Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 1738689" data-attributes="member: 463">Yeah, but nobody in any game is going to be carrying around an M2HB as a personal weapon (unless PCs are wearing Power Armour or the GM is a milksop)!  Certainly with realistic damage, the tendency is to gravitate to the biggest practical man-portable weapon; in the modern day that'd be a 7.56mm assault rifle like the FN-FAL.  Frankly, those _are_ the most effective infantry weapons - far moreso than light 5.56N rifles like the M16 or British L85/SA80.  They have better range & far better stopping power.  Real-life downsides are: 1.The big bullets mean you carry less ammo; 2.The big & high velocity bullets have big recoil, making autofire impractical (the British SLR version of the FN-FAL had autofire removed entirely), it takes a fairly strong firer to fire accurately & rapidly even on single-shot, and the rate of fire will certainly be lower than with 5.56N.3. Hits are often immediately fatal (about 25% fatality as opposed to about 5% for 1 hit from a 5.56N, rising to around 50% depending on lack of medical treatment etc) - this high fatality rate is regarded as a _bad thing_ by western militaries because supposedly if you wound an enemy his friends will break off fighting to tend to him.  This may be true in the West, IMO it's a dubious argument in most combat arenas.  High fatality rate also means that if your troops fire into demonstrators you get many more corpses (14 on Bloody Sunday 7.56 rifles, 4 at Kent State 5.56 rifles).  So light rifles are better for 'peacekeeping' operations where you wish to avoid enemy-civilian casualties.All that said, a big strong capable guy with a fully loaded 7.56N-firing rifle is much more dangerous than a big strong guy with a 5.56N-firing rifle, and with a realistic RPG combat system it's natural big strong PCs will want such weapons.  If small weedy PCs also prefer them, the system isn't reflecting the drawbacks of the weapon.  Likewise a cinematic system that makes it practical to fire an M60 from the hip will see a lot of PCs toting M60s...  hopefully _no_ system lets you do this with an M2HB, though.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

Verification