Parrying attacks with rifle's barrel

[Erling]

My players' characters sometimes parry attacks with rifles' barrels and stocks. But we all consider it too costly to buy Staff of Spear at high level, because it happens not so often that someone parry an attack with a rifle. So we decided to use Brawling level for parrying with rifles (or, in a cinematic way, use Guns(Rifle) level instead, and use it for both striking with rifle and parrying with it).

I suppose it can be translated into GURPSspeak as Skill Adaptation perk (adaptation's scope: Brawling level can be used for calculating Parry when parrying with a rifle).
In case of "Guns(Rifle) replaces Staff and Spear for both striking and parrying" it's more like a Pistol-Fist perk (or tweaked "Rifle-Fist"). Am I right?

[thulben]

Originally Posted by Erling

My players' characters sometimes parry attacks with rifles' barrels and stocks. But we all consider it too costly to buy Staff of Spear at high level, because it happens not so often that someone parry an attack with a rifle. So we decided to use Brawling level for parrying with rifles (or, in a cinematic way, use Guns(Rifle) level instead, and use it for both striking with rifle and parrying with it).

I suppose it can be translated into GURPSspeak as Skill Adaptation perk.
In case of "Guns(Rifle) replaces Staff and Spear for both striking and parrying" it's more like a Pistol-Fist perk (or tweaked "Rifle-Fist"). Am I right?

Are you allowing for full skill use in the parry? That is, let's say the character has Guns (Rifle) at 16. Do they get to parry at skill 16 or is it like (almost) every other melee weapon and they parry at 3 + 0.5*16 = 11? If so, the character should use the rifle to parry every time since that's better than anything else they could use! Also, do you consider the weapon to be unbalanced for the purposes of parrying?

If it were me, I'd allow parrying with a longarm to be a technique that has a default of something like (Skill) - 4 or something like that. So, in the example above, the Rifle Parry technique would have a default of 16 - 4 = 12 and thus when the character tried to parry with the rifle they'd roll against a 3 + 0.5*12 = 9. If it were cinematic, perhaps reduce or drop the penalty on the default (or adjust the difficulty of the technique or get rid of the unbalanced nature of rifles).

[Erling]

Originally Posted by thulben

Are you allowing for full skill use in the parry? That is, let's say the character has Guns (Rifle) at 16. Do they get to parry at skill 16 or is it like (almost) every other melee weapon and they parry at 3 + 0.5*16 = 11?

Of course I mean normal calculation, so it's 3 + half skill level. The thing is, it's half Brawling or Guns level, not half Spear of Staff level.

But in case of cinematic "Guns replaces Spear" perk striking with the rifle would require a roll against full skill.

[Erling]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

I thought staff parried at 2/3 skill. Also isn't w bayonet on a rifle treated as spear?

Striking with a barrel requires Staff of Spear roll, TS26.

2/3 skill? Never noticed that.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

I thought staff parried at 2/3 skill.

That was a 3e rule: parry calculations are one of the things that changed at 4e.

[mlangsdorf]

I think letting people default their Spear skill to Guns (Longarm) - 4 is pretty fair, and lets highly skilled riflemen have a decent skill when using their longarms in melee. Adding a perk to get rid of the penalty (ie, Skill Adaption Guns to Spear) is probably unreasonable in anything other than a cinematic campaign.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by johndallman

That was a 3e rule: parry calculations are one of the things that changed at 4e.

Staff parries at +2 now.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Staff parries at +2 now.

or to me more precise they pare as 3 + Staff skill/2 + 2 [simplified to 5 + Staff skill/2]

Further more if Your using GURPS Martial arts Staff being a 2 handed weapon parry at -2 for addition. parries not -4

Now relevant to this thread only Balanced weapons qualify the +2 when using the staff skill (+0U weapon bing used with the staff skill don't get it) So the real issue does a rifle count as balanced weapon when used as a mêlée weapon

[johndallman]

Parrying blows with the barrel is unlikely to be good for a rifle's Acc. Military rifles intended for regular bayonet fighting had wooden stocks running all the way to the muzzle to provide support, which contributed to them weighing about 9-10lb, where a staff is about 4lb.

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Parrying blows with the barrel is unlikely to be good for a rifle's Acc. . . .

Possibly but the steel in gun barrels is pretty good & the damage done by most melee weapons will be pretty mild -- you'll get nicks but probably will have no effect. IIRC Julian Hatcher (US Army Bureau of Ordnance between WW I & II) did some experimenting with rifle barrels suffering external damage. As long as the barrel remained straight & the cut did not go through to the bore they rarely suffered any measurable accuracy loss.

Alleged in WW II a Japanese officer cut through a US machine gun barrel with a samurai sword but that may well be a "sea story."