[GUN FU] How to offensively defend yourself with guns?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Pistol Fist is great, but confined to only pistols. You can get a similar effect with Improvised Weapons (Brawling) using a pistol as a fist-load. Neither overcomes the problem of using a greater than C-reach weapon in close combat.

I lack Gun Fu, but I have to ask - does it have anything akin to Bow Fencer? That's a [10] Advantage from DF that allows striking (typically for crushing damage, but if you have an arrow Ready it lets you stab with it for impaling damage) and Parrying with a bow, using Bow skill, and with reduced risk of damaging the bow (it makes your bow have DR 6 instead of DR 2). Something similar for firearms would certainly be quite useful.

[Donny Brook]

Basically it allows you to use your pistol as a melee weapon using your pistol skill for rolls. Bulk factors into damage, so big pistols become quite effective weapons.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I lack Gun Fu, but I have to ask - does it have anything akin to Bow Fencer?

It does not. It has a box ("Kung Fu and Gun Fu", p. 9) about appropriate Martial Arts styles to combine with shooting skills, but the book itself has nothing beyond Pistol-Fist.

[Witchking]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Basically it allows you to use your pistol as a melee weapon using your pistol skill for rolls. Bulk factors into damage, so big pistols become quite effective weapons.

It also allows you to melee parry with the pistol at (Pistol skill/2)+3.

Doing the same with a Long Arm isn't that far of a leap from traditional bayonet fighting drills going back to the 1700's. As long as the practitioner has both hands on the weapon, IMHO.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by johndallman

It does not. It has a box ("Kung Fu and Gun Fu", p. 9) about appropriate Martial Arts styles to combine with shooting skills, but the book itself has nothing beyond Pistol-Fist.

Based on the other responses, Pistol Fist is the firearm equivalent of Bow Fencer, it's just limited to pistols. I'm not sure what it would be called, but a version that worked for long arms instead seems like it would be appropriate to me.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Witchking

Doing the same with a Long Arm isn't that far of a leap from traditional bayonet fighting drills going back to the 1700's. As long as the practitioner has both hands on the weapon, IMHO.

Yes, although it might be necessary to change the damage calculation using 2 hands and guns larger than pistols.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Yes, although it might be necessary to change the damage calculation using 2 hands and guns larger than pistols.

Bow Fencer doesn't require a Ready to swap between ranged and melee, and I assume Pistol Fist doesn't either - so neither should the unnamed long arm version. With that in mind, you're probably going to be using it more like a staff than a club, meaning you're often functionally only really using one hand at a time to strike. With that in mind, I'd suggest having the damage match that of a pistol (used with Pistol Fist) with Bulk equal to half the long arm's Bulk. So a short carbine (Bulk -4) does the same damage as a typical pistol (Bulk -2), a full-sized rifle (Bulk -6) does the same damage as a heavy pistol (Bulk -3), and a particularly-long weapon (Bulk -8) does the same damage as a monstrous pistol (Bulk -4). Note this also matches thematically with Gunslinger only getting half Acc with long arms.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Witchking

It also allows you to melee parry with the pistol at (Pistol skill/2)+3.

Doing the same with a Long Arm isn't that far of a leap from traditional bayonet fighting drills going back to the 1700's. As long as the practitioner has both hands on the weapon, IMHO.

Advanced Bayonet fighting is just mixing Spear (the Skill for longarm w/ bayonet) with Staff skill as was common for advanced Spear in individual combat.

Even without a bayonet you can use Staff to butt-stroke with a longarm and presumably Parry with Staff too).

You can whack someone with a Pistol without Pistol-Fist too. You just use Brawlign for an Improvised weapon.

The big deal (and the very Cinematic part) about Pistol-Fist is doing these things with Pistol Skill. However, if you've already gone as far in the Cinematic direction as Pistol-Fist adding a different Perk called "Shotgun Smack" or something like that which substitutes a Guns skill for Staff isn't a gamebreaker.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

However, if you've already gone as far in the Cinematic direction as Pistol-Fist adding a different Perk called "Shotgun Smack" or something like that which substitutes a Guns skill for Staff isn't a gamebreaker.

Even RAW, if you're willing to be that generous in interpretation of Weapon Adaptation.

Originally Posted by PowerUp 2, Perks, p8

In a cinematic campaign, the GM may permit any adaptation, even Knife to Halberd. He might also allow adaptation of Reach C weapons to unarmed skills – e.g., Knife to Karate – complete with unarmed damage bonuses.

The sticky point is the first sentence of the Perk.

You’ve adapted the moves used with one group of melee weapons to another class of weapons. This lets you wield the weapons covered by one weapon skill using a different skill and its techniques...

"Melee", specifically, so not guns. But if buying Staff skill to use when you whack someone with your metal-and-wood hollow staff is too much trouble, I wouldn't really have a problem with using the WA Perk to cover it. It's not really further afield than "Knife to Halberd".

(Since Guns is a cheap skill, I wouldn't really recommend it. Two different skills covering two different uses of the same object. And Guns doesn't cover "everything you might do with a gun"; consider Armory, for instance. But to each his own. The fine granularity of the skills list can be annoying for minor uses as often as it's useful for differentiating similar characters.)

[binn05]

Thank you everyone for replying. It was a hectic week and I couldn't answer before.

Originally Posted by Rupert

For 4 & 5 it's fairly simple rules stuff:
4. At 10% range and under each shot counts as one shot, so no extra hits are possible unless he fires twice, but if he does then yes, at 5+ he gets two hits.
5. This is correct, and for each point of success, he hits with an extra pellet, until all of them are accounted for.

Thank you, that clarifies using shotguns.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Of course, if the Ratdog didn't start the round at Reach C, this is moot - if a foe Steps into Close Combat with you in the process of making their attack, they can defend as though they were still at Reach 1, so no penalty.

I forgot about that. It helps a lot.

Originally Posted by Varyon

The only thing you're missing is that, within that 10% range, the projectile gets a piercing-class upgrade - specifically, it becomes pi++. It's basically an extra-frangible shotgun slug at that range.

It could potentially hit up to 16 times when fired at full RoF, although that would require MoS 15 - 2x8 means you're putting a total of 16 projectiles in the air, after all. So, one hit on MoS 0, two on MoS 1, three on MoS 2, and so forth.

I didn't notice the damage class upgrade. Also, I was mistaken about the 2x8 meaning a maximum of 16 hits. Thanks again.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Relevant to the question of hitting the ratdog's face is that regular dogs at least possess the Born Biter Trait from Martial Arts ("Teeth" textbox on p.115). This would reduce the penalty to target that body part because the jaws of many animals are proportionately larger and more exposed to attacks by thrusting forward in ways that human jaws don't.

As a general note if you are going to "grapple" (pun intended) with issues like this you probably want not only the main Martial Arts book but the Gun Fu and possibly even Tactical Shooting pdfs. They deal with _many_ questions like yours.

One of the problems of GM rotation is forgetting lots of rules. I have MA and forgot about Born Biter. I'll look into GURPS Gun Fu, it seems more like what we want to achieve than Tactical Shooting.

Originally Posted by Witchking

The perk is called Pistol Fist.

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Pistol Fist is great

Also, all the others that contributed to the Pistol Fist discussion: I'll look into the Pistol Fist perk when I get the Gun Fu book, but I have an idea from our discussion.

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

In GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Thieves I wrote up a power-up that lets you attack the target if you defend against their attack. It's on p. 25 and called "Devious Defense."

Thank you, Christopher. Your work is always of high quality, sadly buying DF books again will not be a priority considering Post Apocalypse will be our next line of games.