Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

[jacobmuller]

Random is definitely the way to go, cp Chaos Theory - Butterfly Effect.

I can understand the Armour as Dice idea, it's useful for figuring the average weapon effects, but neither attacks nor armour are 100% homogenous. GURPS isn't random enough for some tastes - forget d6, I've seen d1,000 charts. KISS works real good for me.

If you want to cut out a die-roll, you could link the amount of damage to the attackers' margin of success and roll randomly only for autofire hits, frag, etc. The more succesful your attack, the greater the injury; cuts out that just made the roll and aced the damage roll versus made it by 10 but rolled all 1's for damage... Feels more realistic to me and keeps it partly random.
I've heard of someone being shot in back of head, execution style, large calibre, and got just a nasty scalp wound - bad execution...

[gmillerd]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

No. Two inches to the right or the left, not enough to even be another hit location makes an enormous difference in how much damage a firearm will actually do to anything complex.

FWIW, This seems to address "to hit" mechanics not "damage" determination and almost seems to ask for universality in damage and to hit.

[SuedodeuS]

Originally Posted by gmillerd

FWIW, This seems to address "to hit" mechanics not "damage" determination and almost seems to ask for universality in damage and to hit.

Fitting this into the "to hit" mechanics would be trying, particularly because, unless the person is specifically aiming for something (with a Targeted Attack), skill has almost no effect on how bad of a wound the weapon will inflict. It's pretty much all chance. Now to represent chance, we roll dice. Hey, lookit that - damage is represented by a dice roll.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by oblador

Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

No. We observe in fact that sometimes people are killed by a single small-calibre bullet, whereas other times people of similar build survive multiple hits by large-calibre bullets. It turns out that although ther energy and penetrating power of bullets fired from a given weapon is pretty constant, how dead they make a target when they hit it depends on where exactly they hit. One bullet can plough through skin and muscle and perhaps even zip out the other side carrying a fair bit of energy with it. The next can sever the aorta on its way through to hit the spine. One target is still fit to shoot back. The other is unconscious and paralysed before he hits the ground and bleeds out in twenty seconds.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by gmillerd

FWIW, This seems to address "to hit" mechanics not "damage" determination and almost seems to ask for universality in damage and to hit.

You mean like the way it is done in James Bond 007 or ForeSight? Roll against a target number to get a quality rating for the attack. Reference quality rating with damage class to determine that amount of damage done?

[Johnny Angel]

Originally Posted by Ragitsu

Don't forget people dying from one shot of .22 LR, but surviving a shot from .50 BMG.

As crazy as it sounds, it's possible. I've seen things like this during my time with the military. I've also seen a round from an M-16 enter someone in the leg and exit from their shoulder. M-16 rounds tumble and richochet off bones instead of punching through and penetrating like many bullets do; this makes the weapon very lethal because it causes a lot of internal damage while it is bouncing around inside of the body. Typically though, yes, a .50 shot to anywhere on the body will kill or at least severely maim someone, but it's not completely unheard of for someone to survive.

Also, as has been mentioned, one or two inches to the left or right can completely change what happens when a bullet hits. This sounds like a hit location issue, but it really isn't because one or two inches can make a difference regardless of whether you're aiming for the head, chest, foot, or hand. Unless you want more detailed hit locations which break down each body part into subcategories and account for every possible part of a body part, the easiest way to model such a thing is to have the dice be random. An easy real life example of someone surviving an unlikely situation is the plethora of stories in which someone tried to kill themselves, yet survived because the bullet didn't kill them. Also, the lady who had the face transplant was shot at close range in the face with a shotgun and survived.

Aside from all of that, personally, I like to roll dice. If you'd rather use fixed values, an easy way to set a fixed value is to figure out what the average value for a set of dice are. The average of one d6 would be 3.5; 2d6 would be 7, and so on.

[Johnny Angel]

Originally Posted by Brett

No. We observe in fact that sometimes people are killed by a single small-calibre bullet, whereas other times people of similar build survive multiple hits by large-calibre bullets. It turns out that although ther energy and penetrating power of bullets fired from a given weapon is pretty constant, how dead they make a target when they hit it depends on where exactly they hit. One bullet can plough through skin and muscle and perhaps even zip out the other side carrying a fair bit of energy with it. The next can sever the aorta on its way through to hit the spine. One target is still fit to shoot back. The other is unconscious and paralysed before he hits the ground and bleeds out in twenty seconds.

It should also be noted that many large-calibre bullets kill based on the principle of hydrostatic shock and not necessarily penetration. A small variance to the hit location can change the amount of shock inflicted upon the body.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

It should also be noted that many large-calibre bullets kill based on the principle of hydrostatic shock and not necessarily penetration. A small variance to the hit location can change the amount of shock inflicted upon the body.

I must crush this wherever it appears. Hydrostatic shock as described is a myth. Large caliber bullets - or really, high energy bullets, kill by the exact same mechanisms all other bullets do, with one "exception that isn't."

The one exception is when a high energy bullet hits the target, the expanding temporary cavity can expand so much that it reaches the medium's elastic limit, causing what is normally a nuisance effect to become truly horrific. [this is the exception that isn't really...it's a response to the same physics as every other bullet imparts: direct tissue destruction in the bullet's path, temporary cavity, and fragmentation effects which can add to the other two.]

High energy bullets also create high energy fragments, either of the bullet itself or of hard bits in the body, and these are terribly damaging.

ANY ogive shaped bullet (narrow in front, big in back) will wish to reorient itself in tissue; when this happens, the bullet will often break (esp at the cannelure, the grove where the case crimps the bullet) and possibly shatter. This is another mechanism that imparts some degree (often a large degree) of lethality to temporary cavity formation, creating a "tear on the dotted line" effect that artificially but effectively reduces elastic limits in tissue.

Inelastic tissue such as the liver and brain tend to pulp itself; there is no temporary cavity worth mentioning, and a reason why such wounds are devastating. Hydostatic shock has nothing to do with it, and the body tends to be very robust to true shock waves.

[Johnny Angel]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

I must crush this wherever it appears. Hydrostatic shock as described is a myth. Large caliber bullets - or really, high energy bullets, kill by the exact same mechanisms all other bullets do, with one "exception that isn't."

The one exception is when a high energy bullet hits the target, the expanding temporary cavity can expand so much that it reaches the medium's elastic limit, causing what is normally a nuisance effect to become truly horrific. [this is the exception that isn't really...it's a response to the same physics as every other bullet imparts: direct tissue destruction in the bullet's path, temporary cavity, and fragmentation effects which can add to the other two.]

High energy bullets also create high energy fragments, either of the bullet itself or of hard bits in the body, and these are terribly damaging.

ANY ogive shaped bullet (narrow in front, big in back) will wish to reorient itself in tissue; when this happens, the bullet will often break (esp at the cannelure, the grove where the case crimps the bullet) and possibly shatter. This is another mechanism that imparts some degree (often a large degree) of lethality to temporary cavity formation, creating a "tear on the dotted line" effect that artificially but effectively reduces elastic limits in tissue.

Inelastic tissue such as the liver and brain tend to pulp itself; there is no temporary cavity worth mentioning, and a reason why such wounds are devastating. Hydostatic shock has nothing to do with it, and the body tends to be very robust to true shock waves.

That hasn't been my experience in the field, but I'm not an expert on the subject of hydrostatic shock. All I really cared about was that the target went down, and the reason I was given as to why seemed to match what happened to the targets I hit. However, I'll do more research into the matter. From my understanding, hyrdostatic shock is similar to the ripple effect of throwing a rock into a pond. A big rock creates more ripples. After rippling outward, the ripples come back to the origin point.


All of that aside. I think there are reasons to justify still rolling dice for gunshots. Furthermore, in my opinion, for someone who wants to use fixed values to change dice values into fixed values than it is to change fixed values into dice values.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

That hasn't been my experience in the field, but I'm not an expert on the subject of hydrostatic shock. All I really cared about was that the target went down, and the reason I was given as to why seemed to match what happened to the targets I hit. However, I'll do more research into the matter. From my understanding, hyrdostatic shock is similar to the ripple effect of throwing a rock into a pond. A big rock creates more ripples. After rippling outward, the ripples come back to the origin point.

That's probably temporary cavity, which does more or less work as you describe. The cases where the expanding cavity exceed the flesh's elastic limit - which is the rule, rather than the exception, for the M16 bullet at close range - produce messy exploded looking wounds. The temporary cavity for the .308 round at close range is the size of a volleyball (!) and I don't even want to think about a .50 BMG.