gtrevizo

Delta Green, p. 281:

Forgery [00%]

Forgery is the ability to manufacture and falsify documents. This can range from simple personal letters to complete legal documents and identity papers. It is vital for espionage agencies and is also of use to criminals. Forgery skill also permits one to detect forged papers, currency, and the like.

I will be there, running Götterdämmerung, a Call of Cthulhu (Delta Green) game set during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, on Monday.

I'd suggest you look at THIS entry from the Wiki.

It's an interesting solution, but... if I get this straight, I can fire a bolt-action rifle on my DEX rank, then fire again at the same target in the same round at the DEX -10 rank (provided I have a DEX of 11 or higher); but, if I fire my rifle at one target, I can't rechamber and fire at a different target until 2 rounds later (because the weapon still has the RoF of 1/2 per round and I have to wait a round to reload). Is that how it's supposed to work?

If that's how it works, it just seems easier to change the RoF of bolt-action weapons to 1 per round.

This was discussed some time ago, this was one proposal to fix the situation.

I did search on "bolt action" and came up with a few threads, but nothing that specifically discussed this issue. The closest was this one, where you posted the above solution. I found Jason Durall's post immediately before that very telling, especially this:

Given carte blanche I'd have shortened the combat round to three seconds and completely done away with Strike Ranks... but I was trying to maintain the integrity of the system.

The 12-second combat round really breaks down applied to anything beyond melee combat (where you can use the D&D handwave of "there's a lot more going on than just a single attack"), and is utter abstraction when dealing with firearms.

Please understand, I'm not some gunfondler who desires absolute verisimiltude at the cost of playability. I want a system that's fun and coherent much moreso than anything "realistic." That said, I have run a game where this exact issue has come up (someone was working a bolt-action rifle, others were doing other stuff) and it was maddening to try to make sense of within the rules as written.

So if you up the rate of fire without applying much more severe penalties for the situations in combat than BRP does, you effectively make things unrealistically lethal, via realistic rates of fire and unrealistic levels of accuracy. But if you do things to correct the accuracy, you spend a lot of time slinging dice around to no real purpose, since most shots will miss.

On the other hand, you can have folks sitting around the table with nothing to do, as they feel like they're moving unrealistically in slow motion, while someone with a light pistol is attacking or at what feels *by comparison* to be an unrealistically high rate of fire, or explaining why one character can walk 20 meters in the time it takes you to rechamber your Lee-Enfield.

There are a lot of options in BRP to decrease lethality on the damage end without creating unrealistic restrictions on firearm data, especially restrictions that force players to sacrifice an action just to shoot their gun. My preference would be to simply increase the RoF of bolt-action firearms to 1 per round, as that deals with the issue rather than create further issues with other elements of the game.

This is an easier problem to fix. The 12 second round was just a length of time decided on by the author to base his combat round on. If it seems too long, just say a combat round is 6 seconds, or 3 seconds. What ever best fits the feeling for your campaign. It wont really make a lot of difference game wise.

So if I do that, do I then have to increase the rate of fire for all other weapons? And do the same thing with the Movement rules? So, to allow someone to fire a bolt-action rifle in 1 round, you can now fire 6 shots in 1 round with a light pistol, and can walk 20 meters per round. I'd essentially have to rewrite most of the rules.

I can accept that a long bow takes a full combat round to release an arrow at normal accuracy, but I can't accept that it takes 24 seconds to fire and chamber a new round with a bolt-action rifle at normal accuracy without any special attention paid to aiming. Well-trained soldiers could fire muskets at a higher rate of fire than amounts to roughly 2 rounds per minute.