Worlds of Design: Gun vs. Sword

Lanchester’s Power [Linear and Square] Laws mean that combat in science fiction RPGs will usually be fundamentally different than combat in fantasy RPGs. Or the designer will have to somehow compensate, as in Star Wars.

Image by Andrea Wierer from Pixabay​

F. W. Lanchester, a polymath, inventor, and co-founder of operations research (a subfield of applied mathematics), examined before and during World War I the effects of melee and firepower in attritional combat. This examination was part of Lanchester’s Power Laws. Here we’re discussing how these differences mean that combat in fantasy RPGs, as compared with science fiction RPGs, will usually be fundamentally different unless the designer somehow compensates, as in Star Wars.

Lanchester calculated that in attritional melee the strength of a force is proportional to its number, because there is no action at a distance (“Lanchester’s Linear Law”). It amounts to a 1 vs. 1 environment. In an era of firepower, where military units can act at a distance, the strength of a force in attritional combat is proportional to the square of its numbers. (Hence, “Lanchester’s Square Law.”)

For example, in a melee of 5 vs 10 (or 5,000 vs 10,000), in the time it takes the 5 to inflict one damage, the 10 will inflict two damage (or 1,000 and 2,000 damage). In a firepower situation, the 5 have a relative strength of 25, while the 10 have a relative strength of 100, or 1 to 4. So in the time it takes the 5 to inflict one damage, the 10 will inflict four.

Thinking in immediately practical terms, imagine a typical sword/axe/club melee in an RPG versus a typical pistol and rifle and grenade fight today, and more in a future of blasters. (Keep in mind, the monsters we often fight are also melee weapons, in effect.) Without the effects of fantasy superheroes, the melee is man-against-man, and even a great swordsman cannot dominate a big melee. In the fight of today or the future, a man with a ranged weapon, especially an automatic weapon or an explosive-projecting weapon, can kill dozens in a short time.

A designer of a science fiction RPG faces a problem; firepower-based combat must be very different from melee combat, and probably less satisfying for the players. What can the author/designer do to solve this problem plausibly?

Star Wars compensates for this with the Jedi and light sabers. An adequately trained Jedi with a light saber can block huge numbers of blaster bolts without fail (even though it’s physically impossible if three shots are on target at the same time). He/she can use their light saber to overcome opposing armor and other factors associated with advanced weapons technology, right down to cutting through steel bulkheads. The more or less artificial scarcity of light sabers assures that few soldiers have these advantages, quite apart from the Jedi’s Force powers. Of course, Star Wars Stormtroopers can’t hit the broad side of a barn, either, nor do they use automatic weapons and explosives much.

In many ways, you can think of melee vs firepower as the difference between knife fights and automatic/semi-automatic gunfights. The movie Starship Troopers just ignores tanks and aircraft in order to provide a more visceral melee-like experience as troops fight monsters at short range and hand-to-hand. “Let’s ignore our invulnerable stuff and only bring a knife to the knife fight.” Duh. I think of E. R. Burroughs’ Barsoom stories, where many melees took place in a land with very long-range rifles and explosive bullets, because of “honor” - it was dishonorable to escalate a swordfight to a gunfight. This is one way that an author or designer can compensate for firepower: just don’t use it (except for ship-to-ship combat).

Back to fantasy. What about archery? Standard archery is much closer to melee than firepower, owing to short range, slow action (crossbows), and ammunition limitations. When English longbowmen dominated battles in the Hundred Years War*, they used a weapon that could be fired rapidly by skilled archers, yet use a large supply of ammunition because England was mobilized to mass produce (and transport) arrows. After the development of muskets, longbows would still have been a better weapon given skilled archers and a massive supply of arrows; but musket ammunition was far more compact and easily produced, and it was far easier to train a man to fire a musket adequately, than to fire a longbow rapidly.

Where fantasy moves into the realms of firepower is magic-users using fireballs, lightning bolts, and similar area effect damage spells. Which may help us understand why spellcasters can be the “ace in the hole” and can dominate a battle. Dragon fire may have similar effects.

In other words, there’s rarely a pure melee or pure firepower skirmish situation in games. Yet the higher you move on the spectrum from tactical to strategic, the more Lanchester’s Linear and Square Laws take effect, even though his mathematics only applied to a specific kind of battle. I have simplified the specific circumstances of the Laws for this short piece. You can get more detail from the Wikipedia article cited above.

I’m sure readers can provide many other examples of ways authors and designers have returned science fiction skirmishes to melee parameters.

*Reference: Bernard Cornwell’s excellent historical novels about the battles of Crecy and Agincourt. The protagonist is an English longbowman.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I agree, the real issue shows up when people start meta-gaming Hit Points. Falling I think is one of the worst examples in D&D, though, because of how much experience people have IRL with it (alas, I have a lot of experience with falling, and the injuries to prove it). I agree with you that in many ways "plot armor" would make a fall not lethal, but it's not something that one would blithely laugh off either, but that's exactly what a high level fighter type can do. The issue here is not that other things aren't analogous, such as getting stomped on by a dragon, but because it starts to hit the "uncanny valley" and rub against the secondary reality people are trying to build in the game. Metagaming this is so bad because it exploits a strange aspect of the rules.

You're not wrong with there being a certain disjointedness to falling, particularly if it happens with regularity.

That said, it isn't all that difficult to shore up the realism of something like falling if it's an issue for you. For example, one of my DMs made falling damage d10 Brutal 1, and serious falls require a Con save to avoid broken bones (which is very serious until you get Regeneration - to give you an idea, he added a new spell which reduces the recovery time to 1d4 days).

Characters with plot armor rarely get seriously injured in falls, unless it's part of the plot. They might be knocked unconscious. Most of the time they pick themselves up with a groan, pat themselves to make sure nothing's broken, and carry on like nothing ever happened. And then everyone else, who assumed the character must have assuredly died in the fall, is surprised when the character comes sauntering back with nary a scratch.

Personally, the player of a high level fighter may laugh it off (much like they might a kobold with a dagger), but the character should not (unless they're laughing at the fact that they're lucky to be alive). That comes down to role playing a realistic character, IMO.

 

[chaochou]

Or, to put it another way, if knives and swords actually were equivalent to firearms, why have they been more or less completely replaced as the weapon of choice?

Because, as has already been pointed out, if you can do lethal damage with your sword at one yard and I can do lethal damage with my assault rifle at one to five hundred yards, then at all ranges except a yard, I win. Which means, I win.

And, as has already been pointed out, if it takes three years to become a proficient swordsman and two months to train someone to load a gun and pull a trigger, then armies of riflemen are also better in terms of economics and logistics.

None of that says a bullet does 'more damage' than a sword thrust. It says it does damage more reliably and easily in lot wider range of circumstances.

 

[dragoner]

Daggers should often be deadlier than represented. I have a old FBI pdf about handgun wounding factors, most handguns hit with the power of a baseball. Where Hollywood over represents the power of guns is that the knock people back, when in reality, the bullet would pass through the target, and someone would just fold forward, as our natural stance is forward.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

We've generally accepted that end of the knight as heavy cavalry didn't end because guns killed them too well, it ended because guns eventually made them obsolete. The changing face of warfare meant a heavily armoured man on a horse with a lance wasn't as useful as two dozen men armed with guns. Thus, the local lord hired a dozen men with guns rather than buy himself a fancy suit of armour and a trained war horse.

Melee combat has made a comeback, too, at different times. World War I had a lot of it due to the nature of trench warfare, and whenever static line warfare with a lot of skirmishing and patrolling has reappeared (Italian Front, Stalingrad, lots in China, etc.) or during the Korean War, the Eritrean War, among many other examples, so has melee combat.

Obviously one thing that's happened too is the reappearance of armor on the battlefield. In many ways it'd never totally disappeared as there were cavalry who wore breastplates and many military hats were designed to mitigate saber blows during the Napoleonic Era. Helmets reappeared pretty fast in World War I.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

None of that says a bullet does 'more damage' than a sword thrust. It says it does damage more reliably and easily in lot wider range of circumstances.

True enough, and those are big reasons guns took over from melee and archery. In some cases there's quite a bit of measurable information. A Medieval crossbow compared to even pretty weak guns lose out on the ground of energy delivered to the target. Of course, an arrow is sharp and if the shaft penetrates it does a whole lot of tissue damage, so it may well not really be comparable.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Daggers should often be deadlier than represented. I have a old FBI pdf about handgun wounding factors, most handguns hit with the power of a baseball. Where Hollywood over represents the power of guns is that the knock people back, when in reality, the bullet would pass through the target, and someone would just fold forward, as our natural stance is forward.

A big part of it is that daggers are plenty deadly... against ordinary people. A commoner has 4 hp and is rendered down and dying by a successful dagger strike by another commoner 25% of the time; two strikes are typically down and dying, with but a stab or two to dead. That's not really off reality at all. The numbers make tolerable (if not perfect) sense against ordinary people but this means if we use RL as a basis for comparison for heroic characters and think of hit points as meat points, things look ridiculous.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

You're not wrong with there being a certain disjointedness to falling, particularly if it happens with regularity.

Falling is one of D&D's "Murphy's rules".

That said, it isn't all that difficult to shore up the realism of something like falling if it's an issue for you.

True.

Characters with plot armor rarely get seriously injured in falls, unless it's part of the plot. They might be knocked unconscious. Most of the time they pick themselves up with a groan, pat themselves to make sure nothing's broken, and carry on like nothing ever happened. And then everyone else, who assumed the character must have assuredly died in the fall, is surprised when the character comes sauntering back with nary a scratch.

That's true, but hit points aren't entirely "plot armor" either. For instance, natural healing back in the older versions of the game was very, very slow, so it would revert to quasi-realism. There are many other ways hit points don't line up with being plot armor either. For instance, in many movies, TV shows, or stories, heroes often surrender when having a dagger held to the throat. But the real meta-game thinker would laugh that off.

Personally, the player of a high level fighter may laugh it off (much like they might a kobold with a dagger), but the character should not (unless they're laughing at the fact that they're lucky to be alive). That comes down to role playing a realistic character, IMO.

Perhaps, but I think we've likely both played long enough to know how meta-game thinking is like crack with Cheez Wiz for some players. They just seem to be unable to avoid it, for instance deciding that the way death saves and overnight healing work applies to NPCs as well, especially if it suits their purposes.

 

[GMMichael]

Knife-to-Throat and Falling Solution:
Game modes. Hit points have their proper place, which is not throughout the entire game, but only during intense combat. If your character has a knife to her throat, hit points don't apply because we've agreed (I think) that a knife can inflict lethal damage pretty fast. Use a different resolution system than hit point attrition to determine the outcome.

Fantasy vs. Sci-Fi Combat Solution:
None needed. Fantasy introduces long-range combat alternatives while sci-fi introduces close-combat solutions. If your RPG features equal amounts of non-magical close combat without firearms and ranged combat with only firearms, then you might need a solution. But that's limited to, what, modern-era games with a penchant for realism? Even a James Bond-style game is going to be more fantastic than that.

Use Solutions only as directed. Do not try this at home.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Knife-to-Throat and Falling Solution:
Game modes. Hit points have their proper place, which is not throughout the entire game, but only during intense combat. If your character has a knife to her throat, hit points don't apply because we've agreed (I think) that a knife can inflict lethal damage pretty fast. Use a different resolution system than hit point attrition to determine the outcome.

If you can get players to agree to that, more power to you (literally and figuratively). I think in nearly any group I've played with over the years this would not fly and would be considered a serious violation of player autonomy.

 

[dragoner]

A big part of it is that daggers are plenty deadly... against ordinary people. A commoner has 4 hp and is rendered down and dying by a successful dagger strike by another commoner 25% of the time; two strikes are typically down and dying, with but a stab or two to dead. That's not really off reality at all. The numbers make tolerable (if not perfect) sense against ordinary people but this means if we use RL as a basis for comparison for heroic characters and think of hit points as meat points, things look ridiculous.

You are exactly right in that it is how combat is modeled to where it's representation matters, personally I find all RPG combat to be an abstraction. The FBI pdf is good to provide a realistic baseline, and the conclusion at the end is probably the most salient part of it.

Modern military shoulder arms are interesting in that they are more designed to wound over killing, where the most deadly rifle is the American Civil War muskets. AD&D did ok with firearms, if one wants to think of them as late 15th-16th century person carrying a brace of six or so single shot pistols, as what is seen in drawings of that era. Two shots per round, 1d6 or 1d8 damage, until no more pistols, then it's drawn swords.

Once into machine guns then it's just a save to hit the dirt and avoid the hail of bullets, with the machine gunner saving versus a jam or running out of ammo. Except at the same time it has little relavance to D&D.