Malfunction rules seem excessively harsh

[FishDude]

I understand that weapon malfunction is a very real phenomenon, but nevertheless, it seems too likely in GURPS. Standard TL6+ firearms have a Malf of 17, which gives a 2% chance of malfunctioning when fired. In real life, a firearm that jammed/stopped 1 in 50 times would be considered poor and unreliable. Talking to a friend I have who owns a couple of pistols (An M1911 and a S&W 9mm) that he used to shoot at firing ranges, he says that even after hundreds of shots, the S&W never jammed. On the other hand, the M1911 malfunctioned about 1% of the time, which he considers "unacceptable considering the circumstances a gun is intended to be used in."

Anyways, I think the rules would be more reasonable if it was ruled that weapons only malfunctioned on an attack roll greater than their Malf. For example, a weapon with a Malf of 17 would only malfunction on a roll of 18. In fact, this is a house rule I'm planning on using once I become more familiar with the system. Do you think this is more realistic, or am I misinformed in thinking that weapons don't break down in real life as much as they do in GURPS?

[whswhs]

This is a kind of problem that recurs over and over in GURPS. For example, in GURPS 3/e, every takeoff or landing in an aircraft required a Piloting roll, and if you made a critical failure, it required another Piloting roll to achieve a slightly rough landing rather than a crash. I used to play in an apartment whose living room looked out over the landing path for San Diego's main airport; I saw a plane coming in every few minutes. If you figure 216 landings a day, and effective Piloting-16 or better, you would have a really difficult landing every day (one in 216) and a crash every 54 days (about six crashes a year). No one would fly if air travel were that unsafe!

On the other hand, suppose you rewrote the rules so that you had to roll 8d6 and get all 6s to crash. That's about one crash in 20 years. The thing is, you could go through an entire campaign and never see a crash, trivially. Rolling the dice would just be a bit of busywork that wasn't going to make a difference. If you play every week, and make two flights a session, and roll for takeoff and landing, you're going to see maybe one natural 18 on Piloting; anything more stringent that that is just busywork, the kind of thing I wrote "no nuisance rolls" to avoid.

The way I take it is that when you roll the dice, you are not looking at "what are the odds of this happening in a real world event?" You are looking at "what are the odds of this happening in an action movie, or a TV show where flying is important?" That is, you're sampling from the most exciting fraction of all events. You can figure that for every time you roll there are dozens or hundreds of times when no roll is called for at all. Or, at most, it's a job success roll, made once a month, and in 18 years you'll have one bad month.

Trying to translate real world probabilities into dice probabilities doesn't work. You just don't want to play a game where nothing interesting happens 99.9% of the time.

Bill Stoddard

[Crakkerjakk]

Yeah, GURPS increases the likelihood of critical effects (both good and bad, including gun malfunctions) in an attempt to make these events dramatically interesting. Won't break anything if you alter the frequency, but I would suggest playing with the regular rules first and seeing if you actually dislike the frequency of extreme outcomes in actual play.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by FishDude

On the other hand, the M1911 malfunctioned about 1% of the time, which he considers "unacceptable considering the circumstances a gun is intended to be used in."

I recently had the chance to go to a firing range and try a few weapons, for GURPS research purposes, of course. The brand-new out-of-the-box M1911 jammed at the fifth shot. Only one malfunction in a batch of 50 shots, but still fairly unacceptable.

I get the feeling that Malf Ver., like the Glocks, SIG-Sauers or HK pistols is the kind of reliability that a modern handgun is supposed to have. Something that jams 1-2% of the time is clearly an outdated design that you shouldn't rely on for life-and-death situations.

Someday I hope to have the opportunity to test Beretta 92FS or M9 handguns, to check if the US military really adopted such a mechanically inferior alternative to the Glock or SIG-Sauer.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Converting those figures to percentage chances of a stoppage on each round fired, you get:

• H&K XM8: 0.21%
• FNH MK16 SCAR Light: 0.38%
• H&K 416: 0.39%
• Colt M4: 1.47%

Remember, those are not weapons in ideal conditions and a high state of maintenance, those are weapons subject to deliberate abuse in an extreme dust tolerance test.

In GURPS, the first three types have Malf. Ver and the last has Malf. 17.

That seems about right.

I've always taken it as a given that the Malf. numbers are for actual use under combat conditions and that use under ideal, non-adventuring conditions would take positive TDM modifiers of some sort, which could include altering the probability of malfunctions.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I've always taken it as a given that the Malf. numbers are for actual use under combat conditions and that use under ideal, non-adventuring conditions would take positive TDM modifiers of some sort, which could include altering the probability of malfunctions.

The actual rules, of course, only talk about malf. ratings being worsened by conditions. And the simulated sandstorm seems like it would probably qualify.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Someday I hope to have the opportunity to test Beretta 92FS or M9 handguns, to check if the US military really adopted such a mechanically inferior alternative to the Glock or SIG-Sauer.

Trust me, they did.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Indeed not, but that isn't to say that having something abrupt and unlikely occur at random during the course of an adventure is necessarily interesting. It might be, for instance, frustrating.

I don't mind looking back on a career of characters who met their ends taking calculated risks for the hope of adequate rewards. But I don't want to look back on a career of characters who died anticlimactically in freak accidents.

Well, checking the Basic Set, I see that Malfunction is an optional rule in the first place; see p. B407.

It seems to me that a firearm malfunction is the sort of thing that pretty much is only going to occur at random. MTBF isn't like a charge on a battery that drains over time and that you can restore by some technical procedure. It's a chance that something bad happens unpredictably. Having bad things happen unpredictably is part of "realism," isn't it?

If you accept that element of risk, the question is what frequency of failure is appropriate to represent it. And given that in GURPS or any rpg we are not playing out every day of unexciting routine activity, or rolling the dice for every time a gunshot is fired, looking to "once in N real shots fired" to determine "once in every M Guns rolls" is not obviously the right way to handle the matter.

If you don't accept that element of risk, what alternative do you prefer? Should the GM script that a Malf will occur in a certain situation? Should they decide that a Malf is appropriate when it will raise dramatic tension? Should they have a Malf only when the player asks to have one? Any of those seems to change the gaming contract.

In writing fiction, bad things can happen when the writer decides they ought to happen, and only then; they happen when they make narrative sense. But in gaming, given that we roll dice at all, bad things will happen unpredictably. It's then the GM's and the players' job to make narrative sense of them after the fact, and to shape a coherent and interesting drama out of them.

If your position is that in a particular situation, the odds of failure are too high for that to be possible, that's surely an arguable case. But it can't be supported by an argument that could entail never rolling dice for anything with actual consequences; nor by an appeal to the actuarial odds of failure in the real world. And it seems to me that if the actual argument is that critical failure, or critical failure followed by verification of failure, is too frequent to be dramatically acceptable, the simplest answer must be, "We don't want that kind of incident in this kind of drama; we aren't going to use the optional Malfunction rules in the first place."

Bill Stoddard

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If you don't accept that element of risk, what alternative do you prefer? Should the GM script that a Malf will occur in a certain situation? Should they decide that a Malf is appropriate when it will raise dramatic tension? Should they have a Malf only when the player asks to have one? Any of those seems to change the gaming contract.

In writing fiction, bad things can happen when the writer decides they ought to happen, and only then; they happen when they make narrative sense. But in gaming, given that we roll dice at all, bad things will happen unpredictably. It's then the GM's and the players' job to make narrative sense of them after the fact, and to shape a coherent and interesting drama out of them.

Not all gaming contracts are equal, Bill. GURPS is heavy on the simulation front, and so leaving random things to random rolls is perfectly acceptable. Other games do otherwise. The most prominent example of this would be Fate, where a firearm malfunction happens because the GM decides it's dramatically appropriate and the player agrees (there are mechanics for this, but let's not get bogged down with the particulars). Other games have similar concepts, though rarely so clearly executed.

As for those feeling that Malf comes up too often, just change the rule, make it so it requires a "malfunction confirmation roll" that is a 3d roll where a result over X results in an actual malfunction.

[Litvyak]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Someday I hope to have the opportunity to test Beretta 92FS or M9 handguns, to check if the US military really adopted such a mechanically inferior alternative to the Glock or SIG-Sauer.

If you do get the chance, I think you may be surprised. With good magazines I've found the 92/96/M9's I've owned to run as good as the Glocks I've had and better on average than Sigs I've owned (out of 7 Sigs, I've had two problem guns which brings their average down).