Weapon Damage in Men of Teak

[Bailey]

I'm stumped for how to handle the damage of a weapon in my Men of Teak game due to a contradiction that exists in my aims.

1. The game is about martial arts insanity and occasional chi powers
2. Any punk with an AK47 can be dangerous.

Being dangerous is something that the player characters do through intense training and expenditure of the xp (yes the game is old school) and it seems unfair for weapons to be a cheap way to be crazy viscious.  Still I want the gun toting thugs to be capable of doing some damage without giving them incredible skill.

I have a simple workaround but it feels kinda kludgy (and what if a player wants some ninja with throwing stars?).

Damage is equal to Trait+Skill or equal to the weapon's damage rating.  As characters become more skilled they don't do more damage with their weapons until their skill surpasses what the weapon would do in the hands of any shmuck.  After that the choice of weapon is only an affectation instead of a manipulation of rules.

This thing only came up because someone did feel instistent on playing a ninja in a playtest sessionof Men of Teak.

[Paganini]

I'm stumped for how to handle the damage of a weapon in my Men of Teak game due to a contradiction that exists in my aims.

1. The game is about martial arts insanity and occasional chi powers
2. Any punk with an AK47 can be dangerous.

Being dangerous is something that the player characters do through intense training and expenditure of the xp (yes the game is old school) and it seems unfair for weapons to be a cheap way to be crazy viscious.  Still I want the gun toting thugs to be capable of doing some damage without giving them incredible skill.

Actually, in the movies gun thugs tend to have really terrible skill. The way I would do it would be to give gun thugs a really really low chance to hit, but allow them to do lots of damage when they do. In a less old school game, I would say that mooks can't hit PCs unless it's a very dramatic moment.

In other words, make guns deadly, but make mooks clumsy. A gun in the hands of a master villain is very dangerous indeed... but in martial arts movies the villains tend to look down on guns and prefer hand to hand combat.

--
Paganini

[Ron Edwards]

I agree with Paganini. In many stories about chi-moves and highly-costly training, automatic weapons are more like percussive instruments to accompany fight scenes than anything else.

Best,
Ron