05-25-2009, 03:05 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Not in your time zone:D
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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...
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05-25-2009, 04:25 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Twin Cities, Minnesota
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
FWIW, This seems to address "to hit" mechanics not "damage" determination and almost seems to ask for universality in damage and to hit.
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05-25-2009, 04:39 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Sep 2008
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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.
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05-25-2009, 04:44 PM | #14 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: 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.
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05-25-2009, 04:47 PM | #15 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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?
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05-25-2009, 04:49 PM | #16 | |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Pennsylvania
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
Quote:
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. |
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05-25-2009, 04:53 PM | #17 | |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Pennsylvania
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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05-25-2009, 05:16 PM | #18 | |
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Lakeville, MN
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
Quote:
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.
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05-25-2009, 05:29 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Pennsylvania
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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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. |
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05-25-2009, 05:43 PM | #20 | |
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Lakeville, MN
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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