Weapon Damage Calculation Question

[decline]

let me first just say hi, new to the board here and just discovered it a few days ago and have enjoyed reading through it.
anyway, so a friend and i just started revamping an old house system we had from many years ago and we are having a problem working out the damage
from melee weapons.  it is a fairly generic system and firearms are all worked out, but for some reason we can't quite get hand weapons to do so.
so i'm wondering what other people's experience with doing so is and has anyone developed up a rough formula for doing so.
we want the system to be fairly realistic, meaning we shoot for realism but we err on the side of the player and fun.  so the system is sitting somewhere on a fine line of being just dangerous enough to discourage fighting your way through your problems but not enough so that you just run and hide or start prepping your next character when a fight does come up.

we have been playing with various combination of using the length, width, weight of weapons to get a base damage
we are looking at three types of damage: blunt, puncture, cutting
we don't want to just assign arbitrary numbers to weapons but rather to have a rough formula so that when someone picks up something like a stop sign and swings it the GM will have an idea of how to calculate the damage it could do quickly.  in other words, that there is some kind of rhyme  and reason as to where the damage for the listed weapons came from. 

so yeah just curious if anyone else has developed up any formulas based on the characteristics of weapons and if so what/how they went about it.

[J. Scott Timmerman]

Hello, and welcome to The Forge, decline.

Rare is the game designer who has not put a fair amount of thought into the issue of how much damage should be done by a weapon.  The word "realism" is used to mean different things - by different people or even by the same people in different conversations.

Based on this selective reading of your post:

(...) we err on the side of the player and fun 
(...) just dangerous enough to discourage fighting
(...) not enough so that you just run and hide

It would sound like you're looking primarily at "character risk assessment" when you talk about realism.  In other parts of your post, you speak of weapon size/mass and categories of thrust or sharpness.  So, is it fair to say that the crux of the issue is how much of a factor the ominousness of an opponent's weapon should be in fight or flight response?

-Jason

[dindenver]

Decline,
  I personally, would like to give you some advice:
1) The wimpiest weapons can and do kill in real life.
2) No matter how deadly the combat is, it won't discourage players from resorting to violence

  So, in order to make the game more fun, I suggest a couple of tweaks:
1) Make the damage range between the strongest weapons an the weakest a small spread
2) Make other forms of conflict resolution more effective and more fun in play. Maybe talking someone down from stabbing you shouldn't be a single roll. And maybe it should be harder to hit someone who is in your head (so to speak). So you aren't bleeding to death by the time you convince them not to kill you.

  Does that make sense? Does that help? If not, let me know and I can approach my advice from a different angle.

[John Blaz]

I was starting to do something like what you describe for my survival horror game, under the assumption that characters would need to use their environment to survive. Basically, a weapon could be described by its length, weight, unwieldiness, sharpness, hardness etc. I would assign numeric statistics to the different adjectives, so a long and sharp/pointed weapon (fence post?) would have extra reach (depending on your system, mine would be +1 meter reach), and deal an amount of base damage (say maybe d6) and also some bonus damage for being sharp/pointed. I would also apply a penalty on the to-hit roll because a fence post is unwieldy and heavy.

If you're interested in this idea, let me know, I'd like to develop this system further but haven't had the chance.

[Vulpinoid]

Forget the notion of realism...how abstract or detailed do you want the system to be?...and in what contexts do you really want the detail to be manifest?

Damage is just one part of a weapon, and as John has mentioned in the above post, things like unwieldiness and sturdiness of the weapon can be used just as easily to differentiate between specific types of weapon.

I once went down the road of generating vast lists of tables for every real-world weapon then started pushing my tables into fictional settings...then decided that Palladium had produced a pretty extensive series of weaponry books in the 80's...why bother trying to reinvent the wheel? I moved on to the ideas of formulas to determine damage, weapon accuracy, unwieldiness and sturdiness, but found that most players just wanted a quick look at a chart to determine these things rather than having to recalculate them before equipping each new weapon.

My current theories in this regard have streamlined the notion a bit. Let a character buy a weapon for a point value and they can assign those points across fields:
Damage - Pretty obvious (more points spent here means more damage)
Range - How close you need to be to someone in order to hit them (more points here means you can strike from further away)
Accuracy - The chances of doing a critical or improved hit rate with the weapon (more points here means better chances of vital strikes)
Unwieldiness - The weapons speed (more points here means either an initiative bonus, a chance of a follow up strike or something similar)
Sturdiness - The weapons chance of breaking (more points here means a more resilient weapon).

If a player spends a certain amount of XP (or in-game currency), they might gain a bonus item in the form of a weapon. Once they've acquired this weapon, they can spend a bunch of points to determine the weapon they've acquired [some pre-generated weapon templates could give some ideas on how to spend these points to reflect existing weapons in the setting].

If a player wants to use a found item as a weapon, they could gain a number of points to spend based on the success of their search attempt. The more successful you are when looking for a suitable hitting tool, the more points you get to spend on it. Such makeshift weapons would never be as good as the weapons permanently acquired by characters though. [Again, a series of pre-generated templates can give some ideas on how points could be spent to reflect such things as a broken bottle, a plank with a nail in it, a lead pipe, or other things appropriate to the setting].

That's where I'm heading with my ideas, I just thought I'd share.

V

[John Blaz]

My current theories in this regard have streamlined the notion a bit. Let a character buy a weapon for a point value and they can assign those points across fields:
Damage - Pretty obvious (more points spent here means more damage)
Range - How close you need to be to someone in order to hit them (more points here means you can strike from further away)
Accuracy - The chances of doing a critical or improved hit rate with the weapon (more points here means better chances of vital strikes)
Unwieldiness - The weapons speed (more points here means either an initiative bonus, a chance of a follow up strike or something similar)
Sturdiness - The weapons chance of breaking (more points here means a more resilient weapon).
V

I agree with this system, I would say maybe you could have a certain amount points for a weapon based on the quality. So a poor weapon might have 5 points,  an average weapon might have 10 and a superior weapon might have as many as 20 points.

[walruz]

In my experiences, you produce a good mix of realistic and gameable damage output, by using a system with a fairly fixed range of outcomes, where the lethality of a weapon makes higher outcomes more or less likely. I mean, I'd rather be stabbed than shot with a .223 rifle, and I'd rather be shot with a .223 rifle than with a 40mm autocannon. But I'd rather not get stabbed at all, because, you know, a knife can still kill you.
Dice pools (like in World of Darkness or Burning Wheel, where you roll a number of dice based on skill, damage etc, and then get different levels of success based on how many dice come up with certain numbers) work with this principle, at least if the dice explodes in one way or another (highest result on a die grants you an additional die, for example), as a poor weapon wielded by an unskilled opponent can still kill you, it's just not as likely as surviving a shot from a rifle fired by a skilled marksman.
Another system which follows the same principle, is a system where weapon damage isn't a single number which you add to your rolls or dice pool, but rather a system where each weapon has a number of damage levels. For example, if we use a d10 to roll for damage, a knife might cause a superficial wound on 1-2, a severe wound on 3-8 and a lethal wound on 9-10, while an assault rifle perhaps would cause a superficial wound on 1, a severe wound on 2-5 and a lethal wound on 6-10.
A less clunky way of getting the same result as in the last example, would be to use a die or a playing card or something else with a fixed range of possible outcomes, and having the range of hit points (or similar) be within that same range. You then roll a number of dice (or draw a number of cards) equal to the damage value, and choose the highest (doing that many points of damage). For extra versatility, some weapons or sources of damage could have a negative value, where you calculate damage in the same way, but choose the lowest.

In both of the latter systems, you could have the attacker's level of success affect the damage roll in some way, but then you'd either have to use a bunch of tables (which wouldn't be that much of an issue if you include relevant tables on the character sheets), or find that the damage system only works with the intended level of lethality under a certain range of skill levels.

(the above may or may not make any sense due to lack of sleep and caffeine overdose)

[Vulpinoid]

I agree with this system, I would say maybe you could have a certain amount points for a weapon based on the quality. So a poor weapon might have 5 points,  an average weapon might have 10 and a superior weapon might have as many as 20 points.

That was exactly the intention, I had just forgotten to add in the point factoring.

In this theory, permanently acquired weapons start with a base value of 1 in each category, then points are distributed to improve the weapon from there. Every XP or equivalent point spent on the weapon would provide 5 points to distribute among the categories. Found weapons wouldn't start with this free level in each category, a player would get 5 points to spend on their makeshift weapon for each degree of success on their search attempt. If they found a particularly useful weapon that they wanted to keep for later in the game, they could spend their XP to permanently pick up this weapon as a character feature.

A found weapon with 2 successes provides 10 points of bonus, if you want to keep it you've gotta make sure you allocate at least one point into every category (much the same as a bought weapon), the remaining 5 points can go wherever you want. Since this would work out the same as a 1 XP bought weapon, then this is all you have to pay to make it a permanent character feature from now on.

...

Again, this works for one of the systems I'm working on, and would probably require some number crunching to apply into someone else's concept.

The whole point is to give weapons a value equal to their significance within the story, and their chance of impacting the flow of play. If a weapon does double the damage of a normal fist, but is half as likely to hit (or takes twice as long to hit), it's not much better than a fist in most circumstances...you can often do just as much damage pummeling someone

(...but this all depends on how armour is being used in your game, and that's a whole other discussion).

V 

[decline]

I was starting to do something like what you describe for my survival horror game, under the assumption that characters would need to use their environment to survive. Basically, a weapon could be described by its length, weight, unwieldiness, sharpness, hardness etc. I would assign numeric statistics to the different adjectives, so a long and sharp/pointed weapon (fence post?) would have extra reach (depending on your system, mine would be +1 meter reach), and deal an amount of base damage (say maybe d6) and also some bonus damage for being sharp/pointed. I would also apply a penalty on the to-hit roll because a fence post is unwieldy and heavy.

If you're interested in this idea, let me know, I'd like to develop this system further but haven't had the chance.

interestingly we went down a very similar road, abandoned it, and returned to it again a few times, and have currently detoured away again:

thanks for insights so far.
we kind of decided we didn't care how much/involved it got to be making the character as long as once play started you would not in theory have to refer back to the book.  it seems to be working so far as even a few people we had test it some got through their first sessions without needing to do so.  well the GM did look up a couple of weapons at one point.

if anyone is interested also this is the current set of formulas we used on our backend to calculate the hand weapons.  it looks like a bit of a pain in the butt but its really just behind the scenes stuff we used.  at this point the only reason someone would need it is if they just had some very strange weapons and even then the GM would in theory have done the work on those before playing.  we crunched these over and over in different ways way too late into the nights but these seem to be working out in line with the game and producing more or less "realistic" results. 
CUTTING:  Blade Length/Weight
BLUNT: ( .5*weight*81)/15  Note: 81 is square of speed 9mph derived as an average speed of a swing, and was picked purely arbitrarily and because it worked the formula well.  characters that would have a faster swing is made for in the DMG base modifier.
PUNCTURE:  (Length/2)/Width

SPECIAL: For Wedge Shaped Weapons:  (Head Weight/Head Width)+weapons Blunt DMG
Add Character DMG Base.

in addition weapons have a fatigue modifier, interrupt modifier, and a reaction modifier (though our reaction rating works a bit differently than most systems and is potentially poorly worded, its more of a low end target number that separates characters from inanimate objects.)  we are using a dice rank system with everything coming down to being a rank.  it looks like:
1=1d2, 2=1d4, 3=1d6, 4=1d8, 5=1d10, 6=1d10+1d2, 7=1d10+1d4, 8=1d10+1d6, 9=1d10+1d8, 10=2d10 11=2d10+1d2 etc etc....the highest maxed dice get rerolled.  i hate the d2 because of the reroll part, but it also allows characters to have a sparkle of hope of a chance to do some things in a pinch. 

we will probably be throwing a very rough draft up on our website "soon" and wouldn't mind some people taking a look and poke at it when we do to get some initial reactions.  i'll probably post something when we do.  this site is a great resource, glad to have chanced across it.