Perhaps I’m too enthralled with melodramitc death speeches…
It’s long been my feeling in UA that handguns weren’t deadly enough. I’m thrilled with how hand to hand damage works, since it tends to be a consistent helping of hurting, but handguns tend to be a touch wimpy, especially in the hands of a beginner.
Number crunching rationale follows:
Consider that your 25% in Gun You Down will pretty much cap out at 25 points of damage with a 45, unless they crit, and they’ll average 14 points of damage. On the other hand, my Cut You Up: 25% and a big sharp bowie knife caps out at 28 (matched 22 + 6), not counting my crit of death. And I average 17 points of damage, as well.
End number crunching
Now, it makes sense that my ability to hurt you more goes up with my Cut You Up skill (especially on those tasty doubles), but how much sense does it make that a shooter’s ability to harm increase with their skill? Consider that there is already the significant difference in hitting or not between a beginner and a skilled shooter. That much is true of a melee assailant. But tying melee damage to skill level makes much more sense, at least to me, than it does to tie handgun damage to skill level.
Besides, both versions of the UA manual have gone on to lengths about how dangerous a firearm is, and felt the need to defend both martial arts and magick as reasonable attacks. Functionally, the only difference is that a bullet will travel further than a knifepoint, and you can buy rounds much more cheaply than charges. On the other hand, your knife will more reliably maim your opponent, and Entropomancy is good for more than just killin’ folk: you can call ’em up to chat afterwards.
So, having spent too much space voicing my reasons for this rule modification, let’s get to it:
Whenever you roll for handgun damage, leave the dice as they lay. Determine whether you hit or not based on the dice as normal. If you miss, whatever, next action. If you hit, use the flip flopped result as your damage. Always. Cap it at your gun’s max damage, of course. So, a 18 probably maxes out the gun, and a 31 does one 13 points if you hit. It’s important to understand that this flip flop is not optional.
So, that much is simple. The tricky part is special shooting rules. For instance, aimed shots. Normally, shooting for the head adds 40% to the roll, with the intention of making the roll harder, but the damage more significant. Fine. add 40% to the roll, compare it to your skill. Now flip flop the roll, and 40, and that’s damage. (Incidentally, I’d also add 40 to the max damage of the gun for a head shot.)
Hm. Interesting. I Sorta like it, but isn’t there a chance that then Good shooters will more often be making crappy shots?
Not really. The premise here is that the damage from a firearm isn’t dependant on the skill of its user; part of that is that skilled shooters won’t be the only ones who get the high damage. For the most part, though, it doesn’t mean that their shots will be weaker.
One effect of this mod is that it boosts the benefit of firearms as an obsession skill: an obsessed shooter always wants to flip-flop down, never up, since you always want a high ones digit (to do more damage) and a low tens digit (to hit).
Actually, as I read it, you use the dice as they are rolled initially, no matter what. So, if I rolled an 81, and I flip-flopped it to an 18 so I could hit, I’d still use the 81 as the damage roll – and it would get flip-flopped to 18 to calculate damage. This means that flip-flopping would never increase damage, obsessed or not. I’m not sure of what this does to the utility of having firearms as an obsession skill.
My intention is that whatever the roll used to calculate the hit would be flip-flopped for damage. So if you rolled an 81 and flip-flopped to 18, you’d flip-flop back to 81 for damage. However, the obsessed ability to pick the more damaging of two rolls that would both succeed (say, 13 or 31) remains intact. Keep in mind, though, that the obsessed ability to improve damage only applies in this case. If you’re picking between hit and miss, better damage doesn’t come into it.
The reason people with lower skill do less damage is because they are more likely to panic when they pull the trigger. Think about it. You’ve only ever used a gun on a range and now you’re firing at real people and being fired at in return. Someone with more pratice will be able to keep calm while someone with less skill is more likely to freak out and shoot widely.
I agree with John, and I have a bit of experience with firearms (though nothing “for real” but a bit of hunting, thankfully). The killing power of a bullet depends highly on the skill of the shooter. It’s not just the ability to hit the target but the ability to hit the target in certain spots that makes gunfire deadly. Otherwise, bullets aren’t really that deadly.
The “magic bullet” from a chump is already accounted for by the 01 roll which does maximum damage for the weapon. It’s perhaps not super-realistic that a 22LR cannot kill someone with a Body > 35 but hey, it’s a game–it cannot account for *everything*.
Jay
Yeah, interesting mod, but it looks like you have to get at least 2 or 3 bullets to die, right ? John’s comments are correct about panic and freaking-out low-levelled guys. It’s better to keep it that way. I experienced a bullet hit 5 yrs ago, and even if it was a hunting accident, let me tell you that I almost lost all of my wound pts, even if I’d been shot in the leg ! 🙁
Don’t forget the gamist element of firearms damage.
Low damage means NPCs are less likely to drop in one shot, giving them time for the GM to let them escape to threaten you later.
Equally, it means that a PC won’t, as a rule, be capped in the ass and out of the game from a lucky shot. (Though this is also achievable by hidden rolls and GM fudging.)
In short, guns don’t kill people, but firearms rules can kill campaigns.
All of this is quite interesting, but complicates the game alot. For my campaign I have found a very easy and slender way of solving this Problem:
All Firearms have a minimum Damage Rating equal 1/5 of the Maximum rating (round down). So that Beretta 9mm with maxdmg 50 has now the following value:
Min_dmg 10 / Max_dmg 50.
It’s easy as that!
So if you roll a 02 (the dreaded 02!!!) you still deal 10 points of damage!
Like it?
I’ll admit I’ve only actually been in one campaign of play where firearms came up, but I’d have said focus shifts help a lot and make sense with when you’d be hardened enough to use them. I can’t see some cold motherfucker who’s killed lots of people with knives and just happened to (miraculously) miss out on firearms training being panicky when he pulls the trigger, given how used he’d be to violence. Unskilled, yeah, but not panicky.
To be fair, full focus shifts are probably best for snipers; I only repeatedly used them because I was playing an Entropomancer so taking silly risks like that made sense in-character even if I wasn’t charging off them.