05-24-2009, 09:25 AM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2009
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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. |
05-24-2009, 09:31 AM | #2 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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05-24-2009, 09:34 AM | #3 |
Join Date: Apr 2008
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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. |
05-24-2009, 10:14 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: The ASS of the world, mainly Valencia, Spain (Europe)
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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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05-24-2009, 10:17 AM | #5 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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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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05-24-2009, 10:30 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
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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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05-25-2009, 10:30 AM | #7 | |
Join Date: Feb 2009
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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05-25-2009, 11:54 AM | #8 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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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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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison Last edited by jason taylor; 05-25-2009 at 11:58 AM. |
05-25-2009, 12:52 PM | #9 | |
Join Date: Nov 2006
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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05-25-2009, 02:01 PM | #10 | |
Banned
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Shouldn't the damage inflicted by firearms be fixed?
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