Pre-Gens for Spec Ops - Opinions?

[TheOneRonin]

Originally Posted by DCB

That wasn't the consensus, though, for two main reasons.

First and most importantly, as safisher pointed out, the required skill level strongly depends on what GURPS actions you're choosing to use to represent the real-life actions. The difference between a double-tap every 1 second (AoA) and every 2 seconds (Aim then AoA) is massive in GURPS terms -- up to +6[1] -- which is the difference between skill levels of "not even professional grade" and "stands out among experts". It's not clear which set of actions are correct -- or whether GURPS even has a good match -- but it's certainly the case that there's by necessity a very large subjective component in translating reality into GURPS actions here.

I understand the differences here. But I think it's crucial that you understand the scenario. The amount of time you have to execute a breach & clear on a room with bad guys and hostages is extremely short. I simply don't believe you will have the luxury of time to be able to take an AIM maneuver between each shot. Yes, doing so would net a +4 to each shot, and that's drastic. But don't you think the MOST skilled Hostage Rescue unit in the US should be capable of doing something like that in that short amount of time?

Secondly, the Skill 18/21 estimate seems to have a couple of omissions:
- Each Targeted Attack bonus can go +1 higher (TS p.45 says to round up)
- MP5 has Rcl 2, not 3 (HT p.123-124, no apparent errata)
- Trademark Move: Half-Move and AoA (Determined) Double Tap (Vitals) (TS p.41, suggested on TS p.15)
Each of these gives an additional +1 to hit in the scenario.

You are right on about the first two. TA Vitals maxes out at -1 and TA Face maxes it out at -2, though I'm still not convinced that the "Headshots" would be counted as Face hits in GURPS and not Skull hits. For Skull hits, even with maxed out TA, you are back at -3. And yes, Rcl 2 for the MP5.

And I'm not so sure I'd include trademark move. It seems a little overly specific for a team of operators that have to be very capable in lots of different circumstances.

So if we do maxed TA SMG/Skull for -3 and -2 for Rcl, you still need a skill of 20 to have a net 15 to do this in a real life situation.

With these additions, the required skill goes down to:
- Guns-18: minimal miss chance in combat
- Guns-15: minimal miss chance in training (what was observed)
- Guns-12: minimal miss chance in combat with basic aiming
- Guns-9: minimal miss chance in training with basic aiming

We've covered this. You won't have time for the AIM maneuver. And if you don't include trademark move and shoot for the skull, you are back to skill 20 in combat, skill 17 in training.

One thing we keep forgetting about too is that just because we witness a certain definable MINIMUM skill level in the training scenario doesn't mean that the Delta Cadre couldn't be BETTER than that. Sure, it takes a MINIMUM skill 17 to do repeat what those guys do in training, but is it unrealistic to expect these operators to be able to do the same thing in combat? Is that the level you think they train to?

Note that Guns-14/15 is the canonical estimate for specops soldiers (TS p.42), so the fast way of modeling their training (AoA with no aiming) appears to be fairly reasonable with these additions.

You can't compare Delta or DevGru to normal Special Operations soldiers. The quality of there shooting skills is well above and beyond that of other SpecOps units. It has to be because of the nature of their missions.

[1] +3 base Acc +2 Acc from Very Fine(Accurate) weapon +1 Acc from match grade ammunition. A Very Fine gun's cost and time commitment is so minimal relative to specops training that it seems reasonable to expect.

They might be using good quality weapons, but I'd bet money that they weren't using VERY FINE MP5s with "Match 9mm ammo". None of that matters squat anyway if you aren't able to take turns actually aiming.

[DCB]

Originally Posted by TheOneRonin

I understand the differences here. But I think it's crucial that you understand the scenario. The amount of time you have to execute a breach & clear on a room with bad guys and hostages is extremely short.

True, but as Perfect Organism pointed out, the quote you're working from likely underestimated the elapsed time. You yourself indicated that 6 seconds might be a reasonable estimate for when the flashbang stun would have worn off.

As a result, the prior thread you reference indicated that "between 3 and 6 seconds" is a reasonable range of time to explore.

I simply don't believe you will have the luxury of time to be able to take an AIM maneuver between each shot. Yes, doing so would net a +4 to each shot, and that's drastic. But don't you think the MOST skilled Hostage Rescue unit in the US should be capable of doing something like that in that short amount of time?

That's a purely subjective argument, which is a recipe for wildly different estimates of required skill.

One set of assumptions will have you assigning Guns-21 to these guys, but at the same time another set of assumptions will show Guns-14 to suffice, and it's not at all clear that one or the other is "correct".

I'm still not convinced that the "Headshots" would be counted as Face hits in GURPS and not Skull hits

Look at B.399: Skull hits from the front would be shots to the forehead; is that the size and shape of the training target?

If the standard is shots to a head-shaped silhouette, that would be Skull+Eyes+Face (plus possibly also Neck). A portion of that target area (Face) can be targeted at -5, indicating the whole area would be -5 at most.

And I'm not so sure I'd include trademark move.

Your call for your game, but do note that it's explicitly suggested by Tactical Shooting.

So if we do maxed TA SMG/Skull for -3 and -2 for Rcl, you still need a skill of 20 to have a net 15 to do this in a real life situation.

You're rather easily dismissing the fact that the training targets are (a) completely motionless, (b) completely harmless, and (c) known with certainty to be in a friendly environment, making them almost guaranteed to be easier targets than actual hostiles.

Tactical Shooting suggests various bonuses for training situations. You're free to ignore those, as with any other part of the books, but doing so risks increasingly diverging from what the rules expect from realistic characters.

You won't have time for the AIM maneuver.

One of the reasons I wrote out the skill levels with and without Aim was to point out quite what a HUGE difference there is between the two choices available to a GURPS character. Due to discretizing actions into 1-second chunks, a shooter gets either 0% of Acc or 100% of Acc, but nothing in between.

Reality is not so constrained, so the situation you're talking about may be more accurately modeled with the shooters taking 1.5 seconds with 50% Acc or something similar.

[TheOneRonin]

Originally Posted by DCB

True, but as Perfect Organism pointed out, the quote you're working from likely underestimated the elapsed time. You yourself indicated that 6 seconds might be a reasonable estimate for when the flashbang stun would have worn off.

As a result, the prior thread you reference indicated that "between 3 and 6 seconds" is a reasonable range of time to explore.

Agreed. 6 seconds is possibly in range of reality, but we also never get an exact count of the # of targets the Delta Cadre engaged. If you assume 6 seconds, if they all took 1 second aim actions, the 4 cadre could have "killed" 12 tangos. That sounds like a lot of badguys, especially since there were only trainees in the room.

So yes, with 6 seconds of time, 4 cadre members can take aim actions and dispatch up to 12 tangos. To me, that's an ideal situation. In my own military experience (6 years as an Army Infantryman), we never train for the ideal situation. We always tried to train for worst case. If you can pull **** off under worst-case conditions, then you should be much more likely to succeed.

So what is a reasonable expectation of Stun Duration on a group of HT 10 tangos in a hostage situation?

Tests to resist the Stun effects of a flashbang are HT-5. Any probability experts around that can tell me how many times, on the average, a HT 10 person has to roll a HT-5 check before he succeeds? And what happens when you are rolling for 3, 4, 6, or 10+ NPCs? How many rolls before someone comes out of it?

That sort of thing is beyond my simple math skills, but it would tell us, in GURPS terms, how many 1-second intervals the Delta guys would EXPECT to have to clear a room/airplane cabin/etc.

That's a purely subjective argument, which is a recipe for wildly different estimates of required skill.

One set of assumptions will have you assigning Guns-21 to these guys, but at the same time another set of assumptions will show Guns-14 to suffice, and it's not at all clear that one or the other is "correct".

Agreed. So we have to wait until we know just how much time these guys will have, under GURPS rules, before we can say if they have time to take AIM maneuvers or not.

To be fair, Haney did specifically say 3 seconds. Whether or not that's an accurate assessment is up for debate, but I don't think it's out of the realm of reality for these guys to be THAT good IRL.

Look at B.399: Skull hits from the front would be shots to the forehead; is that the size and shape of the training target?

If the standard is shots to a head-shaped silhouette, that would be Skull+Eyes+Face (plus possibly also Neck). A portion of that target area (Face) can be targeted at -5, indicating the whole area would be -5 at most.

True, but step back from the mechanics and think about what these operators NEED to accomplish. In a real situation, you have to be landing incapacitating shots. In GURPS, hits to the face don't have a wounding modifier like hits to the Vitals, Neck, or Skull. I think that is key to what exact sort of targeting these guys have to do. At worst, the maxed out TA technique for Skull is only 1 point worse than the maxed out TA technique for Face.

Your call for your game, but do note that it's explicitly suggested by Tactical Shooting.

Another good point. I'll have to re-read that section, but I suppose it does make sense for people who train specifically for this sort of thing.

You're rather easily dismissing the fact that the training targets are (a) completely motionless, (b) completely harmless, and (c) known with certainty to be in a friendly environment, making them almost guaranteed to be easier targets than actual hostiles.

Tactical Shooting suggests various bonuses for training situations. You're free to ignore those, as with any other part of the books, but doing so risks increasingly diverging from what the rules expect from realistic characters.

Actually, I'm not

Douglas Cole went through all of the reasonable TDMs for this type of training scenario.

And what a lot of people seem to miss is that if a guy needs to have Skill 14 to do something in training, but skill 19+ to do it under combat conditions, then the training is garbage. ESPECIALLY when talking about the tip top of JSOC units. I started off with the training scenario to show people on this board where I was getting the info, but the bottom line is there is a certain skill level, in GURPS, that is required to be able to perform this kind of action reliably and consistently UNDER COMBAT CONDITIONS.

I think we miss the point when we say "well, there are so many bonuses considering the fact that this is not real combat, that someone with Skill 12 can pull it off 80% of the time." While you may be able to make a case for that, even you admit that those same Skill 12 guys (and the hostages too) will be ****ed if they try to do the same thing under real combat conditions.

One of the reasons I wrote out the skill levels with and without Aim was to point out quite what a HUGE difference there is between the two choices available to a GURPS character. Due to discretizing actions into 1-second chunks, a shooter gets either 0% of Acc or 100% of Acc, but nothing in between.

Reality is not so constrained, so the situation you're talking about may be more accurately modeled with the shooters taking 1.5 seconds with 50% Acc or something similar.

You know, I've been thinking about that as well. The GURPS break-point certainly does skew things that way.

I was actually toying around with changing the CQB technique so it allows a % of ACC on AoA for targets withing PER yards without having to burn a full 1 second on aiming, but I'm not satisfied with how it looks or even convinced that it's not overpowered.

But yeah, some rule/technique for being able to get some % of weapon accuracy without having to spend a full turn aiming would be very applicable to these guys.

[Miles]

Originally Posted by TheOneRonin

And what a lot of people seem to miss is that if a guy needs to have Skill 14 to do something in training, but skill 19+ to do it under combat conditions, then the training is garbage. ESPECIALLY when talking about the tip top of JSOC units. I started off with the training scenario to show people on this board where I was getting the info, but the bottom line is there is a certain skill level, in GURPS, that is required to be able to perform this kind of action reliably and consistently UNDER COMBAT CONDITIONS.

I think we just have a real difference of opinion on how well training translates to reality. If they can complete the training sequence (with a tdm of +3 or 4) with near total confidence, that means they can also perform that same maneuver in combat situations with a good chance of success (effective skill 12ish). I think that's about right, and still puts them miles ahead of regular soldiers that would need a critical hit or a good roll on the random hit locations table to make the same shot.

Yes, performing a maneuver like that is a core part of Delta Force training, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can do it with their eyes closed. My philosophy with GURPS is that high skill primarily exists to be maintain a professional chance of success after hideous TDM, rather than to have near certainty in the outcome at all times.