making firearms more deadly (deadlier?)

[takyris]

It seems to me one of the goals of making firearms more deadly -- not necessarily "super deadly" -- is to compel a change in tactics in the game. You're right, it's not fun if everybody is too scared to come out of hiding and do anything, but it's also no fun if characters can just charge in blazing with little fear of return fire.

Personally, I'd like to encourage more stealth, speed, and tactical thought -- particularly in modern games.

Is this a problem you've run into in your games, or is this hypothetical? I ask because I haven't really run into that problem in my games.

The first game I did with my players was a no-plot arena tournament with lots of cover. Everyone made 2 10th level characters and 1 2nd-level "grunt" template, and everyone got 1 hero and three grunts in the arena at a time. We all tried to kill each other. It was a crash course in how firearms worked.

One guy who was all proud of himself for being a massively armored guy with a flamethrower and a bunch of grenades took a single 2d8 hit on the first round. The damage was high. His massive damage save was low. That was the end of his character.

In this game, I was just another player -- there was no DM, since there was no story. However, the fact that I knew the rules better than other folks showed them a few important tricks. My guy with improved melee smash, spring attack, and a chainsaw went through a few major characters and a whole lot of grunts before a rocket launcher outright killed me. (I got lucky and made my massive damage checks on other attacks -- this one just flat-out killed me from damage.)

The game ended with my character and a player's character facing off as the two survivors. We were both rifle specialists, firing and moving from one covered spot to another. We were both in single-digit hit points when the fight ended. I won, because I was a Tough hero with Second Wind and kept using Action Points to heal myself. After seeing the difference between standing there heroically firing and ducking behind cover, people got really into the cover idea. Anyone who stands heroically there to absorb damage does so knowing that his character is in real danger of immediate death.

My players know my philosophy. Even if a bad guy is only a hoodlum, if he's a hoodlum who is supposed to be good with a gun, he's going to have Point Blank Shot and Double Tap, so he'll be taking a -1 penalty to hit but doing 3d6+1 damage every time he does hit. If you have four people like that opening fire on someone from behind cover, that's a reasonably deadly situation -- and that's just with handguns. When the guards on the Island Fortress of Doctor Malevolent have assault rifles as their standard equipment, you can take people down with autofire alone.

I think that a lot of the problem people have with guns in d20 Modern comes from a core issue with d20 Modern that isn't often addressed: In d20 Modern, the initial proficiency to do something doesn't make you good at it. It takes you from actively bad to mediocre. The rules give heroes all those feats because those feats are what take you from mediocre to good. That holds true with martial arts, armed melee combat, ranged combat, and everything else I've run into.

EDIT: Typos, typos, typos.

 

[mmadsen]

Is this a problem you've run into in your games, or is this hypothetical? I ask because I haven't really run into that problem in my games. [...] My guy with improved melee smash, spring attack, and a chainsaw went through a few major characters and a whole lot of grunts before a rocket launcher outright killed me.

So, a guy with a chainsaw takes out multiple major characters and a bunch of grunts, all (apparently) armed with high-power firearms, and you can't see why someone would want rules to "compel a change in tactics in the game"?

 

[mmadsen]

Bullets do not ignore armor.

No, but bullets penetrate steel plate armor where crossbow bolts and longbow arrows don't.

Proofed armor was being made in the 16th - 17th centuries, proofed means that the armor has been tested against firearms, and has a lead splotched dent to prove it.

Yes, but that armor weighed much more than armor that was merely proof against swords, spears, and arrows, and it wan't proof against close-range arquebus (or musket) fire; it could only stop pistol fire or long-range fire.

A compromise is to offer half protection from nonproofed armors, and full to proofed (masterworked) solid armors such as breastplate, half plate. and full plate.

Although many pieces of armor of proof would qualify as master works, I don't think they'd qualify as masterwork armor in the D&D sense; the key feature of armor of proof is that it's much thicker and heavier than normal armor, not that it's easier to maneuver in. Soldiers ended up wearing thicker and thicker armor over less and less of their bodies, to get the most useful protection per pound of metal.

 

[takyris]

So, a guy with a chainsaw takes out multiple major characters and a bunch of grunts, all (apparently) armed with high-power firearms, and you can't see why someone would want rules to "compel a change in tactics in the game"?

The folks he took out were grunts with 14 hit points who kept trying to shoot instead of run away and get behind cover, which would have allowed them to fire without penalty at chainsaw-guy; a hero who was a ranged specialist but was standing out in the open with no cover; and a hero whose player had decided to build a Fast/Charismatic katana-wielder as a concept for an arena game, which resulted in a character with a decent defense, a lousy base attack bonus, and not enough strength to do anything dangerous with her katana.

As soon as people saw how much damage the chainsaw guy did, they opened fire. The rocket launcher was what killed him, but a few grunts with assault rifles had him in single-digit hit points after one round of attacks.

The tactics people learned in the game involved getting behind cover (which hurts everyone's chance to hit you but not your chance to hit them) and remembering that the best thing you can do with a ranged weapon is not stand right in front of an opponent with a melee weapon. Once they did that, the melee people got blasted out of the arena quite quickly.

Taking cover and not-standing-in-front-of-people-specialized-in-melee-attacks: these are the horrible unrealistic tactics you'd like to do away with?

 

[mmadsen]

I mean is there anything about a gun that makes it deadlier than a crossbow or a sword?

From Art of Warfare, which discusses 16th-century warfare:

Armies of this time period often had more chaplains than doctors. Given the state of field medicine, this may have been just as well. Contemporaries certainly felt that war had become a more bloody business in their day. The wounds dealt by the traditional edged weapons, pikes and swords, separate muscle tissue but are often stopped by bone. They tend to be relatively clean, and if the wound isn't immediately fatal (e.g. a cleft skull), the odds of recovery are fairly good. Wounds from lead shot are another story. They cause a great deal more trauma with their percussive force (one of the common field injuries was being hit by flying pieces of bone and teeth from the guy next to or in front of you), and are more likely to become infected. Maimed soldiers had no Veterans Administrations to provide for them -- they were likely to become beggars and thieves and a source of public shame and disorder.​

Again though, early firearms aren't accurate, especially at range, and a crossbow bolt is certainly enough to take most soldiers out of the fight. The gun's chief advantages are that it's really freakin' intimidating (flash, BANG!, guy's head explodes) and it can blast through armor (at close range).

 

[Henry]

The tactics people learned in the game involved getting behind cover (which hurts everyone's chance to hit you but not your chance to hit them) and remembering that the best thing you can do with a ranged weapon is not stand right in front of an opponent with a melee weapon.

Heck, even kneeling grants you a +2 to Defense; if you're out in the open with no cover at all, crouching and firing is better than nothing.

 

[takyris]

Henry: Yep. The group had just come off a three-year D&D campaign, and they were thinking "Oh, so these are basically bows with different flavor-text, then?" I ran the arena competition specifically to show them that a) if you can do a lot of damage in a single hit you're going to take people out (with chainsaw guy) and b) if ranged attacks are an option in a given fight (ie, you're not grappling in the sewers), a guy with a gun and a few feats is a lot deadlier than a D&D character with a bow.

In the X-Files-like paranormal investigative game that I ran next, I had a lot of people wanting to be gun-experts, and nobody who wanted to be a melee-monster (there was one person with archaic weapons proficiency, and he was a Smart Hero who was working the trickery angle with a cane-sword, intended for flash and flair and not for actual damage-dishing). And when bullets started flying, everybody dove for cover.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

That's why I start all of my Modern games around lvl 4. People can start to get a better feel for what their PCs do.

Heck, I don't start D&D below that, these days.

I think Massive Damage and guns as they are now should suffice. But here's a thought:

If you haven't moved in a round, you're Flat Footed.

If you're Flat Footed and you take damage, you make a MDT.

That'll keep people from standing around with a stick up their butt.

--fje

 

[HellHound]

I also have the PC roll a d12 to assign the location of the bullet strike:
1-2 = left arm
3-4 = rt arm
5-6 = rt leg
7-8 = rt arm
9 = belly
10 = chest
11= neck
12 = head

I used to dislike the hit location table from CP2020 because it balanced shots mostly to the legs... And I worried about tables that give more than a 10% chance of head hits, but it seems most of my worries were misplaced... In the real world at least.
My wife and fellow gamer got the CDC Surveillance Report for Fatal and Nonfatal Firearm-Related Injuries in the United States for 1993-1998, and decided to pass along the following information.

In assault cases of gunshot wounds the following hit locations were given:

Head / Neck - 14%
Arm / Hand - 13%
Leg / Foot - 33%
Upper Trunk - 21%
Lower Trunk - 16%
Not Specified - 3%

(I hate those shots to the "not specifieds" myself, they sting!)

So, here's a hit location table based on that information:

Hit table as follows (d12)
1-2: Head
3: Right Arm
4: Left Arm
5-6: Chest
7: Abdomen
8: Nether regions
9-10: Left Leg
11-12: Right Leg

---

That said, I don't like using hit location tables in D20 games.

What I did for firearms was increase the critical numbers. x3 crits for all firearms, and the threat range is based on the length to width ratio of the round.

1:1 rounds (shotgun shot, musket balls) crit on a 20
2:1 rounds (pistols) crit on a 19-20
3:1 rounds (rifles) crit on an 18-20

10:1 (Flechette & Sabot) rounds increase the crit range by +1, but reduce the damage die by 1 step.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

That's exactly the feel that I'm going for. My problem isn't with the firearm damage per se, it's how the players respond to firearms in-game.

It seems to me that whatever fix you adopt should apply equally to daggers and arrows, though.

I really do think lower MDT is the answer.

By the way, HellHound-- that is really, really cool. I would never have thought to look for that data in that way, or to apply it thus. Tell your better half she's... better than me, too.