damage deal is compensated by ease of shooting or general stability of the round
I mean, you're probably not going to have the easiest time dropping someone with a .22, but holy fuck if you won't be able to plink away really quickly with that dinky little bullet.
>Anti-Material
Ugh
>>So what's the best way to do gun damage in pen and paper games? Damage by caliber? Damage by 'category' of weapon (pistol, shotgun, rifle, lmg, etc)?
Damage by hit location and bullet characteristics. (Phoenix Command)