I'm not sure if this should be in Theory or not, i'm sure it will be moved if it needs to be.

Anyway, what i'm looking for is a survey of systems that use firearms primarily (as opposed to melee weaponry) for combat. But not just any ol' system using guns, i'm looking specifically for a system which also has incredibly easy character death. I guess what i'm looking for is a set of crunchy combat mechanics that are designed primarily for use with weapons that can not be effectively blocked/parried and which are often incapacitating with a single hit...

Thanks.

Thomas

Well, I cannot resist plugging my own game, Unsung. You get shot, roll Meat, and if you fail that roll, you're Down and possibly dead.

You also might find the S Combat System interesting.

I have to praise Millenium's End in this category. I've never played it straight up, but when we converted our long-running Shadowrun/Werewolf crossover game to this system, my shaman/assassin character suddenly found himself massively overqualified to cause instant and messy death with his favorite small-caliber pistol. It's exceedingly good for exactly what you describe, although it's on the way crunchy end of the overall spectrum - Unsung might be a better choice if you want fewer points of contact.

It also has the Simmy virtue that there is absolutely no such thing as a "dodge" of gunfire. You can already have dived for cover, or, well, not; at most, there's an option for broken-field running and the like, which puts you in a continuing state where the TN to hit you is raised somewhat. But as of the declaration, "I pull the trigger," there's absolutely nothing the defender has to say about it, and a single gunshot can be exceedingly fatal.

(One warning, though. Like other systems with the same characteristics, this brings in "what do you do about such hits to PCs?" as a significant question. I almost lost that character when, due to the fact that I was rolling across a doorway and the attacker was distracted, he rolled poorly enough that the nonfatal shoulder shot he had planned failed its roll very slightly, which in that system means it misses its target point by a small distance on a template - in this case right into the head. The magic brought in by the crossover game was the only reason I lived, and that was a 5-year character in an incidental encounter.)

- Eric

BTRC's CORPS satisfied me in this respect. The impairment system is brutal enough, handguns are serious, and there are rample rules for instant kills/head shots/amputations/etc. I mean, it's good for other reasons too, but seemingly realistic combat is a plus.

I looked at Unsung (which i keep meaning to do anyway) and i really like that you have to make a Guts check to attack someone, very nice. The more i look into it and think about it the more i am convinced that Initiative is key. When guns enter the picture firing first generally means firing last. Identifying targets and gaining a "sight picture" first generally means you win.

I'd like to operate on this assumption for now, is anyone aware of a system that has a highly detailed Initiative system that would work in this regard. Something in the direction that Initiative is pretty random with a few bonuses and winning initiative generally means you shoot first. At the same time if you shoot guy X then guy Y has a little more time to bring his weapon to bear... Thanks for the feedback so far, i'm kind of excited about a system that models what i know of CQB style combat...

Thomas

Edited to note that this post crossed with the last -

Why do you need "incredibly easy character death"? Im curious as to what it is that you're trying to accomplish with the mechanic in question. I also what constitutes "incredibly easy".

GURPS, though actually primarily about melee weapons, IMO, does have a lot of rules for firearms, and does make character death from some of them a potentially frequent event. For example, a typical human has 10 hits, and those with more than 15 would be very rare. A hit from a hunting rifle does 7d6 damage, meaning that, on average, a character hit with one, will be down and rolling to see if they survive with penalties right away. If you go to GURPS Traveller you can get yourself a Fusion rifle that does 6dx10 damage. Meaning that on the lowest roll possible, most characters would be instantly dead with no roll (-50), and possibly completely disintigrated (-250). That seems "incredibly easy" to me.

OTHO, I don't think these rules are realistic. That is, people are hit by weapons that are fairly lethal, and live to tell about it all the time. And not just because they were hit in the arm or someplace non-lethal. Statistics on GSWs in the US (which there are plenty of), say that less than 10% of them are lethal. If you are hit in the intestines, for instance, you will not die if you get to a hospital in a reasonable amount of time. Sometimes people live for days this way, bleeding out internally (the external bleeding from most gunshot wounds is easy to control).

More to the point, swords do more "damage" than bullets do. Much more, actually. Damage, is tissue damaged caused by the breaking of bonds, which is caused by the momentum of the object hitting the tissue being translated back into energy as it hits the tissue. Guns have exactly as much impact as the kick that they have. Newton says so. That's all the more force that's imparted. So a bullet's only advantage is that it has a small surface area. That's how they penetrate inside someone and cause damage.

Well, if you can hold a gun, you can cause more damage with a sword. Period.

Now, am I saying that guns aren't lethal? No, I'm not. The big difference between guns and swords is not the amount of damage they do (in fact damage is largely irrelevant in some ways). It's the ease of which you can hit someone with each. Guns are designed to be very easy to use. Point and click, as it were. Swords, for various reasons are not so easy to hurt a person with.

So the standard model for many RPGs and how they handle damage is broken. All weapons are capable of disabling an opponent under the right conditions (I'm stealing from Jake here). A letter opener, wielded correctly can kill a person instantly. It's just ridiculously difficult. And that's the key. It's not how "damaging" a weapon is, it's how easily it's brought to bear on the opponent. See TROS for a model that does this better than most games. It doesn't have rules for Guns, but there are some on the forum here, and given the realism of the system, they end up better than most modern systems.

Interesingly, we all know these things to be true intuitively. We're just trained by RPGs to think of it in incorrect modeling terms. Instead of doing more damage, guns should simply be easier to use. Because this is realistic, it's also more dramatic in most cases. Does it really matter if a character is dead or incapacitated if he's an NPC? Not really, we just don't pay attention to him either way. For PCs, however, it' gives us more to deal with if they rarely die instantly.

So, again, I ask, why do you want really lethal guns? Is it so that players won't do unrealistic things when they encounter them? Or are you creating some game that's like a First Person Shooter that needs a mechanic that eliminates characters quickly? Because there are better and worse solutions for each.

For the ultimate in simulation of firearms, see Pheonix Command. Aftermath! also had complex rules for firearms. These are both examples of systems that look at this sort of resolution in grisly detail. Morrow Project and Twilight 2000 as well (the whole GDW House System is interesting in terms of guns). One thing that you hadn't mentioned, however, is how much detail you're looking for. Still, in a survey, these should be included.

And you did say crunchy. Lots of systems handle firearms in manners that I find to be comepletly realistic, but without much crunch or detail. Loki's recommended systems fall under this category, as do games like The Pool, Unknown Armies, and Dust Devils (which includes a ton of gunplay, typically). I assume these are not what you're looking for?

For a more cinematic take on guns Feng Shui is classic with it's Gun Shticks (Carinval of Carnage, and Both Guns Blazing come to mind). You also might be interested in BTRCs Gun supplements, which, while not precisely system specific can give you a lot of info on the subject. Rolemaster's supplement on Guns (Gun Law?) might be interesting in terms of the critical charts.

Mike

RTalsorian's Cyperpunk 2.0.2.0. combat rules (given the incredibly cute name Friday Night Fire Fight) may just fit the bill. Generally speaking, head shots kill, limb shots incapacitate, and body shots injure. Automatic weapons are fearsome, fearsome things that can kill multiple targets in the blink of an eye.

If you're playing with all the cybernetics, wired reflexes, etc that are in the main book, it can get a little out of hand, but it's a very good system for gunfire, especially in conjunction with tactical movement.

yrs--
--Ben

Mike- sorry about my miscommunication. I tossed off "easy character death" without really thinking. What i'm really going for is "easy character incapacitation." In other words, it doesn't take many hits to be out of the fight. You may not die (as you said survival chances are actually pretty good,) but you're not going to keep fighting.

As to your recommended "non-crunch" systems, as much as i like them, they just don't quite do the CQB thing for me. I guess what i'm really looking for is a system that allows you to model a door-by-door building search in a SWAT or Spec.Ops sense. Kicking in doors and using that second or two of surprise to put everyone down. Right now i'm thinking that unless you're trying some sort of tricky shot (shooting past hostages or friendlies) simply having initiative would be enough to hit first. I'm not sure at this point.

I'll spend some time looking into the materials suggested before i come back to this... Thanks for the input everyone...

Thomas

Incapacitation is another interesting issue. Again, have you looked at TROS? Other systems do this fairly well. But in general, there's the issue of motivation in all this. Called morale in the military, essentially there's a point at which most people will cease fighting, and quite often this comes well before being wounded. Merely the threat of being wounded is often enough. Which means that wounds of any sort are very frequently are all it takes to put someone out of a fight.

My favorite example is has to do with the fallacy of stopping power. Guns for the most part, very simply, do not have enough force to knock people over. People fall over when shot, because they think that's what they're supposed to do.

What you really need to model is the character's will to fight after being shot. Because few shots actually render people unconscious.

OTOH, I'm being overly realistic here, possibly. One can model things on how they happen on TV, where it looks like most people shot with guns just fall over unconscious. I personally feel that the more realistic approach has more thematic oomph in most cases. That is, it's more interesting to consider injured parties who've surrendured than to just assume that they fall unconscious. OTOH, if the genre requires it, then unconsciousness it is. Often a "mook rule" will help here, making the dramatically unimportant characters go out, while dramatically important characters stay awake to speak.

Now, the problem with applying this to PCs is that the usual control level of characters means that a player can overcome combat fear and the like at will. And for good reason - protagonists are the ones who are most likely to stay up in a fight. Sorcerer has a rule for Sorcerers only that allows them to stay up with will long after other characters decide to stay down. This is somewhat like the mook rule, but more extensive.

Again, it all comes down to the specific vision for the game. If it's gritty like a SWAT thing, then I think that the Unsung Gut's Check is the right thing for everyone. For another game, however, you'd want something completely different.

Have you looked at Unknown Armies, actually? The madness meters might be perfect. I love the "hardened" concept and it's implications.

Mike

Well, I think I'm going to have to tout my own game system here...

Step 1: Roll to hit. This is your RA (Range Attack) attribute. Roll under it on a d100. There are lots of modifiers, but the gist of it is that a trained but green character has about 50% at ranges around 20 meters during combat.

Step 2: Interrupt? My system has no dodges, which is where I really quibble with GURPS on firearms. However, you do get an interrupt action useful for many things... one of them is diving behind cover when someone points a gun at you. Of course, most types of cover don't stop bullets completely and you're SOL if you can't find any cover.

Step 3: Penetration. Add weapon strength to a 1d6 and subtract armor. An unarmored person has no armor, and even a bullet proof vest only gives 2 points. Melee weapons range in strength from 1-3 (mostly*) with firearms ranging 1-5 (mostly) for 20th Century weapons. * a successful ST test by the attacker adds +2 to the weapon's strength, making them comparable to ranged weapons.

Step 4: Damage. Transpose the digits on the hit roll for a location, and look it up on the hit chart. In general, a Penetration of 1-4 yields light wounds that are negligible, 5-6 are disabling but rarely life threatening. 7-8 are disabling and life threatening (death by bleeding is most common). 9+ are either instant kills or require instant medical attention. Thus, a person hit by a .45 pistol (strength of 3) can suffer the full range of effects.

Step 5: Incapacitation. This is a Willpower test, to see if you can shrug off the pain, shock and demoralizing effects of the shot. It's the only part of the damage system that's cumulative, and Endurance has a small effect. Failure means the character cannot do anything for a short time, but he can keep attempting tests until he "snaps out of it."

I based these results on some military research, and the only nod I made to gaming issues is that I reduced the chances of instant death. Not that there's much you can do when severe bleeding can kill in as little as 30 seconds... If you wanted more deadly damage, you could use a d8 or d10 for Penetration.


There are some other good systems out there. Pheonix Command is probably the best, but I find it too cumbersome for use in actual play. Riddle of Steel has great potential with modification for modern weapons.

Another interesting cross-reference for you: the rather antique Aliens RPG, whose publisher I'd have to use a search engine to find and which is probably out of print. Overall a very, very eighties game, with some good Sim insights buried in it.

For guns, the insight had to do with aiming time. Your comment about the SWAT search and room-to-room fighting made me think of this mechanic. TROS does sort of the same thing with its missile weapon rules (not off the forum here, the ones in the rulebook), but in a much more granular fashion which (IMO) yields not nearly the same Sim bang for your buck.

Essentially, one combat round in Aliens was a stupidly short period of time. Forget multiple actions, we're talking two paces across a room or taking the safety off as full-round actions. Most things took several rounds to complete. Gunplay, in particular, was directly indexed to this idea. The key table cross-referenced two variables: (a) what's your guns skill, on about a five-point scale, and (b) how many rounds did you take aiming and firing the shot?

You could take a shot as a one-round action. With a pistol, you might get as good odds as 10% on percentile. Spending two or three rounds rapidly increased this chance to reasonably useful levels; spending four or five maxed out your chances to a limit based on your skill, but gave much smaller returns than the second and third rounds had done.

One table per weapon; with a scoped sniper rifle, your chance of a hit if you only spent one round on the process was literally "no, don't bother." Not even a token 1%. However, if you spent those five rounds, if it lay in any range bracket whatsoever, your odds had climbed to 99% - the system may even have had a "Don't roll. You hit." statement, which for the eighties is impressive.

I mention this because the rhythm of the concept does a good job of complementing the sort of room-to-room thing you were talking about; officers burst into the room and swing their weapons from person to person, and it's a kind of race between recovering from surprise (which, given how little one can do in a round, could simply be modeled by requiring "I roll out of bed!" as a full-round action, etc), and the time it takes the offers to get an adequate shot lined up.

Naturally in a more modern game you'd want a better way to handle those teeny rounds than "roll initiative, declare, etc." which that game just didn't have the background to move beyond. A TROS-style "keeping the initiative" system might work, or - given how short the rounds are - ignoring initiative and having everything essentially simultaneous within a given round, maybe rolling a fairly-random initative only after you find out that two gunshots are being made (and have been committed to!) in a round.

Perhaps, rather than (or in addition to?) considerations of lethality, you should be looking at firearms pacing mechanics - or am I reading too much into your last post, Thomas?

- Eric

I just cited this article to someone else, but it's worth examining if you're going for realistically lethal. Charles Franklin's, Hitting Them Where It Hurts in the first issue of The Way, the Truth, and the Dice converts military statistics on combat wounds to a damage mechanic.

Multiverser is set up such that the primary advantage of guns (over melee weapons) is speed. An ordinary person can't usually kill someone with one shot, but a skilled user can do so (and it also depends on the gun).

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

Harlequin wrote: Another interesting cross-reference for you: the rather antique Aliens RPG, whose publisher I'd have to use a search engine to find and which is probably out of print. Overall a very, very eighties game, with some good Sim insights buried in it.

- Eric

A coulpe of games have had a feature I liked: forcing characters to duck if they were attacked by automatic weapons. Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. required a Cool roll, and Conspiracy-X requires a Combat Experience trait.

I'd check out Con-X. This is one of those systems you either love or hate it seems. The important thing about Con-X's system is that you only roll for tests that are uncertain to a sufficient degree to warrent it, otherwise they are automatic actions. Now, range bands equal difficulty, so at short range its quite possible for a good shot to put 3 or so bullets in the target without needing to roll. Movement and so forth can add to difficulties, but becuase of the ability to "script" a sequence of actions such that you automatically hit or are willing to accept the chances, this means that you can move and shoot in quite complex ways.

Wounding is a fairly complex business to explain but IME works quite well. It has a sort of damage array which exploits the strongly karmic system; weapons have both a damage grade a number of points. The points are used in a test against the targets stamina to stage the grade up or down, which makes the wound more or less life threatening. The points are also used as a rating within that wound grade which is used for things like tests to stay conscious. The points, as well as the grade, can also be manipulated by character actions and gear and whatnot. All this makes for quite a complex interaction and there are a fair number of steps to the final effect determination, but because of the strongly karmic system relatively few of these need to be actually rolled out.

I'd have to second the suggestion of Unknown Armies. Fights are fast, guns are notoriously lethal and there are the madness meters gauging the psychological trauma from violent encounters.

Ok. Looks like i'll be looking into Phoenix Command and Unknown Armies (which i've briefly glanced at before, but which i know really nothing about). Eric, thanks for your post. Thanks to everyone else as well, but Eric brought up some interesting stuff and helped me mentally clarify what i want to do.

My current thinking is to do a couple of modifications to The Burning Wheel's combat system and see what happens. The Stell vs. Hesitation mechanic (with its subsequent loss of combat actions) may cover the recovering from surprise thing and combat scripting may well model the short timeframe for actions.

To address Mike's point on genre, i'm looking for something that is pretty realistic. I guess it's time to go check UA out.

If anyone else has brilliant ideas, or simple observations, they are welcome.

Thomas