Lockpicking Hollywood style

[fett527]

He should have used a trebuchet...

 

[Rel]

He should have used a trebuchet...

This goes without saying for almost any endeavor with the possible exception of Gynocology.

 

[Henry]

On a related note, I want to thank jonesy for pointing me to "Box o' Truth!" Pretty neat site that I'd never seen before.

 

[buzzard]

Somebody point Hellhound "RPG's Overstate the Effectiveness of Shotguns" at this thread.

Hmm, never saw that. I'd have to say that if anything, the effectiveness of a shotgun is understated by RPGs.

I mean a 12 gauge shotgun is a pretty serious piece of boom stick. While everyone is quite familiar with gun diameters since caliber is a pretty straightforward measurement, gauge is rather obtuse. Your normal guns pretty must just tell you the inside barrel diameter (9mm, 45 caliber=.45 inches). Shotguns OTOH use a rather archaic system where the gauge means the number of lead balls with the diameter of the barrel which would make one pound. Thus lower numbers are bigger. Hence, about the most common shotgun gauge, 12 gauge is .727 inches or 72 caliber. Remeber a 9mm translates to about 35 caliber (roughly the same as a .357 magnum, though the bullet selection is quite different).

The guys on the web page blew the lock apart with a shotgun slug. Those are basically single bullets for shotguns. If we look at what he used on the lock (I will assume most common bullet weights):
9mm 115 grain
.45 ACP 230 grain
.44 (Remington)magnum 240 grain
.223(5.56 mm NATO) ~70 grain
.308 (7.62 mm NATO more or less) 147 grain
12 gauge shotgun (.727 inches) 437.5 grains (1 ounce).

A we can see the bullet from the shotgun is twice(roughly) as heavy as any of the pistol rounds and is probably going at least as fast as the magnum round (comparable).

If you've ever seen a shotgun slug, you'd be quite certain that you had no desire to be on the receiving end.

Though in RPGs most shotgun uses are probably assumed to be shot (buckshot I'd bet). What is buckshot? Well it's the largest shot size used in shotguns. Commonly people use 00 buckshot. This means a bunch of 33 caliber balls. The number of balls depends on the gauge of the shotgun and the length of cartridge. You can generally assume that a dozen balls is reasonable for a 12 gauge. So if you get tagged by a 12 gauge firing buckshot (at close range), it's not very different from being shot 12 times by a submachinegun.

So to anyone who thinks RPGs overstate shotguns, put the above in your pipe and smoke it.

buzzard

 

[Henry]

Let's not start a shotgun war, but I understand your feelign on it. However, not all RPG's "understate" shotguns - Call of Cthulhu (the original) didn't understate shotguns AT ALL; in fact, my PCs were carrying either a rifle or a shotgun with slugs when hunting deep ones.

We didn't carry anything when hunting shoggoths - it would have made our escape slower.

 

[jonesy]

However, not all RPG's "understate" shotguns - Call of Cthulhu (the original) didn't understate shotguns AT ALL; in fact, my PCs were carrying either a rifle or a shotgun with slugs when hunting deep ones.

We didn't carry anything when hunting shoggoths - it would have made our escape slower.

On a slight tangent:

I just unlocked the last difficulty level on Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. I'm about halfway through, and I never would have gotten this far without the shotgun.

When a Deep One is about to rip your throat out it's the one weapon you better have in your hand.

 

[frankthedm]

Let's not start a shotgun war, but I understand your feelign on it. However, not all RPG's "understate" shotguns - Call of Cthulhu (the original) didn't understate shotguns AT ALL; in fact, my PCs were carrying either a rifle or a shotgun with slugs when hunting deep ones.

4d6 for buckshot is nasty. Though i do feel armor values should be doubled [at least] Vs. buckshot.

When a Deep One is about to rip your throat out it's the one weapon you better have in your hand.

Is a point blank head shot still a one hit kill? Body?

On the smoking pipe subject, are those 33 balls getting the same amount of powder they would have been as 33 bullets?

 

[jonesy]

Is a point blank head shot still a one hit kill? Body?

On Mythos Specialist the shotgun is pretty much the only weapon that kills from an upper body shot. With all of the others you need to go for the head. And the puny pistol is so ineffective in that that once you get other weapons the only use for it is for wasting ammo on leg shots to slow the hordes down.

 

[Rackhir]

On Mythos Specialist the shotgun is pretty much the only weapon that kills from an upper body shot. With all of the others you need to go for the head. And the puny pistol is so ineffective in that that once you get other weapons the only use for it is for wasting ammo on leg shots to slow the hordes down.

In the one CoC campaign I was in after our first encounter with a shogoth my character abbandoned guns for dynamite. He died when the BBEG was trying to run him off a New England back road in the middle of the night and he tried tossing a stick of dynamite out the window (did I mention that he didn't have the driving skill). He fumbled the attack roll for the dynamite so the DM ruled that it landed on the running board. He did manage to open the door and kick the dynamite off of the running board, but it took long enough that the stick of dynamite went off underneath the pickup truck bed...

... where the other 96 sticks of dynamite and 20 gallons of gas were kept.

On the bright side the BBEG would have required x3 the amount of damage it took to kill a normal man and I did manage to do enough damage to kill him. On the down side I didn't survive either, but at least humanity (and surprisingly enough the ape chained in the truck bed) survived.

 

[Rel]

On the bright side the BBEG would have required x3 the amount of damage it took to kill a normal man and I did manage to do enough damage to kill him. On the down side I didn't survive either, but at least humanity (and surprisingly enough the ape chained in the truck bed) survived.

Do you always keep an ape chained in the truck bed? I thought this was illegal (except in South Carolina of course).