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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RedSage" data-source="post: 518055" data-attributes="member: 9159">This does anything but prove that D20 Modern does a good job of modeling a modern firefight. The issue is not making the D20 Modern combat more lethal, it's improving the fidelity and making it more realistic.I think one of the key statments from the AAR is, ""the more I see of this stuff, the more I'm convinced that nothing hand-held is absolutely reliable." I think this sums up the basic problem of modeling modern weapon damage with a bell curve (i.e. 2 dice). This has the + effect of making the damage more predictable, and thus easier to design a game around. But, in point of fact tissue disruption from bullets doesn't really look like a bellcurve. It's flat at the bottom, where all rounds basically do roughly the same amount of tissue damage, and then as the rounds come closer and closer to center-of-mass the difference between high kinetic energy and low kinetic energy rounds becomes more pronounced.The key is that bullets do very, very erratic things, and there are many wounds possible. Following the link (<a href="http://www.frenchanderson.org/french/forensic/report/pdf/section2.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.frenchanderson.org/french/forensic/report/pdf/section2.pdf</a>) to the forensic review of the tissue damage shows that Platt essentially only received two significant wounds: a wound to the chest that damage his lung, and the final round that stopped him, a penetrating round to the chest that damage his spinal cord. Half of the other 10 rounds were 00 buck shot rounds to his feet, and the other half were to non vital, non-center-of-mass areas of his body. The important thing to understand here, is that this is not a statistically "out there" event -- Platt was extremely motivated, well trained, and not particularly lucky.Throw into this the different penetrating characteristics of different rounds, and the ability to fire far more accurately and quickly than the D20 Modern rules would have you believe, and things start looking very fishy with D20 Modern.Sage</blockquote>

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