Ƒirearms

Aren't primers the hardest part of the bullets to manufacture?

yes, but if you have the ability to secure enough material to make casings and smokeless powder, making primers isn't too much of an issue.

People gonna be mad at me for suggesting you get videogamey, but I suggest you get videogamey. Rather than doing a lot of tedious book keeping for the number of rounds you have, figure it like this: a player can carry 36 rounds of pistol ammunition, 24 shotgun shells, or 18 rifle rounds. Whenever they visit a settlement sufficient size and infrastructure this supply can automatically refill to represent them scrounging up rounds.

If you're just asking lore wise, bullets aren't terribly hard to make and can be done by hand if you have the resources. Obviously if you want more than shitty cottage rounds that'll fuck up your gun, you need machines rounds.

Interestingly enough the mad max videogame touches on this, you help a settlement procure the resources to start manufacturing their own bullets so they don't have to use shitty crossbows by securing sources of sulfur and saltpeter for them.

fuck maybe i'll just make bullets rare for futuristic religious reasons or something. worth more than their weight in gold because bullet manufacturing can only be done by certain high priests with much ceremony, and guns by even higher priests with even more ceremony.
>nitric acid + cellulose + some other shit = smokeless powder
ah but we had guns since around 900, and it took us until the late 1800s to figure that out, so maybe after 1000 years of darkness we wouldn't have figured out how to do this again yet.
and maybe if it was a carefully guarded religious secret at that point in history (3000 something), that could explain the relative scarcity of bullets...
not the ideas i originally had, but i guess it could be interesting to be caught between a new kingdom that sought to divorce guns from their religious importance in the year 3000, and end the monopoly the bullet church had on guns, and the church itself, which is a near tyrannical organization that stomps out plastic explosive advancements with a brass and steel fist.
whats better? freedom (perhaps granted by a psychotic war monger)? or controlling weaponry and such to prevent another age of fire?

Don't constrain yourself to bullets mate.

One of my favourite things in modern settings is to carry around a small fire extinguisher. This is mainly for two reasons.
A) getting lit on fire is a real danger of adventurers in any time period. Also some FE provide protection against electricity
B) combat: Almost nobody is going to take your little fire buddy from you at the security control, i mean, it is just a fire extinguisher, right ? what hatm can it do ?

Simple, spray your opponent in the face (or just in general direction) and having him enjoy some penalities for obscoured vision, which also applies to thermal visio, also the stuff inside tends to be quiet cold which comes maybe to the vision penality.

And then you move in and hit the guy with your damn fire extinguisher. Those things are mostly made out of metal (you should get one of those) and some tend to have good ergonomics to handle them. Hit him in the head, just like that.

Light Pistol
Heavy Pistol
Light Rifle
Heavy Rifle
Shot Shell
Slug Shell
Custom Shell
Grenade
Rocket

That's it, anything custom requires a check of some sort, but it's easy enough to hollow out a shell casing and fill it with bees. Your players aren't going to care about specific calibers.

Light is Faster than Heavy
Heavy Pistols have more STOPPIN POWAH
Heavy Rifle has more range, peircing

Copy Fallout's system for ammo. Don't go too deep. Just one bullet type per weapon category.

I also like Metro's system where bullets are currency. That might make your players think twice before shooting. If every shot from their Sniper is 100gold, maybe they'll choose the non-combat route.

>If every shot from their Sniper is 100gold, maybe they'll choose the non-combat route.
plus theres plenty of reasons in a ttrpg not to use guns. i.e. firing a gun in a dungeon might make monsters come running, you might need a magic lance to even harm a dragon, or you might need to duel someone with a sword. thats not really a post apocalyptic bent, but say if you were infiltrating some bunker or what have you, if you fire a gun down there with no suppression you could definitely alert people that you're around.
all the more reason to avoid them if bullets are also a precious resource.

The general purpose of most fire extinguishers is to suffocate the fire.

So you don't need to hit anyone.

You effectively drown them with whatever medium your extinguisher "sprays".

Or take their breath away with a short burst...

Yeah that also adds to the effectivity as weapon, but sometimes you want to take down a target quickly or they wear breath protection... or just conserve your "ammunition".

I had a similar problem recently: i decided on 6 basic types of bullets.
medium pistol ~ 9mm common stuff
large pistol ~ .45-10mm packing a kick
huge pistol ~ .50AE, iirc, or whatever the fuck DEagle eats
and likewise
medium rifle ~ .223 intermediate rounds
large rifle ~ .303 battle rifle rounds
huge rifle ~ .50 antimateriel ammo

and then theres specialty stuff like various shotgun ammos, or just plain weird shit like gyrojet. didnt even bother with small ammo like .22LR because you might as well use a sling.

Oddly, this is how our GM learned to limit the amount of "ammo" a player's FE can have.

They make a hilarious assassination tool. You can effectively silence, blind, and suffocate all with one action.

Truly a more refined weapon, close and ranged, in a more primitive time.

Five. Shitty, good, great, exotic armor piercing, exotic flesh destroying. Done.

Common military rifle caliber/civilian equivalent
Common military medium machine gun caliber/civilian equivalent
Common military heavy machine gun caliber
High power precision rifle caliber
Most common shotgun she'll
Smaller shotgun shell
High velocity, small caliber pistol round
Low velocity large caliber pistol round
Very small caliber rimfire round

That should do it.

The best ones are found on air planes. They still use halon 1301 on planes and likely will for a long time. They can also be found in smaller, more concealable sizes, with the ability to be reloaded. There is a whole world of wonderful toys to be found in the land of fire extinguishers.

Complexity is only good when it allows for depth, and the more depth you get from the least possible complexity, the better.

So, consider the following.

>large settlements are very few and far between, in the ruins of large cities (assuming USA here)
>medium sized settlements are more common but still often hours or more apart by car (of which there are none or not so many around, I recommend the latter)
>small settlements are decently common but have only a few dozen families at most and are pretty poor, mostly located around some sort of natural resource like a river or a pocket of still-fertile farmland

Bullets are easy to acquire in the first. Common bullets are easy to acquire in the second, but rarer bullets less so. All bullets are rare to come by in the small towns, as the few people with any have to travel a long ways to buy more so they're not particularly willing to part, and nobody local is making them. Inbetween settlements, when looting stores or finding monsters or whatever, they're all but non-existent sparing the rare stash somehow not looted yet.

I've been meaning to write a setting that's an alt-history based on a Dust Bowl that didn't end, maybe now I will.

Well in IRL terms some rounds are more popular than others; .22lr, .45, .303, 9mm, 5.45, 12 guage shot, etc. I'd focus on making the popular civilian guns that use those rounds available.

If players are scavenging for ammo, I think it'd make more sense for them to carry fewer guns which can more or less accept wider ranges of ammo.

A humble single-shot .410 shotgun can shoot pretty much anything that'll fit in the chamber: .45 Long Colt, .30-30 Winchester, .454 Casull, .44 Magnum...
Cram a little collar inside and it'll even accept 9mm

Granted it's smoothbore so all of these rounds will keyhole (spin on the wrong axis and hit the target sideways) but they'll still hit a man-sized target within 100 meters.

I think it'd be neat if in combat players were sort of just grabbing bullets blindly out of a pocket or something and every now and then they get a fuck-off magnum cartridge on a good roll, or on a bad roll they slipped something in that was slightly too small went off with more of a fart than a bang on a stroke of bad luck

>100 meters
You'll be lucky.

This. 50m would probably be as far as Id trust something like that.20 would be more reliable, but inside of 10 would be the only distance Id trust something like that to hit every time.

It's the post-apocalypse, my dudes.
Unreliability is part of the fun.

This is now a glorious weaponized fire extinguisher thread.

Also: in a non-Apocalyptic settin you should be able do get a (fake) note from a doctor that you need your extinguisher to keep you fire related trauma in check (which may or may not be a character trait).
Refilling is cheap and in some cases even paid by some goverments.

Also in an post.apocalyptic setting: i would suspect that most looters ignore those glorius red bodys of divine fury for other things, like food or bullets. So most related equipment (refilling machines or "fuel") should be still where it was before and i don't really think that that stuff decomposes easily.

Yes, but rolling buckets of dice over five turns to hit one target isnt fun by me. If you want to abstractly increase the range and accuracy of weapons in the name of actually having a fun game, it shouldnt be the end of the world.

They have a shelf life of around five years, mate.

Effective or dictated by safety regulations ?

>rolling buckets of dice isn't fun

Get out.

I love buckets of dice that DO something. Not buckets of dice that do nothing.

>How many different kinds of bullets is the right amount? I'm working on a postapocalyptic setting and I want to make bullets somewhat hard to find, but not so hard that its like once you shoot the few rounds you find with a weapon, you may as well toss it because you're never finding a dardick tround again.

Make bullets the new currency. That way they will always seem in short supply.

What country are you planning on using for the setting user? and I guess how far after the apocalypse are we looking?

Like if you were in Western Europe the quantities and types of ammunition available are going to be rather limited compared to say Texas.

Also bare in mind that when it comes to manufacturing ammunition. MOST people aren't going to know how to do it and without internet access there will very few people will be able to find out. Add onto that the lack of power meaning that factories that produce extruded brass/steel/aluminium for cartridges are not going to be functioning and even if you could produce good quality brass on a smallish scale, you've now got to get hold of lead styphnate or at a push silver/mercury fulminate from somewhere. Now you've actually got to find the propellant; sure black powder is easy to make and the formulae can be found in any good library same with gun cotton, but Cordite or any post war formulation of going to be much harder to produce.

Course the above might not be a problem if you're running a game in the the US immediately after the event, but if you're going for decades later the obvious supplies may have already been looted. That National guard depot? irradiated, The Federal Ammo warehouse? picked clean, Walmart? Get fucked there's cannibals living there now. All the local gun stores either picked over a hundred times or the seat of a minor barony lording it over the locals.

Manufacturers say 5 to 15 years depending on model. They can lose pressure even without use.

Rock salt shells. For when you want to keep someone alive, but you're not too concerned about doing it nicely.

In a post apocalyptic settings there's only three types of round:

Shells, which are easy to refill, reuse, and remake, that are used by the smooth bore pipe guns that are most available in the setting.

New Rounds, which are doing double duty as ammunition and symbol of a fiefdom's relative prosperity - that they are able to operate the supply chain or production facility for a local "standard" (probably, like coinage, named after the head warlord/king) to become a secondary norm in a region after shells, as well as the "mass production" of a "better than pipegun" tier assault rifle that the feifdom's thugs and troops are armed with.

And then there's the Old Rounds or Olds, which are rare and rendered effectively "worthless" by hardly anyone having guns in good enough condition to be capable of firing them.

The reason these three "tiers" of ammo are useful in an RPG is threefold:
1, saves item management, you basically need a character sheet to have 3 boxes on it now; Shells, Rounds and Olds.
3 ammos, no muss, no fuss.

2, it says a lot about the setting itself. Specifically it also allows you to have all that post-apocalyptic "guys wearing bits of metal on themselves in lieu of platemail" actually mean something - pipeguns and post-apocalyptic mass produced guns firing from casings that have been handed down through generations are gonna have shitty gas seals and fairly low velocity bullets...

3, It means that when the PCs get their hands on a pre-apocalypse gun and ammo, they have a weapon that, in comparison to the normal guns of the setting, are monstrous and Special, including the special one the hero's family kept hidden but well maintained until a time of great need, like the important quest they're leaving the village to do.

Basically, you can drop a "Master Nagant" that is the only weapon in the setting capable of defeating Calamity Cannon and his Iron Men.

You, i like you.

I'm going to steal this if i ever run somethin post apocalyptic

Honestly I'd just say guns and bullets are rare and leave it at that.
If pressed then say the technology and infrastructure's been lost, some people still have the skills to produce new bullets or maybe even new (shitty) guns but it's rare.

It's a core post-apoc trope that I reckon most gamers would accept pretty easily, same way we suspend disbelief for narrative purposes when a wizard casts fireball in a fantasy game.

>Calamity Cannon and his Iron Men

Let's use magic as a way of limiting bullets!

You've got your classic Shells, Rifle and Pistol rounds. You get them in Pre-war (always reliable), Apoc (Mostly reliable) and Scav (Not reliable) flavors too! Sometimes you'll get Apoc Tracer or Pre-war Anti-personnel for variety.
Y'know, typical bullshit. Nothing too limiting.
But the interesting shit are the magic bullets. Or holy bullets. Or nano bullets. Or [insert jargon here] bullets.

As an example, let's say that these special rounds have lil' spirits and demons in them. To make them you need an ordained priest to sit down and carefully inscribe the summoning circle by hand -because demon rules say they can only be brought into Creation by the hand of Man- all while chanting the dark prayers and finally writing the true name of the demon to be bound to the bullet. And after the apocalypse there aren't a lot of people who know the chant or circle let alone any true names. Maybe there's a couple of folks out there in arcane workshops who can, very slowly, create Apoc Demon rounds but nothing like an old world bullet that shoots mini black holes.
Potential Plot Twist: People only THINK they're magic as they don't recognise the circles as tech, the demon names are actually just for identification.

So, assuming the setting is located in the former US, would it look something like this?

> 5.56 /.223
> 7.62 /.308
> .50 BMG
> Either .30-06 or .338
> 12 gauge
> 16 gauge
> 9mm
> .45 ACP
> .22 LR

thats also sorta what i said
though ill add that id err on the side of calling the rounds as generic as possible to avoid potential sperging *cough*fallout 4 assault rifle using .45 pistol ammo*cough*
and for that medium/large/huge and pistol/rifle is both descriptive and differentiating enough

Oh I also forgot to add that you should have it that there isn't any unverisal standard rounds like 9mm etc etc. each gun smith makes their own kind of gun and their own bullets that works best for their guns only.

yeah this is probably the real answer, my own autism is highly limiting though.
i actually was thinking about renaming bullets assuming people couldn't read what was stamped on them and instead thought they were pictographic. which would also serve to obfuscate what bullets are what and make it less reliant on realism in terms of bullet availability.
i.e. say a .380 might take bulls, a .357 might be a drake, a 9mm might be say a beetle.
but i mean i don't really care that much whats what, i wasn't even imagining this setting would necessarily be earth as we know it, so it doesn't really matter what bullet names are what.
but if i went with my whole religiously motivated scarcity idea i had earlier in the thread, then naming them after demons or what have you could be cool too.

I would go with realism and say that most guns fire .308, 12 gauge, .22, 9mm, 5.56, 7.62 short or .45 ACP. Thus, guns in that chamber are most valuable to have.

I'd be interested to hear more about your setting, user. i am working on one myself and I always like to compare notes.

>rounds are not gradients, they either work or they don't
I'm pretty sure bad ammunition can clog up the barrel with crap even if the bullet itself fires the first few times. Unless you want to make mechanics for gun maintenance, I'll abtract that as damage to the gun's lifespan.