What elements should I factor in to determine the odds of hitting someone in ranged combat? Before I get too far, I want my game to model two elements, the first being the fear and confusion of battle and the second being how hard it is to realistically hit someone under such circumstances. A hunter tryig to hit a non-threatening animal is going to be far easier than shooting at a target when your own life is at stake.

Some obvious elements:
Range- How far away the target is
Target Size- How large is the target
Target Vector- At what speed and direction is the target moving?
Shooter Movement- At what speed and direction is the shooter moving?
Weapon Accuracy- How inherently accurate or inaccurate is the weapon? A paintball gun is almost pure randomness after about 200' for example even if you're aiming dead on.
Aim Time- How much time are you aiming?
Weapon Stability- Related to shooter movement. How stable of a firing platform do you have? Firing prone, kneeling, standing, with bipod, tripod, etc.

These elements only cover the actual physical aspects of trying to hit a target, but then there's also the fear factor. All the skill in the world means nothing if your hands are shaking so bad that you can't hit something 7m away. The obvious answer is to let your Morale rating subtract directly from your Skill Level.

As Greg Porter pointed out to me though, how much of this instinctive and intuitive skill, and how much of this is calculated? For example, I mentioned something I'm brewing up called the Delta Theta, which is the rate of change of weapon angle (to keep the target covered) with respect to time. If the Delta Theta is very large or very small, it's harder for the shooter to hit. For example, at extreme ranges, the Delta is extremely small, meaning that the shooter has to make very minute adjustments to account for windage, bullet drop and weapon inaccuracy. At close ranges, if the target's vector is moving perpendicular at a decent speed, the weapon has to be swung through a wider arc to keep on track with the target. This requires more hand-eye dexterity as compared to true skill in order to keep the weapon on target.

So from what angle should I approach this? From the intuitive point and shoot school of thought, or the marskman school of thought? While range has a big influence on this decision, there are several ramifications. For example, what's more important attribute-wise to shooting....dexterity, intelligence, awareness? While the shooting skill covers one's experience and training, and to a degree his innate aptitude it should also be influenced by one of or more of the character's attributes.

Here are some more "obvious" elements:

Conviction - How much do you really want to shoot your target?
Confusion - Are you aiming at the right guy?
Preparation - Is your gun actually unlocked, loaded, ready to fire?

Frankly, I think that if you want to model fear and confusion, one of the best ways to do this is to ignore or obscure all the mechanical aspects that you have been putting so much loving gunbunny attention into, and pay more attention to the mental and emotional aspects that underlie the fear and confusion aspect. The fact is that the players will act less confused if they have access to more information - and each of these elements is a piece of information.

I'm looking at the "gunbunny" and hard science elements of the game merely as a baseline model. I'm not a priest calling upon the Gods of physics to guide my game.

I'd much rather have a cold hard look at the foundation of things, both physical and mental and make some conclusions than to just "wing it" and say, "hmmm, well, this seems like a good number". While its impossible to include every factor that goes into tasks, the more that you consider, the more that you can decide if its important to what you want to model or not. If my cold hard facts number just don't play right or give an experience contrary to what I want out of my game, trust me, I'm going to throw it out and replace it with something that still feels right and coincides with the mood and flavor of the game I'm trying to give.

In other words, I'm trying to apply scientific principle to gauge the statistics involved with certain tasks. Not just the cold hard physics and math, but the human aspect as well. It seems that many people here are focusing on my hard science and not on the human element that I'm trying to convey.

So what I plan to do here is to calculate the baseline probability of combat when the shooter isn't under duress. Once I have this established then I can modify this by the inner human psychological processes that can influence this. Afterall, there will be times that shooting will not be psychologically under duress (for example a sniper firing his first shot).

The suggestion is perhaps that I should do it in the opposite order. Figure out one's mental clarity and stability and then figure out if he's aiming in the right direction? I suppose that's possible. But this goes back to the morale of the character affecting his shooting ability. I do know from reading some statistics that trying to hit someone while being shot at it is incredibly difficult, but shooting at something when your own life is in danger isn't as hard (for reference, to qualify as a Marine Sniper, you have to hit a man sized target at 1000 yds, and a running target at 800 yds 80% of the time).

I get the distinct impression here that many people are against looking at statistics and hard science to develop their game. That anything which is so based on reality must have inherent shortcomings as a game. Whether this is due to a belief that reality doesn't make for good gaming or that somehow I'm "missing the point" I don't understand. The hard science and statistics I am looking at is merely a helpful tool to try to find the game mechanics I want....they are a means and not the end. In fact, to say that I'm "basing" my game on these numbers is wrong, rather I'm using these numbers as models to create my own models. Once I have some cold hard numbers then I can tweak and manipulate these numbers.

Why not just come up with numbers and skip all the hard work? Because then I won't know how deviant they are from the baseline. If the argument is, "well, yeah, but who's to say that your cold hard numbers are any closer to reality than my guesstimates?". It's very possible that's the case, but I'd far more appreciate knowing how I got there than just a gut level intuition as to what certain probabilities are. If my estimations are wrong, at the very least someone else can run with my designs and tweak them, knowing exactly how I came up with my conclusions (the core rules and some of the plug-ins are going to be freeware, including all my design notes...the only thing I'm definitely going to charge for are the World Books, and maybe one or two of the plug-ins). In effect, I'm also creating metagame mechanics...in the traditional sense of the word meta (and not what many people think of like Hero Points, Fate Points, or some other metagame mechanic that allows you to override an affect).

By metagame mechanics, I mean that the GM and players will know exactly how I came up with what I did. From designing weapons to figuring out how to hit someone to figuring out how much damage someone takes from something, to determining how one's psychological states affect combat, to determining how one's socio-economic class affects one's lifepath. By doing this, I allow the users to look under the hood of the game and allow them to tweak it as they see fit. Perhaps they don't like some of my calculations or probablities because their experience tells them differently.

I've also noticed a trend that says, "the more information a player has, either the game becomes more boring or the player is less fearful because he knows his chances of doing something". I agree wholeheartedly which is why I think some game mechanics should be more transparent. For example, in my game, only the GM knows the exact level of damage the player takes and he only describes it to the player. The player won't even know what kind of penalties he's taking for being wounded.

The same can be done with many combat statistics. It's harder if the player also reads the information, but generally speaking any trained character in combat will know many things he should do to increase his chances in combat (for example, taking time to aim, not moving while shooting, stabilizing his weapon, minimizing target area exposure, leapfrog style combat overwatch, etc etc).

So is there a way to make a player not know, "hmmm, my target is 60m away. With my trusty M16A2 and my skill level of 5, taking 12AC to aim, and my target's not moving, I should have a 32% chance of hitting". One of the ways is with the fear factor invoked. Just as with damage, a character can know that he's trembling or uneasy, but he won't know exactly how much it is affecting his aim. Now he doesn't know how much this is affecting his combat ability.

As for modeling the confusion factor, the best way to do this is by describing only what's in the character's field of concentration (perhaps modified by his fear and his awareness). The more fearful a character is, the more he narrows his awareness on what's causing the fear, or he loses it altogether and concentrates only on himself. If a character is concentrating on a target or using a passion in order to increase his chances of doing a task, he also should narrow his awareness. Again, the best way to deal with this is to describe only what is in his field of focus. If an enemy is coming up on his flank...oh well, better hope that his buddy sees it, or that enemy is himself preoccupied with something else. Creating this "tunnel vision" is somewhat tricky because as the GM describes the combat area around one player, another player may be able to pick up cues about what's going on. To a degree this is realistic, as the character should still be able to hear what's going on...but there's a difference between hearing something and listening to something. We can have sensory stimuli all around us and still be oblivious to it (ever been driving on "autopilot" and all of a sudden realize what you were doing, like "that was a green light I went through wasn't it??"). So I'm still not sure exactly to handle this, but these are just preliminary ideas.

May I take a general stab at this?

Suggestions:
1) Rather than look at optimal chances of hitting, look at " combat normal" chances of hitting.

What I mean is this: Base the pcs' chances of hitting on situations with aware enemies who are returning fire, along with various loud noises ( explosions, screams of wounded comrades, etc) and poor visibility ( due to hunkering down, smoke, dim light, foliage). By making this your base number for ranged combat, you give players a good basic idea of what they can do in the normal firefight ( ie- almost a worst case scenario as the norm).

Adding bonuses for the betterment of the situation is then relatively easy.

I'm not sure what sort of system you're using, but if it was a d%, I would probably count someone with a normal 10% base value as trained/experienced and someone with a base 20% as absolutely deadly. That of course is assuming that the timeframe represented is relatively small (1-5 seconds or so) per attack.

2) Divide combat ranges of weapons by about 3 to find normal combat effective range. Or, arbitrarily decide that combat normal range for firefights is about 5-15 yards for most small arms. Of course, visibilty may make this longer or shorter.

3) Fear and confusion? Make getting hit random and deadly. Heck, just plain skip anything along the lines of Hitpoints or wound levels. If someone gets nailed by anything, just have a roll on a random wound chart. I've heard of people surviving relatively unharmed from mortar attacks and other people that got killed by tiny shell fragments really far from the actual point of impact. Think of it as Random Negative Reinforcement. It should make players very twitchy after the first time they experience it.

4) Have entirely random modifiers, then autopsy the results of the roll.
This one is a little radical. Let's pretend that we are using a d% system and the combat normal base for our hypothetical shooter is 15%. The shooter's declared action is something like "blaze away at the closest visible enemies" ( fairly reasonable in a firefight). Rather than consulting a whole bunch of heavy modifiers, you have a chart that looks something like this:

Roll d10:
1= -15% 2= -10% 3=-5% 4,5,6,7=no mod 8=+5% 9=+10% 10= +15%

or whatever.

You've got your mod for the attack. If you're so inclined, roll the random mod, and come up with a reason for it on the spot. Alternately, simply add/subract the mod, work out the results, then "autopsy" the result- y'know, explain "why" after the fact. For example, the shooter rolls a 10 for his mod, and comes up with +15%. He now has a 30% of nailing those enemies closest to him ( let's also presume some sort of repeating weapon here, so multiple hits become possible). If he rolls and hits some or most of the enemy, the explanation becomes something like:

"The stormtroopers gasp as you pop up to the window and open up with your Sten. Their sergeant never even gets a look at you as the bullets hammer into them, throwing them into the dirt. A single rifleman jumps away and back into the doorway across the street, scrambling to escape your bullets, which shatter the stucco beside his hiding place."

Misses, or a mod roll that pretty well makes the attack useless, is described as easily. Maybe another enemy is giving covering fire that makes the shooter keep his head down, or maybe the shooter is momemtarily distracted, and fires uselessly after the enemies as they duck into relative saftey closer to the shooter's position.

As an aside, please understand that I do tend to be an avid miniatures gamer as well as a roleplayer. I hope that the suggestion for using the random modifier and random effects for hits is not misconstrued as an impingement on a very gamist approach to combat. Far from it. I would hope instead that these suggestions would move the strategy part of addressing challenge in firefights away from modifier mongering at the one man level to the modifier mongering at a more situational level. The tactical minded player then moves form worrying about the aspects of say training level, to the more tactical level of setting of ambushes against unprepared oponents, or properly using superior numbers for outflanking or crossfire benefits.

Anyway just some thoughts.
Robert

komradebob-
It's funny you mention a random modifier for shooting. I've been debating whether I should include varying Die mechanics to represent the varying level of randomness of certain tasks. For example, when you are trying to lift something, generally speaking it's a very consistent task. You might get +/-10% of your max lift on any one try throughout the day (not counting fatigue). Other tasks are mostly time dependent...given enough time you will do it, but your time variation may be a little more or less. Some tasks are almost totally random, for example trying to dodge shell fragments with no cover (by the way, I found a pretty detailed site on medical statistics from the Korean War, and the majority of combat related deaths were caused by shell fragmentation...almost two to one compared to bullet deaths, and the second most common cause of death was amputation, either outright or out of necessity for an operation).

So I could include a sort of random Die Mechanic in which the probability of probability is itself affected. I was thinking this might be confusing and lead to groans of protest however.

So you suggest looking at the combat normal chances of hitting as the baseline rather than the "cool and collected" chances of hitting as the baseline? I suppose it could work either way. I've been toying in my brain an idea of a tetrahedron (a 4-sided pyramid like a d4) that represents the cardinal aspects of a human. Each apex covers a central aspect of the character. The apexes are: Mental, Emotional, Physical, and Spiritual. Every task has one of these apexes at the "top" and another vertex is pointing at the player (if you imagine it sa a d4 on the table, one apex is always pointing up, this is the major factor, and the secondary factor is the vertex pointing at the player), and every vertex is influenced by and influences the other vertices. Trying to figure out which aspect is the top apex is a bit tricky. I've been seeing ranged combat as mostly a physical aspect with the mental as secondary, but if you use the combat as the baseline, then emotional is the most important with either physical or mental as secondary.

A part of me even wants to use this tetrahedron idea as a d4 in play. You roll the d4 and that becomes your influencing factor. You can shift the result up or down by expending various points to better your chances.

The Korean War stat is interesting. I recall reading something similar in the designer notes for an old edition of Panzerblitz regarding ww2 casualties on the Eastern Front.

The only thing I have a concern about such statistics is that they might give a misimpression of weapon deadliness, rather than the usage of a given weapon on the battlefield. Mind you, I'm not suggesting that artillery isn't deadly. What I'm getting at is that it is a slightly different kind of deadly than small arms fire.

Artillery drops death on you out of the sky, probably from someplace you can't even see, much less return fire on. Basically, you can hunker down and take it, hoping that you get lucky, or you can hotleggit out of the area and hope that you don't get slaughtered in the open by shellbursts or gunned down by enemy infantry moving in on your unit under cover of the barrage.

With small arms, you and the people who are attempting to kill you are within each others effective range. Hopefully you will be able to make them go away, or, barring that, can get away yourself. If neither of the above is possible, hopefully your friends nearby will rush to your aid, and allow one of the two above mentioned options to take place.

The fact that optimally armies use some sort of shelling, either by artillery or aircraft, as a prelude to an attack may well account for those figures. Add on top of that that casualties in some units might only come from those sources ( artillerymen for example, who would probably suffer the bulk of their casualties from counterbattery fire, or tank crews who would only be likely to take hits from other armoured units or aircraft), so this may also skew the raw numbers. Finally, what do things like grenades and rifle grenades count as, shells or small arms fire?

In any case, my combat normal idea came from stats I had seen concerning the amount of fired bullets per enemy casualty caused somewhere. I want to attribute it to James Dunnigan, in How to Make War. JD was an old avalon hill and spi wargame designer, and how to make war was a book he wrote in the mid-80s on the subject of wargame design. You might want to check it out.

On a related issue of interpretting statistics:
Dunnigan noted that military formations tended to suffer attrition rates around 2-3% with active contact, slightly higher during battles, say 5-6%. He also noticed that units stopped aggressive fighting at about 10% casualties, and often routed at 15%. Units often ceased to exist at the 30-50% casualty mark ( NOTE: these are from memory. They are probably off a few percentage points. PLease forgive). Hmm.

Now, I remembered some of Granddad's war stories about one of the battles in the Southern Pacific, where he referred to US Marine casualties in some units being as high as 70-80%.

Well, I thought, my god, that doesn't match up with JD's figures at all. So I went to check another source, this being a US Army history of the battle in question. According to this history, Marine casualties were high, but not higher than JD's figures. So was Grandad lying or what?

Well, yes and no. See, both Dunnigan and the Army history were counting casualties for bigger formations, like divisions or regimental combat teams. Granddad was referring to the platoons and companies actually hitting the beaches. Those smaller formations got their asses handed to them. However, when their casualties were averaged in with those in follow-on units and later arriving reserves, the percentage unit casualties drop dramatically.

Incidently, KPFS has a nice rant about general gun deadliness, pointing out among other things that bullets do not magically disappear if they fail to hit their intended target. Basically, just being in the area that combat is occurring is deadly. It did give me an idea, that harkened back to an old April Fools issue of Dragon Magazine article about wandering damage tables.

Since I'm a d% junkie, I'll throw it out there in that form.

Each turn ( combat round, heartbeat,whatever) there is a small chance that any given person in an area of a firefight becomes a casualty. Like say just 1% on any given turn, maybe modified to 2% for especially intense combat with barrages in effect, or if characters are really close to the center of activity. Simply go ahead and check at the beginning of the turn. Maybe check again whenever the character draws attention, such as by moving or firing. If they get hit, roll on the random effects table.

Now, that doesn't sound too bad, right? But if your turn is say 5 seconds long, a five minute firefight involves a minimum of 60 times that you have a chance of getting wounded for no particular reason other than you're there. That isn't even counting the folks actively trying to kill you. Oh, yeah, everybody else in the area is in the same spot as well. Everybody. Your guys, the other fellas and any unfortunate civvies present.

Incidently, I was just bashing together some simple miniatures rules the other day. I arbitrarily decide to use a d6, and equally arbitrarily decided that a given attack hit on a roll of "6". That works about to 17% chance of knocking out the other fellow for each die rolled. Despite that seemingly low chance of hitting ( and with some saving throws thrown in as per warhammer tradition), I still found that combat was appropriately deadly. I recognize that this does seem to fly in the face of concerns with "whiff factor" frustrations that posters here on the Forge have mentioned. On the flipside, most hits were effectively terminal (figures that were allowed saves generally only saved on a "6" also).

Later
Robert

I understand that you're trying to create frightening, bloody, infrequent combat, and at the same time take into account all these features.

What I have been trying to say in all these threads where you seem to be looking for validation for decisions you already made is this: You're only looking at one side of the coin. Mechanical effects of the system are well and good, but without paying attention to the perceptual effects of a system, you will break your system.

In reference to this design effert, I mean that your attempt to take all this into account (in whatever way you end up trying to do it) will slow down the pace of combat, which means that, perceptually, it will be frequent and without tension, because events will be relatively rare, separated by long stretches of resolution, and the amount of time that combat will take will be significantly larger than that of any other resolution. Even if someone dies every turn, if a turn takes a half hour, no one will care. This is basically the feeling I get from low-level D&D combat - even though your character is in genuine danger for his life, because combat resolution is so slow, detailed, and complicated, you hardly notice it when someone does die, because it is lost in the slow tide of rolling dice. It seems odd to me that you are claiming to make a mechanic with a particular feel, and yet you are completely ignoring the feel of your game because you want to be comfortable in your game's ability to simulate reality.

Shreyas-
Most of the time spent in determining combat will be due to the calculations the GM makes. I'm trying to make a lot of the mechanics transparent to the players so that they can't factor in all the statistics and odds in their heads.

I also disagree with your assertion that a lengthy combat process will create less of a sense of dread and intensity for the players (their perception of the flow of combat and its ensuing chaos). In fact, if anything, I've discovered the opposite. In most of the wargames I've played there was a time limit to the amount of time you had to conceive of the orders for your troops. I'm thinking of doing the same (on a subjective level), meaning that the players will have a time pressure to think of what it is they must do. Because of the great level of tactical choices available to them, the players must be on their toes and ready for anything.

There are in essence three major parts to combat: 1) Determining what you want to do, 2) figuring out who goes when, and 3) determining the outcome of the event. The first part takes no longer than other games. The second part takes longer than most games because I don't use a simple initiative system like most do. Instead of rolling your initiative dice and adding some form of Agility to figure out who's action goes first, I instead use an Action Cost system wherein every action has a set amount of AC, and a roll is made only at the beginning of an Exchange. In my system, the lower one's Reaction the better, as this Reaction score is added to the total from the dice. So you add your Initiative Total (including your Reaction attribute) to the AC of whatever action it is you wish to do. Whomever has the lowest amount goes first. As long as the Exchange lasts (and an Exchange is defined as two or more entities engaged knowingly and specifically against each other) no more rolling is required, and from that point on, only the AC of the committed action counts. I think I'm going to use a count-up system, such that you always add the AC cost of an action to your current total...again, whomever has the lowest AC count when the action completes in the phase goes first.That's why it's more important to know who finishes a task rather than who starts a task first (it's very possible that a slightly faster character wielding an axe will start his swing first, but the other character thrusting his sword will complete his task first). Complicating this slightly is the fact that players can chose to make hasty or patient actions which increase or decrease the time requirement but modify the chances of success.

The third part is probably what will take longer to figure out compared to most games. I have certain "Pools" of points which the player can use to modify the chances of his success or the intensity of the outcome. I currently have 4 such Pools, though I've been thinking of a few others...but 4 eems good for right now (too many Pools may cause too much of a delay due to choice). The actual Die Mechanics are very simple, though very adaptable. You roll 2d6 and 1d10. The 2d6 determine the result, and the 1d10 is the control die. The 2d6 uses an absolute value system, the result is as follows:

|FirstDie - Second Die| -1 = modifier
Unless both die come up with the same value, then it becomes
DieValue - 1

So for example
{5,3} (5-3)-1 = 1
{2,5} (5-2)-1 = 2
{1,6} (6-1)-1 = 4
{3,4} (4-3)-1 = 0
{5,5} 5 -1 = 4
{3,3} 3 -1 = 2

The control die will tell you whether this modifier is a positive or negative modifier. Normally, it is a 50/50 chance, but using certain Pool points or other modifiers can shift this up or down. The Die Mechanic suits my idea that most tasks are only slightly random and that it is more important for a character to have to act properly to succeed (to concentrate and focus on what he's doing, spend more time, get help or invoke a passion to increase his chances). If you'll notice, the Die Mechanic I use centers strongly around +0 (it's a very steep bell curve...different from one you'd get if you use 2d6-7 which generates the same -5 to +5 values)

And it is precisely because the player has so many choices that the perception of his task feels more that it is player choice rather than random result that affects his action. And that is why I submit that my system, though it may take longer to carry out than most other games will also feel much more direct. My game will hopefully have the feeling that the player has a much more direct hand in how his character succeeds because of the player input. So I will assert that the length of time is actually a boon to the perception that the player is immersed in the world of the character. These choices take some extra time. But adding in the hidden mechanics that only the GM knows (because he determines them) and because of the hidden levels of things like fear and wounds, the player will never be certain of anything. They may know that the bullet drop of a 5.56mm round fired from an SA80 is so many cm per 100m, and they may know that the patter spread of a shotgun blast should cover a human sized target at 15m with 00 buckshot, but that will only partially help them. It's no different than what we would know in real life, and it doesn't always help us either.

Komradebob-
Very interesting stuff. I for one was surprised at the combat statistics too, until I found another site that details the current war in Iraq, and it's following about the same pattern (most of the soldiers there are getting wounded by RPG and roadside bomb attacks, about 31%, 25% from blasts and about 16% are coming from bullets). I know that in the Korean War, about the only advantages the UN troops had was air superiority and artillery. I also remember reading about how in one WWI battle (can't remember which though it may have been the Sonne) it was estimated that one artilelry shell landed for every square meter of the battlefield. That's simply mind-boggling. I can now understand why 90% of the British Army that had been enlisted before 1914 were dead by 1917.

As for morale and combat effectiveness, I think your granddad was right. Those Marines got chopped up pretty good on those island hopping campaigns. One of my great-uncles was a Marine too, one a Sea-bee, and my grand dad was a Lieutant-Commander in the Navy who participated in several of the island hopping campaigns as Naval bombardment (he was in command of a Destroyer early in the war, and a little later, commanded a Destroyer Escort squadron). I wouldn't be surprised if my granddad did some of the artillery bombardments for your grandad in one of them (I know for sure my granddad was at Palau, Gaudalcanal, and Tarawa and I think he was at Kwajalein too, though I'm not positive..and I have no idea about Iwo Jima). Unfortunately, I was too little to remember one of my great-uncles story (the one that was in the Marines) before he died, though I do remember one of my other great-uncles tales about D-day and Market Garden (he was in the 82nd AA). Actually, all 5 brothers served and all made it home amazingly.

But those stories did have an impact on me. And that utter confusion and fear is something I really want to get across. The idea of a random hit at any point in the battle is an interesting one. I can see that very easily for a tactical level skirmish game, but I don't know how well it would sit in a roleplaying game. Perhaps if a player does get hit, it can be a "flesh wound" kind of thing. One to get the player panicky wondering how in the hell he got hit, but other than the pain and some minor blood loss, not make it too detailed. If one doesn't know where one's enemy is, the psychological affect is very traumatic (and speaking of psychological trauma, it was disheartening to see in the medical statistics for the current Iraq War that as of March 31st, 2004, 677 Army personnel were evacuated out due to psychological distress...that's almost as many as have been killed in all the armed services combined).

Once I come up with some statistical numbers, I'll probably playtest them out a little bit to see how they feel. I'm willing to give a deviance of about +/-20% in order to "flavor" the game system in the particular direction I want. I'm trying to avoid being too arbitrary, even if it happens that being arbitrary will give me the exact results I want.

Here's an interesting link for you Dauntless

Things to consider concerning Gunshot Wound Reaction
http://www.firearmstactical.com/tacticalbriefs/volume4/number2/article421.htm

Wound Ballistics Myths
http://www.firearmstactical.com/briefs23.htm

There's a bunch of interesting writeups at that website's homepage.

Including the Myth of Energy Transfer that states that a lot of the "stopping power" from being shot is psychological on the part of the victim.

Possibly the most interesting for you is the FBI Handgun wounding factors article.
http://www.firearmstactical.com/hwfe.htm

a different website with actual combat statistics from police reporting, including hit percentage by range
http://www.iupa-fl.org/Articles/combat.htm

Bob-
Interesting links and I'll check them out in more detail in the next day or two, but probably more geared for my thread here.

You wouldn't happen to have any info about the statistics of actually hitting anyone in a combat situation though would you besides that last link?

Wow, I just read a little of that last link, and there's some very interesting statistics there...

From NYPD Research wrote: The police officer's potential for hitting his adversary during armed
confrontation has increased over the years and stands at slightly over 25% of
the rounds fired. An assailant's skill was 11% in 1979.

In 1990 the overall police hit potential was 19%. Where distances could be
determined, the hit percentages at distances under 15 yards were:

Less than 3 yards ..... 38%
3 yards to 7 yards .. 11.5%
7 yards to 15 yards .. 9.4%

In 1992 the overall police hit potential was 17%. Where distances could be
determined, the hit percentages at distances under 15 yards were:

Less than 3 yards ..... 28%
3 yards to 7 yards .... 11%
7 yards to 15 yards . 4.2%

An attempt was made to relate an officer's ability to strike a target in a
combat situation to his range qualification scores. After making over 200
such comparisons, no firm conclusion was reached. To this writer's mind,
the study result establishes that there is indeed a disconnect between the
two.

Now that I think about it more, it seems that courage under fire is THE determining factor for determining combat ability.

I was just thinking about my paintball experiences and remember thinking how impossible it seemed for anyone in a war to survive. While paintball is played at fairly close ranges (about 100ft or less) it's amazing how easy it is to get hit with wildly inaccurate semi-automatic guns (sometimes you can actually see the blur of the paintball whizz towards you or even blow off course). In a world with fully automatic weapons that are highly accurate, I just couldn't see how anyone would get out alive.

While paintball does have a pain factor that makes you not want to get, there's still not that overriding fear of death that hangs over everything that you do.

So with this in mind, perhaps the traditional skill in combat should be the modifier to the emotional state, and not the other way around? In other words, your emotional state gives the base chance, and your marksmanship gives you a modifier. The traditional combat skills are only benchmarks for non-stressful events in which the emotional state is not important.

For my RPG engine (which is broadly inspired by Riddle of Steel -- borrow from the best!), I focus heavily on firearms combat, and went down much the same path you're doing.

I had all kinds of situational modifiers, I had all kinds of weapon modifiers, I had all kinds of weapon stats.

I then read the same reports you just did, and threw them all away.

You can take two skills (A weapon skill and usually a psychological skill like "Professional Skill: Soldier" or "GangBanger" or "Leadership") and add them together to make a Combat Pool. If the skills have different TNs, you need to use different colored dice.

At the start of every combat round, everyone divvies their dice into three subpools:

Stress
Awareness
Effectiveness

Every round in combat, you need to score a number of successes equal to the stress rating of the combat action. If you fail to meet this threshold by 1, your other allocations go immediately to Awareness. If you fail to meet this threshold by 2, you freeze. Fail it by three and gain a Flaw...

Situational mods add or decrease the stress level. Think of it as a morale check. Current sit mods are "Running while under fire: +1 stress per hex travelled." "That was a close one..." (target just misses you) +2 stress.

Stress levels in combat generally decline as the combat progresses, and get upped again with situational mods as above.

Everyone rolls stress and just keeps track of "made it, missed by 1, missed by 2, missed by more."

Everyone rolls awareness, and holds up fingers showing how many successes they got. Lowest successes spend them first, and the GM is encouraged to require quick answers.

Awareness successes can be "spent" on three things:

1) You can spend one awareness success to remain aware of one other person in the fight.

2) You can spend one awareness success to add a -1 success defensive modifier against someone you're aware of.

3) You can spend two awareness successes to add a -1 success defensive modifier against everyone in the fight, but also suffer the same penalty when firing back. If you blow Stress by 1, all of your successes in awareness go into option 3.

Maximum defensive bonus is set by the lower of successes, or a GM determined maximum based on cover and concealment available.

Declaration is done low to high, with PCs winning the ties.

Effectiveness is what you actually SHOOT with, and can only include dice from the Weapon skill. The other two categories can pull dice from either skill. Effectiveness is done in the order of highest Awareness total to lowest.

Roll dice, meet a success threshold based on the range to the target, part of the body aimed for if firing within 30 meters, and whatever defensive bonuses he's taking from Awareness. If you get a number of successes equal to this threshold, you just missed him (and his stress level goes up by one). If you get one over it, you've hit him -- additional successes past that add to the wound roll.

High velocity bullets have a bonus for getting past armor. Larger calibre bullets have a bonus to the wound roll. Like RoS it takes time to regenerate your dice in effectiveness -- for pistols, the recharge rate is N, for short long arms (M-16) it's N/2, for long long arms (Sniper rifle) it's N/4. The maximum number of dice in effectiveness you can have is also set by the weapon, with pistols having lower maxima than long arms.

I'm trying to find a way to avoid the 'chart-reader' problem of TRoS, while still giving the appeal of targeting regions of the body.

In terms of the "gut check" test:

1) It gives full weight to the psychological aspects of shooting.
2) It allows people to do "target fixation", which is a COMMON thing in police reports.
3) It keeps total accuracies down.
4) It actually encourages "hug the foxhole like it's your momma" as a behavior, especially as "near misses" keep adding to the stress levels. Watching a comrade get hurt adds to stress levels, etc.

What I'm most worried about is that it's going to be as slow and cumbersome as TRoS has turned out to be for my group.

I have more on this on my BBS at http://www.adastragames.com/discus.html

Ken Burnside

Dauntless, you wrote:

In other words, your emotional state gives the base chance, and your marksmanship gives you a modifier.

AdAstra-
Very intriguing system you've got there. I like how the effect of one task can cascade and affect the others. I've been trying to think of something similar myself, but with my system (I don't have Dice Pools) it doesn't seem to work very well.

I wouldn't worry about it taking too long to resolve. The biggest time waster will be the players trying to figure out how many dice to allocate. I don't think the actual die rolling itself and the calculations will be that bad. Plus, the tension created by rolling the dice is fun in itself. So I think the real time issue here is how long it takes the players to decide how many dice to allocate. I'd use the old countdown method....count to 10, and if they haven't declared it by then, they get no dice and just hold.