Nightshade

I pretty much agreed with everything you said here, but wanted to comment that a big part of the effectiveness of modern firearms, especially handguns, has little to do with one shot stopping or killing power; I honestly suspect on a shot-to-shot basis, few handguns are better than a routine melee weapon. Their big advantage is in some forms of penetration, and more importantly, rate of fire; its almost impossible to launch a serious of melee attacks at the rate even relatively slow firearms (such as a bolt action) can do, let alone faster guns. And that's always been modelled poorly in BRP games.

Not really. There's random and there's random; multiple die rolls tend to pile up a lot; linear die rolls don't, and gun damage sometimes seems astonishingly linear. However, it will roll 10 more than either, and that's often more than enough to kill a BRP character under at least some versions of the rules. As such, 3D6 should only be used on weapons that are reliable, one shot killers, and that's rarer than you might think. Except very few shots actually _do_ kill someone immediately. That almost always requires a heart shot. The vast majority of lethal wounds do so over time, sometimes quite long times.

If mechanics were the _only_ element in a game's success, that might be true. But its one of several.

That's the problem with a lot of weapons when you start getting into the guts of their mechanics; you can start doing more and more special cases if you don't watch it.

Most of those are just as trivial to keep track of because they're in 5% increments; since each 5% adds 1% to specials, if you can remember one you can remember the other. Crits aren't as tidy, but the breakpoints are so big it shouldn't be hard to notice when you hit them.

Right. None that I know of, really, but as I said, the information was commonly available (on the Web) for a relatively brief period after the studies were done, and as far as I know largely vanished off the radar after that. I suspect if you aren't in certain corners of the firearms effectiveness field, or in trauma medicine, its almost unknown. And as I said, its counterintuitive, and an awful lot of game rules are written by intuition rather than research anyway.

And that's usually it; unless you start people very light on money (and if so, they certainly aren't going to have appreciable armor above the level of heavy leather), they're liable to chose more generally functional weapons than the spear for their weapon choices, and carry the same. That adds up, in essence, to the spear having a slight strike rank edge, and that's if using strike ranks. So in practice, you end up giving them one shot at the start that you still get to parry. The real benefit to the spear in most RQ games, is that it impales, which can be quite grim; but that also often risks you losing the spear. So even if someone does want to go that route, they'll almost always carry a sword or the like as a secondary weapon.

I think, however, that the need to do at least some of this shows that the weapons aren't entirely represented properly. Past that, what it usually encourages is about what you'd expect; most people tend toward using a one handed sword.

Though parts of Greg's impairment rules seem a bit unrealistic in light of studies the FBI and military have done in recent years. It turns out that (at least in firearm combat, though I'm hard pressed to assume its much different in melee) that a lot of assumed impairment just flat out doesn't happen short-term. This is apparently because the adrenaline rush at the start of a combat does two things; it masks further damage, and it impairs you itself. This turned out to mean that even things you'd intuitively assume would cause impairment (hand wounds for example) usually didn't (there are obvious exceptions, such as severed tendons). The result was that there were only three likely results of fireams combat: the target shocked out (which could happen with surprisingly minor wounds in theoretically noncritical areas), he bled out (usually because of hitting an artery) or there wasn't much effect until the adrenaline faded and everything caught up. This has implications for most death-spiral combat systems, but the information isn't very widely distributed and I've had trouble in the past finding it on the Net, so its hard to get people to believe it as its rather counter-intuitive.

I think this makes big assumptions; many combatants may well have had little exposure to combat outside of some militia training before the events of a campaign. After that they get used to it of course, but that's just as true in the firearms case. Take a look at the occupation tables in RQ3 some time and ask yourself how many of those professions are _really_ "conditioned for personal combat". I suspect, especially at the Barbarian and Civilized levels, the answer would be "not many". The professional combatants and no others. Running like hell may well, however, when you see him charging you in the first place. The fact the survival techniques are different doesn't matter; the fact standing and fighting isn't usually the ideal for either is. I'd be really interested to see if its actually worse than it was with weapons. With artillery I can believe it, but I'm honestly unconvinced an experienced soldier reacts any more badly to bullets winging past than an arrow storm or just the sight of a charging mass of enemy.

Militia didn't use them because they were a good weapon; they used them because they were easy to use and cheap. Same is really true of the use of bayonet on weapons (the fact they'd do double duty as a dagger didn't hurt). Most of the others were using them during periods when the other weapon choices were, frankly, often substandard, and before breakout into specialized troops. I already acknowledged the benefit of the Pike, but notice its a specialized weapon in the end; it was designed primarily to deal with cavalry, which used lances. The spear is a good formation weapon, but once formations break up, its reach doesn't really make up for its limitations in other ways. Its just got the virtue its cheap and easy to learn to use; it doesn't have the control issues you have to some degree with maces and axes, and even worse with flails, nor the cost associated with decent swords. (Though as an aside, an awful lot of early swords were largely either-or in terms of thrust versus slash; its hard to find one that was really good for both functions, and some were almost useless for one of the two purposes (usually thrusting)).

Well, I've made my opinion pretty clear, but perhaps to some people's surprise, I quite agree they belong in the optional rules rather than the core.

One thing that you have to watch when setting weapon damages is making them _too_ robust. Handguns kill people, and do so regularly, but people also eat four or five shots and keep coming; rifle rounds are more reliable, but people still survive being shot with rifles (and even .50 caliber machine guns). That's why I suspect keeping the damage somewhat modest and expecting impales to make up the difference is going to work better than getting too carried away with base damage. Of course you also run into some problems where what works in a system using hit locations won't work in one that doesn't; in practice our black powder rules are much more deadly in RQ than they'd be in most versions of BRP.

I think there's certainly an argument that guns are going to look odd as long as you don't differentiate penetration and damage, that's not unique to them; there are distinct problems with other types of weapons in this area, too (as far as that goes the psychology of combat thing is more general; people behave erratically under fire, but I don't doubt the same thing is true when rude people are swinging battleaxes at your person).

As to healing, if the body was healable it was resurrectable. I don't recall what the last version of death by total hit points I used was; but then, most deaths I saw were from locational damage.

Well, part of the answer is that when all weapons are available, some _won't_ get chosen as much. As an example, spears are by their nature a somewhat primitive and limited weapon. Other than specialized forms for certain forms of combat (pikes and lances, for example) you don't see them used all that late when other weapons were present. Throwing weapons are in much the same bucket; you carry them when you're not trained to use something better and/or when you think you might want one occasionally (a small axe functions both as a throwing weapon and a backup weapon in case your primary gets broken, for example). That said, I think there are, as the prior poster noted, some issues with the fact that vanilla RQ and all forms of other BRP I know treat all skills as equally easy to learn; that was one of the things the Easy/Medium/Hard skill breakdown from RQ: AIG was trying to address. And of course, sometimes there are weapons that are simply likely overstated (I think the bastardsword tends to land in this category in a lot of cases).

Its certainly better than muzzle energy which I often find a bit dodgy to use by itself. I'd have never thought of _not_ giving firearms impaling damage, to tell the truth. I have to remind myself its not standard to non-RQ versions of BRP. I don't think that'd be necessary, honestly; impales are usually ugly enough to do the job. There are some problems with criticals in some versions of BRP not dealing with unarmored targets well, but I think that needs to be addressed generically; its not just a problem with guns.

Well, honestly things like Dramatic Editing are a step farther along than simple luck points and the like; while I think they have a place in certain sorts of structured stylized settings (superhero games for example), they're well beyond what I've been talking about here. Why do rerolls specifically bother you? As compared to other buffering uses? I think there's nothing wrong with that; I just think it serves people that they're in the rules, and properly integrated by someone who understands the rules structure.

While impact energy isn't a bad metric, its not entirely the whole story, either.

Pot, kettle. I'm not the one who's gone out of my way to mention how much disdain I hold for people with styles that don't match my own.

I'd suggest I'm not the one acting like having something like Drama Points is contaminating BRP; I won't say you've done that, but I'd take a look at Badcat's posts on the topic before you suggest I'm pulling it out of thin air. As am I. Again, I'm just suggesting that blowing off people who have problems with some aspects of the rules is not productive. I actually participated in that thread toward the very end. I do agree for some styles of play that hero point mechanics can sometimes be jarring; but then, immersive players are often the most bothered by unexpected character death or maiming, so its a trade-off.

I have to agree that there's a certain amount of mountain constructed from molehill here. First, most of these chances can be listed with the weapons involved; those get modifications to their to-hit, of course, but that doesn't happen all the time, or even the majority of the time. Second, even if you don't, you only need to check this in a subset of cases. With a 5% chance of a crit, you know you aren't critting on anything over a 5 (unless you have over 100% skill), so you don't need to wonder about it most of the time; same with specials on rolls over 20%.

In the black powder rules we've used locally, we treated regular bullets as impaling damage and shot as crushing damage (in the RQ: AIG sense) and had it vary according to range; double at short, half at long.

[Deleted for off-topicallity].

I did not use the word "significant" accidentally. To people who are bothered by such, introducing a hero point type mechanic into a game that doesn't have one is beyond what they'll often want to do with house rules. You probably aren't, but some people in this thread have acted like this _isn't_ one of the reasons its not a popular system, and I think they _are_ ignoring it, or trying to. Please. Lose the chip. Actually, unless _all_ you look at is WOTC and Palladium, there's little sign that's a general taste of the hobby. You have to look good and hard to find any other game made in the last 20 years that uses them. Again, you probably aren't; I'm just suggesting that people who think that exposure will magically increase the popularity of BRP games dramatically are likely living in a dream world. That's always a risk, but the question you have to ask is if meeting halfway is worth it to you. If it isn't, it isn't.