10-24-2018, 11:01 AM | #31 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
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IF someone just pistol whips or butt-strokes someone, or bangs a door with the butt of the rifle, I wouldn't worry about breakage unless the weapon is known for being fragile (which is not the same as unreliable). If someone swings a modern weapon around by the barrel, especially if they hit something hard with it, I'd check for damage (with a HT roll, etc.).
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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10-24-2018, 11:08 AM | #32 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
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Note that those big muzzle loaders with the reinforced butts do get swing+1 damage, and count as a small club (i.e. they use Axe/Mace skill). I'd use the stats of a small round mace if someone was serious about this - it's the same weight, and does the same damage, so using the rest of the stats seems fair.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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10-24-2018, 11:16 AM | #33 | |
Icelandic - Approach With Caution
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Reykjavķk, Iceland
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
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10-24-2018, 11:17 AM | #34 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
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Which leaves the question, did the Swedes take a large number of casualties, force melee and still win, were their opponents ineffective in inflicting casualties before the Swedes could force melee or did the enemy simply run when charged? Failure to answer this sort of question leads to the sort of false lessons that the Russo-Japanese war taught for WW1 - infantry can indeed break a trench line defended by wire with reasonable artillery support ... if they are very high grade troops, their opponents are fairly low grade and they are prepared to accept heavy casualties. And artillery defensive fire isn't really a thing yet. Quote:
Actions such as Monmouth's rebellion and the various Irish risings provide good examples of where even highly motivated melee infantry would typically be cut to pieces trying to close. Even during the '45 revolt, the highlanders suffered terribly closing to melee range ... initially when they could force melee their broadsword/shield combination was effective against line infantry, but then mostly only against men unfamiliar with the correct techniques for fighting it and, in many cases, poorly trained in general. Once improved anti-shield drills had been developed and fully trained (in many cases veteran) infantry deployed against them (with a consequent improvement in volumes of closing fire) ... and we must suspect, many of their best men lost in earlier engagements ... the highlanders were comprehensively slaughtered. |
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10-24-2018, 11:21 AM | #35 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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10-24-2018, 11:49 AM | #36 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
It would have worked had Highlanders been Romans and had there been no such thing as bullets.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
10-24-2018, 12:03 PM | #37 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
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The battles were fought in the 1700's, so we have what claim to be good sources on the casualty numbers. Go to the great northern war on Wikipedia and click on the list of battles, and they'll start showing numbers. I don't know if the numbers are biased, but the Swedish victories tend to have utterly lopsided casualty numbers, while the losses tend to look like bloodbaths on both sides, though that's just me looking at a handful of numbers. Sweeden certainly wasn't winning by throwing more men at a problem than its enemies. Its numerically outnumbered in most battles. Its troops are considered to generally be of higher quality than its contemporaries, so the high discipline vs. low morale argument is not without merit, but the swedes seem to have killed and wounded a lot of folks as well as scaring them (though that may have been pursuing horsemen). Tactically, they would try to provoke the enemy into shooting at them at mid range, then charge to close range before the enemy could reload. They'd stop briefly to fire a volley at very close range, then go in with sword and pike. Sweeden's defeat is usually attributed to a small population not being able to sustain a 20 year war against multiple foes each with a larger population. Their soldiers were considered elite, and I've always got the impression that solid melee troops take longer to train than musket troops.
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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10-24-2018, 12:35 PM | #38 | ||||||||
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
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This is not the same thing as saying bayonets are primarily psychological devices. Quote:
I addressed the parrying point earlier. (there was a thread where we went into the detail on this, but I can't for the life of me find it now!) Quote:
Or put it another way should you get into HtH contact with you opposing if they have bayonets you really going to noice the lack if you don't! Quote:
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Again that's a simplification, where and when in 'the east'? Not every battle or campaign in the east was fought in a giant steppe. If by your argument cavalry dominated so fully in 'the east', why did they ever field infantry formations? Quote:
If nothing else if you are talking about eastren armies here its not like the gun was an unheard of thing in teh east either?
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Grand High* Poobah of the Cult of Stat Normalisation. *not too high of course |
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10-24-2018, 01:21 PM | #39 |
Join Date: Aug 2018
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
Regarding the avoidance of accidental discharges from impacts (hitting or parrying using your gun) or preventing an enemy from being able to quickly fire your weapon if he is able to grapple the handle/trigger (which you risk by gripping the barrel and using it like a mace)
Page 8 of Tactical Shooting (visible on page 4 of http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-0134_preview.pdf) mentions that safety can be thumbed off (going from Condition One: Cocked and Locked to Condition Zero: Cocked and Unlocked) using a Ready maneuver. Would it be reasonable to think the inverse: that it would also take a Ready maneuver to thumb the safety back on (going from Condition 0 to Condition 1) ? It also mentions "Lightning Fingers" (page 39 of Tactical Shooting) or "familiar users" (page 80 of High Tech) can thumb off the safety as a free action. Would either of these allow re-safetying (thumbing on) weapons as a free action too, or should this always cost a Ready? If someone is allowed to do either a free action, would they be limited to 1 free action per turn? I'm imagining using All-Out Attack (Double) with Rapid-Strike (getting 3 attacks) and all in 1 turn unsafetying a weapon, firing a shot, resafetying it, pistol-whipping someone (hammer fist with a fist load), unsafetying the weapon a 2nd time, firing a 2nd shot, then re-safetying the weapon a 2nd time (4 free actions in 1 second) and it sounds like it should be hard to do. Last edited by Plane; 10-24-2018 at 01:25 PM. |
10-24-2018, 02:57 PM | #40 | |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: Rifle Butt and Pistol Whipping attacks
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I do put a limiter of "your free actions need to be possible and congruous"... so using Akimbo to get two Reloads + two safety changes (one per weapon) is okay. But I also tend to run Action games with the Cinematic dial set in the upper bounds. For 'realism' sake, I'd limit it to "one free action" per round without "reasons"*. For your above multiple safetying example... if the Player really wanted to be able to that, I'd allow him to as long as he had either 2 levels of Lightning Fingers, or Lightning Fingers and some other "and I can do two things at once with my pistols" Perk, like Akimbo, or Dial A Load, or what-have-you. It would have to make sense to me, but there would be that extra 1 point cost involved (heck, if he had Enhanced Time Sense I'd count that). I might even allow it with a Fast-Draw (Pistol) roll. It depends on the campaign settings. * IE they have a UBC that gives them highly Cinematic abilities, like Heroic Archer, Weapon Master, TBaM, etc... or you're just running a higher Action/Cinematic game and allowing the above Akimbo, Quick Reload, Lightning Fingers combinations. |
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on target, pistol whip, pyramid, rifle butt |
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