How to keep melee weapons relevant in a setting with "guns"?

[GodBeastX]

1. Lower Gun damage across the board. I usually do this in martial arts games like "Street Fighter" or "River City Ransom" style so that martial artists seem invincible. All guns become crushing damage and 1/3rd the damage for people with weapon master or trained by a master. Being shot with a gun then becomes as effective as being punched. You often see this in a lot of martial arts games/movies. I mean, Bebop and Rocksteady used to unload machine guns on the ninja turtles.

2. Increased the player's power. If you have super powers, or you have cybernetic implants that let you pull off crazy maneuvers and have bullet proof underskin meshes, etc, it might be more effective to just punch the guy for damage or club them.

3. Remove gun technologies. Maybe single shot guns only exist and are inaccurate as heck.

4. Parrying bullets isn't crazy. Just give every players the skill/advantages to do this. And don't charge them points for it. Or make it part of the setting that everybody can do it if NPCs can do it too.

[AlexanderHowl]

If you are going to use abilities, just allow character to purchase one level of DR (Limited, Piercing Only, -40%; Tough Skin, -40%) [1/level] for every four points that they have invested in style skills and techniques (if a skill or technique is shared for multiple styles, it counts multiple times). Skilled characters reduce the damage that they suffer from guns based off their experience and training. Of course, you could end up with characters with DR 40 (Limited, Piercing Only, -40%; Tough Skin, -40%) [40], but I think that would be acceptable it games where martial artists can go up against multiple gunmen and win.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Also another one I thought of:

Run a game where the characters are somehow physically unable to use guns but can still maybe swing melee weapons. Anything where the characters are quadrupeds using their mouth as their only hand, or otherwise lack the capacity to hold or fire a gun but can still flail with big/pointy sticks.

Of course some inventive individual might come up with a way to stabily mount a gun on a back-brace with a mouth-squeeze trigger. But that's treating the gun more like heavy ordinance* like a bazooka, so it's a fine occasional-use weapon or terror item one of the Big Bad's lieutenants lugs around.

*Appologies if I'm not using that term correctly.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Cold smoke is literally mist. Heavy enough water vapor absorbs both IR and low band radar. But this is really only useful for fixed positions and vehicles (the machinery for it is not man-portable).

There are groups working on hot smoke that will scatter IR in addition to (or instead of) visible light, but it isn't quite working yet. I think the major roadblock is getting the particle size right - burning stuff is not a great way to produce controlled sized particles. Some of the advantage of those coated glass flake ideas is you can control that. It doesn't help that big particles settle out faster either.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by malloyd

There are groups working on hot smoke that will scatter IR in addition to (or instead of) visible light, but it isn't quite working yet. I think the major roadblock is getting the particle size right - burning stuff is not a great way to produce controlled sized particles. Some of the advantage of those coated glass flake ideas is you can control that. It doesn't help that big particles settle out faster either.

Brass and graphite flake VIRSS already exist. The problems they have are dispersal rate (once deployed they are rapidly broken up by even light breezes and as you mentioned, gravity) and toxicity.

[Anthony]

There are, of course, physical screens that will stop infrared just fine, but they're not very convenient to deploy. There's also environments that naturally degrade various sensor types.

[Bobcloclimar]

Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer

That reminded me of Legend of the Galactic Heroes and their use of Seffle particles to justify melee weapons. Basically as I recall they didn't so much make ranged weapons useless as they limited the use of them (fire a gun and the particles would blow up and kill everyone - so its more a MAD type situation) You could still use things like crossbows though.

It wasn't just the particles*, though. Assault armor was laser-proof (there's a couple shots onscreen of them reflecting bolts, including point-defense turrets), so melee weapons were required to engage with said troops; otherwise, firearms (laser or slug) were used. IIRC, the only times civilian melee weapons were effective against the armor was when the troops removed their faceplates, so I think only the military-grade halberds could actually break through the armor (and were probably mono weapons of a sort, although I haven't looked at any supplementary material for the series).

In short: Make the principal enemies of the PCs wear armor that is effective against the firearms the PCs (or their allies) would tend to employ, and make available melee weaponry capable of penetrating said armor. To make firearms still something that most civilians would fear, make the armor expensive enough that only military/paramilitary organizations would be able to purchase it, and/or change the LC as others have noted.

*I've seen romanized it romanized as "zephyr," but I'm not sure what Tanaka's intent actually was.

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by Bobcloclimar

In short: Make the principal enemies of the PCs wear armor that is effective against the firearms the PCs (or their allies) would tend to employ, and make available melee weaponry capable of penetrating said armor. To make firearms still something that most civilians would fear, make the armor expensive enough that only military/paramilitary organizations would be able to purchase it, and/or change the LC as others have noted.

Yeah; that was the thought behind my “Injury Tolerance (Unliving)” proposal. Guns tend to inflict some form of Piercing damage, while melee weapons tend to inflict Crushing or Cutting damage; so something that severely degrades Piercing damage without similarly degrading Cutting and Crushing damage would tend to discourage guns without simultaneously discouraging melee weapons.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

Yeah; that was the thought behind my “Injury Tolerance (Unliving)” proposal.

That's usually not enough without additional effects. At a range of 2 yards with a skill of 16, an assault rifle is expected to get 3.5 hits for 5d each, which even with Unliving is 20-odd points of injury, and it only requires ST 10. There are no melee weapons that can average 20 points of injury with a ST of 10.