Adjustments For d20 Weapons Locker

[dagger]

I have seen a Marine Corp sniper with a .50 fire it from the hip at a small Isuzu pickup truck in Afghanistan.....the bullet went all the way through the damn truck....from grill through the tailgate..... (didnt want Taliban using it to move people and gear). He was standing right in front of the truck.

 

[wingsandsword]

Anything else is just walking that fine line between "RPG enthusiast" and "Asperger Syndrome."

Here here! The constant obsession with firearms realism is one reason I don't really frequent the WotC d20 Modern boards anymore. (Not complaining about this thread, it's quite uncommon here.)

If you want firearms to be "realistic" in d20 Modern, use the optional rule that the MDT is reset to 10 instead of CON or 50. That way almost any gun can force an MDT save on any hit (with 2d4 .22's only on a crit), and just about any random gunshot (or any solid hit from a melee weapon) can theoretically kill a 20th level PC.

Weapons in d20 are supposed to be abstract. The biggest disappointment I had in d20 Modern was the huge details in weapons, with . D&D doesn't draw distinctions between a nodachi, spadone, zweihander or claymore, they're all Greatswords. The D&D short sword covers the gladius, wakizashi, hunting swords and xiphos. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I think d20 modern weapons should be as abstracted, just like the Defense/Hit Points system is an abstraction.

People often want more "realism" in games about fields they know better. I've seen martial arts practitioners complain over the unrealistic tripping and grappling rules. Firearms enthusiasts complain about unrealistic weapons damages. Nurses and EMT's complain about the natural healing and disease/poison rules. Hackers complain about the Computer Use skill (and Craft: Electronics). If you made a system that was as realistic as everyone wanted, it would be so cumbersome and awkward as to be unusable. Actuallly they did that, it was called GURPS: Where it required (at least in 3rd edition) significant calculus just to determine the stats of any given vehicle. The detail overkill of GURPS is one reason nobody I know plays it, let's not see d20 take that route.

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

Stuff

1: It might have helped to have mentioned in your first post that the article you were posting was, in fact, and article; knowing that the insults and rudeness of the author did not come from your pen might have made people more favorably inclined to you.

2: No-one here was uncouth in the slightest, except for arkham, who wasn't rude to you.

There was no way for anyone to know that knockback only applied to a few guns, unless they had seen the article before.

Honestly, given the scathing tone of the article (that you gave no indication of being such), the responses thus far (again, except for arkham's) have been stupefyingly polite. I can only hope that you receive comments as polite as this if you post such inflammatory material in the future.

 

[jerichothebard]

So... if a bullet has the ability to move the target backwards five feet... wouldn't firing a burst of 5 rounds from submachinegun move the shooter back 25 feet? After all, a bullet gets momentum FROM somewhere, and the acceleration of the bullet actually produces MORE energy than the impact, since the bullet loses some momentum as it travels.

Interestingly, over the weekend, Discovery Channel ran a Mythbusters marathon. One of the episodes had them taking a recently-deceased pig carcass, and having a police weapons expert shoot everything in the book at it. Small and large hand guns, rifles, shotguns, fully automatic assault weapons, multiple fully automatic assault weapons simultaneously.

They filmed it from the side on a high speed camera.

The results?

The only thing that moved it - at all - was the solid slug from a 12-gauge shotgun. For exactly two inches of knockback.


Knockback is a myth, folks. It don't work, and Discovery Channel's got the film to prove it.

 

[wingsandsword]

I think the myth of knockback comes from the idea of people falling backwards, supposedly from the impact, after being shot (and because directors throw it into movies because it looks cool and they've probably never been in a gunfight).

Never mind that they could lose their balance from the shock and surprise of being hit, or just somebody being killed and falling backwards (and possibly staggering once on the way down) could be mistaken for "knockback". Or somebody feeling the impact and trauma of the bullet and visibly recoiling away from it, looking to the shooter like they were pushed back by the bullet.

Does knockback exist? Provably not. Do things happen in combat that the untrained could mistake for knockback? Probably.

 

[HellHound]

Then I get jumped, even though it’s apparent I’m a green horn. And an article that I didn’t even write, but thought was helpful, gets torn apart and it’s obvious that parts of it were missing. It was one hell of a first impression! But I understand that when you show up on a new scene the first couple of people you meet are the most uncouth pricks in the crowd. They are first to open there mouths and usually don’t think about what they are saying because they love to hear themselves talk. So I’ll stick around away

Wow.

I'm now one of the "uncouth pricks in the crowd" and "don't think about what I say because I love to hear myself talk". I think I hsall add it to my .sig

I didn't take this to personal insults, I tried to point out what I thought were falacies in the arguments you posted. I would certainly appreciate it if you didn't take this to personal insults (aka "flames") either.

Unfortunately, you did not indicate that the material you posted was written by someone other than youself. Instead, you launched into the post by heaping abuse on a product and then providing half-rules material to 'fix it'. The fact that the material was written by someone else doesn't change the fact that you posted it without crediting the source, that the material in question is offensive in tone, and that I still don't think that any of this handles the problems inherent in this 'fixed' system.

I still find it interesting and inherently false that this system espouses a belief that a single bullet from a handgun can knock a target back 10 feet, but not move the firer any noticeable distance.

 

[JPL]

I'd note that one of the lead designers for d20 Modern was a tank platoon leader in the first Gulf War.

Probably knows a thing or two about how guns work [note the big gunlike thing on top of a tank]. Might know a thing or two about game design.

But I'm sure this guy complaining to his dear sister is some sort of SWAT team leader.