Weapons Locker info

[JPL]

Magnum slugs to the door hinges... it will come down. Trust me.

Ah, magnum slugs...is there anything you CAN'T do?

 

[ddougan]

But the thing is, you don't really even need the stats... seeing as how almost all guns in a given category in D20M have the exact same stats. Look at the SMGs in Weapons Locker... with very few exceptions, they all do the same damage, have the same range increments, the same crit threat range, and the same ammo capacity.

I have a copy of it, thanks to a friend, but I'm skeptical of how much use I will get out of it.

Totally agree, my copy arrived in the post today and its very disappointing. The artwork and flavour text is grand, but the stats are virtually identical - no real reason for me to use this book when virtually all 5.56mm assault rifles do the same thing in the game...

I thought for a book with so many weapons, they would have added some additional weapons rules to the guns to make them interesting. I loved Spycraft's treatment of weapons in their Moderns Arms Guide.

Surely WOTC could have put together some (even optional) rules and stats for:

Recoil (to affect automatic fire or burst mode)

Accuracy (something other than just +1 to hit for master work equivalent weapons)

Bulk (e.g. ability to limit target selection - easy to swing a pistol at different targets, harder to rotate round with a light support machine gun)

etc

 

[JPL]

Bulk (e.g. ability to limit target selection - easy to swing a pistol at different targets, harder to rotate round with a light support machine gun)

etc

Well, there's the -4 for using a longarm against an adjacent opponent.

But as it says in the intro, d20 Modern doesn't try to model every single aspect of every weapon. Some folks will disagree about how much is enough.

 

[ddougan]

Well, there's the -4 for using a longarm against an adjacent opponent.

But as it says in the intro, d20 Modern doesn't try to model every single aspect of every weapon. Some folks will disagree about how much is enough.

I'm not disagreeing about how much is too much - if D20 Modern wants to treat weapon modelling at a simplistic level, that's fine - I bought into D20 Modern some time ago (although I would have loved greater weapon variation).

But when WOTC release a book with 500 guns which are really about 15 different stats, I don't get it (heh, or rather, wish I hadn't got it - would have saved myself some cash )

 

[ddougan]

Well, there's the -4 for using a longarm against an adjacent opponent.

Sorry, this wasn't what I meant.

Say you have the ability to take 3 ranged shots per turn.

Then with a low bulk weapon like a pistol, you could fire at 3 different targets without any further penalty.

Perhaps a mid-bulk weapon like a carbine can give you 2 different targets without penalty (e.g. you could fire twice at one target, and once at another) - but if you shoot at 3 different targets, you receive a negative modifier to reflect the weight/bulk of bringing the weapon to bear 3 times inside a 6 second period.

Then a high bulk weapon like an assault rifle may have more severe penalities and/or a maximum number of different targets.

These are rules that are easy to apply as optional over the D20 Modern system, but WOTC did nothing in the Locker book to add anything to the combat system.

Look at the DnD Equipment & Arms guide - that was packed with alternative armour materials, vehicle combat etc.

 

[JPL]

Sorry, this wasn't what I meant.

Say you have the ability to take 3 ranged shots per turn.

Then with a low bulk weapon like a pistol, you could fire at 3 different targets without any further penalty.

Perhaps a mid-bulk weapon like a carbine can give you 2 different targets without penalty (e.g. you could fire twice at one target, and once at another) - but if you shoot at 3 different targets, you receive a negative modifier to reflect the weight/bulk of bringing the weapon to bear 3 times inside a 6 second period.

Then a high bulk weapon like an assault rifle may have more severe penalities and/or a maximum number of different targets.

These are rules that are easy to apply as optional over the D20 Modern system, but WOTC did nothing in the Locker book to add anything to the combat system.

Look at the DnD Equipment & Arms guide - that was packed with alternative armour materials, vehicle combat etc.

I think WotC has settled on a certain level of complexity for d20 Modern and is not that interested in developing optional rules that would make combat more complicated. Under this default level of complexity, a lot of guns are more or less the same, statwise.

Other approaches are viable, and I assume that "Big Bang" and other products get further down into the fine details of shooting people.

The DnD Arms & Equipment Guide had the advantage of being able to make stuff up...coral armor, mercurial weapons, that sort of thing. Had it been limited to real-world items, it would've been considerably shorter, because D&D is also a game where relatively subtle distinctions between weapons don't matter.

 

[ddougan]

I think WotC has settled on a certain level of complexity for d20 Modern and is not that interested in developing optional rules that would make combat more complicated. Under this default level of complexity, a lot of guns are more or less the same, statwise.

Other approaches are viable, and I assume that "Big Bang" and other products get further down into the fine details of shooting people.

The DnD Arms & Equipment Guide had the advantage of being able to make stuff up...coral armor, mercurial weapons, that sort of thing. Had it been limited to real-world items, it would've been considerably shorter, because D&D is also a game where relatively subtle distinctions between weapons don't matter.

I dont have a problem with their level of detail in D20 Modern (I'd like to see more, but the core book has a weapon selection list that suits the rules).

My problem is with a book with 500 weapons being released - and because they offered no additional level of detail between them, there may as well have been 15 weapons.

They could have done lots of additional rules in order to differentiate between the weapons without relying on making things up.

You've said above that D&D is a game where subtle distinctions betweens weapons doesn't matter. In a similar fashion, D20 Modern is a game where *significant* differences between weapons doesnt matter - yet they've still brought out a book containing nothing more than 500 weapons ... with extremely limited distinction between them...

That's my complaint - nothing to do with the weapon modelling in D20 Modern - just the disappointment of buying a book with 500 weapons that all act the same because WOTC chose to release what is essentially needless without the additional rules to differentiate them.

 

[JPL]

I guess it's a question of what constitutes a "significant" difference between weapons.

I think the book is useful from a roleplaying standpoint. I like to know a little bit about the guns. I like to know what the gun looks like. I like to know which sniper rifle an ex-Delta Force guy is likely to carry. That sort of detail is more important to me than getting into the nitty gritty of the technical details.

And I do like to know the stats, even though you could get along fine with just "pistol", "submachine gun," etc and even though many similar weapons have similar stats. And there are certainly weapons like the Beowulf or the Master Key or the Minigun that are different from anything in the main book, and I like that.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Having looked through the Weapons Locker, I was hard pressed to find anything that lived up to Ultramodern Firearms. The "all these stats are the same" bit was present to an extent in UMF, but it made up for it in my opinion by having lots of additional information about various weapons.