Smoking Frog

Long ago in my misspent youth, I did some Civil War re-enactment, and along the way, I picked up a decent collection of actual minie balls that had been recovered from various battlefields. A lot of them were still pretty much in the original shape, and holding one in your hand makes you really understand how massive it was compared to modern bullets. And the nose was anything but pointy. One got the image of a "fist" pounding through you rather than a spear point.

I have a quirk in favor of using hit locations. It may not matter for vampires and werewolves exactly where the multiple rounds that have no effect on them actually hit them, but I like the specificity for "normal" humans. Wounds in vital parts are scary, but on the flip side, if you get your limbs shot or mauled, you may still be able to do something with the ones that remain. I guess it would also depend on how much firearms combat you expect to have.

Yes. I'm sure the minie ball would be outlawed if anyone tried to use it now. As I recall, the minie ball's slow muzzle velocity actually made the wounds more serious. A modern rifle round, if it doesn't tumble or deform, with its lovely pointed tip might just zip through some part of you, taking some of its energy with it. Because the minie ball was both big and moving relatively slowly (by modern ballistics standards) it would take a leisurely stroll through whatever it hit, tearing a monster hole in it. I was amazed when I read that during the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr (future US Supreme Court Justice) survived, among other wounds, a minie ball passing through his neck. Ouch. Obviously he was down after that one and spent a night trying not to drown in blood.

Well, as I noted above, if you think shot people only fall into the category of dead and not dead, you're ignoring a lot of complications. Other than the brain and heart, I don't think you have an organ that results in instant death. Blood loss, on the other hand, is a big deal. You can't lower your blood pressure significantly and it not effect you. The random damage rolls are the way BRP simulates the difference between a hit that miraculously misses anything needed, and one that drops you, especially when you are using the damage per hit location. For example, if you have a total of 12 HP, your chest has 5 HP. If you are shot by a 9mm (medium pistol) in the chest, assuming no CRIT or SPEC and not at extreme range, you will take 1D8. If you take 5, 6, 7 or 8 points of damage (50% chance), you are down and only able to crawl. (And if it's less damage, you're not even knocked down). If you are shot by an assault rifle in the chest, again assuming base damage, you will take 2D6+2. If you get a miracle roll of 4 points of damage (a 1/36 chance) you're not even knocked down. Without a CRIT or SPEC, you have a 50% of "shrugging off" a 9mm hit in the chest, while you only have a 1/36 chance of 'shrugging off' a hit from an assault rifle in the chest. That does not seem too far outside the expected to me. Actually, high skill is a huge advantage if you are using hit locations. Aiming at a specific area is Difficult, so you have a 1/2 chance. But if your character is an SAS anti-terrorist guy with pistol 100%, he has a base 50% chance to get a head shot. And of course if you are within DEX/3 meters, it is Easy. If you allow skills over 100%, the SAS anti-terrorist guy may have a pistol skill of 150, meaning a base 75% chance for a head shot. (Before I get hate mail from any SAS guys: I know you can shoot 5 terrorist in the head, twice each, in under 10 seconds, while ironing a shirt and faxing an order for Chinese take out. I'm just using it as an example.) This also seems to be the expected result: "super soldiers" are extremely dangerous because, among other things, they do so much firearms training that they would expect to be able to shoot their opponents in the head, probably more than once.

The same thing if he wants a POW 30, INT 30, or APP 30: The characteristics can't exceed 21 at creation, so super-Conan is limited to STR 21 initially. And if he wants to pump-iron to build up to STR 30, he's still out of luck: you can't train up STR or CON higher than the highest starting value of STR, CON, or SIZ. If I was running a game with a sufficiently high level of silliness that a villain named Pip the Mighty Squeak would fit in, I hope no one would ask how such a shrimp can be so strong. (You're not going to complain that Mighty Mouse is too little to lift a building are you?)

I love all the accurate detail from Sengoku, and my goal is to do a Heian-era setting with that sort of historical detail. If I was going for a Sengoku-era setting, it would be easy just to convert the game mechanics of Sengoku. (I suppose at some point, I will do that.) My disappointment with Land of Samurai is that it is nominally set in the Heian-era, but it is more of a Sengoku-era setting, with ninja, daimyo, ronin, iaijutsu, and tea ceremony, among other things. And they left out the onmyoji! If you have a Heian-era fantasy game, I don't see how you could leave out the Imperial Court's own masters of ying-yang magic. Abe no Seimei must be spinning in his grave. It may be that if you're going for maximum sales, anything set in Japan has to have at least a few ninja sneaking around and at least one iaijutsu duel, whether it belongs there or not.

I love watching people who really know what they are doing with their weapons. When you see how dynamic and fluid this is, you understand that there really is no such thing as "I swing, you parry. Now you swing, I parry." There's so much going on all at once, including the amount of movement they do. Look at how much space they cover. How could you try to model all of the individual elements? It also shows why I think a 12 combat round is a long time: there is almost constant probing, deflecting, and moving. thanks for posting. That was a treat.

I love watching people who really know what they are doing with their weapons. When you see how dynamic and fluid this is, you understand that there really is no such thing as "I swing, you parry. Now you swing, I parry." There's so much going on all at once, including the amount of movement they do. Look at how much space they cover. How could you try to model all of the individual elements? It also shows why I think a 12 combat round is a long time: there is almost constant probing, deflecting, and moving. thanks for posting. That was a treat.

There seems to be an important point here. We can worry too much about the particular details of how to model some aspect of combat rather than asking the question of whether the game system produces results that at least broadly correspond to what we know happened historically (or in terms of the genre if we aren't using a historical setting). However realistic an idea might sound, if the result in game terms is, for example, that people who fight with rapier and dagger are at a big disadvantage or someone who uses a buckler is unstoppable, we know it is not reflecting "reality." And if players can never kill a dragon, something has gone wrong, because everyone knows dragons can be killed. I think the details of actual weapon fighting are very complex and you'll never be able to model them "realistically" in a game, if by that you mean a one-for-one correspondence of what real fighters would do and what the game characters do. Since we're playing a game, it seems to me that the biggest challenge is to make sure that the broad requirements of the the historical period or the particular genre are satisfied. So 17th century sword fights in the game should be something like historical 17th century sword fights while pulp heroes should be roughly as effective as their literary predecessors. When you adjust one part of the system, it changes other things, and we should be most concerned with how the final system works as a whole rather than the various details.

If we're taking a straw poll on Rosen's avatar, my vote is to keep the present one. One of the great joys of my life was seeing his profile picture after seeing the avatar. (He and I share a similar hair style.) It might be the most perfect avatar on this site.

I love the Vitruvian Man background. I was just wondering what failing the Resistance Roll means in terms of what the character has done with the object to be thrown. The rule says a character has to succeed on the resistance roll to see if the object can be grasped and lifted up to throw properly. Obviously, if I make the resistance roll, I'm just going to use my throw skill as normal. If I fail the resistance roll, what does that mean? Is this something where the GM just has to rule what happened. It seems like this could be a problem if the thing I want to throw is dangerous (like a bomb or something on fire). If I flub the resistance roll, I wonder if I might drop it on the floor next to me or something else nasty.

That was quick. Thanks! The vague assurance that something might happen suggests that I shouldn't hold my breath waiting. I'm sure I can finish my own setting before they redo LoS.

On the BRP Ancient Greece thread, hanszurcher posted this quote from the State of the Mongoose 2010 (from back in December): "We are also expanding the ‘historical’ range of RuneQuest books, starting with an updated Land of the Samurai, combined with the Price of Honour campaign, giving you everything you need to start playing in mythical Japan. Pete also has a hankering to cover mythical Greece and after his sterling work on Vikings, how could we say no?" We now know after the recent shake up that Pete will be doing Ancient Greece at some point without Mongoose. Does anyone know of plans for Land of Samurai/Price of Honour? I would have liked to see a book really doing Heian Japan rather than a sort of Heian meets Sengoku. But we take what we can get. Of course, if I could spell "purgatory," I might be dangerous. Oh, well. Why conceal one's foolishness?

I've been holding my breath hoping RosenMcStern doesn't make the mistake of laughing at his mule. If he does, I'm diving behind the nearest watering trough.

Well, of course, El Borak isn't "real," but he's as "real" as any PC or NPC. It would seem that as a "type" he's not outlandish. I would not want to restrict players' options regarding SIZ and STR because just as someone may want to have rippling thews of steel and the reflexes of a panther (STR 21, SIZ 18, DEX 18), someone else might want to be smaller than average, extremely swift, and deceptively strong (STR 15, SIZ 10, DEX 18). Mass certainly does matter. The damage bonus is based on STR + SIZ. So Uncle Clem (STR 12 and SIZ 12) has the same damage bonus as Pip the Mighty Squeak (STR 21 and SIZ 3). If Uncle Clem were to arm wrestle Pip, Pip has a huge advantage. But Clem could pick Pip up and throw him. And a super-sized sumo wrestler of SIZ 26, even if he "only" has a STR of 13, is not going to be moved by much. Don't even think about what happens if the sumo body slams Pip. Ouch.

I hope I've not said anything to suggest that I'm so dense that I don't know that there is a difference between being shot in the hand and being shot in the head. If you are playing in a setting that uses firearms and even a little bit of realism, I don't see how you can do it without using hit locations and HP per location. There have been many studies of shootings with handgun ammo to look at "one shot stopping" or some variation on that idea. Generally, they will exclude from the study incidents where the person was shot in the head or extremities because the one shot stopping percentage of head shots skews the data up and shots in the extremities skews it down. So usually you're just looking at people shot in the chest or groin with pistol ammo. "Stopping" is variously defined, but it is never "lethality," rather usually something like: stops shooting or stabbing and doesn't walk more than 10 feet before collapsing. For many types of ammo, like high powered 9mm or powerful .45 ACP, the studies will show one stop percentages in the 90s. That is, someone shot in the chest or groin with one of those rounds is more than 90% likely to be out of the fight. There's a lot of variation, of course, and there's lots of debate over the value of the data and/or analysis. But all of these studies give the impression that shooting someone in the chest with at least a medium powered pistol gives you a good chance of putting him out of the fight. (That of course matters a lot more than whether he dies now or at the ripe age of 98; so long as he's not fighting me anymore, I don't have to worry about him. If he's not out of the fight, I need to shoot him a few more times.) Military body armor covers the chest and groin because everyone knows that injuries there are much more serious than in unarmored areas like arms and legs. The rules for hits in different locations seem to do this right: the consequence of high damage in your head or chest is much more lethal/incapacitating than high damage in a limb. I don't know what exactly you mean by rifles and pistols having the same lethality. Certainly if you are shot someplace other than the head or chest/groin, you're not likely to die no matter what you're shot with so long as you get prompt medical attention to stop the bleeding. But I've never seen anything to suggest that being shot in the head or chest with a rifle is no more likely to kill you than being shot with a pistol. And here, again, range is a big issue. Most law enforcement shoot outs are at 7 yards or less. You can get hit from rifle fire from hundreds of meters. (And the .50 sniper rifle seems pretty lethal at a mile.) The chance of getting a hit at 300 meters with a pistol is zero or close to it. But 300 meters is within the normal range for combat with rifles. You might state this as being shot in the head with a pistol or rifle are both likely to kill me or at least put me out of action immediately. The significant difference is that a head shot with a rifle is likely at a much further range. The same would be true for chest and groin shots.

Here's an interesting quote I just stole from Wikipedia. The speaker is a British soldier who was shot in the back while wearing body armor: "(...) I was hit in the back by a single shot. It must have been from about 200–300 metres away. The round knocked me down in an instant, it felt like being hit by a sledge-hammer at full swing. I slammed into the dirt face down. (...) I was in agony, I certainly couldn't walk on my own (...) I think it was a 7.62mm round. That's a high calibre bullet to be hit by, but it shows you that the body armour works. I wouldn't be sitting here now telling you this story, if I wasn't wearing one. Thank you to whoever designed the body armour. If I ever meet them, I'd like to buy them a pint. —Lance Sergeant Daniel Collins" This gives you some idea of how much energy you are dealing with. He was wearing a military grade vest and the round had traveled 2 to 3 hundred meters. I stole the quote from the "personal armor" article.

I've been focusing on military type rifles. If you mix pistol, shotgun, and rifle data, I think it's like looking at traffic fatalities and not distinguishing when cars are going 65 mph and when they are going 25 mph. The formula for kinetic energy is E = 1/2 (m*v[squared]). So velocity's relation to the energy is exponential. Just to give an example of the relative difference you'd be dealing with, here's some examples from the Wikipedia article on Muzzle Energy. The specific energies are of course approximations, but the hopefully eye-opening point is the enormous difference between energy levels once you get into rifle ammo, which produce much higher velocities. Here's some items for comparison: Round Engergy in Joules 9mm 519 .45 ACP 564 5.56 x 45mm 1,796 7.62 x 51mm 3,799 .50 BMG 15,037 The energy level of the 5.56 round was something like 3.5 times what the pistol rounds produced. And obviously the .50 is out of the world, but even the 7.62 has more than 7 times the muzzle energy of the 9mm. If you look at actual rounds from actual weapons, obviously you'll get a lot of variety, but this shows you the scale of comparison. Just to compare, if we assume that HP of damage done is 1% of the muzzle energy, the HP you'd lose from each of these would be: 9mm 5 HP .45 ACP 6 HP 5.56 18 HP 7.62 38 HP .50 150 HP Obviously one could argue all day about what the appropriate measure of damage should be, but kinetic energy is obviously a big part of that equation. Given how disparate the energy levels are, to be realistic, I think you need to keep pistol data and rifle data separate. There's loads of data on pistol shootings because that is what law enforcement shoot outs usually involve. Your chances of having your arm remain functioning after getting shot obviously change when the energy you absorb goes from 519 joules to 3,799. And think about something with that much energy hitting you in the chest, not to mention the head!

Excellent points. Carrying a load of bricks in your outstretched arms is doomed to failure, but position it over yourself so you can use all your big muscles, and you're in business. People who've humped a really heavy backpack know this too: You can position it on your back so you can carry it all day, but you'd not get very far holding it in your arms. There's a big difference between what you can hold and what your can carry. While adrenaline obviously isn't PCP -- at least that's what people tell me -- I would think in a desperate situation, a character might be able to accomplish some strength feat that would even injure him or her, like moving a big slab you should not be able to move, which sprains your back, leg, arm or whatever, but at least the monster is trapped on the other side.

Uzis fire pistol ammunition, although depending on the version they have longer barrels than most pistols, so the round is coming out with greater velocity. I've not seen anything about how vests fare against that type of round. As I recall, the Marrow Project had a damage calculation that took muzzle velocity into effect, so a 9mm round from a pistol would do less damage than from an Uzi. (Now that is a flash-back to my ill-spent youth!) As far as rifle ammunition goes, I can just cite the experience of the US combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their Kevlar vests are not proof against rounds from rifles or machine guns. The troops are issued ceramic plates to give them rifle-stopping protection. My earlier reference to a round "effectively amputating" a limb if it hits the bone was not meant to suggest you're going to get many limbs sheared off. But if you have a bone shattered and significant damage to the muscles, the limb may be just hanging there "flapping in the wind." Whether it's still attached or on the ground, you're not going to be using that arm or leg for anything. And you may be quickly bleeding to death. There's a difference between surviving a hit and ignoring it. I was told that the FBI started to emphasize agents' practicing shooting with their "off" hand after a gun fight in which an agent was shot by a pistol. If I remember the details right, the agent was hit in his right arm, and he couldn't use it. He had to cock his shotgun with his left hand and then aimed and fired off hand, which actually worked since he killed the other guy. Also along those lines, if you read "Black Hawk Down," you may remember the comment of a SAW gunner who had been issued state of the art Teflon coated bullets, which were supposed to be super dooper good against people in body armor. More than once he hit a Somali -- none of whom had body armor, of coure -- with multiple rounds which just passed through. Guys would be knocked down, then get up and run way. I would doubt seriously, though, that a guy with multiple "pass through" bullet wounds would be anything like 100% fit, even if he was able to get up and get away. Apropos of the chance of being overcome by intense pain, I recently read some first-hand accounts of the Battle of Attu Island during WWII. One particularly intrigued me. The US ground troops had not been in combat before. One platoon leader after the battle commented that he was glad that they had been briefed about some of the realities of combat, particularly how wounded men screamed. He wrote that it was unnerving and he was glad he had been at least warned about it. That obviously doesn't mean everyone is screaming after getting shot, but it happens enough that it was addressed before the battle. The main point I would make is that if you want to simulate the effects of real military-type weapons, you have to have a system in which people neither always survive rifle hits nor always die. There's a huge range of possibilities (from instant death to "merely" having a hole in you") and a "realistic" simulation would need to take that into account.

Ah. Now that's an interesting point! Part of my disadvantage is that mostly my BRP experience during my misspent youth was Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon, so I don't have a good handle, as many people here do, on the variations that have been tried. I have RQ2, RQ3, and SB5, so I'm going to go back through them and see if I can become more "fluent" so to speak.

Robert E. Howard's Francis Xavier Gorden ("El Borak") was described as being shorter than average and slender but very strong. So he might easily be a SIZ 10 and STR 16+. Apropos of nothing, if you've never read any El Borak stories, they are a fun read.

You wonder if the victims of the "thighs of death" were disappointed or thought it was worth it.

I think you have to be careful about painting with too broad of a brush. Depending on the length of the barrel on the weapon firing the round, and the range to the target, the velocity of the round at impact can vary greatly. (And velocity determines the energy at impact.) I think it is better to try to assign damage values based on the combination of bullet plus weapon (and range to be more accurate, so a rifle should do more damage than a carbine firing the same round at all ranges, and at farther ranges, every round does less damage. Also, there seems to be a lot of variability in how a particular round performs. If a 5.56 round is going 2,700 f/s on impact, the expectation is that it will fragment and tumble in the body, increasing the damage done considerably. But recent combat experience seems to indicate you can't count on fragmentation or tumbling. (If you get it, the victim is probably toast.) Also, because of impulse, the damage done by an automatic weapon getting more than one hit essentially simultaneously is much higher than the same number of hits spread over time. Someone who was a machine gunner in the Vietnam War described seeing people "come apart like rag dolls" when they were hit with multiple 7.62 rounds. And there is one other aspect to being wounded that can incapacitate you: intense pain. Someone who was wounded in Vietnam by a 7.62 (Warsaw Pact) round described the pain as so intense that it was totally incapacitating and was not controlled by the first two injections of morphine he got. The third injection knocked out the pain but also put him in Lalaland. This was a leg wound that did not do any permanent damage in that he was able to fully recover. I think if you want to simulate what happens when people get hit with military grade ammunition at rifle velocities, you have to account for both the possibility that you might get lucky and the round does not hit a bone, destroy a vital organ, etc. (so you might still function), and also the possibility that a single round could effectively amputate a limb if it hits the bone or completely destroy vital organs by fragmenting or tumbling inside the person. You should probably also take into account that at longer ranges, the velocity is lower and the damage less. Critical hits and specials might be the simplest way of dealing with the variability of this.

But I don't understand your criticism. Isn't it obvious that a hole that is .32 inches in diameter would be more "damage" than a hole that was .223 inches? And the same for .45 and .30. It's just obvious looking at the numbers. Isn't it? Yeah, I hear you, brother. My pimply adolescent friends and I played lots of Top Secret when it first came out, but my thought when I saw this thread was "do you really prefer the old cheesy James Bond movies with the comic super-villains being defeated by Bond's super magnet watch, which Q conveniently supplied after reading ahead to the climax of the plot, or do you prefer seeing Daniel Craig just straight up pound the crap out of some international terrorist banker?" The 80s were great while they lasted, but I think we can get so much more game for our effort now, even if we mostly have to do the details ourselves. Remember the Yugo?