Gun and Firearm mechanics

[contracycle]

My personal interst re: firearms lays in how to best represent that you were sorta aiming at a region, then seeing where you actually hit. You are almost always aiming, but allowing a very small location to be the target with wandering from there usually results in too fine an accuracy. I personally am looking at something where the player rolls more than one hit location die, getting more the more they hit by, and selecting from there either based on a chosen large location (like torso), or just plain from what was rolled (if you roll 4 locations, maybe one is close to where you wanted to hit). Then i just need to add in something about a centered of mass hit vs a grazing wound.

Well I can tell you how I did it.

The system used a colour chart, in the following order - red (best), green, yellow, white (worst).  Whenever you fired, you could either do so as an aimed shot, ot an unamed shot.  They had different action point costs.  An unaimed shot would simply roll on a random location table that used two dice with probabilities converging on the centre of mass.  For an aimed shot, the colour needed to hit the nominated target depended on the location - red for head or hand, green for arm or leg, yellow for torso, etc.  For an unaimed shot, only a yellow result was needed.  In both cases, colours were shifted by range and other factors.

If you fired multiple shots, in a single action, each subsequent shot was treated as one colour step lower.  If you were using aimed automatic fire, the first shot was considered on target, and the remainder were treated as unaimed, and therefore rolled on the random table, and the colour determined how many of the subsequent shots were sufficiently on target to strike at all.  If you were using unaimed fire, you got a colour shift bonus, but all shots were random - the colour rolled was relevant only to determine the number of hits.  At short enough range this would produce hits even with a White roll, which was the minimum result and usually regarded as a miss.

I didn't bother much with grazing hits and the like; that was subsumed in the usual damage roll of 1d10 plus damage value; seeing as these values were in the 3-5 range for pistols and 6-8 range for rifles, the random factor was quite significant.  The final damage value was compared against a table for the relevant body part, which was organised from "scratched" to "destroyed" depending on the mass and fragility of the part.  Thus a final damage value of say 8 would result in a "destroyed" result on the head and a "damaged" result on the thigh.

The final result worked quite well, even if it did rely on a number of table lookups.  The actual part hit was very important to the effectiveness of a shot, and therefore the decisions to aim or to blaze, what to aim for, how many shots to fire, what armour to wear, all mattered quite a bit and therefore informed play.  Automatic weapons were popular, snipers were deadly, helmets were almost always worn even in the absence of other armour.  Cover was also important, as if a part was covered a random hit against it would be blocked.  I was quite pleased with the results overall, although in retrospect I understimated how accurate human shooters can actually be, and using 1-second rounds was probably not ideal.  Also a system so potentially dangerous presents its own inherent difficulties for play overall.