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02-26-2022, 02:17 PM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
A few GURPS supplements—like Zombies and the Spaceships series—suggest using the rapid fire rules to resolve many attacks at once. Unfortunately, this makes no sense, because the rapid fire rules are designed on the assumption that recoil will prevent you from scoring 10x as many shots just because you used 10x more dakka.
One very simple approach would be to borrow from the multiple close combat rules (B392) and say that to resolve a bunch of identical attacks with a single roll, use best effective skill + 1/5 the effective skill (rounded down) of all other attackers. Treat melee attacks as having Rcl 1. This seems to produce reasonable-ish results. Far from perfect, but surprisingly reasonable for such a simple rule. Playing around with some numbers in a spreadsheet, another option I came up with is to have each attacker after the first add the lower of [(effective skill - 10), (RoF - 1)]. Again, treat melee attacks as having Rcl 1. Also, treat a +0 bonus as +1/2, i.e. every two attackers with an effective skill of 10, or a higher effective skill but only an RoF of 1, give a +1 bonus. This rule was designed to produce (roughly) the right number of hits on average and is arguably more realistic for highly skilled attackers. OTOH the variance doesn't scale right at all. The maximally realistic rule would probably do something fancy with standard deviations, but I don't know if such a rule could be made practical for the gaming table. Though I'd be interested if people have their own ideas on how to improve these suggested rules, or if they have their own completely different ideas.
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Handle is a character from the Star*Drive setting (a.k.a. d20 Future), not my real name. |
02-26-2022, 02:48 PM | #2 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
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But if you want some random in (and you probably do) you could perturb that number by doing something like multiplying by 6d and dividing by 21. That should be a narrow enough variance not to be too crazy while not having perfectly predictable results. And it's few enough dice you can actually roll it.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-26-2022, 02:52 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Re: Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
If you know the number of attackers and the effective skill level, you can simply use the success percentage at that skill level and say there are a corresponding number of hits (you can even work out crit success and failure numbers).
So if you are working with, say, an effective skill of 12 and 10 attacks, you know that 74.07% of attacks would hit, which is 7 or 8 out of 10 - call it 7 on the basis of only counting whole numbers and not fractions. Also, 1.85% will be a crit success (3 or 4), so that's 0 crit. On the flip side, 1.85% will also be a crit failure, so that's 0 crit failure. If you move it to 100, it becomes 74 hits, 1 crit success and 1 crit failure. This removes the "swings", but with larger numbers would come more consistency. If you wanted some "swing" you could perhaps have a random effective skill modifier up or down by 1 or even 2, with whatever percentage chance you like to do it to reflect "luck". But really, this is very simple to model in table and provides super quick resolution of larger numbers that likely reflect general results the higher your numbers any way.
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Farmer Mortal Wombat "But if the while I think on thee, dear friend All losses are restored and sorrows end." Last edited by Farmer; 02-26-2022 at 05:16 PM. Reason: Crit numbers were wrong |
02-26-2022, 03:07 PM | #4 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-26-2022, 03:18 PM | #5 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
Would you like to correct the number of criticals?
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The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
02-26-2022, 03:49 PM | #6 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
Took me a bit to find it, but here's something I came up with some time ago. Note it's faster if, instead of rolling 3d6 three times, you just roll 3dF (dF are Fudge dice, d6's that have two +'s, two -'s, and two blank faces; treating 1,2 as +, 3,4 as blank, and 5,6 as -, lets you use a normal d6 in place of dF).
Note that gives you some variability (but with fairly similar spread in results as what you'd see actually rolling each attack separately), and works anytime you'd need to make a lot of rolls against the same target number. If does require a calculator, and a table lookup (to see how the probabilities work out), however, but it supports figuring out the MoS/MoF of each attack as well.
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GURPS Overhaul |
02-26-2022, 04:36 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
I was pondering coming up with a 'horde' trait to allow using the single combat rules for mass combat. Never finished it, but the basic mechanic probably works here. What I have:
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02-26-2022, 05:15 PM | #8 |
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Re: Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
Yep, thanks, will do.
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Farmer Mortal Wombat "But if the while I think on thee, dear friend All losses are restored and sorrows end." |
02-26-2022, 05:18 PM | #9 |
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Re: Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
Yep. You just add in the number of attacks and their effective skill level.
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Farmer Mortal Wombat "But if the while I think on thee, dear friend All losses are restored and sorrows end." |
02-26-2022, 05:30 PM | #10 | |||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Writing a "massed fire" rule for when the "rapid fire" rules don't make sense
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Though having just made the tables for Rcl 2 and Rcl 3, I wonder if I should have used skill-9 instead. For skill-11 and RoF 13+, you expect ~2.1 hits at Rcl 1, ~1.2 hits at Rcl 2, and ~0.9 hits at Rcl. Increasing the expected number of hits by (skill-9) / Rcl gets +2 hits, +1 hit, and +2/3 hits, respectively. So that would be fine. The skill-9 rule would actually do pretty well in general. But for Rcl 1 it's over by about +1/2 at high skill levels. IDK, maybe that's fine. Quote:
Lol. I just had an idea that seems too simple but might be the best simple rule. What if you just summed the skill of all the attackers and rolled (n x 3)d where n is the number of attackers? Not that you'd want to do that for truly huge numbers of attackers but for a single-digit n, D&D players roll that number of dice all the time, at least at high levels.
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Handle is a character from the Star*Drive setting (a.k.a. d20 Future), not my real name. |
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