Okay, maybe my other post on Engineering was a bit too deep.

So here's one of my questions without so much of the background. How can I figure out how much damage a certain weapon does? While specifically I'm looking for guns, any form of kinetic energy damage counts.

Kinetic energy of the round only plays part of the role. It's possible to have a high powered round go clean through a person and do less damage than a lower powered round that doesn't exit through the victim. If you know anything about inelastic and elastic collisions, it partially deals with this concept.

The diameter of the round plays a part in determining damage, but is it more or less important than the kinetic energy? In fact, could it be the momentum (or impulse) of the bullet rather than the kinetic energy? The diameter of the round in part determines how large of a hole it's going to make in someone. But a smaller round which tumbles can actually do more damage than a large round that do to its momentum will just burrow a hole in a straight line through you.

As I recounted in the other thread, there appears to be at least 4 other factors:

Round fragmentation
Round tumble
Round deformation
Round cavitation

I've a few ideas in mind how to correlate all this information together, but I'd like to hear a few other ideas or suggestions.

Dauntless wrote: I've a few ideas in mind how to correlate all this information together, but I'd like to hear a few other ideas or suggestions.

As I recounted in the other thread, there appears to be at least 4 other factors:

Round fragmentation
Round tumble
Round deformation
Round cavitation

I've a few ideas in mind how to correlate all this information together, but I'd like to hear a few other ideas or suggestions.

I assume you're trying to create mechanics for gunfire for a game you're designing.

Capturing realism is like trying to count the stars in the sky; everyone has a different threshold. Even after you get your mechanics the way you want, someone will take a look and say, "Hey, you didn't get that part that's so important to me," in different words.

So regardless of whether you necessarily understand it perfectly, what's so important about role-playing gunfire, to you?

* * *

OT: one to two weeks back I had this big breakthrough with a game I'm designing when I realized that all weapons do the same amount of damage. Now, I know that's not literally true, but it's a game truth that facilitates my goal, which was to normalize what a TROS player would call Margin of Success. I differentiate weapons in other ways (i.e. constraints on defensive actions, different dice counts for defense to different types of weapons, etc.).

After the changes I made, any weapon could hurt and kill you, in one to more blows, limited by appropriate defense. It's not Newtonian physics, but the demo rocks.

What I'm using in EABA to good effect is a model like this:

1) Weapon does N six-sided dice of damage (+1 or +2), like 4d+2

2) Armor is similarly rated.

3) Armor subtracts from damage, and you roll the remainder.

Benefits:
1) If you have an armor that you know will stop a bullet, it will always stop that bullet. EXAMPLE: a 9mm in EABA is about a 2d+1 attack. A level II bulletproof vest is about a 2d+0 armor. The 9mm does exactly 1 point of damage (blunt trauma).

2) On the other hand, any amount larger than 0d+2 that penetrates armor has a variable damage, so you can have the effect that it was just a graze, or it hit something vital. EXAMPLE: A 3d+2 attack vs. a 2d+1 armor does 1d+1 Hits to the target. A 5d+1 hitting a 2d+0 armor does 3d+1 Hits.

Location specific effects add to damage -after- penetration, and may also have location-specific caps on damage. EABA subtracts for the arms and legs, and adds for the head (with a minimum of at least 1 point if 1 point penetrates armor).

I'd also note that EABA has a declining scale on damage. The more you've taken, the harder it is to get further effects. That is, shooting you in the arm twice does not do twice the damage as shooting you in the arm once. You need to model this somehow to reflect the real world cases where people are shot several times and survive, or are stabbed dozens of times and somehow pull through.

Greg Porter
BTRC

For the ultimate resource on this kind of stuff, see if you can find a copy of 'Guns, Guns, Guns' by BTRC. It's a complete firearm design system, similar to the vehicle design systems you often get in SF games. It includes a formula for calculating damage that takes into account bullet velocity, diameter and such. However...

Ravien wrote: Also, my final question, is if you are aiming for realistic combat, why bother with all of this? I mean, you get shot, you fall down in agony. No more fighting for you.

Maybe I should claify what I mean by realism.

I'm not looking so much into an accurate 100% modelling of reality, but rather, something that's close enough so that you think, "this could really happen", that there's 100% consistency across the board, and that it doesn't require much (if any ) suspension of disbelief. The simulation of damge affects here has one main goal....consistency.

Many game rules have arbitrary or inconsistent game rules when it covers game damage. Some have some basic principles to guide the damage ratings like, "it's a bigger caliber round so it should do more damage". But since my game allows for the creation of new guns, I can't just set up arbitrary rules for determining damage. There's another design aspect for why I want to determine the many factors that go into damage determination. I want to be able to make different guns that seem similar have different characteristics.

As for suggestions to reading Greg Porter's Guns! Guns! Guns!, I've had the original since 1988, and I have the pdf version as well. It's been a great inspiration, but I'm going to be doing a few things differently than he is a I outlined in the Engineering post. For example, I'm going to be seperating raw Damage (or Wounding Capacity) from Penetration. I'm going to include much more bullet characteristics as well, such as cross-sectional factors (to determine drag and penetration...this is the "shape" of the bullet) as well as the other mentioned factors in determining damage.

someone mentioned that the Damage factors I mentioned are random. While there is a random element to it in some cases, in others, there is a consistency in one or more of the factors. Round tumble is very often a consistent characteristic of a round fired out of a gun. A great example is the first M16 rifles when they entered service in Vietnam. Unlike today's M16A2 and M16A4 which are given mediocre man-stopping power ratings, the first M16's were noted as quite lethal. There were two main reasons for this. The first was that they put more grains of gunpowder in the round, and the second was that the original had a rifling of 1:12 (one twist in the barrel every 12" to produce spin to the bullet). This meant the round carried more energy and more importantly, the bullet had less spin, and therefore the round tumbled more. Because the round tumbled, sometimes the bullet wouldn't even hit the target nose-on. This meant the round also tumbled through the human body rather than puncture it with a nice clean hole. The top brass in the army didn't like the accuracy of the first M16's though, so they increased the rifling to 1:7 and changed the gunpowder. The change in gunpowder decreased the fouling (plus they added a chrome liner in the receiver to reduce dirt muck-ups) and also slightly decreased the velocity, but the improved rifling also made the round more accurate but it didn't tumble as much when it hit the body.

So the newer M16's tended to drill nice holes into people whereas the older one's were reported to literally blow people's limbs off or even blow off heads. The tradeoff was very poor accuracy and range with the older M16's. From talking to other people who have fired other assault rifles from other countries that also fire 5.56mm NATO, they've all said one thing...the M16 accuracy sucks compared to FAMAS (France), the SA80 (England), or the Steyr-Aug(various other countries). Same round, but different gun produces different accuracies and even different damages.

And this all leads back to how do you determine damage? Well, I'll put up these bookmarks as they helped me out some and they might help other designers as well. Many agencies have a HUGE interest in how lethal guns are, and to think there is no research done on it is naive at best. While no one does live testing on humans, some countries have done tests on animals (not to mention anecdotal stuff from hunters) and even here in this country, test rounds have been fired on cadavers. So it's not just gel blocks that a lot of this data comes from. And of course there's also hospital data. What I'm really looking for but don't know if I can find because it's classified are any military reports. I know they exist, but haven't been able to find any information. And I don't know if a Freedom of Information Act request will go through in order to do "Roleplaying Game research".

But anyways, here are a few websites with some useful info:
http://medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GUNS/GUNINTRO.html
http://www.mindspring.com/~ulfhere/ballistics/wounding.html
http://www.steyrscout.org/terminal.htm
http://www.isl.tm.fr/en/scientif/pages/d1/d1_e_atb.html

http://medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GUNS/GUNINTRO.html

Another point about getting shot....sometimes you get hit and don't go down, at least not immediately. The M16 has been getting a lot of flak recently because there have been quite a few battlefield reports that it's taking more than one solid hit by an M16 or M4 round to take the bad guy out of the fight. In fact, the Army and Marines are both looking at a new caliber round to address some of the problems the troops using 5.56mm rounds have been facing (the scuttlebutt right now is that the army is looking at a 6.8mm round).

So really, getting hit, even in the chest or stomach may not take you out of the fight depending on the round, the person's health, and perhaps more importantly, their state of mind. And this in turn is important because if you aren't hors de combat with the first shot, you might be able to take out a few more people.

Famous case in point, the M1911A1 (or the "colt 45") was developed shortly after the Filipino Insurrection. the gun was developed because the Smith and Wesson 38 calibre that was standard issue of the American troops wasn't putting down the Filipinos with even spotty regularity. There were many documented cases of Juromentados (my mom says this basically translates as "religious fanatics") getting hit at point blank range with all 6 rounds, and they kept coming to kill the soldier (there were also documeted cases of some filipinos cutting Springfield rifles in half with their Kris swords). So, the US decided it needed a sidearm that would literally blow a person off their feet...and the legendary 45 was born.

This is a reason why my Damage modelling system keeps track of different types of damage (I don't use hit points, but rather a comparison of a Damage Rating to a Status System). For example, I differentiate damage by structural capacity (broken bones, torn muscles, torn cartilage), Trauma (life critical wounds), Neurological/Motor (getting stunned, paralyzed or knocked unconscious), Support (blood loss, dehydration, hunger), Mental and Physical Fatigue. Guns generally do a combination of tearing and penetration and this in combination with the location hit determines what kind of damage is done (well, that and the Damage Rating of the gun).

BTRC-
I actually much preferred Greg Porter's older games Timelords and Spacetime when it came to damage modeling. Again, his works have inspired my own. In that sense, EABA was a disappoint to me because it didn't feel as realistic as his earlier stuff.

While I agree that people can get shot multiple times and live, I didn't like the fact that the more hits a character takes, the less each succeeding damage does. Most health care professionals are aware of shock and how lots of tiny effects can escalate into one big one. Pain and blood loss can trigger other systemic reactions which aren't good for the human body. But I'm definitely including rules which make sure that health isn't "ablative" (every wound takes away from a life meter).

While my mom's a great resource in an anecdotal way (she's been a nurse for 40+ years, with a quite a few of those in ER, including Cook County hospital....yup, that ER), I still need to do a little more digging on this. But I did very much find Greg Porter's game of Timelords and Spacetime to have a very interesting way of modeling damage.

For wound effects, the Army Medical Service did a report after WWII on wounds and wounding, using field hospital data. With grisly pictures as I recall. Gunshots, shrapnel, etc.

For more modern info, look up books on emergency room medicine. These will deal with the nature of, effects and early response treatment of gunshot and knife wounds, among other things. More grisly pictures.

And remember, not everything you hear about weapons is true. The .45 has a lot of hype, none of which is apparently backed up by either theoretical figures or real-world ballistic tests. For instance, if the M-16A1 was as unstable as noted, you would have trouble deliberately hitting anything with it. Not a problem when you have hundreds of guys filling the air with lead, but for a roleplaying standpoint, I'd rather have my bullets flying straight and hitting what I aimed at, rather than flying through the air sideways and causing significantly more damage...to something other than what I was aiming at. Also note that if a bullet is travelling say 600m/sec, then it is only spending several -thousandths- of a second in a human target. Quick calculation: If a bullet decelerates from 600m/sec to 100m/sec on its way through a 20cm target (shedding 97% of its energy in the process), then it spends about 1/1000th of a second in the target. There's only so much tumbling -any- bullet can do in that interval.

If the tumbling, expansion or other bullet geometry helps the bullet shed energy, that's generally what does the damage, not any increased mechanical tissue damage caused by a larger bullet cross-section.

When an officially adopted weapon gets a lot of hype to about its effectiveness, it improves the morale of those using it, and those that have a vested interest in the weapon (manufacturer, military procurers, those who voted for it, etc.) will tend to agree, despite any later facts to the contrary. The current UK service rifle (L85 series) is a current example. Took years for the gov't to admit it was unreliable, inaccurate, too heavy and overly complex, despite numerous field reports of all of the above. For instance, despite being a bullpup design that is decades -newer- than the M-16 series, the UK's L85A1 is still -heavier-. A classic case of "We adopted it, therefore it must be a good weapon." I got roundly criticized by a few Brit gamers for pointing out the L85's flaws in the early 90's, but oddly enough, they stopped emailing me after I gave them proof to support my assertions...;)

Look for third-party info about weapons before believing any anecdotal hype or national bias.

Greg Porter
BTRC

Dauntless wrote: BTRC-
While I agree that people can get shot multiple times and live, I didn't like the fact that the more hits a character takes, the less each succeeding damage does. Most health care professionals are aware of shock and how lots of tiny effects can escalate into one big one. Pain and blood loss can trigger other systemic reactions which aren't good for the human body. But I'm definitely including rules which make sure that health isn't "ablative" (every wound takes away from a life meter).

I'm not looking so much into an accurate 100% modelling of reality, but rather, something that's close enough so that you think, "this could really happen", that there's 100% consistency across the board, and that it doesn't require much (if any ) suspension of disbelief. The simulation of damge affects here has one main goal....consistency.

My comment about things seeming like "it could really happen" was made in general and didn't necessarily reflect specifically combat per se.

That being said, the perfect simulation of reality is not my #1 priority. My #1 priority is rather consistency based off game reality. In other worlds the game rules create reality (with some help of GM interpretation of course) and this game reality should be very consistent. In parallel with this design goal, I want the game rules to clsoely mirror the real world reality.

What do I mean by consistency? It means that the results should be based on an underlying set of laws, principles or rules. In effect my rules are the cause, and what happens in the game are the effects. Inconsistent rules create effects which don't seem logical, rational, or plausible (according to the game setting...what may seem illogical or inappropriate for one setting may be appropriate for another). These laws or rules should apply in every circumstance. For example, in the real world, ballistics has to obey the laws of physics, and wound trauma has to follow the laws of human physiology.

Game systems can become inconsistent when the underlying principles or laws are either ignored, not thought through fully enough, or simply don't exist. Case in point, I was just on a forum discussion board on herogames.com where someone asked why axes were so much better than swords. In Fantasy Hero, 1-H axes had a lower STR min and did more base damage than a 1-H sword...and swords were more expensive. Clearly there was an error in thinking here. Axes should have a higher base damage, but they should not have a lower STR min (unless the designer wanted to simulate that it's easier to increase the DC of an axe compared to a sword...in which case he missed the point that it also means that a lower strength character can do more damage with it than a stronger character with a sword).

The Hero system is an effects based system where the underlying causes are not considered because it is either irrelevant or because there are too many possibilities. I want my system to consider both the cause and the effect, hence eliminating many unecessary inconsistencies (you'll never get rid of all of them, but that's what GM's are for...but a good rule set will minimize this need). But the Hero system allows players and the GM to create weapons or equipment for any genre imaginable because it only models the effect and not the cause.

But this is also the root of its inconsistency. My game system has a much more restrcted confine of setting, and the rules were designed to create a very "grim and gritty" atmosphere with lots of tactical choices. I also took the approach that this is a Roleplaying Game. I've noticed a trend for many games to emphasize the Roleplaying part while minimizing the Game part. I want it to be a good blend of the two. Even the roleplaying will have game mechanics to encourage or discourage character behavior (and hence how the player controls his character).

I'm creating these damage rules because I want players and the GM to be able to create weapons (any weapon up through a certain technological period) for their game. Because the GM can create his own weapons, the playtesting must already be built into the design rules. This is another potential flaw in effects-based systems like Silcore or The Hero System. Hero requires the GM to scrutinize a design to make sure there has been no min-maxing or out-of-context equipment (or characters), and the same can be said of Silcore (for example, in the rules for Silcore, it says there's nothing stopping anyone from loading 12 beam cannons on a small mech...if it has to be done, the engineers will find a way to do it). That's precisely what I want to get away from, and what I see as potential inconsistency.

The flaw with my system is that it is constrained to the technological limits that are implied within the game rules. For example, suppose that tomorrow we develop superconductors....well, my rules don't allow for it until about 2020. Another points lies here as well...I'm creating rules for equipment creation up through about the next 100 years after which I'm stopping. I don't know how our technological limits will be, but the game rules provide the virtual reality that all the effects are based on. The game effects may not always jibe with our own real world, but they will be consistent as much as possible within the context of the game world. So my design goal as a second priority is to model our own real world close enough. Partially so that we can relate, and partially because reality is a great way to provide a framework of design rules with built in checks and balances.

About the fear and confusion angle...I've been following Sydney's thread closely and offered some of my own thoughts on what to do.

I come from a wargame background so modeling this confusion and fear is very important to me. I think there's a fine line where roleplaying begins and Game ends, and where Game begins and Roleplaying begins. Where you see this line is how you develop the rules to handle these kinds of situations. If you lean towards the roleplaying line, then the player should act out his character model the fear and confusion. If you fall towards the game line, then you model how the fear and confusion affect the character's ability. Ideally you do both.

Is technical nuance unnecessary to model this chaos? Not at all. The technical detail is there to support and guide the roleplaying. The game rules determine the effects, and the shared imagining has to fit within this context. For example, let's say that a character has to make a coolness under fire check if a shot comes very close, and the character fails this fear test. He fails the test but not badly, so the player says that his character hits the dirt and tries to find any cover to protect him. If the character failed badly, the player might say that his character hugs the ground, hands over his head in a fetal position whimpering for his mommy.

To me, I find this more realistic than a character charging a MG42 gun position while all his friends are turning into fair approximations of hamburger while he froths at the mouth screamig at the top of his lungs that the vermin Jerry's are going to pay. Now instead, if the player has to make a roll against his willpower, perhaps having to spend some of his precious Task Enhancing points or metagame points to achieve that level of heroism is something else. As my grand dad always said, "if it comes easily, it's not worth it". And games that allow players 100% control of their characters in all circumstances without making them pay for it in some manner is not just unrealistic but ultimately not as rewarding either. After playing some harder edged games that were more grounded in realism, I came to appreciate that the victories were hard fought and hard earned. It made victory (and defeat) that much sweeter. In many ways, I scaled down the strategic necessity of a commander to always be in control of his troops down to the indidvidual, but instead of the individual controlling his troops, he's trying to control his emotions.

So the technicalities don't take away from roleplaying, rather they supplement it. Much like a director telling an actor how a scene should be played out, that's what my rules do. The players frame the scene with their actions, the dialogue and acting still in the hands of the player, but the direction is in the hands of the "director". The more concrete the rules are the more information you have at your disposal. I don't see this as taking away creatvity. It does take away dramatic license, or the freedom to act out the scene as you envision in your head. But it doesn't take away creativity. Instead the concrete rules provide the confines within which the roleplaying description (the shared imagining) should take place.

Hello,

I would offer that Vincent has a few words to say on just this subject, within the context of his game. If one didn't care for profanity, I'd advise against following the link.

Best,
Will

BTRC (or Greg :))-
I can see that damage in a structural capacity has a diminishing returns effect; as you said, a broken arm is a broken arm and there's not much other game effect to having multiple breaks (we're excluding the pain factor here). But I think there's different kinds of damage types. In your Spacetime and Timelord games there were also neurological effects (stunned, unconscious, etc) as well as ability impairments (presumably due to pain) and what amounted to mortal wounds. If there were a way to incorporate Spacetime damage in EABA, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

I think determining damage is a measure of where the damage path goes, how wide the damage path is, how deep it is and how the tissue is affected (curshin, cutting, impaling, etc). Where the damage path goes determines the potential reaction of the body (how much structural, neurological, pain and critical damage occurs), and the width and depth determine its severity. Determining the location path is moderately difficult. It's moderately difficult because in the case of the bullet, where you hit may not wind up being where the wound channel is created. Obviously there's a random factor, but I think the hit-roll should resolve much of it. If you barely hit, to me this can be accounted for by saying that it was mostly a felsh wound, or the bullet deflected off a bone.

If you split up damage into its various effects on the human body, I think you can remove the "I got killed after being hit in the toe" syndrome.

In some ways my weapon creation system will be easier than yours, and in others harder. I'm trying to develop it in an abstract way...for example, energy weapons will also have Receivers, Actions, Feed Systems and Barrels. It may not make sense if you look at it from a literal point of view, but if you look at the purpose of a system rather than a restrictive definition it makes sense. My system is looking more and more like the GM'll have to use a different methodology in thinking about weapon design. Rather, I should say the algorithms (though similar)will be different. I mean algorithm not just in the sense that the formulas are different, but also the order of steps you think about to create the weapon.

BTW, how's Stuff coming along? My own vehicle creation rules are in its infancy, but it's definitely not going to be anywhere near as complex as VDS. The Weapon's Engineering Manual will probably seem very familiar to 3G!, but the Vehicle Engineering Manual will be much more abstract. So I'm interested in seeing how Stuff comes along.

Dauntless wrote: So my design goal as a second priority is to model our own real world close enough. Partially so that we can relate, and partially because reality is a great way to provide a framework of design rules with built in checks and balances.

Shreyas-
Don't worry, I didn't see your comments as crapping on my thougts :)

Trust me, I have no false illusions that what I'm creating is itself an abstraction. Creating a model of something is always an abstraction of something. The key to creating a good model is making sure that it does something you said; cover all the essential factors that are relevant to the information you need. Because consistency is high on my priority list, I need a lot of detail to ensure that there is a built-in "reality" which determines the causal nature of how something works.

I'm not so much interested in recreating 100% reality to a T. Rather, there must be a semblance of laws and rules which govern why the game objects have the effects that they do (and in so doing, create as little inconsistency as possible). For example, I've split what most games would consider strength into Force and Speed. These combined with a character's Fitness, Mass and Height determine how "strong" a character is (how much he can lift) as well as how much Power (Force/Speed) he can put into his actions. This allows one to create a character which is slow but strong (a bodybuilder) or one who is lithe but wiry (a Bruce Lee type who may not be able to lift as much weight, but can hit you with a wallop).

In other words, I'm trying to create a set of rules which establish some fundamental laws of how the game world works. Most game systems do this of course, but because of my desire for internal consistency, I pay more attention to the causal nature of how things work. Notice I said internal consistency, because it's more important for me to get consistent results that follow the game setting, and then secondarily that these results are consistent with real world data. On a scale of 1-10, my priority for consistency is a 9 and accuracy is a 7.

Am I biting off more than I can chew? Probably. Do I need to look at the damage factors to this degree of scrutiny? Again, probably not. But I do feel that how a human being is damaged is one of the most arbitrary design considerations in most game systems. Concurring with this because they are related is how a weapon does its damage. That's not to say that these rules don't work for that game and the setting it covers, so they are still valid choices. No one can model reality 100%, but you can extract the factors that are relevant and get a pretty good degree of accuracy. That's what I'm aiming for. Eventually I'll move on to figuring out how melee weapons do their damage and consider many of the same aspects (how much tissue damage is created) and how the weapon influences this wounding capacity.

I'm creating these rules to eventually be integrated into a computer game. It will integrate warfare from the strategic down to the personal level. this is another reason I value consistency and quantification so much because the computer requires it.

Actually, I will be basing the game off tactical profiles, but the tactical profiles are generated from the flight characteristics or nature of the weapon. You don't use the raw flgith characteristic data, instead formulas are used to derive them into the tactical data which is relevant to the game system.

For example, how quickly it takes to ready your weapon will be based off a mass to length ratio as well as some balancing issues (bullpup designs have a center of mass closer to the shooters own, so it will be slightly quicker for example). The flight characteristics of the round will determine how accurate the round is at certain ranges, as well as how much damage it will do. Pistols are not only inaccurate, but they also lose damage rather quickly, whereas rifles (true rifles) are very accurate and keep their damage over long distances. It is the flight characteristics that determine the tactical profiles.

The reason I want these design rules is so that I don't have to arbitraily chose them, and also to allow the GM to create his own.

In the end, I could have just used 3G!, but I there were enough tiny differences that I felt I should use my own system, plus I didn't want to lose more data by converting from the 3G! system to my own game system. Many of the tactical profiles are the same or have analogues in my system (Inherent Accuracy, Aiming RC and Damage RC, for example) where mine will have a few his do not (Cross Sectional Area, and more fine tuning capabilities for length"weight ratios and gunpowder properties) not to mention that I will figure out Damage Ratings differently than his Damage Value.

Dauntless wrote: own game system. Many of the tactical profiles are the same or have analogues in my system (Inherent Accuracy, Aiming RC and Damage RC, for example) where mine will have a few his do not (Cross Sectional Area, and more fine tuning capabilities for length"weight ratios and gunpowder properties) not to mention that I will figure out Damage Ratings differently than his Damage Value.

Dauntless, I'm very puzzled by your use of the word "consistancy" in this context. Consistant to what?

If I say a .22mm does 1d4 damage and a 9mm round does 1d8 damage, and every gun in my game is stated that way...that's consistant. Its also obviously not what you're talking about.

So what do you actually mean when you say consistant.

Are you saying you want to be able to take a news report of an actual shooting, set up that situation in your game and have a possibility of the events occuring the same way in the game as it did in reality?

That would be one interpretation of consistancy.


If so, I'd have to say your pursuit of a causal link is nice theory but will never ever work to any extent worth the effort. I say this simply because as a micro armor gamer from way back I remember well the great debates about gun calibre vs armor matchups...the great efforts some gamers would go to to get the precise thickness and angle of armor for every surface of a tank, and then insist on perfectly to scale 3d terrain so they can get accurate angles of fire, and then extrapolate the exact thickness of armor being hit by any given shot so they can compare armor hardness and calibre and muzzle velocity and range to determine whether or not a given tank round penetrated.

In the end all of these calculations provided just the illusion of accuracy, and the end result of the number crunching was absolutely no different than simply analysing the figures from a historical tank battle and concluding "70% of the hits on a Sherman by a Panzer result in mission kills. Roll percentile and move on." In other words 10 times the effort yielded results that ultimately were 0x more authentic.

There are tons of factors to account for in something as simple as tank gun vs tank armor. Those factors are all well known. They involve lots of precise mathematical calculations and the range of possibilities is relatively low. Yet even in such a controlled environment the results of taking a Casual approach are trivially different from the results of taking an effects based approach in application.

Judging weapons fire of any time of small arm against a human target involves orders of magnitude more factors than tank gun vs tank armor. You have to account for the angle the shot penetrated the body, the possibility of hitting or missing vital locations by the tiniest of fractions, all sorts of soft and hard cover effects, etc etc etc.

If this sort of exercize is largely futile for something as simple as armored warfare, I can only expect it to be even more futile for man to man combat.


My suggestion really is to take an effects based approach starting with the sort of results that would seem sensible and consistant to you without violating your disbelief and then fashion mechanics that give that output.

In the end, you get to almost the exact same place with lots less headache.

Greg-
I'm using the cross-sectional area to help determine both tissue damage capability as well as some penetration capability and also as a measure of air drag (to influence the accuracy over range and damage over range ballistics of the round).

The physics looks pretty ugly, especially since my own physics knowledge is relatively limited (one semester in college, and currently in my second semester physics).

The hardest part for me to figure out is correlating the kinetic energy of the round with the Damage Rating. For penetration it's rather easy. Force/area equals pressure, and with a little cross sectional area/density calculations thrown in to tweak it, you can figure out penetration. The tissue damage is partially a measure of the energy of the round multiplied by the diameter of the round as this represents the tissue trauma that's created (the larger the round the more tissue it affects). But trying to figure out the effects of tumble, deformation, fragmentation and cavitation (or hydrostatic shockwaves) is a bit trickier.

Inelastic collisions between the human body and a bullet should probably be more damaging than elastic or partially inelastic collisions. For those unfamiliar with physics, an elastic collision is one in which the momentum and kinetic energy of a particle is transferred to another (such as two identical metal balls attached by strings hitting each other...the second bouncing due to the collision of the first). An inelastic collision is one in which the objects bounce away from each other such that some of the kinetic energy is lost (in reality, some kinetic energy is always lost, even in elastic collisions due to heat, sound or friction). How does this concern terminal ballistics? When a bullet is going fast enough, it will hit the human target and go through his body...this creates a partially inelastic collision. This means that not all of the kinetic energy is transferred to the target. A totally inelastic collision means that the bullet becomes embedded in the target such that all the kinetic energy is transferred.

The trick is that depending on where the target is hit, it will offer more or less resistance to the bullet, so I'm not sure this can be adequately represented other than as a purely random factor.

I actually read an article on the web (which I unfortunately lost track of )that debated that terminal ballistics was less dependant on kinetic energy of the round than on momentum, and went into detail about how the impulse of the bullet can be a better predictor of damage than kinetic energy. If correct, it would imply that velocity and mass are equally important since momentum = mass x velocity, whereas kinetic energy equals mass x velocity^2.

Valamir wrote: If I say a .22mm does 1d4 damage and a 9mm round does 1d8 damage, and every gun in my game is stated that way...that's consistant. Its also obviously not what you're talking about.

So what do you actually mean when you say consistant.

Valamir wrote:
In the end all of these calculations provided just the illusion of accuracy, and the end result of the number crunching was absolutely no different than simply analysing the figures from a historical tank battle and concluding "70% of the hits on a Sherman by a Panzer result in mission kills. Roll percentile and move on." In other words 10 times the effort yielded results that ultimately were 0x more authentic.

There are tons of factors to account for in something as simple as tank gun vs tank armor. Those factors are all well known. They involve lots of precise mathematical calculations and the range of possibilities is relatively low. Yet even in such a controlled environment the results of taking a Casual approach are trivially different from the results of taking an effects based approach in application.

Judging weapons fire of any time of small arm against a human target involves orders of magnitude more factors than tank gun vs tank armor. You have to account for the angle the shot penetrated the body, the possibility of hitting or missing vital locations by the tiniest of fractions, all sorts of soft and hard cover effects, etc etc etc.

If this sort of exercize is largely futile for something as simple as armored warfare, I can only expect it to be even more futile for man to man combat.

I don't get anything about bullet trajectories or anything like that. I don't personally care about physics. I would much prefer a game thats fairly simple TO PLAY.
Just because something is rules light doesn't mean for a player its going to be easy. The rules have to handle the world, yes, but precision isn't always neccesary- role playing is, after all, about stories and characters. Realism can add to it yes, but 'breaking character' is the worst thing in the world if we're going the acting analogy.
I agree with the salesman pitch. Thats all acting is- very good salesmanship, except you're selling the character or environment. A good actor, and in here by extension a good player, will sell almost any environment. The writer, or in this case the GM, needs to set a good foundation. An actor can do bupkiss with a play thats a piece of crap because the blocking is all wrong, the character dialoge is choppy and other details are out of whack.

(DISCALIMER: THIS ISN'T NECCESARILY A SYSTEM DOESN'T MATTER STATEMENT!) When it comes to 'hard fought battles' and 'memorible sacrifices', the system doesn't totally matter. Its the players, its the GM. The bulk of the weight rests on the GM to take the rules and create something within it to challenge the players- if the player hasn't fought tooth and nail against all odds to win, its not all the systems fault- thats more the GM, for not knowing the players, knowing their capabilities or knowing their characters. Doesn't matter if there is a perfect simulation of reality- if the GM stinks at scenerio organization, the adventure is going to stink. If the system ISN'T right, the GM can still scale the system to meet their needs, especially if there are guidelines on consistancy.

Just saying more of what you're posting is leaning to the "ultra-realistic as possible" as opposed to "easily scaled within realistic parameters". If you were to create more of a scale than a lesson on phyisics and enegineering I'd say that'd work out a lot better- you can do your realism as much as you want and the Average Joe can properly scale their new Quantum Bolt Rifle within the standards laid out.

I think a lot of people are confusing my design rules with the actual play rules. What I'm looking for are some suggestions based on real world data that could help me determine how damage is applied to the human body (specifically in the context of conventional small arms). I need this information to help me design the Engineering Manual I'm working on which allows users to create their own weapons, vehicles, system components and the like.

I need the hard data based on real world data so that I can make a more simplified, yet hopefully still somewhat accurate and consistent model. In other words, I'm not taking the hard physics and physiological data and applying it directly in the game. Instead, I need the data in order to create the algorithms (the game rules) that cover these topics.

I'm looking at the real world so that I can create the "virtual game world reality". Instead of real life physics, I'm condensing it into "game physics" and "game pathology and physiology". The game laws don't have to be 100% compatible with the real world, but the more the better. As I've said, internal logical consistency is my #1 goal followed by a good approximation to what happens in the real world.

So I think a lot of people's issue with my word realism is a matter of degree. I also feel that many people have different concepts of what exactly roleplaying is. I think the new trend is to emphasize the roleplaying while deemphasizing the game part. In other words, roleplaying has been going down the road of improvisational theatre and storytelling. An adherence to reality for this play style is not only unnecessary but depending on the kind of story you wish to weave, may be detrimental.

I think the one of the first design rules should be, "what kind of experience do you want to give to your players". From this, all other decisions stem. I'm creating a system with lots of tactical choices for several reasons. Firstly, I disagree that it's only up to the GM (within the system rules) to create a hard fought battle for the players. What matters is the realization for the player that it was his decision making and choices that allowed him to persevere and triumph. The fewer options that are given to the player, the more it becomes a simple die-roll, and where is the feeling that the player actually accomplished something in that?

I'm actually not aiming for ultra-realism, as I'm willing to sacrifice some realism to create logical consistency. There goes taht word again :) What do I mean by that? It means that given the setting, the technology and the rest of the game system, everything fits together seemlessly without requiring a suspension of belief. Let me give an example. Let's say that I create rules that allow a hand-sized weapon to destroy a tank. Okay, that's possible...that's what some AT weapons are like right now. Okay, but now let's say that I create rules that also allow it to be the size of a pistol. Well, okay...that's still possible depending on the technology. Who knows, maybe in the next 50 years or so it could happen. But right now it can't. And to include the rules to design such a weapon would be inconsistent with not just our own sense of reality, but it would also be inconsistent within the design rules itself. In other words the design rules should not even allow for the creation of such a weapon even as an "oddity". why would it be inconsistent? Because the "virtual game world reality" has laws that says that at a given technology, only so much energy can be created within such and such a mass. And this energy is what determines the damage potential of the weapon.

I'm going to clearly state upfront how I think the game will best be played by describing its strengths and highlighting its weaknesses. It will be a relatively slow moving game when it comes to combat, but unlike many other game systems, hopefully combat will be rare. Also, in my system, combat is going to be quite deadly, and one or two hits will probably take the character out of the game (it may not kill him, but he'll probably be incapacitated). The trick is in not getting hit (and most games make it FAR too easy to hit your enemy...in real life, it's amazing how hard it is to hit someone...in the famous LA bank heist of 1998, over 1000 rounds were fired, and less than half a dozen officers were hit in a firefight that ranged less than 20meters). As Sydney Freeburg pointed out in his thread, I think many combat systems miss the point of the utter confusion, fear and chaos that fighting is. The martial combat system will be fairly unique in that it's both technique based as well as theory based (sort of like spontaneous magic in Ars Magica). So even the melee combat will be relatively bogged down. I'm also going to have some extensive emotional mechanics so that the players' choices are tempered by the character's psyche and the context of the situation.

As a consequence, my game will probably not appeal to those who want a fast-moving game or one in which the protagonist always does what the player says. It will appeal more to wargamers or people interested in trying to understand some of the factors that go into combat (they may not be 100% real, but at least the players have to think about these factors).

Dauntless wrote: It will be a relatively slow moving game when it comes to combat, but unlike many other game systems, hopefully combat will be rare. Also, in my system, combat is going to be quite deadly, and one or two hits will probably take the character out of the game (it may not kill him, but he'll probably be incapacitated).

It will be a relatively slow moving game when it comes to combat, but unlike many other game systems, hopefully combat will be rare.

Combat will be rare not because it won't be a focus of the game, but rather because hopefully the players will try to avoid it at all costs when they can. If the players want to be combat monsters, it's their prerogative...as long as they don't mind rolling up new characters a lot. In fact, for one of my game settings, I was thinking of borrowing another game idea from Ars Magica, that of playing a "troupe". This way, if you lose one of the characters it's not as traumatic, plus you can't see your group as just cannon fodder. Let me put it this way, combat will be at least as deadly as The Riddle of Steel and Phoenix Command.

When I was running a Phoenix Command campaign set in Vietnam many years ago, both myself and the players learned how deadly combat was. Over time, the players truly learned to fear combat, which is something I can honestly say I've seen no other roleplaying system do. It was the only game I've played that didn't require any form of emotion mechanics to make the players make their character's duck their heads when the bullets came flying in their direction (and some of my players were the grandstanding, "what?? It's just a dragon, we can take it out without breaking a sweat" kinda players").

I hope to recreate that sense of dread that combat brings to the table even though combat is sometimes unavoidable. If anyone is familiar with the Phoenix Command system, I'd say mine's a little bit more complex than it is right now because I have some additional tactical choices the player has to make. One of its main criticisms was that it played pretty slowly due to the number of charts you had to look up as well as the record keeping required to determine the characters' actions and who went first (both it and my system use an action cost system where actions cost a certain amount of points to do...the more time consuming the action, the longer it takes to finish, hence sometimes it's not as important to know who starts an action first, but rather who finishes an action first). But of the 8 people that played in my campaigns they all unanamously agreed it was the best RPG they played (admittedly, most of them also did some wargaming).

As for how complex the combat will be? Well, a lot of my ideas are still rough ideas or even just placeholders. I'm nowhere even near the playtest stage yet so I'm not sure what I can and can't trim to make things play right. Determining damage will be rather complex due to the many forms of damage a human body can take. But basically it'll boil down to figuring out where you got hit, and with what kind of weapon. One roll to hit, how well you hit modifies damage and/or placement, and a damage roll should be all that's required. I'm also pretty sure I'm going to have to make charts bodypart by bodypart and damage form by damage form, as I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out a way to do it just with the dice, but an algorithm has eluded me.

Still, I don't see determining damage as taking any longer than it did for Phoenix Command or Spacetime. I think the harder part is just simply the bookkeeping. Since I have at least 6 System Tracks that measure the various levels of health (structural, neurological, support, psychosis, fatigue and critical) it can get messy pretty quick, especially since some like neurological and fatigue can fluctuate turn by turn.

In the end, I'd rather start with something too complex and through playtesting realize what I can trim than to start too simple and have to add rules later.

An interesting article I read a while back had some intereseting information on firearms and the wounds they create. This FBI agent had done helli-grips of research on fatal and incapacitating wounds and came to a few, simple conclusions about dropping people with the greatest of expedience:

1. Hydrostatic shock is a myth.
2. Temporary cavitation is just that, temporary.
3. The best way to drop someone is to hit the CNS and/or major blood-bearing organs/vessels.
4. In order to have an "effective" offensive/defensive firearm it simply must possess the ability to propel a chunk of lead into someone with enough force to strike the aforementioned areas from any angle and enough energy left over to disrupt them.
5. It's all about shot placement.

Taking all of the numbers and data into account, this simple list of rules is serving our law enforcement and military communities quite well. It also shows that the use of hollow-points can actually hinder the incapacitation process in certain circumstances as the added area of the bullet can keep it from penetrating the target enough to hit the MBBO/V and CNS (see above).

It's all subjective, of course, but a little more info never hurt anyone,
Mark(psycho)Phipps( HAHAHA! )

BTRC and Psycho-
I wish I coud find some military/police data on wounds. If it seems like the caliber of a round is largely independent of how incapacitating a wound is, then I'll account for that in how I determine damage. It's this sort of statistical data I'm looking for to help me figure out how to calculate damage. Do any of you have links or books sa suggestions I could read? From what I've read so far, it does seem like the biggest factor in determining damage is where the wound channel is (what tissue gets damage) and secondarily the severity of tissue trauma (how much of that tissue is destroyed). But on the other hand, I've read some accounts of soldier reports from Somalia to Iraw saying how they had hit targets with multiple 5.56mm rounds to the torso and the target continued to fight. There have been enough of these after action reports that the Army and Marines are seriously looking at replacing the 5.56mm round. I've also seen several pictures of some 82nd AA troops in Afghanistan using the older M14 battle rifle as they said they prefer the weapon there (there's not as much house to house fighting there, and the fights take place at longer ranges...plus they say the 7.62 has greater manstopping power). I've also read an Army after action report saying that only 60% of the troops felt confident in the M9 Beretta, and many troops are requesting the older .45 instead. Not only is the 9mm sidearm not very good at putting down the enemy, they say it has a very high failure rate and is tough to clean.

While real world data may make playing the game seem too depressing or anti-heroic, I can always tweak the data just a little bit. I'm not after 100% realism but rather a system which coincides mostly with reality and doesn't require a stretch of the imagination to believe.

In the end, I want my game to be able to make what's possible in the "real" world (even if very unlikely) possible in the game (and equally as unlikely), and what's impossible in the "real" world impossible in my game. Why did I put quotations around "real"? Because the game core rules should be able to handle alternate realities which are similar to ours but still follow the same basic physics laws but may have different technology capability or may lean towards some mystical or paranatural abilities.

This may seem to circumvent my desire for a consistent "virtual game world", but again, it just points out that I have to make the game world consistent with everything. My favorite example is creating a magical world in which teleportation is possible. If this is possible then you have to think about the ramifications of this technology. If teleportation exists, then what's to prevent one Lord from sending his troops or assassins directly into the castle of a rival Lord? As another example suppose you have FTL travel which is akin to teleportation. In such a case there will be no warning if a force is going to invade another planet.

So the "real" world is the setting of the world and how it works. If it's impossible in the setting of the world, it should be impossible within the game system. This also means that my game system is only partially Universal. It has a Core system that all settings must use, but then there are "plug-ins" that expand how the setting of the world works. For example, the Engineering Manual I'm creating only works for worlds with no magic, and only covers technology up to the next 75+ years from now (give or take a few years). Another "plug-in" will describe how my martial arts setting will work, since it relies on some pseudo-mystical and parahuman abilities (that aren't beyond the realm of belief, but seem almost impossible. But if you've read of the accounts of some modern martial arts masters like Morihei Ueshiba, you'd think they were fairy tales).

Like I said, US Army Medical Service report on combat injuries, WWII and Korea. Also, any medical text on emergency room medicine should have a section on the immediate effects of and treatment of gunshot wounds. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) did some stuff that may be of use as well.

Greg Porter
BTRC

A Name To Know in this regard is Martin L. Fackler. Stick him in google and you will find some articles. Other search terms would be: 'wound ballistics' and 'terminal ballistics'. There is apparently a lot of controversy, but sometimes I suspect this is more smoke than fire. Little of this is actual statistical analysis because a well recorded fight is a rare thing.

I agree with Raviens tho; with this much attention to injury, the system is encouraging peoiple to fight, else they have no use for the system. So whatever you decide, you should operate on the assumption that a large proportion of the actual in-game resolution will be combat related and plan accordingly.

Question:
Given that
1) You have an extensive background as a war-gamer
2) Your playtesters are, by your statement, possibly more into war-gaming than RP'ing
3) The system in question is focusing on 'realism' and a high level of precision in emulating the real world, leaving some room for 'margin of error' type occurances.

Do you have any actual play you can post?
Concurring with the above, that a lot of the mechanics are gearing toward combat, I'm wondering if this is more a war/mini's game without precisely created terrain and minis.
Just a personal opinion, but role playing means more storytelling to me. Pitch the physics- if it makes a good story, I'm for it :D But thats just me.

Thanks Greg and contracycle. Once I'm done with one of my school projects, I'll do some more research on this.

As for a play by play account of how my system works, I'm getting there, but there's still a few things that I haven't fully worked out yet. The main one being the Sequencing system I use. I also have to do more work on the statistical chances of actually hitting anyone. Right now, I want to make my system's ease of hitting someone fairly hard to do unless they have a good amount of time to aim and both the shooter and target are relatively stationary.

Actually, the first and second points go hand in hand with each other. The more time you spend aiming, the longer it takes for you to pull off your shot, but then you have a better chance of hitting. The downside is that you're vulnerable, the other guy may hit you first if he pulls off a snap shot, and even if he misses he might make you flinch. I'm still trying to decide if I should use a count-up sequencing system like Phoenix Command used (where the Action Cost of doing a task depends on the character's speed) or a count-down system, similar to the first edition Shadowrun where you roll an initiative amount, and then count down (and if someone reaches 0, they get to add their speed score again to refresh the initiative pool). They basically both work the same, but the hard part is calculating Action Costs for various tasks, and then modifying this by the character's speed (the faster you are, the shorter it should take you to do something). If I make it such that higher speed characters only have higher initiative pools, it means that they can perform more actions per round, but they won't be faster than a slower character who is performing the same task...so I'm not sure how to tackle this other than factor the character's speed into the Action Cost.

Hopefully I'll have a prototype game engine up within the next month or two (as school permits) and then start tweaking by playtesting it from there.

As for how much roleplaying there will be in the game? Hopefully about a 50/50 mix of gaming and roleplaying. I think they both can bounce off the other. For the experience I'm trying to get across, I think combat is best left to having detailed tactical choices. Roleplaying (or narratively describing combat) the combat scenes just isn't my cup of tea. I tend to prefer things to be a bit more objective than the more narrative (I don't mean this necessarily in the GNS sense) combat resolution systems. In my system, you still have to describe in intimate detail what you are doing and how you are doing it, but these choices are objectively quantified.

For me, the roleplaying will come from the setting. I have two preliminary settings in mind. The first will be a pseudo-historical pan-asian setting. If you can imagine that the eastern nations didn't encounter any European nations until about the 1860's-1900's timeframe, you'll get an idea. The theme of the game will be about the loss of a way of life, and it will highly stress the philosophical and mystical aspects of the many martial and philosophical orders of asia. The martial arts will be realistic, though bordering on the paranormal (imagine if it was not uncommon to find warriors as good as Bruce Lee, Morihei Ueshiba, Mas Oyama, or Sokaku Takeda). There will absolutely be no wire-fu, no mystical flame bolts, no glowing 6' swords, and no steam punk Edwardiana/Victoriana. But it will be about having to find a way of life swallowed up by a growing insidious industrial and mechanistic power. So the setting will not just have combat, but also intrigue as well as diplomacy attempts to reconcile the eastern and western powers.

The other setting will be a transhumanistic, pre-singularity near future timeline (about 2050-2075AD). The world suffered through a 3rd World War in the 2040's between what we would consider the 1st world countries today, and what would be considered 2nd and 3rd world countries (China, India, all of South America and Africa except S. Africa). The war was fought over the right to research and develop certain key technologies (the dangerous ones) which the 1st world nations forbade. Because the 3rd world countries refused, they used these technologies to gain an equal economic footing with the rest of the developed world. Much of the world is now pretty much fully developed, or at least more developed than it was at the turn of the millenium. But the war was never fully resolved to the satisfaction of either parties, and there has been a low key cold war going on ever since. The threat of the proliferation of the GNI technologies (Genetics, Nanotechnology, Intelligence) has created a new form of arms race. Ironically, the former 1st world countries are now forming Luddite movements to actually try to stop some technological progress, as they fear the new transhumanist and extopian movements which have swept over the world.

So this setting is really about player choice. What side do they represent? Are they Luddites or Transhumanists? Are they artificial lifeforms suffering racism? Where to do the players stand on the creation of artifical humans or artificial intelligence? There is combat in this universe, but ironically, it's harder to "die" in this setting too. In fact, it's because of the almost superhuman nature of some of the characters in this game that I'm most worried about determining damage. If I can figure out the baseline damage for a normal human, then hopefully I can extrapolate out what androids, or genegineered and nanite enahanced humans could withstand.

Thanks Greg and contracycle. Once I'm done with one of my school projects, I'll do some more research on this.

As for a play by play account of how my system works, I'm getting there, but there's still a few things that I haven't fully worked out yet. The main one being the Sequencing system I use. I also have to do more work on the statistical chances of actually hitting anyone. Right now, I want to make my system's ease of hitting someone fairly hard to do unless they have a good amount of time to aim and both the shooter and target are relatively stationary.

Actually, the first and second points go hand in hand with each other. The more time you spend aiming, the longer it takes for you to pull off your shot, but then you have a better chance of hitting. The downside is that you're vulnerable, the other guy may hit you first if he pulls off a snap shot, and even if he misses he might make you flinch. I'm still trying to decide if I should use a count-up sequencing system like Phoenix Command used (where the Action Cost of doing a task depends on the character's speed) or a count-down system, similar to the first edition Shadowrun where you roll an initiative amount, and then count down (and if someone reaches 0, they get to add their speed score again to refresh the initiative pool). They basically both work the same, but the hard part is calculating Action Costs for various tasks, and then modifying this by the character's speed (the faster you are, the shorter it should take you to do something). If I make it such that higher speed characters only have higher initiative pools, it means that they can perform more actions per round, but they won't be faster than a slower character who is performing the same task...so I'm not sure how to tackle this other than factor the character's speed into the Action Cost.

Hopefully I'll have a prototype game engine up within the next month or two (as school permits) and then start tweaking by playtesting it from there.

As for how much roleplaying there will be in the game? Hopefully about a 50/50 mix of gaming and roleplaying. I think they both can bounce off the other. For the experience I'm trying to get across, I think combat is best left to having detailed tactical choices. Roleplaying (or narratively describing combat) the combat scenes just isn't my cup of tea. I tend to prefer things to be a bit more objective than the more narrative (I don't mean this necessarily in the GNS sense) combat resolution systems. In my system, you still have to describe in intimate detail what you are doing and how you are doing it, but these choices are objectively quantified.

For me, the roleplaying will come from the setting. I have two preliminary settings in mind. The first will be a pseudo-historical pan-asian setting. If you can imagine that the eastern nations didn't encounter any European nations until about the 1860's-1900's timeframe, you'll get an idea. The theme of the game will be about the loss of a way of life, and it will highly stress the philosophical and mystical aspects of the many martial and philosophical orders of asia. The martial arts will be realistic, though bordering on the paranormal (imagine if it was not uncommon to find warriors as good as Bruce Lee, Morihei Ueshiba, Mas Oyama, or Sokaku Takeda). There will absolutely be no wire-fu, no mystical flame bolts, no glowing 6' swords, and no steam punk Edwardiana/Victoriana. But it will be about having to find a way of life swallowed up by a growing insidious industrial and mechanistic power. So the setting will not just have combat, but also intrigue as well as diplomacy attempts to reconcile the eastern and western powers.

The other setting will be a transhumanistic, pre-singularity near future timeline (about 2050-2075AD). The world suffered through a 3rd World War in the 2040's between what we would consider the 1st world countries today, and what would be considered 2nd and 3rd world countries (China, India, all of South America and Africa except S. Africa). The war was fought over the right to research and develop certain key technologies (the dangerous ones) which the 1st world nations forbade. Because the 3rd world countries refused, they used these technologies to gain an equal economic footing with the rest of the developed world. Much of the world is now pretty much fully developed, or at least more developed than it was at the turn of the millenium. But the war was never fully resolved to the satisfaction of either parties, and there has been a low key cold war going on ever since. The threat of the proliferation of the GNI technologies (Genetics, Nanotechnology, Intelligence) has created a new form of arms race. Ironically, the former 1st world countries are now forming Luddite movements to actually try to stop some technological progress, as they fear the new transhumanist and extopian movements which have swept over the world.

So this setting is really about player choice. What side do they represent? Are they Luddites or Transhumanists? Are they artificial lifeforms suffering racism? Where to do the players stand on the creation of artifical humans or artificial intelligence? There is combat in this universe, but ironically, it's harder to "die" in this setting too. In fact, it's because of the almost superhuman nature of some of the characters in this game that I'm most worried about determining damage. If I can figure out the baseline damage for a normal human, then hopefully I can extrapolate out what androids, or genegineered and nanite enahanced humans could withstand.

Wow, Dauntless...

Both of your settings sound intrigueing.

But I can't for the life of me even conceive how game play in either of them will be enhanced by a combat system that takes into account bullet tumbling.

I mean, I had assumed when you started discussing the nitty gritty of ballistic weaponry that your game was going to be about PCs as members of a SWAT team, or a commando unit, or a unit of soldiers ala Band of Brothers.

A game about "having to find a way of life swallowed up by a growing insidious industrial and mechanistic power." sounds pretty cool.

What fer schlitz do you need to worry about modeling ballistic effects for to play that game?

Seems like a dramatically misplaced priority. My first concern would be how to structure the key attributes and mechanics of the game to focus on the issue of individuality vs. mass produced culture; tradition vs. progress and other key setting elements.

The last thing I'd worry about in a setting like that is detailed trauma mechanics for getting shot. I have to say, that seems entirely...pointless.

Dauntless wrote:
As for a play by play account of how my system works, I'm getting there, but there's still a few things that I haven't fully worked out yet. The main one being the Sequencing system I use. I also have to do more work on the statistical chances of actually hitting anyone. Right now, I want to make my system's ease of hitting someone fairly hard to do unless they have a good amount of time to aim and both the shooter and target are relatively stationary.

If you can pull the role playing in from the setting, most excellent.
Just looking at how you're setting everything up, with the attention to detail and realism and algorithims, concerned it would become nothing more than a war game without minis.
Thats what I said about "breaking character"- having to stop being the character to calculate the damage, trajectory etc etc There is a certain amount of that in any game, granted, but I'd think you'd want to keep more of that to a minimum to keep it from becoming a war game or a board game.
Detail is a good thing, but just saying for a "role playing game" you'd want to keep the math and calculating players have to do to a minimum so they can focus on the character, setting, and events at hand.

Strange, I had created a followup post, but instead the first got double posted and the followup didn't get posted at all....oh well...

In my second post I had conceded that in many ways my game is something of a wargame in disguise. While it's possible to do combat without minis and a map, it'll definitely be easier. It's also developed the way it has because I'm going to transport and modify many of the rules I create for this game into a computer game engine (which I call STRIKE, for Strategic Tactical and Roleplaying Integrated Kit Engine). The Kits are various plug-ings which supplement the Core rules (in fact, which are necessary to play in certain genres).

So while my two settings may seem far removed from modern day gun combat, the Transhuman setting will need to cover firearm combat in great detail, and I also wanted players to be able to create their own settings. The game system is only going to be semi-universal however. There are Core Rules, there are Plug-ins, and there are the World books. Technically the World books are optional, as these will have world detail as well as the Lifepath Templates of the various socio-economic-cultural-caste stereotypes. There will be rules to cover the creation of new Lifepath Templates, but the World books will cover them in detail.

If I ever finish the first two World books, my third is going to go back to Vietnam in which case I'll definitely need the Terminal Ballistics data.

I hope the roleplaying is inspired from the settings. They are both somewhat niche settings, but ones which nevertheless offer alot of insight into the human psyche. It may seem that with my relentless pursuit of getting the numbers right that I'm losing sight of the human element. One of my goals with the game design is to get the players truly fearful of combat, because I think it's used too often. There will be many times where combat is unavoidable, but I want the players to never take combat for granted. In my martial arts system plug-in, I also wanted to do justice to the philosophical and mystical aspects of the arts to get away from the Technique-Fu of other games. If I can pull off the feeling of Katsujinken (the life giving sword, as opposed to satsujinken, the life taking sword), then I'll have accomplished my goal.

BTRC-
For me, the tricky part about figuring out the statistics of shooting is dealing with the range aspect. The farther away a target is, the smaller the target appears, so in a way, it's about target size. But it's even more difficult because now you have to take into account the round trajectory. Most modern weapons fire on the order of 1000m+/sec, so lead times aren't going to be that bad really. Not to mention that most firefights even out in desert zones take place at less than 700m. Even at a relatively far range of 100m, a weapon with a muzzle velocity of 1000m/sec will get there in a little over 1/10th of a second (the bullet slows down due to drag). That means the bullet drops due to gravity only about 9.8m/sec sq*(.1sec)^2 = .098m, or about 4" give or take a little. Combine this with bad winds, and the weapon's inherent accuracy though, and it can come out quite a bit more...enough to make the shooter miss the target if he didn't make any corrections.

I'm also trying to account for what I call the Delta Theta. The Delta Theta is the change in angle the shooter has to make to keep the weapon trained on the target over a certain amount of time. Very large Deltas and very small Deltas are hard to do. For example, let's say that the target is only 10m away, but is running very fast, say about 8m/s perpendicular to you (at a 90 degree angle). You can do some fairly simple Calculus to determine the rate of change of Delta Theta with respect to time. The much more intuitive idea is simply this....a target moving at right angles to you requires a greater Delta Theta than a target that's moving directly toward you or away from you. In other words, target speed andtarget direction (his vector) are important. On the flip side, the farther away a target is, the more minute the Delta Theta becomes. At ranges past 300m, changing the angle 1minute of 1 degree could mean the difference between hitting or missing.

Finally, I have to consider the whole fear and confusion factor. It's one thing to shoot at a non-moving target on a firing range, and quite another to accurately shoot while that target is shooting back. It's been said that the best gunslingers of the west weren't always the fastest or the most accurate, just the ones who controlled their fear the best.

Actually, I'll probably start a thread on this subject in a little bit since it deserves its own thread.

Dauntless,
You're doing it from the wrong direction (add exclamation points to taste). Increased shooter skill means increased ability to do those calculations intuitively and on the fly, just like an outfielder can figure the trajectory of a ball and intersect where it is going to land, even though they are themselves moving while they figure it out and mentally keeping track of their position compared to where they want to throw the ball once they get it.

You simply need to set your range and movement modifiers so they give plausible results for most modern weapons (since you will have no lightspeed weapons). If you have a weapon with exceptionally good or poor range characteristics, you factor that into the weapon's stats as a fixed quantity.

I have no combat experience, but if I pick up a rifle of a given caliber, I know that if it is sighted in level at 100 meters, about how much to compensate vertically for any useful range on that weapon, and how much to lead on a stationary or walking target. This comes from my (passable) skill level.

And I know not to shoot at a running deer at most ranges because I'll probably not hit my aim point, and would rather not have a wounded animal to track down. Knowing when -not- to shoot also comes from my skill level (an intuitive feel of my success chance).

Come up with a few curves that you are confident with, and then work the skill and modifier system to match the curves. I'm a numbers geek, but -trust me-, few roleplayers want to spend 15 minutes figuring out MOA dispersion at 231 meters range with air density at 2,300 meters altitude with a 7 meter crosswind and 5 degree inclination.

At a certain point, your accumulated error exceeds the accuracy gained by each extra step.

Greg Porter

I need the hard data based on real world data so that I can make a more simplified, yet hopefully still somewhat accurate and consistent model.

I wish I coud find some military/police data on wounds. If it seems like the caliber of a round is largely independent of how incapacitating a wound is, then I'll account for that in how I determine damage. It's this sort of statistical data I'm looking for to help me figure out how to calculate damage. Do any of you have links or books sa suggestions I could read?

Was working on one of my own projects, and stumbled across this site:

http://www.firearmstactical.com/tactical.htm

Might have some useful links.

Greg Porter
BTRC