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Old 05-24-2009, 09:25 AM   #1
oblador
 
Join Date: May 2009
Default Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

Hi folks,

I've been playing gurps for a long time and I've always wondered why the firearms damage isn't fixed instead of being given by dice rolls. It'd be logical for me that one shot of a certain gun could only inflict a certain exact amount of damage that would only diminish according the victim's armor or damage resistance.

Thus, my question is:
Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

Thanks.
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Old 05-24-2009, 09:31 AM   #2
David Johnston2
 
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Default Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

Quote:
Originally Posted by oblador View Post
Hi folks,

I've been playing gurps for a long time and I've always wondered why the firearms damage isn't fixed instead of being given by dice rolls. It'd be logical for me that one shot of a certain gun could only inflict a certain exact amount of damage that would only diminish according the victim's armor or damage resistance.

Thus, my question is:
Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

Thanks.
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.
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Old 05-24-2009, 09:34 AM   #3
Xilodel
 
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Default Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

I'm hardly a gun expert, but I would think it's for the same reason muscle powered weapons don't do the exact same amount of damage with each strike - after all, is shooting someone twice in the same place any different from stabbing them twice with a rapier in the same spot?

It has to do not necessarily with where you hit, but what you hit. If you shoot someone in the thigh, it can pass right through their leg, hitting nothing but muscle, and pass out the other side without much of a problem (the proverbial "flesh wound"). Or, I can shoot someone in the thigh and shatter their leg bone, or hit the femoral artery and have them bleed to death in under a minute.

Hitting someone in the exact same spot and doing a perfectly identical amount of damage in a combat scenario just seems too unlikely to be feasible.
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Old 05-24-2009, 10:14 AM   #4
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Default Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

For me, the randomized damage has always represented the chances of having slightly different incidence angles, or the effects of collisions with bones and subsequent ricochets inside the body. I seem to recall papers that showed truely incredible effects of stray bullets.
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Old 05-24-2009, 10:17 AM   #5
Anaraxes
 
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Default Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

The more common complaint is that armor penetration isn't fixed, while still allowing for random flesh damage. There's a somewhat common house rule to treat armor as dice rather than a fixed integer, so the armor subtracts from the damage dice before you roll them. Penetrating armor is predictable; damaging the target underneath remains highly variable.
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Old 05-24-2009, 10:30 AM   #6
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Default Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

I've heard some people take the average damage and make it static. This works slightly more realistically with armor (according to them), and if you wish to address the rest of concerns brought up by this thread, you can use the special hit location rules given in Martial Arts. That should address whether hitting someone in the thigh simply hits muscle, or if it hits a major artery. It's a simplification, but so is the generic damage system.
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Old 05-25-2009, 10:30 AM   #7
Maximumpain
 
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Default Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

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Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
The more common complaint is that armor penetration isn't fixed, while still allowing for random flesh damage. There's a somewhat common house rule to treat armor as dice rather than a fixed integer, so the armor subtracts from the damage dice before you roll them. Penetrating armor is predictable; damaging the target underneath remains highly variable.
I think that also depends on angle of attack or deflection as well as various types of armor may not have a consistent amount of protection depending on where it is struck such as a in a flexible joint or seam or it could be affected by whats underneath the armor at any given point. Also not all damage to an individual target are from actual penetration some is from the blunt force trauma transferred through the armor to the victim.
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Old 05-25-2009, 11:54 AM   #8
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Default Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

No it should not be fixed. Bullets do the weirdest things and cannot be that readily predictable. There are stories of such things as a bullet richocheting around the inside of someone's helmet and leaving him alive. While that sort of thing is obviously a freak and thus should be put in only by Divine Right of the GM, rather then by dice and should certainly not happen regularly, bullets are definitely not predictable. The slightest variance will determine the course it takes within the victims body, whether it egresses or remains inside and whether there is secondary damage to other parts of the body caused by strain from the force of the bullet(I believe that is reasonably common). Things like that.
Then there is secondary damage outside of the victim's body. For instance being injured by flying teeth from the man in front of you.

In other words, bullets have quite a bit of unpredictability to them and that should be allowed for.
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Old 05-25-2009, 12:52 PM   #9
chris1982
 
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Default Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

Quote:
Originally Posted by oblador View Post
Hi folks,

I've been playing gurps for a long time and I've always wondered why the firearms damage isn't fixed instead of being given by dice rolls. It'd be logical for me that one shot of a certain gun could only inflict a certain exact amount of damage that would only diminish according the victim's armor or damage resistance.

Thus, my question is:
Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

Thanks.
Why only for firearms? You could say that for every damage roll...
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Old 05-25-2009, 02:01 PM   #10
Ragitsu
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Default Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?

Quote:
Originally Posted by jason taylor View Post
No it should not be fixed. Bullets do the weirdest things and cannot be that readily predictable. There are stories of such things as a bullet richocheting around the inside of someone's helmet and leaving him alive. While that sort of thing is obviously a freak and thus should be put in only by Divine Right of the GM, rather then by dice and should certainly not happen regularly, bullets are definitely not predictable. The slightest variance will determine the course it takes within the victims body, whether it egresses or remains inside and whether there is secondary damage to other parts of the body caused by strain from the force of the bullet(I believe that is reasonably common). Things like that.
Then there is secondary damage outside of the victim's body. For instance being injured by flying teeth from the man in front of you.

In other words, bullets have quite a bit of unpredictability to them and that should be allowed for.
Don't forget people dying from one shot of .22 LR, but surviving a shot from .50 BMG.
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