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But just what do we consider to be a reasonable range for damage? Or what do we consider to be a medium pistol and what do we consider to be a heavy pistol? I think it boils down to what level of abstraction people are happy with. That depends on lot on campaign genre and style of play. For example, you usually don't need to differentiate between, say a 20mm Vulcan autocannon and a 30mm ADEN. In most cases a hit against a PC or a PC driven vehicle will be an autokill. But, in a campaign that has a lot of tech, or superpowers, then the differences between it might be important. But, if I were running a Call of Cthulhu campaign, I wouldn't care much at all, since so many of the Mythos nasties are essentially bulletproof. As far as damage vs. penetration goes, yes, it is tricker. For example a modern tank round can penetrate further than one of the main guns from a WWII battlewagon. But the main gun is going to do a lot more damage. There are a few ways to handle this. The best might be to rate weapons in how much armor they can bypass, or apply some sort of modifier to damage after it gets past armor. Maybe even something as simply as tweaking the impale damage (like how rapiers do more than double damage on an impale but halberds do less)

Exactly. Those numbers are more in the category of self inflicted gunshot wounds. Data I see indicates a fatality rate closer to 30%, with the majority (two-thirds)of that being people who died before getting treatment.

Or how time seems to slow down for an experienced race driver.

I was working on a BRP variant that addressed skill in terms of initiative order/first strike. What I did was use a skill roll with the 10s digit read as the strike order (higher was better). I also factored in for weapon length/reach with each decimeter of reach worth a +10% to skill (so each meter was worth an extra 100%). It wasn't all that bad of a method.

Or just nuke 'em. If the hoards really keep coming with no end in sight then nuke 'em. Personally, I don't see how the enemy could keep up morale if their front ranks are continually being mowed down, but assuming that they STILL KEEP COMING, then nukes are the way to go. Preferably on the other side of the gate. I think the trouble with this campaign idea is that if the Evil Empire is powerful enough and smart enough to pull this off, then they will and there is nothing the PCs can do about it (basically, it's just like Call of Cthuhlu). Which makes for a lousy campaign. On the other hand, if the EE isn't powerful and smart enough to pull it off, then they won't, and there is nothing the PCs can do about it, nor do thay need to. And that also makes for a lousy campaign. The best situation is one where the EE has the ability to pull it off, but only if they use brains and brawn correctly. That way the PCs have a chance of doing something that could affect the outcome.

To be honest just about every solider. It's not like they get to go shopping to buy their ammo. It's provided for them. Secondly, the type of ammo you are promoting isn't really better for soldier on the battlefield. Hoolow point rounds aren't all that effective at the velocities used by most handguns. Nor all that great for low caliber rifle rounds such as 5.56mm. Hollow point and franible ammo (hydra-shock, glasier safety slugs, etc.) are best for civilian home defense use, and do not perform well against armored opponents.

But you're not closer to real world lethality stats. Its' more like you are making super weapons. Just where are you getting these really high lethality numbers from?

That's kinda how the old James Bond RPG used the Sixth Sense skill. PERception was used to notice things. Sixth Sense was used as a kinda safety net to allow the PCs the chance to notice something that they either didn't with thier PER rolls, or that they'd have no real way of noticing.

Yeah, hollow point ammo is one of the few things that the US Military does stay away from. But MJ, your damages aren't more realistic, but less. It look like you're basing your damages on by watching some od film noir movies, where everybody who gets shot conveniently drops dead.

The value of skills, relative to one another depends a lot of the style of play, and the type of adventures the GM runs. That holds true with attributes as well. One approach you could consider doing with information gathering skills (such as spot hidden) would be to have the die roll determine how long it takes for the characters to discover the information. In other words, eventually the characters will discover the grimore hidden under the loose floorboard in the attic. The die roll determines how long it takes them to do so. A GM could make some things time dependent. So the character might not be able to spend all day tearing the house apart, and could miss something becuase they had to stop searching. Another thing you might consider is having the background and professional bonuses affect the difficulty (i.e. easy/normal/hard) of the attribute rolls rather than adding a flat modifier. The benefits of doing so would be that you'd get simpler math (you'd never have to add anything, just work out the 1/2 and 2x percentages, which you could do in advance) and that it could be used to address those tasks that should require training. For example, surgery could be a difficult (or harder) skill, but normal for someone with the right medical background. You could even allow for a "master surgeon" reducing the difficulty two levels to easy. This would be a simple but elegant way to deal with skills without skill percentages. It could even be used for character advancement.

Probably because a person can fire a readied missile weapon such as a bow, crossbow, or firearm faster than someone can attack with a readied melee weapon. . Unless the misile user has some kind of physical handicap, fumbles his weapon, or gets distracted, he's going to get the attack of first, all the time. I saw something awhile back where they showed how it is virtually impossible to jump someone who "has the drop on you" without their getting a shot off. Throw missile weapons are a bit slower to release, but that is made up for by the time it would take for the opponent to close. Now after the first missile attack, it's a different story. Reading the second arrow, aiming, and getting off a shot isn't going to be all that much faster than attacking a sword or spear. Probably the reverse. Especially if you can't really look at what you are doing, and can't really defend too well against a melee weapon with just a bow. The "feints & things" really keeps this from going into a series of 1SR melee rounds. But, in a real fight a lot of attacks are going to be compound attacks, as it is pretty easy to block or parry a weapon otherwise.

First off the FBI report isn't just one FBI agents personal conclusions, it is a report that was authored by that one agent based on test results done by the bureau. He's just the guy whose name happens to be on that particular report. I just don;t buy into your conclusions or your damage ratings. By your reasoning a 9mm Hydra-Shok round should be the superbullet, but it just doesn't have that sort of performance. I haven't seen anything that supports your belief that a 9mm hydrashock round does more damage that a chainsaw.

I think no, as do a lot of firearm experts. Gel tests differ from actual flesh because there aren't any bones. There are those who have used ballistic gel around a skeleton and gotten very different results. The bones tend to reinforce the gel. On top of that most researchers consider hat ballistic gel is more elastic that actual flesh, and have larger that the temporary wound cavities than would actually be the case, so the results are somewhat misleading. In addition most do not consider the temporary wound cavity to be a good indication of the lethality of the round. The FBI claims: The tissue disruption caused by a handgun bullet is limited to two mechanisms. The first, or crush mechanism is the hole that the bullet makes passing through the tissue. The second, or stretch mechanism is the temporary wound cavity formed by the tissue being driven outward in a radial direction away from the path of the bullet. Of the two, the crush mechanism is the only handgun wounding mechanism that damages tissue. To cause significant injuries to a structure within the body using a handgun, the bullet must penetrate the structure. Temporary cavity has no reliable wounding effect in elastic body tissues (emphasis added). Temporary cavitation is nothing more than a stretch of the tissues, generally no larger than 10 times the bullet diameter (in handgun calibers), and elastic tissues sustain little, if any, residual damage. So I doubt that the 9m is going to complete destroy any human body part the way it shreds gel. I think no again. 3D10+1D6 means that your 9mm round is more lethal than the bullet from an elephant gun (3D6+4) or sniper rifle (2D10+4), and is nearly the same league as the "cannon" (4D8+4). That's overkill.In game terms, the weapon has over a 50% instant kill chance with a single shot, and that's much much better than any handgun ammo has in the real world. Yes if you apply it to a non-linear system, such as hit points. Someone who is SIZ 18 has twice the mass of someone who is SIZ 10, and therefore twice the volume. But he won't have twice the hit points. Likewise, a SIZ 34 Giant would have eight time the mass and volume of a SIZ 10 person, but he wouldn't have 8 times the hit points. So any weapon damage has to be on a similar scale as the hit point progression to work properly and give the weapons the right lethality relative to each other. You can't just come up with new damages in a vacuum and then stick them in with the other weapons. Rarelt taken in account in RPGs. often taken into account elsehwere. Yes, your source document is translatable. I just don;t consider it all that reliable. Here's a different source that disagrees with your conclusions and damages.

Maybe you could do up some sort of review of the game, and explain how the new mechanics work? No offense, but I think most of us here don't know enough about the game or it's author to get much out of the interview.

Because you used a linear progression for damage. BRP (and pretty much all RPGs) uses a compressed scale for damage. Partialy to keep the numbers down to manageable levels and party because killing something isn't entirely about how much damage you do, but what part(s) of the body you do that damage to.

Is this a Swedish only RPG, or is it going to be translated into other languages? I find it kind of hard to get into a interview with a game designer about a game that I can't read and find out about. The author may have made improvements to BRP, and came up with new interesting changes, but I can't tell a thing based on the interview.

Not sure yet. What I am thinking of doing is getting real world data for penetration of armor steel and then try to correlate thickness to a AP progression. Then see where that leads. But off the top of my head, if a .50 M2 round can penetrate 25mm of steel, and 30mm of steel is AP 28 (per the BGB), and the .50 cal does 2d12 damage then we'd be at an average damage of 13 points with 12 penetration (total 25 AP), which seems to be close.

But it should be possible to get an insta-kill with a .22. Not all that easy, but possible. As for bullet type, I figure we can use military ball ammo for the default value,then give modifiers for other types of ammo. That would depend on how we end up handling armor penetration. Probably something along the lines of AP round dropping down a step in damage, but getting 3 or so more points of Armor PEN.The idea would be that the AP rounds would be better to have if the target had armor. Conversely hollow points could raise the damage die up a step, but have 3 or so fewer points of Armor PEN.

Ya know I actually did up a hitpointless combat system for BRP back in 2007! It is the downloads section, so I can prove it! You can check out BRP Eventually Fatal Results if you like. Oh, since I wrote this up before the BRP book came out, I didn't know about the difficulty rules. Otherwise I'd have made the STUN rolls easy Willpower rolls for Scratches and Minor Wounds, and difficult for Critical and Mortal Wounds.

Not too bad. My biggest differences would be that I think .44M should be higher than 10mm; I'd up the rifle rounds a bit. A 7.62 NATO round should hit harder than a 10mm; and rather than using a d12 plus a lower die I'd rather use two of the same size. (I.e. 2d8 instead of a D12 plus d6). But overall I think you and I are close, and within "1 die step" even on the stuff we differ on. Certainly workable. And I wan't some way to up the damage a little for specials and critical so somebody could be killed outright by a .22LR. I'll see about plugging the desired results into a table and try fitting the progression with a formula.

I don't believe that was the reason - since I was odd for it to factor into only one weapon. Besides, the increase in db that's to the higher SIZ more than compensated for the extra HP.

So can we agree on desired damages for various benchmark calibers? For example, .22LR, 9mm Parabellum, .45 ACP, .357M, .10mm, .44M, 5.56mm, 7.62 NATO, .50BMG to get the ball rolling.

I'd say the break point should probably be a little lower. Probably just past the 7.62mm. Big game ("elephant") guns seem about right to me. I agree, although I could see using a flat +1. Although...a huge add might be a better way to handle heavy weapons, since it would give a more consistent damage total for aromr penetrating purposes. Lets face it, no normal person is going to survive a hit from a LAW rocket or such. Yeah. I was thinking that maybe the weapon ignores armor points equal to the lower of the damage roll or PEN value. That way armor might be able to deflect a marginal hit. But it's still a bit tricky. I could see some of the small caliber "penetrator" rounds not working out. Or perhaps would could up the damage die for weapons with good AP but then apply a penalty to the final damage. Something like bumping a weapon that does 1d6 up to 1d8, but subtracting 2 from the final damage score. Once we figure out what we want the damages to be, we should probably assign ballistic armor AP scores based on real world info (i.e. NIJ ratings or some such) on just what rounds they are supposed to stop.

It depends on how literal you mean by "graze". For example, it's possible for some bullets to crease the skull, doing little relative damage but not penetrating too deeply. Likewise it's also possible for a .50 cal round to just take off a pinkie. What might help here would be some sort of Stun/Shock roll that the character must make when injured to continue acting. A Willpower roll for example. A "0 point" graze could do do no damage but still trigger the Stun/Shock roll. We could even determine the difficulty of the Stun/Shock roll by the damage taken. No damage would require an easy roll, some damage a normal roll, and a major wound (or location disabling) wound could require a difficult roll. And the nice thing about a Stun/Shock roll is that it (and by extension "grazes") could be an optional rule.

Actually there is. A "graze" from a 120mm tank round could tear off more skin and cause more bleeding than one from a 9mm pistol round. But it's probably not all that significant in game terms. Odds are even if someone was only grazed by a tank gun round, they'd probably be close enough to the tanks target to go up in the secondary explosion anyway. I can see using a new datasheet with weapon damages. As SDLeary has already pointed out, it's not like this would be the first time. Especially for firearms. I think the damage for for some firearms has already been changed three or four times over the years in various pre-BRP RPGs. The question more along the lines of what values will we be happy with? What we need is some sort of consensus of about what damage vales we want for some benchmark weapons, and then we can ft the curve to get values for other weapons. We also have to keep in mind how the new damages will relate to armor and vehicles. We need to make sure that round will be able to penetrate what they should, and not penetrate what they shouldn't.