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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2280447" data-attributes="member: 5171">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.</blockquote>

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