Survivable Musket

[CarrionPeacock]

Survivable Guns article suggests halving the damage of some firearms and giving them AD(2) to make them less lethat. However, the article seems focused on modern firearms using jacketed ammunition.
Early firearms like muskets uses large unjacketed lead balls that are soft but expands well on impact. If I wanted to make muskets more survivable, would it be realistic if I kept its damage but added AD(0.5) on it?
Well armored cuirassiers with DR9 plate could resist the average musket shot (4d+2), but an unarmored line infantry would still take lethal wounds from it.

[TGLS]

Well from Wikipedia:

Though the armour could not protect against contemporary flintlock musket fire, it could deflect shots fired from long-range, stop ricochets and offer protection from all but very close range pistol fire.

Taking long range as past 1/2d range, it seems like the cuirassier has it covered. Big pistols can even be shrugged off at close ranges. Going more than that might make muskets too survivable.

[The Colonel]

What are you trying to achieve by making gunfire survivable? There are a couple of work arounds elsewhere in the rules for cinematic conventions if that helps - things like Stormtrooper marksmanship, bulletproof nudity and something to do with HK cinema conventions about guns...

[Rupert]

One of the things that make musket shots so dangerous is their size, which gives them pi+ or pi++ damage. If you want to emphasise armour's value, your idea of giving them AD (0.5) is a good one. If you want to simply reduce their lethality, making them do crushing or pi damage is probably more useful. Crushing makes them very effective vs zombies, so if that's something you don't want, make them pi, but note that pi attacks can target the vitals and eyes, whilst crushing can't, but crushing has better knockback and blunt trauma so choose the dame type that has the effects you most want.

[AlexanderHowl]

Another possibility would be to double armor DR against piercing attacks after the widespread use of firearms.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by CarrionPeacock

Survivable Guns article suggests halving the damage of some firearms and giving them AD(2) to make them less lethat. However, the article seems focused on modern firearms using jacketed ammunition.
Early firearms like muskets uses large unjacketed lead balls that are soft but expands well on impact. If I wanted to make muskets more survivable, would it be realistic if I kept its damage but added AD(0.5) on it?
Well armored cuirassiers with DR9 plate could resist the average musket shot (4d+2), but an unarmored line infantry would still take lethal wounds from it.

Survivable Guns also says "Guns firing relatively low-velocity projectiles (under approximately 1800' per second) have their dice of damage unchanged." Musket vs. cuirassier seems like black powder would be the likely propellant. Black powder muzzle velocities don't usually exceed 1300 fps (a .44 Walker revolver), with most muskets having muzzle velocities less than 1000 fps. It doesn't strike me that an armour divisor of 0.5 is justified.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by CarrionPeacock

Survivable Guns article suggests halving the damage of some firearms and giving them AD(2) to make them less lethat. However, the article seems focused on modern firearms using jacketed ammunition.
Early firearms like muskets uses large unjacketed lead balls that are soft but expands well on impact. If I wanted to make muskets more survivable, would it be realistic if I kept its damage but added AD(0.5) on it?
Well armored cuirassiers with DR9 plate could resist the average musket shot (4d+2), but an unarmored line infantry would still take lethal wounds from it.

I don't see how that would be either realistic (why would you expect any of this to be realistic?) or survivable. The whole idea of survivable guns is to make them less destructive to people without making them incapable of penetrating barriers (which would be blatantly unrealistic). Your proposal perfectly reverses both of those aims.

[Aldric]

I don't really see a problem with 4d6 muskets. Of course that depends on the kind of game you're running, but I hope your characters aren't getting shot by multiple muskets each round, and they even have access to DR 9 armor...
Between reload time and malfunction chances, if they have a decent chance of just bouncing off your armor, what good are they ?

My players feared muskets in a pirate campaign I ran, and they were at best wearing DR 2 leather jackets and sometimes a cap. Still, it never stopped them from boarding juicy ships.
Sometimes someone didn't make it, sometimes someone was dragged away and brough to the cook (who was also the ship's medic ofc), but then there was the next ship, and the next musket...

[CarrionPeacock]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Taking long range as past 1/2d range, it seems like the cuirassier has it covered. Big pistols can even be shrugged off at close ranges. Going more than that might make muskets too survivable.

Musket 1/2D range is 180+ yards, low acc and minimum -12 range penalty means that's not really personal threat but a battlefield hazard, likea cannon ball.

Originally Posted by The Colonel

What are you trying to achieve by making gunfire survivable? There are a couple of work arounds elsewhere in the rules for cinematic conventions if that helps - things like Stormtrooper marksmanship, bulletproof nudity and something to do with HK cinema conventions about guns...

I'm suggesting a possible extension of the rules, I never played in a table that used muskets and to be honest have no plans to.

Originally Posted by Rupert

One of the things that make musket shots so dangerous is their size, which gives them pi+ or pi++ damage. If you want to emphasise armour's value, your idea of giving them AD (0.5) is a good one. If you want to simply reduce their lethality, making them do crushing or pi damage is probably more useful. Crushing makes them very effective vs zombies, so if that's something you don't want, make them pi, but note that pi attacks can target the vitals and eyes, whilst crushing can't, but crushing has better knockback and blunt trauma so choose the dame type that has the effects you most want.

Emphasise armor value is my objective. I have no doubts someone hit by musket would drop dead, but there's plenty of historical armors that's said to have withstood direct musket fire. It's usually a duplex construction but for whatever reason GURPS only gives a meager extra point of DR for it, which makes it absolutely useless against weapons using multiple dices.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Another possibility would be to double armor DR against piercing attacks after the widespread use of firearms.

Possibly, but that's a little extreme and beyond my judgement.

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

Survivable Guns also says "Guns firing relatively low-velocity projectiles (under approximately 1800' per second) have their dice of damage unchanged." Musket vs. cuirassier seems like black powder would be the likely propellant. Black powder muzzle velocities don't usually exceed 1300 fps (a .44 Walker revolver), with most muskets having muzzle velocities less than 1000 fps. It doesn't strike me that an armour divisor of 0.5 is justified.

That's why I didn't halve its damage. The armor divisor is to represent its soft unjacketed lead balls.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I don't see how that would be either realistic (why would you expect any of this to be realistic?).

f hollow-point gets armor divisor 0.5, why a soft unjacketed lead ball doesn't?

Originally Posted by Aldric

I don't really see a problem with 4d6 muskets. Of course that depends on the kind of game you're running, but I hope your characters aren't getting shot by multiple muskets each round, and they even have access to DR 9 armor...
Between reload time and malfunction chances, if they have a decent chance of just bouncing off your armor, what good are they ?

My players feared muskets in a pirate campaign I ran, and they were at best wearing DR 2 leather jackets and sometimes a cap. Still, it never stopped them from boarding juicy ships.
Sometimes someone didn't make it, sometimes someone was dragged away and brough to the cook (who was also the ship's medic ofc), but then there was the next ship, and the next musket...

How many points those characters had? Because a single hit can cause 28 injury on them, enough to make a HP 14 character start rolling for death. My guess is that those characters didn't need DR because they relied on high Dodge, which costs a lot of points.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by CarrionPeacock

Musket 1/2D range is 180+ yards,

Nope, I've checked Basic, Low Tech and High Tech and found no item with "musket" in its' name that has a 1/2D of 180 yards or longer. The earliest weapon that does is the Dreyse from the 1840s.

80 to 130 yards seems commen.