# Worlds of Design: Gun vs. Sword



## jedijon (Sep 6, 2019)

Not sold.

It’s a great topic. Why gun games aren’t sword games. These “laws” suggest that a fighter has to be able to act on all the other participants—range is a good criteria.

As said, arrows and magic have range.

It seems pretty clear that what we’re doing is giving everyone a turn. Not simulating a war.my turn with a pistol is intended to be similar to your turn with a flaming sword...

And really, in a narrative game, is it hard to see why blades vs bullets is a thing?

We’re primed to believe it takes several whacks with a sword to accomplish anything but a well placed bullet is the end.

I guess ultimately it’s more a reason bullets aren’t found in fantasy and every game where they are has some rad tech to keep the fantasy high so we’re not just going Nathan Drake on it.


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## Morrus (Sep 6, 2019)

jedijon said:


> We’re primed to believe it takes several whacks with a sword to accomplish anything but a well placed bullet is the end.




I firmly believe that being stabbed through the eye with a rapier will kill me just as quick as a bullet will. The benefit of firearms is that they're quick and easy to use compared to a rapier. But both will kill you with a well-placed hit.


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## Jacob Lewis (Sep 6, 2019)

Why did you have to go and make it personal??


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## DWChancellor (Sep 6, 2019)

Was hoping for some reference to the silly business in Warhammer 40k.  My son keeps flipping through Visions of Heresy (the art book) and demanding "what's the point of all of these swords and axes?"

On a similar note, most games sidestep the incredible power of military formations, especially for melee purposes, because they would make mincemeat of small units like adventuring groups.  The phalanx (for example) was hyper dominant in their terrain for ages because of this factor.

The data is sparser, but I believe there were big differences in wound/fatality rates during the battles when armies switched from largely melee/archery to guns as well (as opposed to mop up afterwards).


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## Ratskinner (Sep 6, 2019)

DWChancellor said:


> The data is sparser, but I believe there were big differences in wound/fatality rates during the battles when armies switched from largely melee/archery to guns as well (as opposed to mop up afterwards).




No expert myself, but in conversation with a fellow doing research for a book some years ago, he indicated that artillery (in particular gunpowder artillery) was the big turning point for both casualties and things like PTSD. Humans (at least Western/civilized*) appear to have an instinctive aversion to killing each other that show ups pretty quickly in military training research, but that aversion doesn't seem to kick in for artillerists and bombardiers. (especially true for those who cannot see their victims) Similarly, there's little in our instinctive arsenal to deal with being on the receiving end of massive explosions.

EDIT: *Not trying to be racist or anything, but we don't fully understand the relationship between this kind of attitude and growing up in a "civilized" environment vs. "primitive" environment...or even what particulars might cause such differences. There is some evidence to suggest that things work differently for people in those different circumstances....but its not well understood. Almost all of the military and psychological research in this area has been conducted in the Western or modern world so...this comment represents a limit to our understanding, not the humans in question.


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## Celebrim (Sep 6, 2019)

DWChancellor said:


> On a similar note, most games sidestep the incredible power of military formations, especially for melee purposes, because they would make mincemeat of small units like adventuring groups.  The phalanx (for example) was hyper dominant in their terrain for ages because of this factor.




In a game like D&D, you can apply rules like shield walls and formations in depth (forming for example a phalanx) to give low level humanoid opponents a bit of ability to stand up to higher level groups at about the time they would otherwise start to be easily slaughtered. However, there is some limit to this, because at about that same time, those same groups start to get abilities like 'fireball' and even if you give formations in a shield wall some protection from attacks of that sort it's still likely that low level humanoids in close formation will at minimum take significant casualties and have that formation disrupted by a fireball.

One thing I've noticed over the years about dungeon design is it almost invariably exists to give the PC party a vast advantage over their foes. Most dungeons you'll see are anti-fortresses designed to make it impossible for the inhabitants to defend themselves from the attacks of a small group of commandos such as the PCs, and in the context of the article to overturn Lanchester's Power Laws. Specifically, dungeons are designed to make reinforcement difficult, to allow large forces to be defeated in detail by spreading out defending forces piecemeal, to make retreat by an attacking force easy, and to force all engagements to occur at close range such that generally melee can be reached in the first moment of battle. 

The most egregious examples for me are Gygax's 'Giants' series, where the PC's have basically no chance of winning except for the fact that their foes occupy anti-fortresses designed to render them vulnerable.   Where these giants only to keep a good watch and sally forth to meet their foes, the PC's would have no chance against the massed might of boulder throwing giants.   Instead, the logic of the anti-fortress is that it is easily infiltrated, that reinforcements don't readily occur, and that the defending forces are divided up into bite sized morsels that can be readily destroyed.   There are lots of things on the maps of this sort listed as 'guard rooms', but they are more like anti-guard rooms.

Most players and PC's I think seldom have to experience Lanchester's power laws, because I think encounters with masses of missile armed foes at greater than melee range are rare to nonexistent.


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## Celebrim (Sep 6, 2019)

Ratskinner said:


> Humans (at least Western/civilized) have an instinctive aversion to killing each other that show ups pretty quickly in military training research, but that aversion doesn't seem to kick in for artillerists and bombardiers. (especially true for those who cannot see their victims) Similarly, there's little in our instinctive arsenal to deal with being on the receiving end of massive explosions.




SLA Marshall's work is highly controversial in part because no evidence exists that the raw data his book was supposedly based on actually exists. He has records of interviewing soldiers for example, but no records of asking questions that could be used to back his claims regarding the reluctance of soldiers to fire their weapon in anger, much less the answers to those questions. Much of the research purporting to show this instinctive aversion has similar problems, and the whole idea seems to fly in the face of the historical record which is filled with massacres of many sorts. So the question then becomes is there an aversion to killing that may or may not be cultural, or is there a cultural aversion to believing that we are the sort of species that enjoys or at least has little instinctive aversion to committing homicide.

For my part, I think Marshall and the like completely misinterpret the data. Humans don't have a particular aversion to homicide, but they do have a deep and instinctive aversion to facing violence directed against them. What Marshall interprets as a fear of killing is in fact a fear of being exposed to death. Soldiers fail to effectively engage the enemy because they fear being engaged in response. This theory - unlike Marshall's - fits the larger data with respect to human warfare. IMO, in its natural state, human warfare consists of three phases which are observable not only in all human warfare, but in warfare engaged in by our close relatives the chimps and the bonobos.

Those phases are the meeting phase, where the two sides take stock of each other and make relatively ineffectual threats toward each other at long range. In all stone age warfare this tends to consist of chanting, singing, yelling threats, and tossing spears at each other at beyond their effective range. The purpose of the meeting phase is primarily to work the combatants up into an emotional state where they can overcome their fear. The second phase is the charge, where one or both sides partially overcome their fear and then attack more closely. In this phase, only a small percentage of combatants on both sides have truly overcome their fear. Most are still terrified into relative inaction, but out of fear of appearing shameful to the comrades that they can see attacking, advance ineffectually toward the enemy. Finally, the third phase of battle is the slaughter where most of the killing actually takes place. The slaughter occurs when one side or the other loses its nerve, and attempts to disengage from the battle. This exhilarates the side which hasn't lost its nerve and at the same time reduces the ability of the now losing side to resist. With most of the danger now removed from the equation, the side that perceives it is winning now joins the attack altogether and the participants freed from their fear, now experience a surge of pleasure at killing their hated enemy, relishing in the slaughter in ways that will seem very bizarre and uncomfortable - especially to people who've been told that humans have an instinctive reluctance to kill.

Professional training from antiquity to the present day is all about overcoming and manipulating the behavior of your fighting force so that it can both skip that meeting phase and go straight to the charge and thereby attempt to demoralize a less disciplined force, and otherwise manipulate the opposing force with advanced tactics like feigned retreats that cause opponents to lose their discipline.

Artillery enters into this only in the sense that unlike a hand thrown spear which has limited range and can be seen coming and dodged, artillery in the meeting phase really is extremely effective and lethal. The US military for example attempts to manipulate the simian battlespace by pinning a less disciplined opponent mentally into the meeting phase, and then having done so bringing overwhelming force against the static positions of the enemy.


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## Blue (Sep 6, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> For my part, I think Marshall and the like completely misinterpret the data. Humans don't have a particular aversion to homicide, but they do have a deep and instinctive aversion to facing violence directed against them. What Marshall interprets as a fear of killing is in fact a fear of being exposed to death.




An ancedotal bit - I was talking to a not-closely related relative at a family gathering who was in the armed forces at the time and had been deployed overseas.  He mentioned that boot camp teaches them how to attack, but doesn't teach them how to kill people.  That not being able to pull the trigger and kill a human in their sights was a big problem.

Take it for what it's worth, but it's the only bit I've personally experienced one either side of the question.


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## Imaculata (Sep 6, 2019)

lewpuls said:


> A designer of a science fiction RPG faces a problem; firepower-based combat must be very different from melee combat, and probably less satisfying for the players.




I don't accept this whole premise. Why would it need to be very different? And why must it probably be less satisfying for the players?

I don't see much of a difference at all between melee weapons versus guns in an RPG. The only minor difference I see, is in battle tactics (taking cover and reloading becomes more important) and damage (presuming guns do a lot more damage than swords, which need not even be the case).

I also find it strange to mention Star Wars as a possible solution to what ever design issue you are suggesting exists here. Star Wars and its jedi are a system that is fundamentally broken for an RPG. Because jedi are supposed to be rare, yet they are also very powerful. So you are going to run into the '*all jedi or no jedi*' problem. Any player who plays a jedi is going to be way more powerful than any of the other players who are not playing jedi. Such a power difference between pc's is simply not desirable in any RPG in my opinion, so you either run the game with every player playing a jedi, or you have no jedi at all. You also run into this issue with confrontations between Sith and the players. Good luck trying to stage an epic fight between a jedi and a Sith, because nothing is stopping the non-jedi players from simply focusing all their blaster fire on the one Sith that is so eager to have a one-on-one lightsaber fight.

In my experience with running a 3.5 pirate campaign, and playing in a D20 scifi campaign, battles that involve guns are MORE exciting than classic D&D melee fights, not less. There are higher damage numbers, so combat is more deadly, and there is more focus on positioning, cover, line of sight, visibility and reload time. Throw in a truck load of scifi gadgets, such as personal forcefields, EMP grenades, sniping, and homing ammunition that fires around a corner, and you have combat that is way more exciting than any standard melee in D&D.


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## Arnwolf666 (Sep 6, 2019)

Pistols 1d6 rifles 1d10. They work fine in my game.


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## John Dallman (Sep 6, 2019)

I got interested enough to buy and read Marshall's *Men Against Fire*. It's a horrible book to base any planning or game design on because it is so _muddled_. It presents itself as being based on extensive research with clear results, yet it does not describe those results with any clarity. It has patches of what seem like good sense, sometimes on the same page as utter nonsense. I suspect that many of the people who were supposed to have read it gave up after a couple of chapters, and just generalised the ideas from the first part of the book.

In those first few chapters, Marshall describes one scenario clearly. I think this is the only time he does so. It's worth describing.

A green infantry company is making an unsupported frontal attack on an opponent who is well dug in and concealed. The company advances some distance, then comes under effective fire. The men go to ground, as they must. And then nobody takes charge. Nobody starts calling orders or asking questions; the troops are not given orders, reminders or any encouragement. About 25% use their weapons.

Actually, that seems a fairly good performance, under the circumstances, by the men but a terrible one by the NCOs and officers. I seem to be working across a cultural familiarity gap here, because Marshall explicitly says it is not the job of squad leaders to get their men organised.

Since they should be near their men, and know them well, it seems to me (and it's traditional British doctrine) that the NCOs, who have some experience, have the primary job under these circumstances of getting the men organised, encouraging the ones who are new to this and scared, and telling the ones who haven't figured it out where to shoot. With that done, the squad leader needs to shout to his platoon commander, with word of losses and what's being done.

But Marshall reckons the squad NCO should not be doing any of this, but should be concentrating on using his personal weapon. If that's the case, why has he been given his leadership position?

Marshall stresses the job of the company commander in getting all of these things to happen, while also worrying about his flanks and rear communications. He's not a superman. He can't control all of his men individually. He needs to use the chain of command. Yet Marshall seems to ignore this.

Marshall makes a kind of sense as a reaction to a problem that the US Army was suffering during WWII. Because it had been expanded so quickly, it had a serious shortage of NCOs who were experienced. New infantry units thus could not use NCO-based organisation, because the NCOs of the time weren't capable of doing that job. The culture of the US Army stressed confidence and its own superiority. It reckoned before Operation Torch that its newly-raised units were superior to experienced German ones.

Under those circumstances, the actual performance of the Army required an explanation. Telling the high command that it was a result of human nature would have been far more acceptable than acknowledging it was an effect of over-rapid expansion.


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## DWChancellor (Sep 6, 2019)

Imaculata said:


> I don't accept this whole premise. Why would it need to be very different? And why must it probably be less satisfying for the players?
> 
> I don't see much of a difference at all between melee weapons versus guns in an RPG. The only minor difference I see, is in battle tactics (taking cover and reloading becomes more important) and damage (presuming guns do a lot more damage than swords, which need not even be the case).




The design of combat space is pretty different and tends towards larger environments the more "modern" or "sci-fi" gear is available.  

I think it is worth mentioning that designing dungeons that players find "fun" and motivating is pretty easy.  See the anti-fortress discussion of Celebrim above.  As DM Against the Giants bothers the hell out of me b/c it makes no sense.  But my group of players had a great time.


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## GMMichael (Sep 6, 2019)

lewpuls said:


> A designer of a science fiction RPG faces a problem; firepower-based combat must be very different from melee combat, and probably less satisfying for the players. What can the author/designer do to solve this problem plausibly?



Well it's a good thing @Morrus found his way into the thread.  Insights, sir?

@Celebrim, that sounds spot-on.  How does it apply to fantasy and sci-fi RPGs, though?  

The issue, though, sounds like a wargaming problem to me.  I'm not going to keep track of any enemy NPCs in excess of twice the number of PCs (in a fantasy or sci-fi RPG).  The excess NPCs just become setting/environment at that point.


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## dragoner (Sep 6, 2019)

Classic Traveller is very much war game "fire and movement" which does seem to be less than satisfying for many players. When they try to just charge into a situation, their character dies in a hail of gunfire, and often they don't understand why that happens. However, Marc W Miller is a Vietnam veteran, so I suppose he intended it that way, to be accurate for what people knew of combat in 1977.


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## Morrus (Sep 6, 2019)

DMMike said:


> Well it's a good thing @Morrus found his way into the thread.  Insights, sir?




For me - and note D&D does not accomodate this well - for firearms and the like you need to incorporate cover, positioning, overwatches, and so on. Give it some elements of a chess game as combatants try to outmaneuver each other. I strongly dislike attempts to give firearms ridiculous amounts of damage; they shouldn't be much different from a sword. A solid hit from either will finish you in real life; in a game it'll probably graze you or whatever until the shot/blow which takes you down.

That's just my preference though. Other people will feel differently, which is fine.


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## DWChancellor (Sep 6, 2019)

Morrus said:


> A solid hit from either will finish you in real life; in a game it'll probably graze you or whatever until the shot/blow which takes you down.
> 
> That's just my preference though. Other people will feel differently, which is fine.




This gets to flavoring HP.  Players always like the think of HP as literal "health" like the Doom guy's picture getting wounded as it runs out.  Then you use bandages, and hey presto, no more bleeding wounds!

I'm with Morrus, I much prefer the 5E style of HP as "stamina" where you are running down and getting sloppier.  A high level character is more alert, has better instincts, and superior situational awareness to _avoid_ being genuinely injured.  This is why you heal to full with resting.

Okay okay, some gamey-business going on, but it makes sense.  It also makes balancing "damage" of modern weapons versus melee since it isn't the 1:1 physical effect of being bashed.


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## Morrus (Sep 6, 2019)

DWChancellor said:


> I'm with Morrus, I much prefer the 5E style of HP as "stamina" where you are running down and getting sloppier.  A high level character is more alert, has better instincts, and superior situational awareness to _avoid_ being genuinely injured.  This is why you heal to full with resting.
> 
> Okay okay, some gamey-business going on, but it makes sense.  It also makes balancing "damage" of modern weapons versus melee since it isn't the 1:1 physical effect of being bashed.




That wasn't my position at all (not that I disagree).

What I meant was that being skewered with a sword through the eye doesn't do any less damage to you than being shot in the same place. Both are fatal. Getting beheaded with an axe is not less damaging than being shot in the leg with a revolver. The benefit of the gun is that it makes it much easier to deliver that damage.


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 6, 2019)

Blue said:


> An ancedotal bit - I was talking to a not-closely related relative at a family gathering who was in the armed forces at the time and had been deployed overseas.  He mentioned that boot camp teaches them how to attack, but doesn't teach them how to kill people.  That not being able to pull the trigger and kill a human in their sights was a big problem.
> 
> Take it for what it's worth, but it's the only bit I've personally experienced one either side of the question.




No offense to your relative, but they are mistaken.  We were taught, extensively, how to kill.  not just a focus on center mass with firearms, but even with unarmed combat training it was around disabling/killing your opponent as quickly as possible.

Also, on a related note, I'm not sure where this aversion to kill idea comes from, exactly.  I mean, I can see it if you're shooting at someone who is just standing there and/or doesn't know you're shooting them.  But in a firefight?  I'm here to tell you there is no general hesitation to shoot back.  In chaotic situations like that, you rely on training and muscle memory, and don't devote time to morality of what it means to shoot another person.  Additionally, this aversion effect is probably lessened because you're also drilled to dehumanize your opponent.  They aren't really people.  They are the enemy, worth less than you.  Not men or women, but any racist name you can think of; animals out to kill you first.




DMMike said:


> Well it's a good thing @Morrus found his way into the thread.  Insights, sir?
> 
> @Celebrim, that sounds spot-on.  How does it apply to fantasy and sci-fi RPGs, though?
> 
> The issue, though, sounds like a wargaming problem to me.  I'm not going to keep track of any enemy NPCs in excess of twice the number of PCs (in a fantasy or sci-fi RPG).  The excess NPCs just become setting/environment at that point.




I'm not Morrus obviously, but I have designed several games, including sci-fi games.  For games that are almost exclusively firearms (or derivative thereof), there are some changes I've done, but mostly to account for range and rof (affecting speed of combat rounds).  I've done systems that have focused on more realistic scenarios to account for ballistics, etc, but I'll be honest.  That overloads the system with formulas and math, and that's just not fun for most people.  Therefore, IME, you can easily handle a sci fi system the same as you do a fantasy system.

As Morrus said upthread, there's this myth we have as gamers to make guns more lethal by comparison than swords, and that's not really as true as people assume.  We look at what a 9mm FMJ round does to a clay block and compare that damage to the damage of driving a knife inside it and make that assumption.  Fair, but a bit misplaced.  There are people who have survived two dozen knife wounds, and people who have survived over a dozen bullet wounds.  And there are people who died from one knife wound and people who have died from one bullet wound.  There are so many factors, it's just easier to treat them pretty close to the same (just assign a reasonable damage value of the weapon).


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## Morrus (Sep 6, 2019)

Sacrosanct said:


> As Morrus said upthread, there's this myth we have as gamers to make guns more lethal by comparison than swords, and that's not really as true as people assume.  We look at what a 9mm FMJ round does to a clay block and compare that damage to the damage of driving a knife inside it and make that assumption.  Fair, but a bit misplaced.  There are people who have survived two dozen knife wounds, and people who have survived over a dozen bullet wounds.  And there are people who died from one knife wound and people who have died from one bullet wound.  There are so many factors, it's just easier to treat them pretty close to the same (just assign a reasonable damage value of the weapon).




Indeed. Anne Boleyn would argue it's pretty easy to die from one sword blow!


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## Ovinomancer (Sep 6, 2019)

John Dallman said:


> I got interested enough to buy and read Marshall's *Men Against Fire*. It's a horrible book to base any planning or game design on because it is so _muddled_. It presents itself as being based on extensive research with clear results, yet it does not describe those results with any clarity. It has patches of what seem like good sense, sometimes on the same page as utter nonsense. I suspect that many of the people who were supposed to have read it gave up after a couple of chapters, and just generalised the ideas from the first part of the book.
> 
> In those first few chapters, Marshall describes one scenario clearly. I think this is the only time he does so. It's worth describing.
> 
> ...



That a leader of an infantry unit should be concentrating on using thier weapon directly contradicts army training field manuals and journal duscussions on military tactics during WWII.  These clearly state that it's the exceptional situation where a leader -- officer, NCO, or private -- should be using their weapon rather than controlling the maneuver and fire of the unit.


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## LuisCarlos17f (Sep 6, 2019)

I give the name "Cobretti effect" to the broken balance power in the TTRPGs when the it becomes a survival horror or a "duck hunt" if there are firearms. In the movie Cobra Briditte Nielsen's character couldn't face the night slasher, but only to hide and run away, but Sylvester Stallone with weapons and ammo could kill all the cult of the new dawn. 

This is a true headache to create the ultimate universal d20 system, and I could bet Hasbro wants a Modern 2.0. to play their franchises as Transformers or G.I.Joe. 

I wonder about the solution may be a special system of XPs reward, like the monster templates, but for "extra help".


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## Celebrim (Sep 6, 2019)

DMMike said:


> @Celebrim, that sounds spot-on.  How does it apply to fantasy and sci-fi RPGs, though?




The issue behind Lancaster's Power Law is one of the reasons Sci-Fi RPGs occupy such a small niche in the RPG world,and those that are fairly familiar tend to be Science Fantasy where you have very traditional Fantasy tropes given a superficially far future veneer - say Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, or to even some extent Star Trek.

I've said it before, but it's very hard to do epic fantasy gaming in any setting where the technology of the setting strongly favors attack over defense. This precludes then settings where you have artillery, machine guns, or even really just rifles. Once you start bringing modern weaponry into the fray, and modern conceptions of battles you have to either willingly suspend a tremendous amount of disbelief, or else you have to accept that your character is and always will be a mook who can die randomly from some farmer or bandit with a musket whom he couldn't even look in the eye.

Take the hit point. I have always asserted along with Gygax, that the hit point is an abstract combination of resistance to wounds and some metaphysical resistance that allows you to avoid being seriously wounded. The hit point well mimics any sort of movie or story where the heroes get wounded, but the wounds they suffer are "just a flesh wound" and never seem to slow them down except momentarily. It is a narrative device that works well with a fortune in the middle mechanic where you can compare the damage taken to the sort of being that took it, and the hit point total of that creature, and describe the wound in a proportional manner. Hence, 10 damage to 10th level character is just a scratch, but potentially a deep or even fatal stab to a 1st level character. The difference in the wound size is explained by the 10th level characters ability to avoid such a wound (at the last moment) through _something_ where the something isn't really important and can also be narrative constructed.

This works fine (famously) until you run into a situation that doesn't easily fit into Fortune in the Middle, but instead seems to fit into Fortune in the End, where we aren't trying to find out what happened in as FitM, but rather are trying to resolve what happened. The classic examples of this are falling 400' and immersion in acid. In both of these cases, we know already what happened and it would seem like we'd want the system to resolve the result of that - Fortune in the End. The person has already fallen, now tell me the damage. In a normal situation with a sword swing, you can wait to narrate how deeply the sword struck once you get a chance to compare damage to remaining hit points, and it's easy to make up something about how the cut was just a scratch or the blow was glancing or whatever. And if you do that, the rest of the system falls into place and is at least plausible. Against a sword, a guy could parry, block, or dodge and evade most of the blow. It feels reasonable for the more skillful hero to win those fights, because wielding a sword feels like one of those things where you could if you were good protect yourself from similar weapons.

Until you get to that falling damage problem. Not saying that there aren't ways around it, but the testimony to how problematic it is is just how often it has come up and how much wordage has been used trying to deal with it.

Well, a modern or sci-fi world where you have 155mm artillery, .50 caliber bullets, and assault rifles tends to produce those conceptually 'Fortune at the End' situations much much more often than fantasy. Grenade blows up 5 feet away, it feels like we need to resolve this and not find out what happens. You get shot by a guy with a submachine gun, it feels like we need to resolve this and not find out what happens. And so forth. And that does a lot to take away the hit point mechanic, and with it the wonderful ablative plot protection and character continuity that it provides.

Which means that you need a science fiction setting with powered battle armor and personal force screens to return to that world of armored knights that can shrug off or mostly shrug off attacks. And then you start having to deal with the other problems Sci-Fi gives you.

Some have suggested to do fire fights right you need to do suppression fire, cover, concealment, and all that sort of thing. But there are two huge problems with any attempt to do that. First, that suggests an attempt at realism, and the more you attempt realism the more Fortune at the End problems you are going to have where the expectation of resolution is that the PC just got their head blown off or their guts shredded or one of their legs just parted from their body at high velocity. And the other problem is that meeting engagements with modern weaponry often start at distances of 400-500 yards, so if you want to model them at a yard or 5' to the inch, you are going to find you need a battle mat the size of an empty two car garage or else do this all theater of the mind which means all your realism about terrain and cover is now a bit pointless.



> The issue, though, sounds like a wargaming problem to me.  I'm not going to keep track of any enemy NPCs in excess of twice the number of PCs (in a fantasy or sci-fi RPG).  The excess NPCs just become setting/environment at that point.




Frankly, my standard operating procedure is at least 2 enemy NPCs per PC.  (I can go into why if you want.) But yes, that frequently can lead to a lot of die rolling.


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## Fearless Leader (Sep 6, 2019)

The new Star Trek Adventures game has an interesting asymmetry to range vs. melee combat which is I think designed not to be realistic, but rather to justify genre expectations of a tv show where choreographed fights scenes were way cheaper to produce than animated raygun special effects. Ranged attacks follow the typical roll to hit, roll for damage paradigm. Melee attacks are opposed by the target, and if the target scores higher, then the attacker takes damage. So a really good melee combatant's opportunity to do damage is proportional to the number of attackers they face, whereas the ranged fighter can usually only shoot at one target a round.


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## Fearless Leader (Sep 6, 2019)

The Doctor Who Adventures in Time & Space game addressed this problem pretty brilliantly with an initiative system that emulated what you see on the tv show. Talkers go first, followed by runners, then doers (push the red button) and then finally fighting/shooting.


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## Morrus (Sep 6, 2019)

Fearless Leader said:


> The Doctor Who Adventures in Time & Space game addressed this problem pretty brilliantly with an initiative system that emulated what you see on the tv show. Talkers go first, followed by runners, then doers (push the red button) and then finally fighting/shooting.



That distinguishes talking vs fighting, not swords vs guns.


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## LuisCarlos17f (Sep 6, 2019)

And now the sci-fi has to add the fight with remote-control drones, and swarns of mini-drones. And lots of videogames are suggesting new ideas for shootings in a sci-fi game.

In fantasy TTRPGs there is a "race arms" between PCs and DM, tricks in the fight gunslingers vs spellcasters. A gun is powerful, but it can't work against some magic tricks, for example illusory magic for smoke walls, watering gunpowder, summoning swarns, or constructs as walking turret shields. Some DMs could create bulletproof monsters, not only undead, but also constructs, aberrations from the far realm, some oozes, or shapesifter feys (with regenation powers). 

Usually the PCs are the gunfighters against unnarmed monsters, like the husks from Fortnite: save the world, but sometimes the PCs are primitive tribemen, like the ewoks from the return of the jedi, or the na`vi from Pandora in James Cameron's Avatar, being invaded by aliens with high-tech, like in "the war of the worlds". For gameplay effect the players aren't true fighters, but avoiding walking shooter traps. 

This matter is worse in superheroes TTRPGs where some PCs are martial artists (Batman, Iron Fist, Daredevil...) but others are Rambo-clones (Punisher, Deadshot, Deathstorke, Red Hood...)


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## Celebrim (Sep 6, 2019)

Fearless Leader said:


> The Doctor Who Adventures in Time & Space game addressed this problem pretty brilliantly with an initiative system that emulated what you see on the tv show. Talkers go first, followed by runners, then doers (push the red button) and then finally fighting/shooting.




While that is a brilliant analysis of genre and excellent matching of mechanics to verisimilitude of setting, the ridiculousness of that initiative order is one of the reasons I've never been able to get into Doctor Who.


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## Umbran (Sep 6, 2019)

LuisCarlos17f said:


> This matter is worse in superheroes TTRPGs where some PCs are martial artists (Batman, Iron Fist, Daredevil...) but others are Rambo-clones (Punisher, Deadshot, Deathstorke, Red Hood...)




Deathstorke - he brings a baby, and a long range sniper rifle.

In super hero stories things are easier - it is all _super_, so you don't have to worry about realism so much.   

I recall a FATE variant or two in which the difference between a gun and a sword was only in the narrative, with no mechanical difference except in what you could reasonably assert you could do with it.  The character did the same damage no matter what weapon they used.


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## Celebrim (Sep 6, 2019)

Umbran said:


> I recall a FATE variant or two in which the difference between a gun and a sword was only in the narrative, with *no mechanical difference except in what you could reasonably assert you could do with it.*  The character did the same damage no matter what weapon they used.




Yes, but if that is reasonable then a massive mechanical difference exists between a gun and a sword. I can reasonably assert that I can hit something from 400 yards away with a battle rifle or hunting rifle, and that I can attack at least a half dozen times in the time it requires for the guy with the sword to cover that distance. Likewise, if I have a M20 Bazooka, I can reasonably assert that I can destroy a light armored vehicle with it. But I can't reasonably assert that if I have only a sword.  Or if i have a grenade, I can reasonably assert that I can attack everyone in a small room at once in a literal flash, but you would have a much harder time convincing me you could reasonably do that with a sword sans some sort of superpower. 

The upshot of the system is that character's DON'T do the same damage no matter what weapon they use.  Instead, they've left the differences up to GM fiat.


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## Umbran (Sep 6, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> The upshot of the system is that character's DON'T do the same damage no matter what weapon they use.




Correction:  The upshot is that some characters may, depending on situation, have more opportunities to do damage.

Because, let's face it, generally speaking, the "swordsman running 400 yards over open terrain while the gunner plugs away at them" is a boogeyman that doesn't happen in practice with enough frequency to be a meaningful issue.  RPGS are small-group tactical combat, often with lines of sight severely restricted, because large open fields don't make the scenario particularly entertaining.

If I recall correctly, the game in question worked in "zones", and the ability for anyone to hit things decreased rapidly with the number of zones of separation.  A guy just standing there with a gun was unlikely to hit you.  An opponent who had set up with all the appropriate aspects to tag to make a sniper shot (like, Hidden, with Good SIght Lines, and a Sniper Rifle with Scope) could be dangerous, but that's expensive to make in terms of in-game resources - and useless if the target didn't come via the right route.  

In practice, then - combat was with things in your own zone with occasional shots into the next for ranged attackers.  The dude with the gun cold hit at range, but probably found the weapon useless or destroyed if they tried to use it for defense when the melee character got to them.  Rifles don't like being chopped in half much.


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## Celebrim (Sep 6, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Because, let's face it, generally speaking, the "swordsman running 400 yards over open terrain while the gunner plugs away at them" is a boogeyman that doesn't happen in practice with enough frequency to be a meaningful issue.  RPGS are small-group tactical combat, often with lines of sight severely restricted, because large open fields don't make the scenario particularly entertaining.
> 
> If I recall correctly, the game in question worked in "zones", and the ability for anyone to hit things decreased rapidly with the number of zones of separation.  A guy just standing there with a gun was unlikely to hit you.  An opponent who had set up with all the appropriate aspects to tag to make a sniper shot (like, Hidden, with Good SIght Lines, and a Sniper Rifle with Scope) could be dangerous, but that's expensive to make in terms of in-game resources - and useless if the target didn't come via the right route.




Which gets right back on topic with lew's post and my response to it - RPGs typically rout around the problem of Lanchester's Laws by unconsciously or consciously constructing the game such that the long lines of sight that are normal in reality are non-existent in the game world, thereby creating parity between melee and missile weapons that generally doesn't match reality.    They do this in fact even in cases where the rules don't punish a player for using cover, concealment, and a ranged weapon, much less in cases like FATE that you are talking about.



> In practice, then - combat was with things in your own zone with occasional shots into the next for ranged attackers.  The dude with the gun cold hit at range, but probably found the weapon useless or destroyed if they tried to use it for defense when the melee character got to them.  Rifles don't like being chopped in half much.




Except historical experience tells us that a rifle or shotgun with a bayonet on it, being essentially a short but effective pole arm, tends to out perform a sword in close combat and the only reason that they stopped issuing bayonets (and bayonet lugged combat shotguns for that matter) is that experience showed that the number of times the enemy was actually able to close into hand to hand combat successfully was so low as to hardly be worth worrying about. Even in close combat the majority of casualties turned out to be from bullets, and the major impact of that bit of sharpened steel tended to be psychological. And in cases where it was no deterrence, say last ditch charges by Japanese Samurai during WWII, there was still far more shooting the enemy at point blank range than parrying and stabbing with the bayonet effective though that proved to be when needed. Rifles are extraordinarily hard to chop in half, even for a berserk Samurai with a katana. 

And the Claymore mine pretty much ended the human wave attack as a tactic.

So again, even by the FATE rules with an M1 Garand, I'm advantaged in pretty much all cases over just having a sword.


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## Beleriphon (Sep 6, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> So again, even by the FATE rules with an M1 Garand, I'm advantaged in pretty much all cases over just having a sword.




You are, and that advantage is using a different skill than the sword guy (usually) and being able to attack outside of your own zone (some weapons should probably allow two zones away). So, now you've attacked sword guy before he's in your zone, and you can still attack him in your zone next round. So, that's two attacks compared to his one attack. That is functionally the default advantage in FATE, which tends to operate on Action Movie Logic so beyond that there isn't an advantage per se.

I also don't think attritional combat is particularly effective at the small scale as described in the OP. Five combatants versus ten combatants with ranged weapons could very well be a toss up if the five are highly trained special forces types in the vein of the SAS or similar, while the ten are green troops or some kind of informal militia.

The five spec-ops are going to be better co-ordinated, have a much higher on target hit rate, and likely have better equipment. The ten untrained guys are going to have second rate equipment, minimal training in co-ordinating their tactics, and probably not have particularly good aim. All those five guys have to do is take five of the other guys out of the fight without taking any casualties themselves (which isn't unreasonable) and suddenly things are even on a man to man basis.

If we ramp that up to 25 vs 50, or 500 vs 1000 then attritional combat can start to work. In theory to make it equal man to man the 25 only have to cause one casualty each, but that means that none of the 25 can be a casualty in turn.


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## Derren (Sep 6, 2019)

Imo what affects the gun vs sword debate the most is the HP system a RPG uses. The more tank like characters are, the less sense do guns make. Thats why D20 Games have always struggled with them.

No matter the HP, melee combat generally stays the same. Two combatants meet, one stabs the other until he dies and the winner moves on. This generally stays the same with lots of HP, only that there are several cimbat rounds until one of them dies.

On the other hand, HP fundamentally alter the way ranged weapons/guns are used. The entire point of those weapons is to kill someone from far away, but except for maybe 1st level this win't happen. The enemy will always reach you unless you have a meat shield, you will always need several shots to kill one guy and you always need to plan around melee combat.

The more advanced the gun is, the more obvious this difference between "reality" (or what people expect from reality) and the game becomes.
If you want guns you need to throw away the HP system first.


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## Beleriphon (Sep 6, 2019)

Derren said:


> Imo what affects the gun vs sword debate the most is the HP system a RPG uses. The more tank like characters are, the less sense do guns make. Thats why D20 Games have always struggled with them.
> 
> No matter the HP, melee combat generally stays the same. Two combatants meet, one stabs the other until he dies and the winner moves on. This generally stays the same with lots of HP, only that there are several cimbat rounds until one of them dies.
> 
> ...




I think has to do with genre conventions, HP by itself works fine from the standpoint of a game. There are plenty of real people that have been shot dozens of times and kept fighting. If nothing else Badass of the Week should prove that.

From a genre standpoint if we're playing say spaghetti westerns or a _Dirty Dozen_ kind of game when I shoot nameless black hat #37 or that stinking gestapo rat he falls over dead. When the El Gaucho Maximo or Oberstleutnant Frizt Krankelrauter shoots at my character I expect maybe to withstand a round or two of that. But, that's a genre convention rather than anything inherent to the way guns work.

That said, if we want to encourage certain behaviors in game, like hiding behind cover, and not running around in the open like crazy person, we can keep HP the way they are. We just have to add a few rules that encourage the players to do what we want, no critical hits while in cover, standing in the open gets a free shot from every enemy in range, all kinds of things can work and still use HP as they are.


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## Celebrim (Sep 6, 2019)

Derren said:


> If you want guns you need to throw away the HP system first.




I don't really think you do. However, I do think that the more you are dealing with something like a bullet, which flies too fast to be reacted to, the less easy it is to swallow the explanation that the character is dodging at the last minute and thus only being nicked by the attack. At some point if you mix guns and classic D&D style hit point system, it just feels like the hits should be more random and if more random then more lethal instead of concentrated around the edge of the target as they would be in D&D.

However, if hit points are small relative to the size of damage - as in say CoC potentially - then this problem goes away. One or two bullets is enough to drop or kill anyone most of the time, and people's sense that bullets should be more random and hit more solidly most of the time is not violated.


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## Morrus (Sep 6, 2019)

Derren said:


> Imo what affects the gun vs sword debate the most is the HP system a RPG uses. The more tank like characters are, the less sense do guns make. Thats why D20 Games have always struggled with them.
> 
> No matter the HP, melee combat generally stays the same. Two combatants meet, one stabs the other until he dies and the winner moves on. This generally stays the same with lots of HP, only that there are several cimbat rounds until one of them dies.
> 
> ...




It makes no difference. Being stabbed with a sword or shot with a gun. Both involve metal entering your body and kiling you. Requiring that bullets hitting you kills you with one shot and swords stabbing you do not is peculiar, at best. The range is irrelevant to the hit points; it's merely revelant to the ease of delivering the damage.


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## The Crimson Binome (Sep 7, 2019)

Fearless Leader said:


> Melee attacks are opposed by the target, and if the target scores higher, then the attacker takes damage. So a really good melee combatant's opportunity to do damage is proportional to the number of attackers they face, whereas the ranged fighter can usually only shoot at one target a round.



That's only true if the enemies are blind to the way that their world works. Otherwise, the first two Klingons get counter-stabbed, and the rest of them pull out their disruptors when they realize that melee is counter-productive.


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## Tony Vargas (Sep 7, 2019)

Sacrosanct said:


> I'm not sure where this aversion to kill idea comes from, exactly.



 Empathy?



Morrus said:


> I strongly dislike attempts to give firearms ridiculous amounts of damage; they shouldn't be much different from a sword. A solid hit from either will finish you in real life; in a game it'll probably graze you or whatever until the shot/blow which takes you down.




I wonder if early D&D's outsized influence on the hobby hasn't had something to do with the issue.  By the time I started in '80, it seemed like there was a clear narrative about guns being bad in D&D, with the corresponding expectation that they must be something terribly overpowered.  

Could it have been that guns were originally considered 'bad' in D&D, merely for being anachronistic and contrary to genre, not overpowered?  But, the general gaming community has a perception that guns to be 'realistically' put into D&D, must be wands o' insta-death?


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 7, 2019)

jedijon said:


> It seems pretty clear that what we’re doing is giving everyone a turn. Not simulating a war. my turn with a pistol is intended to be similar to your turn with a flaming sword...
> <...>
> 
> And really, in a narrative game, is it hard to see why blades vs bullets is a thing?




RPGs aren't necessarily narrative. They had a narrative streak to them but the wargame origins of D&D are pretty evident. Many modern games are much more explicitly narrative than D&D has really ever been and have game mechanical structures that support that. 5E has a few toes dipped in the water for that but only toes. 




> We’re primed to believe it takes several whacks with a sword to accomplish anything but a well placed bullet is the end.




Unfortunately much of what we "know" about weapons comes from Hollywood tropes. 




> I guess ultimately it’s more a reason bullets aren’t found in fantasy and every game where they are has some rad tech to keep the fantasy high so we’re not just going Nathan Drake on it.




In some cases we're talking genre boundaries. "Fantasy" stayed away from guns. I also think it's kind of challenging to balance realistic pre-modern firearms in an RPG, at least if one wants to enforce reloading time. While they were effective battlefield weapons for lots of reasons, they really weren't on a personal level. A musket was essentially a platoon-scale weapon (as indeed were most crossbows).


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## Celebrim (Sep 7, 2019)

Tony Vargas said:


> I wonder if early D&D's outsized influence on the hobby hasn't had something to do with the issue.  By the time I started in '80, it seemed like there was a clear narrative about guns being bad in D&D, with the corresponding expectation that they must be something terribly overpowered.
> 
> Could it have been that guns were originally considered 'bad' in D&D, merely for being anachronistic and contrary to genre, not overpowered?  But, the general gaming community has a perception that guns to be 'realistically' put into D&D, must be wands o' insta-death?




I don't think there is anything concrete you could say about old school play, nor a blanket description you could give of the motivations. Certainly we know that Greyhawk had guns, and probably a lot of other games had guns. And the motivations of the individual tables for not embracing guns were probably diverse, and did include a desire to stay true to a perceived genre or perceived conventions of history.

I think part of the problem has to do with the fact that simultaneously our culture fetishizes guns and fears them, a situation that I think has a lot to do with the decline of practical experience with guns and particularly with practical experience of guns as a tool. I grew up with guns everywhere, but no one I knew romanticized guns either. And the only time I ever saw a gun treated as a snake that might leap up and bite you was when for safety's sake a young cousin had to be traumatized about touching guns after he got one out and treated it like a toy, and that only until he was old enough to understand and put one to practical use (which in many families, started at around age 5).

But whatever the larger cultural gestalt might have been, at least at the tables I was familiar with at the time, wanting to bring guns into a game was seen as a very stereotypical sort of Munchkinism - the inevitable thing that a player just cutting their teeth on the game would hit on as a highly original idea likely to lead to the them 'winning' the game. No guns was seen mostly as opposition to a certain immature perspective on the game: a stance that shut down attempts to overcome obstacles in ways that the player thought were 'thinking out of the box' but which were really just banal, metagamey, and attempts to win by getting the table to agree to changing the rules. The older gamer would say something like, "No guns. Gunpowder doesn't work on this world. Beside, read Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. He got there years before you did."

Realistic guns aren't the wands of insta-death that the Munchkin's imagine, but they change the game world in ways that are contrary to the Munkchkin's purposes. The characters that get the most out of guns aren't the Heroes, but the Commoners. The ordinary goblin mooks get far more out of a rifled mini-ball caplock musket or an M16 assault rifle than leveled characters ever would. As the old saying goes, "God made men. Sam Colt made them equal." And we could use more inclusive language than that probably. It's not I think a coincidence that women's suffrage and followed after the invention of a weapon that made sheer athleticism not the sole essence of military prowess. After all, the essential truth of male and female equality had been decided on in the West a good 2000 years prior, but no one ever really acted on it until a young lady could shoot the head off a fly at 20 paces. Guns might not be wands of instadeath, but by levelling the playing field they have a tendency to be anti-heroic, and play against those great ape fantasies of being all important and the center of all attention.


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 7, 2019)

If Gary thought guns were inherently bad or hated, he wouldn't have included in the 1e DMG how to incorporate Gamma World and Boot Hill into your game.  And Expedition to the Barrier Peaks would have never been a thing.


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## Beleriphon (Sep 7, 2019)

On guns in D&D, a thought I've had recently is that early D&D is based on some very bad research that got passed around from the mid-Victorian era to at least the late 1980s. Names of armour being one example, old stories about a knight needing a crane to get on his horse would be another (I recall children's history book from when I was six or seven featuring this, that was 1988/1987). The very idea that firearms were the death knell of knights in shining armour because a firearm would punch a hole in the plate and the man wearing it was relatively prevalent for a long time. So this myth gets picked up by the early gaming community, many of whom were history nerds, and the only way to make that work in game is to give guns stupid high amounts of damage, thus nobody wanted to use them.

We've generally accepted that end of the knight as heavy cavalry didn't end because guns killed them too well, it ended because guns eventually made them obsolete. The changing face of warfare meant a heavily armoured man on a horse with a lance wasn't as useful as two dozen men armed with guns. Thus, the local lord hired a dozen men with guns rather than buy himself a fancy suit of armour and a trained war horse.


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 7, 2019)

I think there were more movie/book nerds that were gamers than history nerds.  What I mean by that is that I'm sure at any given game table, most also watched fantasy movies, but few if any were actually history buffs.  Therefore, I think a lot of these misconceptions in the community were based off of movies and books that were inaccurate as opposed to the actual historical accuracy.

For example, the super heavy armor that needed a crane is a scene from the movie Sword of the Valiant from 1984 (I'm sure there were other references as well, that's just off the top of my head).  And let's be honest.  Fantasy movies from the late 70s and early 80s (a huge rise in them in that period) weren't exactly known for their historical accuracy.


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## Bawylie (Sep 7, 2019)

“Guns vs Sword” is just such a loaded topic and I doubt there’s even a meaningful consensus on terms. 

I mean, what level of tech (roughly) is permissible in your medieval fantasy game? Renaissance? Golden age of piracy? American Revolution? American Civil War? Wild West? WWI? II? 

Do we need as many variations of “pistol” as we have of “sword”?

How do we consider physical space? If we can shoot a rifle at even a modest range, we’re gonna need a few feet’s worth of 1” squares. 

What do you want to do about loudness? Are we firing in a cramped dungeon hall? Does that mean anything? 

Or - scrapping all real world assumptions, do we go back and say “well, this is a world of classical elements, crafted by deities and molded by heroic action, so we have guns but they aren’t quite like you understand them because it’s a magical world and the rules are different”? 

And then, we haven’t really even addressed their implementation as game elements. How ‘different’ should they be? How easy to use? How fair compared to other ranged weaponry? How about cover fire? I mean, yeah, we’ve talked about it some. We’ve seen some games take some stabs at it (with some real success, too). But not quite a good, easy integration into d&d. 

That’s aside from the “Well, actually...” objections that are sure to arise because everyone has a slightly different take on what Should Be. 

And in the end I’m just not at all sure on how to weigh in on gun vs sword. Except that I wouldn’t start with the real world comparison. I think I’d start in the game world (though I’m not even certain about that).


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## Imaculata (Sep 7, 2019)

Bawylie said:


> I mean, what level of tech (roughly) is permissible in your medieval fantasy game? Renaissance? Golden age of piracy? American Revolution? American Civil War? Wild West? WWI? II?




I'm currently using all manner of flintlock weapons in my pirate campaign. This includes some variants that were invented over the span of several centuries, but I handwave that for the sake of weapon diversity.



Bawylie said:


> Do we need as many variations of “pistol” as we have of “sword”?




I feel that we do. It is one of the first things I added when playing D20 Modern and D20 Scifi. Guns with different ammo capacity, different calibers, different range, different damage dice. An extra rule we added is that longarms are easier to disarm, to make bullpop weapons have a distinct advantage in close quarters.



Bawylie said:


> How do we consider physical space? If we can shoot a rifle at even a modest range, we’re gonna need a few feet’s worth of 1” squares.




We have had to add some extra homebrew sniper rules, since the existing systems did not account for such a specialization.



Bawylie said:


> What do you want to do about loudness? Are we firing in a cramped dungeon hall? Does that mean anything?




For my group I have come up with a system of weapon mods, that allow players to reduce the muzzle flash and loudness of their weapon at the cost of either damage, range or accuracy, to make their weapons harder to notice when firing. This means that when firing from a hidden position, an enemy needs to succeed on a perception check to find out where the shooter is shooting from. Louder guns with bigger muzzle flashes are easier to spot.



Bawylie said:


> And then, we haven’t really even addressed their implementation as game elements. How ‘different’ should they be? How easy to use? How fair compared to other ranged weaponry? How about cover fire? I mean, yeah, we’ve talked about it some. We’ve seen some games take some stabs at it (with some real success, too). But not quite a good, easy integration into d&d.




This is a good question. In our games we allow for cover fire, but we don't really have a clear rule for it. We basically leave it up to the DM to improvize a ruling. We have added different types of ammunition as well, to add special effects to the damage that guns can do (fire,cold,radiation, armor penetration, knockback).


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## S'mon (Sep 7, 2019)

Blue said:


> An ancedotal bit - I was talking to a not-closely related relative at a family gathering who was in the armed forces at the time and had been deployed overseas.  He mentioned that boot camp teaches them how to attack, but doesn't teach them how to kill people.  That not being able to pull the trigger and kill a human in their sights was a big problem.




My ex's grand dad's WW2 anecdotes from the 3rd Infantry Division are full of tales of NOT killing Germans when he had the chance. I saw 'Bomb Happy' at the Edinburgh Fringe recently and it had some of that too. 

But it may have been a factor of 'civilians in uniform' with enemies of a common race & culture. The WW2 Pacific Theatre, and Vietnam War, seem to have been completely different. It may also have been an ethnic-European thing,or at least common-culture thing. I don't think WW2 Japanese & Chinese had this problem.


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## Arnwolf666 (Sep 7, 2019)

Morrus said:


> For me - and note D&D does not accomodate this well - for firearms and the like you need to incorporate cover, positioning, overwatches, and so on. Give it some elements of a chess game as combatants try to outmaneuver each other. I strongly dislike attempts to give firearms ridiculous amounts of damage; they shouldn't be much different from a sword. A solid hit from either will finish you in real life; in a game it'll probably graze you or whatever until the shot/blow which takes you down.
> 
> That's just my preference though. Other people will feel differently, which is fine.



I would be intrigued to see a system like that, although in general I am happy with pistols 1d6 rifles 1d10 I am open to what u r proposing over just giving firearms big damage.


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## Arnwolf666 (Sep 7, 2019)

Derren said:


> Imo what affects the gun vs sword debate the most is the HP system a RPG uses. The more tank like characters are, the less sense do guns make. Thats why D20 Games have always struggled with them.
> 
> No matter the HP, melee combat generally stays the same. Two combatants meet, one stabs the other until he dies and the winner moves on. This generally stays the same with lots of HP, only that there are several cimbat rounds until one of them dies.
> 
> ...



Try playing call of Cthulhu with 9 hit points against rifles that do 4d6 damage. It’s a very different experience.


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## dragoner (Sep 7, 2019)

Ultimately the solution is going to be to design down from guns to melee weapons, I actually mostly go ranged and then melee as two distinct categories, except ranged is dominant. Anything modern to SF, firearms will dominate; early modern to medieval-classical, fantasy, melee weapons, which is basically the historical truth of the battlefield.


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## Fanaelialae (Sep 7, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> I do think that the more you are dealing with something like a bullet, which flies too fast to be reacted to, the less easy it is to swallow the explanation that the character is dodging at the last minute and thus only being nicked by the attack. At some point if you mix guns and classic D&D style hit point system, it just feels like the hits should be more random and if more random then more lethal instead of concentrated around the edge of the target as they would be in D&D.



Perhaps that is how some people look at it, but to me a character with high HP isn't dodging the bullet (unless he's Neo), he's dodging the gunman. Which is really what is happening with a sword as well. Bullets can't generally change direction mid-flight, but a swordsman can certainly adjust his attack mid thrust (switching to a feint and then attacking from a new angle).



S'mon said:


> My ex's grand dad's WW2 anecdotes from the 3rd Infantry Division are full of tales of NOT killing Germans when he had the chance. I saw 'Bomb Happy' at the Edinburgh Fringe recently and it had some of that too.
> 
> But it may have been a factor of 'civilians in uniform' with enemies of a common race & culture. The WW2 Pacific Theatre, and Vietnam War, seem to have been completely different. It may also have been an ethnic-European thing,or at least common-culture thing. I don't think WW2 Japanese & Chinese had this problem.



I think what it comes down to is that people are complicated. I have little doubt that irrespective of the war, there were inexperienced soldiers who hesitated at killing, as well as those who had no such reticence. Those who study such matters may be able to suss out generalities, but those will not necessarily apply to any given individual.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 8, 2019)

DWChancellor said:


> This gets to flavoring HP.  Players always like the think of HP as literal "health" like the Doom guy's picture getting wounded as it runs out.  Then you use bandages, and hey presto, no more bleeding wounds!
> 
> I'm with Morrus, I much prefer the 5E style of HP as "stamina" where you are running down and getting sloppier.  A high level character is more alert, has better instincts, and superior situational awareness to _avoid_ being genuinely injured.  This is why you heal to full with resting.




That's not just new to 5E, I'm pretty sure that Gygax made roughly the same justification back in the day. 

The problem is that things like falling damage end up feeling rather ridiculous for high level characters. So a lot of it comes down to what you want hit points to represent, which necessarily involves choosing which parts of the game won't be so well represented.  

All that said, I do think that hit points, as warty as they can be, are _practical_. They allow the game to proceed with very dramatically different scales of monsters.


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## MGibster (Sep 8, 2019)

I remember reading something about the ridiculousness of hit points in regards to Palladium Fantasy (which isn't D&D of course) written in to one of the gaming magazines in the 1980s.  It had something to do with a PC deciding to just throw himself on a grenade because he had enough SDC* to absorb all the damage.  The reply was something along the lines of, "If the PCs do something that should logically just kill them then just let them die."  And I think that's good advice.  A dagger might only do 1d4 points of damage but if a PC wants to use one to kill themselves I'm going going to roll for an attack and let him whittle away at those hit points.


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## Hussar (Sep 8, 2019)

Sacrosanct said:


> /snip
> 
> As Morrus said upthread, there's this myth we have as gamers to make guns more lethal by comparison than swords, and that's not really as true as people assume.  We look at what a 9mm FMJ round does to a clay block and compare that damage to the damage of driving a knife inside it and make that assumption.  Fair, but a bit misplaced.  There are people who have survived two dozen knife wounds, and people who have survived over a dozen bullet wounds.  And there are people who died from one knife wound and people who have died from one bullet wound.  There are so many factors, it's just easier to treat them pretty close to the same (just assign a reasonable damage value of the weapon).




Fair enough.  But a 9mm pistol round isn't exactly the standard here is it?  As soon as we go to long gun rounds, I don't care how strong you are, a .308 round is a HELL of a lot more damaging than a knife or a sword.  And, 7.62 mm (close enough to .308) is pretty standard for military grade rifles in a lot of the world.  Even 5.56 (NATO) rounds are devastatingly effective.

And, that's not even getting into heavier caliber weaponry.

Frankly, I think this is where the problem lies.  Swords and knives, sure, they can kill you.  But, if I'm in plate armor, you can bang on my breastplate until the cows come home and all you're really doing is making noise.  OTOH, 7.62 mm will blows nice neat holes through that armor and nicely shred the juicy meat bag underneath.

The problem is, we accept a completely abstract combat system in fantasy, but, as soon as we get into modern weaponry (never minding SF weapons which should be even more effective), suspension of disbelief gets a lot harder because a lot of us know what these weapons can do.  Unlike swinging a sword, there's lots of us here who actually have fired firearms.  

Or, to put it another way, if knives and swords actually were equivalent to firearms, why have they been more or less completely replaced as the weapon of choice?


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 8, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Fair enough.  But a 9mm pistol round isn't exactly the standard here is it?  As soon as we go to long gun rounds, I don't care how strong you are, a .308 round is a HELL of a lot more damaging than a knife or a sword.  And, 7.62 mm (close enough to .308) is pretty standard for military grade rifles in a lot of the world.  Even 5.56 (NATO) rounds are devastatingly effective.
> 
> And, that's not even getting into heavier caliber weaponry.
> 
> ...




Couple things. A 7.62 IS a .308 for all intents an purposes, just like a .223 is a 5.56. I’m being pedantic, I know lol

Also, a .308 isn’t more damaging than a sword, or axe, or mace. As Morrus was inferring, and I was also saying, there are a lot of factors. Location being one of them. A sword can take your head off (or another limb). A .308 can shatter bones and cause a wound channel bad enough you might as well have had your head decapitated, but it isn’t more damaging. 

The armor thing certainly is a worthy topic, and one we’ve all had. With that, I’d say because we already ignore how a bodkin arrow or spear or thrusting sword make mail armor obsolete, (we still give the target full AC value), then it’s not unfair to do the same with firearms. Well, in 1e Gygax accounted for it, but we quickly found out how most gamers ignored that chart. Therefore, it’s fair to assume players shouldn’t get caught up with firearms either if they want to be consistent. 

And if you do want to account for it, just give a bonus to hit against armored targets. 

For you last question, it’s because you need way less training with a firearm, and you have a much greater effective range. That’s said, when I was in the military in the 90s, we were still very much trained in hand to hand combat with things like bayonets because you run out of ammo


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 8, 2019)

I think modern weapons are largely overrated in lethality compared to melee weapons. I blame pop culture and media representations. For example, in the Vegas shooting (5.56 cal used), there were 58 killed, and 422 wounded by bullets). In D&D terms, the victims were all commoners. So what would be the damage range for a weapon that when a successful hit is made, 15% or so die?  Is it more than a sword?


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## S'mon (Sep 8, 2019)

Heavier high velocity rounds, especially rifles, just ARE a lot more deadly than arrows or melee weapons. One big reason seems to be that stabbing & slashing weapons slide through flesh - the flesh has time to 'get out of the way' - while high velocity bullets tear and destroy it. At the higher range bullets impart huge amounts of energy, far more than a physical blow could.

Now, no weapon instantly/quickly kills people most of the time until you're getting up into stuff firing .50 long ammunition like the Browning .50 machine gun and Barratt .50 sniper rifle - knife & sword wounds don't; arrows certainly don't; bullets don't. Hollywood certainly massively over rates the lethality of all weapons. That doesn't mean some aren't more lethal than others.


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## Fanaelialae (Sep 8, 2019)

Jay Verkuilen said:


> The problem is that things like falling damage end up feeling rather ridiculous for high level characters. So a lot of it comes down to what you want hit points to represent, which necessarily involves choosing which parts of the game won't be so well represented.
> 
> All that said, I do think that hit points, as warty as they can be, are _practical_. They allow the game to proceed with very dramatically different scales of monsters.



I agree that hit points are quite practical.

That said, I think that most issues with HP go away if we simply reframe how we look at them.

Hit points (IMO) are essentially akin to the resilience that important characters in a story have (aka, plot armor). If you're watching TV or reading a book, and an important character falls off a ledge and plumets to their inevitable demise, there's a nearly 100% chance that the character will survive. To the point where that old trope has been a cliche for years now.

Generally speaking, it's not really an issue unless you're expecting HP to model reality or there's metagaming involved. 

In the former, a high level character is among the great heroes, like Hercules or Odysseus, so expecting realism is arguably about having mismatched expectations. If Hercules or Odysseus tumbled off a cliff you can bet either one would walk away from it.

As for the latter, it can be an issue if players of high level characters have them behave as though they were aware of that plot armor, but outside of perhaps comedy, we'd balk at any writer that had a character behave in such a manner (throwing themselves off cliff after cliff because "I've got the hit points". In that case it isn't the HP system that is at issue, but rather the player's metagaming.



MGibster said:


> I remember reading something about the ridiculousness of hit points in regards to Palladium Fantasy (which isn't D&D of course) written in to one of the gaming magazines in the 1980s.  It had something to do with a PC deciding to just throw himself on a grenade because he had enough SDC* to absorb all the damage.  The reply was something along the lines of, "If the PCs do something that should logically just kill them then just let them die."  And I think that's good advice.  A dagger might only do 1d4 points of damage but if a PC wants to use one to kill themselves I'm going going to roll for an attack and let him whittle away at those hit points.



This brought to mind an episode of MASH where a grenade gets tossed and (IIRC) Col Potter throws himself on the grenade. There's a tense moment, but the grenade is a dud, and everyone is okay.

That said, if the player throws his character on grenade after grenade, I'd agree, just let them die.

Back in the day, when we were playing 3rd edition, we ended up with a very high level party (somewhere around 25 I think). We came across a group of powerful creatures who had opposed us for much of the campaign. They offered to allow us to be reborn as one of them, and offered us a rusty dagger. And that's the story of how, one-by-one, each character of a epic level party slit their own throat. Self inflicted TPK. The DM still likes to trot that one out when he's in the mood to gloat. 



Hussar said:


> Fair enough.  But a 9mm pistol round isn't exactly the standard here is it?  As soon as we go to long gun rounds, I don't care how strong you are, a .308 round is a HELL of a lot more damaging than a knife or a sword.  And, 7.62 mm (close enough to .308) is pretty standard for military grade rifles in a lot of the world.  Even 5.56 (NATO) rounds are devastatingly effective.
> 
> And, that's not even getting into heavier caliber weaponry.
> 
> ...



A near miss is still a near miss, whether it's from a .308 or a .22. That's what I'd argue is the case for a high hit point character facing off against someone with a modern military rifle. You might be getting peppered with debris as the rounds shred through anything around you, but you haven't actually been hit until you're reduced to 0. I could totally see a rule that makes stabilizing a character brought to 0 with such a weapon more difficult.

There were weapons even before modern rifles that were designed to kill an armored opponent. Warhammers and the like. No standing around all day against those weapons. You could always bring back the old weapon vs armor charts if that sort of thing interests you, but it's not my thing.

That said, some games like Stars Without Number do go a more realistic approach. More advanced weaponry will typically ignore less advanced armor. High powered weapons are likely to put a low level character on the ground in one shot. Even high level characters probably can't handle more than 2 or 3 shots. Truly powerful weapons, like those mounted on a starship, will outright kill most characters unless the GM rules otherwise. Of course, the game makes it possible to resuscitate dying characters with med patches or psychic powers (unless the GM rules that the character is beyond saving), and also makes rolling up replacement characters fairly quick. Obviously, SWN assumes a less heroic tone by default.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 8, 2019)

Fearless Leader said:


> The new Star Trek Adventures game has an interesting asymmetry to range vs. melee combat which is I think designed not to be realistic, but rather to justify genre expectations <...>




_STA_ and the other Modiphius 2D20 games are 100% aimed at genre emulation more than any kind of simulation of "reality." For instance, Stress and Wounds, which are common to all 2D20 games, are quite clearly set up to feel like a fairly pulpy action show and in _STA_ you have to take Threat to make lethal attacks. _STA_'s starship combat is really quite good, too. It "feels" like starship combat in the shows.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 8, 2019)

Fanaelialae said:


> I agree that hit points are quite practical.
> 
> That said, I think that most issues with HP go away if we simply reframe how we look at them. Hit points (IMO) are essentially akin to the resilience that important characters in a story have (aka, plot armor). <...>
> 
> Generally speaking, it's not really an issue unless you're expecting HP to model reality or there's metagaming involved.




I agree, the real issue shows up when people start meta-gaming Hit Points. Falling I think is one of the worst examples in D&D, though, because of how much experience people have IRL with it (alas, I have a _lot_ of experience with falling, and the injuries to prove it). I agree with you that in many ways "plot armor" would make a fall not lethal, but it's not something that one would blithely laugh off either, but that's exactly what a high level fighter type can do. The issue here is not that other things aren't analogous, such as getting stomped on by a dragon, but because it starts to hit the "uncanny valley" and rub against the secondary reality people are trying to build in the game. Metagaming this is so bad because it exploits a strange aspect of the rules.


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## Fanaelialae (Sep 8, 2019)

Jay Verkuilen said:


> I agree, the real issue shows up when people start meta-gaming Hit Points. Falling I think is one of the worst examples in D&D, though, because of how much experience people have IRL with it (alas, I have a _lot_ of experience with falling, and the injuries to prove it). I agree with you that in many ways "plot armor" would make a fall not lethal, but it's not something that one would blithely laugh off either, but that's exactly what a high level fighter type can do. The issue here is not that other things aren't analogous, such as getting stomped on by a dragon, but because it starts to hit the "uncanny valley" and rub against the secondary reality people are trying to build in the game. Metagaming this is so bad because it exploits a strange aspect of the rules.



You're not wrong with there being a certain disjointedness to falling, particularly if it happens with regularity.

That said, it isn't all that difficult to shore up the realism of something like falling if it's an issue for you. For example, one of my DMs made falling damage d10 Brutal 1, and serious falls require a Con save to avoid broken bones (which is very serious until you get Regeneration - to give you an idea, he added a new spell which reduces the recovery time to 1d4 days).

Characters with plot armor rarely get seriously injured in falls, unless it's part of the plot. They might be knocked unconscious. Most of the time they pick themselves up with a groan, pat themselves to make sure nothing's broken, and carry on like nothing ever happened. And then everyone else, who assumed the character must have assuredly died in the fall, is surprised when the character comes sauntering back with nary a scratch.

Personally, the player of a high level fighter may laugh it off (much like they might a kobold with a dagger), but the character should not (unless they're laughing at the fact that they're lucky to be alive). That comes down to role playing a realistic character, IMO.


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## chaochou (Sep 8, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Or, to put it another way, if knives and swords actually were equivalent to firearms, why have they been more or less completely replaced as the weapon of choice?




Because, as has already been pointed out, if you can do lethal damage with your sword at one yard and I can do lethal damage with my assault rifle at one to five hundred yards, then at all ranges except a yard, I win. Which means, I win.

And, as has already been pointed out, if it takes three years to become a proficient swordsman and two months to train someone to load a gun and pull a trigger, then armies of riflemen are also better in terms of economics and logistics.

None of that says a bullet does 'more damage' than a sword thrust. It says it does damage more reliably and easily in lot wider range of circumstances.


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## dragoner (Sep 8, 2019)

Daggers should often be deadlier than represented. I have a old FBI pdf about handgun wounding factors, most handguns hit with the power of a baseball. Where Hollywood over represents the power of guns is that the knock people back, when in reality, the bullet would pass through the target, and someone would just fold forward, as our natural stance is forward.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 8, 2019)

Beleriphon said:


> We've generally accepted that end of the knight as heavy cavalry didn't end because guns killed them too well, it ended because guns eventually made them obsolete. The changing face of warfare meant a heavily armoured man on a horse with a lance wasn't as useful as two dozen men armed with guns. Thus, the local lord hired a dozen men with guns rather than buy himself a fancy suit of armour and a trained war horse.




Melee combat has made a comeback, too, at different times. World War I had a lot of it due to the nature of trench warfare, and whenever static line warfare with a lot of skirmishing and patrolling has reappeared (Italian Front, Stalingrad, lots in China, etc.) or during the Korean War, the Eritrean War, among many other examples, so has melee combat. 

Obviously one thing that's happened too is the reappearance of armor on the battlefield. In many ways it'd never totally disappeared as there were cavalry who wore breastplates and many military hats were designed to mitigate saber blows during the Napoleonic Era. Helmets reappeared pretty fast in World War I.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 8, 2019)

chaochou said:


> None of that says a bullet does 'more damage' than a sword thrust. It says it does damage more reliably and easily in lot wider range of circumstances.




True enough, and those are big reasons guns took over from melee and archery. In some cases there's quite a bit of measurable information. A Medieval crossbow compared to even pretty weak guns lose out on the ground of energy delivered to the target. Of course, an arrow is sharp and if the shaft penetrates it does a whole lot of tissue damage, so it may well not really be comparable.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 8, 2019)

dragoner said:


> Daggers should often be deadlier than represented. I have a old FBI pdf about handgun wounding factors, most handguns hit with the power of a baseball. Where Hollywood over represents the power of guns is that the knock people back, when in reality, the bullet would pass through the target, and someone would just fold forward, as our natural stance is forward.




A big part of it is that daggers are plenty deadly... against ordinary people. A commoner has 4 hp and is rendered down and dying by a successful dagger strike by another commoner 25% of the time; two strikes are typically down and dying, with but a stab or two to dead. That's not really off reality at all. The numbers make tolerable (if not perfect) sense against ordinary people but this means if we use RL as a basis for comparison for heroic characters and think of hit points as meat points, things look ridiculous.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 8, 2019)

Fanaelialae said:


> You're not wrong with there being a certain disjointedness to falling, particularly if it happens with regularity.




Falling is one of D&D's "Murphy's rules". 



> That said, it isn't all that difficult to shore up the realism of something like falling if it's an issue for you.




True.  




> Characters with plot armor rarely get seriously injured in falls, unless it's part of the plot. They might be knocked unconscious. Most of the time they pick themselves up with a groan, pat themselves to make sure nothing's broken, and carry on like nothing ever happened. And then everyone else, who assumed the character must have assuredly died in the fall, is surprised when the character comes sauntering back with nary a scratch.




That's true, but hit points aren't entirely "plot armor" either. For instance, natural healing back in the older versions of the game was very, very slow, so it would revert to quasi-realism. There are many other ways hit points don't line up with being plot armor either. For instance, in many movies, TV shows, or stories, heroes often surrender when having a dagger held to the throat. But the real meta-game thinker would laugh that off. 




> Personally, the player of a high level fighter may laugh it off (much like they might a kobold with a dagger), but the character should not (unless they're laughing at the fact that they're lucky to be alive). That comes down to role playing a realistic character, IMO.




Perhaps, but I think we've likely both played long enough to know how meta-game thinking is like crack with Cheez Wiz for some players. They just seem to be unable to avoid it, for instance deciding that the way death saves and overnight healing work applies to NPCs as well, especially if it suits their purposes.


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## GMMichael (Sep 8, 2019)

*Knife-to-Throat and Falling Solution:*
Game modes.  Hit points have their proper place, which is not throughout the entire game, but only during intense combat.  If your character has a knife to her throat, hit points don't apply because we've agreed (I think) that a knife can inflict lethal damage pretty fast.  Use a different resolution system than hit point attrition to determine the outcome.

*Fantasy vs. Sci-Fi Combat Solution:*
None needed.  Fantasy introduces long-range combat alternatives while sci-fi introduces close-combat solutions.  If your RPG features equal amounts of non-magical close combat without firearms and ranged combat with only firearms, then you might need a solution.  But that's limited to, what, modern-era games with a penchant for realism?  Even a James Bond-style game is going to be more fantastic than that.

Use Solutions only as directed.  Do not try this at home.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 8, 2019)

DMMike said:


> *Knife-to-Throat and Falling Solution:*
> Game modes.  Hit points have their proper place, which is not throughout the entire game, but only during intense combat.  If your character has a knife to her throat, hit points don't apply because we've agreed (I think) that a knife can inflict lethal damage pretty fast.  Use a different resolution system than hit point attrition to determine the outcome.




If you can get players to agree to that, more power to you (literally and figuratively). I think in nearly any group I've played with over the years this would not fly and would be considered a serious violation of player autonomy.


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## dragoner (Sep 8, 2019)

Jay Verkuilen said:


> A big part of it is that daggers are plenty deadly... against ordinary people. A commoner has 4 hp and is rendered down and dying by a successful dagger strike by another commoner 25% of the time; two strikes are typically down and dying, with but a stab or two to dead. That's not really off reality at all. The numbers make tolerable (if not perfect) sense against ordinary people but this means if we use RL as a basis for comparison for heroic characters and think of hit points as meat points, things look ridiculous.




You are exactly right in that it is how combat is modeled to where it's representation matters, personally I find all RPG combat to be an abstraction. The FBI pdf is good to provide a realistic baseline, and the conclusion at the end is probably the most salient part of it.

Modern military shoulder arms are interesting in that they are more designed to wound over killing, where the most deadly rifle is the American Civil War muskets. AD&D did ok with firearms, if one wants to think of them as late 15th-16th century person carrying a brace of six or so single shot pistols, as what is seen in drawings of that era. Two shots per round, 1d6 or 1d8 damage, until no more pistols, then it's drawn swords. 

Once into machine guns then it's just a save to hit the dirt and avoid the hail of bullets, with the machine gunner saving versus a jam or running out of ammo. Except at the same time it has little relavance to D&D.


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## aramis erak (Sep 8, 2019)

dragoner said:


> Daggers should often be deadlier than represented. I have a old FBI pdf about handgun wounding factors, most handguns hit with the power of a baseball. Where Hollywood over represents the power of guns is that the knock people back, when in reality, the bullet would pass through the target, and someone would just fold forward, as our natural stance is forward.



Knockback is a real phenomenon, but it's not the bullet pushing; it's the body's reaction to the trauma that knocks one back. 
Also, the claim about a bullet is wrong on its face. A typical fastball (~80 mph) is under 100 Joules, and the peak is about 120; a 22LR, one of the lowest energy weapons in use, is 115 to 125 J (depending upon a number of design factors).
Most handguns have muzzle energies from 200 to 500 J; many longarms are in the 1000 J+ range. The heaviest pistols are in the 2000 J range (.454 Cassul, .44 Mag). The 5.56 Nato is around 1700 J in chamber, and 1500 J muzzle...

Small caliber bullets vs peak fastballs (the record was 105.1 MPH): most small arms are going to be delivering more than 2x the energy, and in  under 1 cm², versus over 25 cm² for the baseball.

It's not the energy that hurts, it's the concentration of the energy that injures.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 8, 2019)

dragoner said:


> You are exactly right in that it is how combat is modeled to where it's representation matters, personally I find all RPG combat to be an abstraction.




Certainly, and the goal is not to simulate real combat at all, generally, but heroic genre fiction. 




> Modern military shoulder arms are interesting in that they are more designed to wound over killing, where the most deadly rifle is the American Civil War muskets.




I'm not sure I agree with either point. Mid 19th Century rifled muskets were indeed quite deadly but the rifle bullets designed in the late 19th Century smokeless powder era were roughly designed to replicate their performance, albeit with a smaller bullet needed due to the massively increased performance of smokeless powder. The ballistics are markedly different, with ACW muskets being slow with heavy bullets and a smokeless powder rifle (e.g,. a Lee-Enfield or Mauser) being much faster. There were marked improvements to the bullets in the early 19th Century, as well. 

One big reason to downsize from 7.62mm to 5.56mm was to allow an infantryman to carry a lot of ammo---recall they're usually carrying belts of machine-gun ammo and/or mortar rounds. The real killer on the modern battlefield was judged to be artillery and crew-served weapons like the machine-gun or mortar, with the role of the infantry rifle being primarily for suppression and defense of these. 

I suspect the notion that modern military weapons are _designed_ to wound is rather an urban legend but I'd definitely like for someone who has expertise to comment. 




> AD&D did ok with firearms, if one wants to think of them as late 15th-16th century person carrying a brace of six or so single shot pistols, as what is seen in drawings of that era. Two shots per round, 1d6 or 1d8 damage, until no more pistols, then it's drawn swords.




Indeed, and in my still running after all these years 2E game guns feature prominently. I have some classics of the era: The PC who's most into them indeed has several pistols and I've let him take his end of round attack with a pistol if he wants so as to encourage his use; he's going to get a clockwork pistol soon. Enemies often have a team of a shooter and one or more loaders. 




> Once into machine guns then it's just a save to hit the dirt and avoid the hail of bullets, with the machine gunner saving versus a jam or running out of ammo. Except at the same time it has little relavance to D&D.




AFAIK, machine-guns are rarely used in sustained fire, although during World War I that happened at times with the water-cooled machine-guns of the time. Generally speaking, they're used in short, controlled bursts to prevent the barrel from overheating and to avoid wasting ammo. If you dump a 100 round belt through a modern general purpose machine-gun you'll waste most of the ammo and hasten the demise of the barrel.

As to the relevance of archers, I often abstract a horde of archers as a Dex save of some sort so I can avoid having to deal with targeting or rolling all those dice, so if there were a lot of rapid fire weapons I'd do the same thing.


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## dragoner (Sep 8, 2019)

aramis erak said:


> Knockback is a real phenomenon, but it's not the bullet pushing; it's the body's reaction to the trauma that knocks one back.
> Also, the claim about a bullet is wrong on its face. A typical fastball (~80 mph) is under 100 Joules, and the peak is about 120; a 22LR, one of the lowest energy weapons in use, is 115 to 125 J (depending upon a number of design factors).
> Most handguns have muzzle energies from 200 to 500 J; many longarms are in the 1000 J+ range. The heaviest pistols are in the 2000 J range (.454 Cassul, .44 Mag). The 5.56 Nato is around 1700 J in chamber, and 1500 J muzzle...
> 
> ...




Shooters calculator puts a baseball at 128 joules, roughly close to a .22's 135; however, it's the frame of reference that counts, which is what the statement is about. Being that the wound cavity is more important than total energy.

People fall forward because our stance is balanced forward. When Hollywood shows someone being knocked back, they are wearing a harness with a cable to pull them backwards.


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## dragoner (Sep 8, 2019)

Jay Verkuilen said:


> Certainly, and the goal is not to simulate real combat at all, generally, but heroic genre fiction.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




One of the big reasons for smaller caliber rifles today, is that small arms are low level casualty causes on the battlefield. Even now, IED's with high explosive being the most, which was true in WW1 and WW2 as well, with the QF Howitzer. Even with controlled bursts for MG's, one can put up a wall of fire, saturating an area.

The large caliber, expanding base projectiles, of the Civil War muskets, were what were deadlier about them, the wound channel. The pdf goes into this in depth, about how bullets wound, all other things being equal, it is the size of the projectile.

Yes, it is about the genre being depicted, and Hollywood is terrible about showing people being shot, say in the shoulder, but they are fine 15 minutes later. Then again there is the fact that some wounds take time to take effect, bleeding out for example, where then someone could die later. D&D as well, doesn't show a lot of people dying from sepsis, which I have heard was bad for early wounds from melee type weapons.


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## Hussar (Sep 9, 2019)

[B said:
			
		

> Jay Verkuilen[/B]]I suspect the notion that modern military weapons are _designed_ to wound is rather an urban legend but I'd definitely like for someone who has expertise to comment.




Well, when I was in the military, it was certainly brought up.  Most battlefield weapons are designed to wound, rather than kill, because wounding is far, far more effective than killing.  If you wound a soldier, it takes dozens of enemy personal to bring that soldier back to the line (people to take the soldier off the battlefield, forward area medical treatment, transport further to the rear, more medical treatment, possibly removal to their home country for still more medical treatment) whereas if you kill someone, it takes two or three people to bury the body.  It's more about economics than anything.

@Sacrosanct - a point to remember about the Vegas shooting was the advent of modern medicine.  Had that same shooting occurred even as recently as a couple of decades ago, the death toll would have been significantly higher.  Numerous US cities have reported large reduction in firearm fatalities, not because there are less firearm incidents, but because they can now save people who would have died from their wounds twenty years ago.

There is the other issue to remember as well - a modern or SF character can carry SO MUCH more firepower than earlier era's.  Compare the firepower of a modern US infantry platoon to even a Korean War era US platoon and they're not even close.  The modern load out of soldiers is truly terrifying.  Never minding the non-weapon stuff too - body armor that is reasonably effective, night vision goggles that are often standard issue, heck, even something as simple as kneepads make a huge difference.  

Now, advance technology 20 years, 50 years, 500 years, and the average soldier is an engine of destruction.  Imagine for a moment what a platoon sized unit (or company sized if you want overkill) could do at, say, Agincourt.


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## S'mon (Sep 9, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Well, when I was in the military, it was certainly brought up.  Most battlefield weapons are designed to wound, rather than kill, because wounding is far, far more effective than killing.  If you wound a soldier, it takes dozens of enemy personal to bring that soldier back to the line (people to take the soldier off the battlefield, forward area medical treatment, transport further to the rear, more medical treatment, possibly removal to their home country for still more medical treatment) whereas if you kill someone, it takes two or three people to bury the body.  It's more about economics than anything.




I always thought it a bit odd, because it's Western armies that react like this to having a man wounded, and Western armies that equipped their soldiers with 5.56mm. Most of their opponents don't react like this to a wounded soldier.


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## Hussar (Sep 9, 2019)

S'mon said:


> I always thought it a bit odd, because it's Western armies that react like this to having a man wounded, and Western armies that equipped their soldiers with 5.56mm. Most of their opponents don't react like this to a wounded soldier.




I don't think that that is true.  Virtually all armies in the world act like this to the best of their abilities.  You don't leave wounded on the field, and you do your best to save the wounded.  Otherwise, your soldiers would pretty quickly decide that you aren't really worth fighting for.


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## dragoner (Sep 9, 2019)

Soviet AK-74 fires 5.45×39mm cartridge, replacing the 7.62×39mm of the AK-47.

Edit: Also preform fragmenting and expanding projectiles, such as "dum-dum" bullets, were outlawed because they caused excessive wounds.



			The Avalon Project : Laws of War - Declaration on the Use of Bullets Which Expand or Flatten Easily in the Human Body; July 29, 1899


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## Fanaelialae (Sep 9, 2019)

Jay Verkuilen said:


> That's true, but hit points aren't entirely "plot armor" either. For instance, natural healing back in the older versions of the game was very, very slow, so it would revert to quasi-realism. There are many other ways hit points don't line up with being plot armor either. For instance, in many movies, TV shows, or stories, heroes often surrender when having a dagger held to the throat. But the real meta-game thinker would laugh that off.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



With regard to old school healing rates, I am of the opinion that the issue was with the healing rules. I never liked them, even back in the day, and usually house ruled healing rates to be along the lines of level plus Constitution modifier.

Using the old rules, take two characters, one with a maximum Constitution and one with a minimum Constitution. Beat them down to one hit point (or zero) and wait for them to heal naturally. The guy with max Con will take much longer to heal than the guy with min Con, because healing didn't account for Constitution (or level). That's fairly counter intuitive to what one would expect. The healthiest man alive ought to be able to recover from injuries faster than the frailest person in the world.

In fairness though, assuming that HP do not represent meat, you could assign any recovery rate to such ephemera and it'd make as much sense as anything else.

Personally, I avoid playing with people who seek to blatantly abuse the rules. So that's my solution. If someone tried that kind of thing at my table, I'd discuss it with them as an adult. If that didn't work, I would politely ask them to find a different group. But I recognize that not everyone will consider that a viable solution to the issue. That said, I'm firmly of the belief that if you've got a people problem you need a people-based solution (like talking it out). Rules-based solutions can only address issues that stem from the rules, as opposed to those caused by people behaving in a manner that is opposed to the intent of the game.


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## aramis erak (Sep 9, 2019)

Hussar said:


> I don't think that that is true.  Virtually all armies in the world act like this to the best of their abilities.  You don't leave wounded on the field, and you do your best to save the wounded.  Otherwise, your soldiers would pretty quickly decide that you aren't really worth fighting for.



There are other reasons besides concern for well being that engender both desire to not kill and to not leave wounded.

Not the least of which is that a live captive in need of medical attention has a real strong lever for coercion... the withholding of pain meds of post-op patients has a history of being used to coerce information. Likewise, it's not hard to get them addicted to pain meds, and then use withdrawl as a sanctionable form of torture.

And then, there's the reuse of issue gear. If you recover the soldier, you usually recover much of his gear, too.

Plus, even your dead have value - the psychology of heroism... burying the dead at home is leverage for coopting new soldiers to want revenge.


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## S'mon (Sep 9, 2019)

Hussar said:


> I don't think that that is true.  Virtually all armies in the world act like this to the best of their abilities.  You don't leave wounded on the field, and you do your best to save the wounded.  Otherwise, your soldiers would pretty quickly decide that you aren't really worth fighting for.




Prioritisation and the amount of effort per soldier varies hugely, and this has been the case for a long time.


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## Hussar (Sep 9, 2019)

S'mon said:


> Prioritisation and the amount of effort per soldier varies hugely, and this has been the case for a long time.




Well, yes, of course.  Mostly due to the actual capabilities of the army in question.  I would think that a, say, US soldier could expect a different level of care than, say, a Somali one, simply because of economics.  That's fair.  

But, the idea that different militaries prioritize the recovery and protection of wounded differently isn't really accurate.  Every military gives it virtually the highest priority they are able to.  Again, not doing so is a very quick way to seeing your military discipline go straight down the toilet in a serious hurry.



aramis erak said:


> There are other reasons besides concern for well being that engender both desire to not kill and to not leave wounded.
> 
> Not the least of which is that a live captive in need of medical attention has a real strong lever for coercion... the withholding of pain meds of post-op patients has a history of being used to coerce information. Likewise, it's not hard to get them addicted to pain meds, and then use withdrawl as a sanctionable form of torture.
> 
> ...




That's just not how this works.  It really isn't.  You don't prioritize patching up enemy soldiers over your own.  No military ever does that.  And, frankly, coercing information by withholding pain medication?  Ummm, never minding the fact that that's a great way to commit war crimes (we do hang people for that), you also generally wouldn't count on that as being a particularly effective means of gaining information.  

Recovering gear is an issue, but, again, the value of the gear is so minimal compared to the value of that soldier.  Do you have any idea the cost of a modern soldier?  How many hundreds of thousands of dollars in training that goes into a modern combat soldier?  The price of a rifle and some kit is so minor that it's largely a rounding error compared to the cost of that soldier.  There are very solid economic reasons to bring that soldier home and get him or her healthy again.  Recovering kit is so low on the list of priorities that it might as well not even be there.


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## S'mon (Sep 9, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Well, yes, of course.  Mostly due to the actual capabilities of the army in question.  I would think that a, say, US soldier could expect a different level of care than, say, a Somali one, simply because of economics.  That's fair.
> 
> But, the idea that different militaries prioritize the recovery and protection of wounded differently isn't really accurate.  Every military gives it virtually the highest priority they are able to.  Again, not doing so is a very quick way to seeing your military discipline go straight down the toilet in a serious hurry.




I guess it depends what you mean by "are able to", but overall I think your perspective feels a bit skewed and US-centric or Western-centric. I remember in the British Territorial Army Reserve in the late '90s being scoffed at when I asked what we did during an attack/assault on position if one of our men was wounded, the answer being "ignore it and keep attacking". Recently though I have seen talk like yours about care of wounded being 'highest priority' in UK too. Standard Russian tactics emphasise fire-on-target over NATO style fire-and-maneuver, accepting higher casualties in return for deciding the engagement quickly.

Edit: I also remember watching Saving Private Ryan around the same time and being gobsmacked by the extreme individualism displayed by the US soldiers, willingness to disobey a (competent) leader in order to maximise their own survival chances. And the whole Vietnam Movie thing where a sniper wounds one guy and the whole platoon gets sucked into saving him, often taking more losses.


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## billd91 (Sep 9, 2019)

S'mon said:


> And the whole Vietnam Movie thing where a sniper wounds one guy and the whole platoon gets sucked into saving him, often taking more losses.




An even better (and more thoroughly documented) example - the Battle of Mogadishu - portrayed in *Black Hawk Down*.

I've done a little looking around and while there have been units espousing the "No one gets left behind" ethos in the US since the French and Indian War (so - pre-US technically), the issue really takes strongest hold in the Vietnam War and probably for a few reasons. 

It could be more credibly accomplished with helicopter extraction than in previous wars. 
Vietnam wasn't a war of territory acquisition in the first place - meaning that most wounded and dead on patrol or strikes were *certainly* going to be lost in enemy territory if not recovered. 
Despite the controversies of the draft, the Vietnam war was fought mostly by volunteers (75% to 25%). Doing their best to get you back out was something of a social contract between the volunteers and the armed forces.

The extent to which this has spread to other US allies may have something to do with 2 of these factors - extractability and volunteerism in a democracy.


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## John Dallman (Sep 9, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Most dungeons you'll see are anti-fortresses designed to make it impossible for the inhabitants to defend themselves from the attacks of a small group of commandos such as the PCs, and in the context of the article to overturn Lanchester's Power Laws. Specifically, dungeons are designed to make reinforcement difficult, to allow large forces to be defeated in detail by spreading out defending forces piecemeal, to make retreat by an attacking force easy, and to force all engagements to occur at close range such that generally melee can be reached in the first moment of battle.



The groups I learned to play amongst did not run dungeons that way. If the inhabitants were actually allied, they would reinforce each other, and use decent tactics. This probably accounts for why the example PCs in the Giants modules seemed so under-powered to us; they were only capable of doing the scenario if the inhabitants played dumb. We worked hard at infiltration tactics, and found _Silence_ spells invaluable. 

I have had the experience of a whole dungeon turning out to fight the PCs in one prolonged fight. It was quite messy.


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## Celebrim (Sep 9, 2019)

John Dallman said:


> I have had the experience of a whole dungeon turning out to fight the PCs in one prolonged fight. It was quite messy.




Even if they had done so, they typically would have been better off had their not been a dungeon at all. If you mobilize the entire dungeon against the PC's, then the PC's can at least find choke points where the full numbers of the opposing force can't be brought to bear against them and they cannot be easily outflanked and attacked on all sides.

As for playing dumb, the real question I'm putting forward is not a question of how efficiently or inefficiently the DM plays the opposing force. I presume that different DMs played monsters with different degrees of competency, for a variety of different reasons, varying from differences in personal tactical aptitude, to different perceptions of how much fog of war the monsters would experience, to different perceptions of how much they should metagame to challenge or not challenge the players. But the real issue I was trying to highlight in that post was just how much aid the dungeon was actually providing to its inhabitants regardless of how tactically adept and organized the DM played them. What features actually made the dungeon defensible?

Gygax has a section in the DMG on how organized different sorts of monsters should be, and had a tendency to like generating fights where practically the whole dungeon turned out to fight the PC's in one prolonged fight. But he doesn't actually ever create dungeons that really help those inhabitants defend themselves in a particularly clever way. Even the gaurdposts in B1 only serve to help turn the whole dungeon out to fight the PC's in one prolonged fight while at the same time only serve to ensure that monsters won't be able to take advantage of their numerical superiority.


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## dragoner (Sep 9, 2019)

S'mon said:


> Standard Russian tactics emphasise ...




 ... маскировка. Soviet policy towards the end of WW2, was to have the surrendering fascists strip the uniforms of dead troops, and be put in the van of the attack to absorb fire, expose concealed positions, etc.. The medical personnel would care little for these dead and wounded.


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## Celebrim (Sep 9, 2019)

dragoner said:


> The medical personnel would care little for these dead and wounded.




Over 20 million dead suggests the Soviet army cared little for the wounded and the living as well. Few armies have ever poured flesh into a meat grinder as thoughtlessly as the WWII Soviet army. Don't even get me started on the operational analysis of weapon platforms like the Ilyushin Il-2.


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## dragoner (Sep 9, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Over 20 million dead suggests the Soviet army cared little for the wounded and the living as well. Few armies have ever poured flesh into a meat grinder as thoughtlessly as the WWII Soviet army. Don't even get me started on the operational analysis of weapon platforms like the Ilyushin Il-2.




Subtract those captured and killed in concentration camps, and one finds combat casualties to be somewhat less; around 3-2. The Germans also murdered 20-30 million civilians. The RKKA, destroyed 85% of the fascist military power, no small feat in that it had defeated everyone else. Another thing to consider, beyond western propaganda, is that Slavic culture is alien to the west, where men are more manly and back woods; I remember my ROTC commander asking me if I could tell him how to say "I surrender" in Russian, and I and told him, "Mir, druzhba" should work.


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 9, 2019)

A few things to respond to in the past couple days, so I apologize for not quoting all of the relative posts.

1. Getting shot doesn't make your body get thrown back.  Doesn't happen.
2. Automatic weapons in modern use are meant for suppressing,  not necessarily killing.  They are highly inaccurate.  If you kill the enemy, great.  But they are meant for suppressing while the rest of your squad flanks into position. 
3. the military moved from heavy caliber like 7.62 (M60s) to lighter caliber 5.56 (M249) for squad based automatic weapons because you can carry more rounds (I think Hussar mentioned this) and you have a universal round type for every soldier
4. It was official army training that the reason you used a 5.56 round for your M16 was because hitting an enemy took 3 out of combat (the wounded one, and 2 men to carry them out).  I.e., the 5.56 was meant to wound and not kill (even if we were trained to kill)  Regardless of how true that is in practical application of combat, that's how the army officially trained it.  At least when I was in in the early 90s.


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## S'mon (Sep 9, 2019)

Sacrosanct said:


> 4. It was official army training that the reason you used a 5.56 round for your M16 was because hitting an enemy took 3 out of combat (the wounded one, and 2 men to carry them out).  I.e., the 5.56 was meant to wound and not kill (even if we were trained to kill)  Regardless of how true that is in practical application of combat, that's how the army officially trained it.  At least when I was in in the early 90s.




Yeah, I feel it was a bit of an ex post facto rationalisation calculated to keep the grunts happy.


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## S'mon (Sep 9, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Even if they had done so, they typically would have been better off had their not been a dungeon at all.




I feel this is true, but somewhat explainable if the main threat is rival tribes, soldiers, and large numbers of weak enemies, not adventurer Spec Ops teams.

That said, if I want to keep my Goblins safe I just put them in 3'  high burrows!


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## Ratskinner (Sep 9, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> SLA Marshall's work is highly controversial in part because no evidence exists that the raw data his book was supposedly based on actually exists. He has records of interviewing soldiers for example, but no records of asking questions that could be used to back his claims regarding the reluctance of soldiers to fire their weapon in anger, much less the answers to those questions. Much of the research purporting to show this instinctive aversion has similar problems, and the whole idea seems to fly in the face of the historical record which is filled with massacres of many sorts. So the question then becomes is there an aversion to killing that may or may not be cultural, or is there a cultural aversion to believing that we are the sort of species that enjoys or at least has little instinctive aversion to committing homicide.




Specifically regarding the idea of a human aversion to killing: I think there's sufficient research from other areas to support the idea. I think the common reactions (among westerners, anyway) to the "fat man" version of the trolley problem points to it. Similarly, there is a pronounced bias in the cultures and history we study more (mostly due to historical accident/reason). For instance, the patterns of hunter-gatherer warfare you mention appear to only function in areas of high population density, and coincidentally(?) have a long "training" periods for young males in the form of war-play. Are they being "desensitized" or something? AFAIK, its not well-studied enough to know, but at least one researcher I've read noted that none of his subjects seem to experience anything like PTSD. Areas with low population density are far less studied, but all the indications I've seen indicate that organized violence are either rare or nonsensical to them, even when they maintain tribal or familial relationships that would permit it. (The general presumption seems to be along the lines of "When resources are scarce, its far better to have a friend who might share than an enemy who wouldn't.")

As far as massacres and things go, there are definite patterns of dehumanization that almost always precede them. Perhaps most famously painting the target group as vermin of some sort (cockroaches or rats are very popular) that need to be exterminated. So, while humans are obviously capable of doing violence to each other in a "warfare"* like manner, it seems to me that it usually takes some work to get there.

just my $.02

As far as the rest goes, I was just relating a conversation I had that seemed relevant.

*Individual or personal violence seems to be a different matter entirely.


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## Hussar (Sep 9, 2019)

Well, to be fair, another reason for the switch to 5.56 was effective range.  Sure, a 7.62 round will go much, much further, but, very few engagements actually begin at further out than a few hundred meters.  It might happen, but, it's very rare.  So, why bother having a round with an effective range of nearly a kilometer when the majority of engagements are under 300 meters?

But, S'mon, I don't think it's a rationalization at all.  Economic warfare has dominated modern combat for the better part of a century.  There's a reason that mines are designed to wound rather than kill.  It wouldn't be hard to make mines much more lethal than they are ("bouncing betty" mines jump up to waist high in order to wound, jump them up another 30 cm and they become much, much more lethal, just as an example).


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## S'mon (Sep 9, 2019)

Hussar said:


> But, S'mon, I don't think it's a rationalization at all.




Well, whatever the justifications, I know I would much rather have an SLR (7.62mm) than the 5.56mm SA80 they issued me!


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## dragoner (Sep 9, 2019)

The 5.56 is more flat trajectory with less recoil, as they found towards the end of ww2, that lighter carbine style weapons were better in the hands of inexperienced soldiers.


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## Beleriphon (Sep 10, 2019)

S'mon said:


> Well, whatever the justifications, I know I would much rather have an SLR (7.62mm) than the 5.56mm SA80 they issued me!




I see the problem. You were using an SA80. The M16 when first introduced was well loved by American soldiers in Vietnam, although the next iteration had to switch to burst-fire rather than full selective fire options given the propensity of American troops let loose in full "rock-n-roll" mode at nothing but shadows.

Mind you, the 5.56mm NATO has another benefit: you can carry lots of it compared to heavy ammo like the 7.62mm. Plus, as a NATO standard you don't have worry about that weird Belgian guy not having a compatible magazine when the Soviets invaded in Germany.


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 10, 2019)

Beleriphon said:


> I see the problem. You were using an SA80. The M16 when first introduced was well loved by American soldiers in Vietnam, although the next iteration had to switch to burst-fire rather than full selective fire options given the propensity of American troops let loose in full "rock-n-roll" mode at nothing but shadows.
> 
> Mind you, the 5.56mm NATO has another benefit: you can carry lots of it compared to heavy ammo like the 7.62mm. Plus, as a NATO standard you don't have worry about that weird Belgian guy not having a compatible magazine when the Soviets invaded in Germany.




There’s...a lot wrong here. Firstly, Americans HATED the m16A1 when it came out in Vietnam. It was garbage. Not only because it rusted like hell (troops weren’t issued cleaning kits because it was touted as maintenance free and it wasn’t by a mile), but powder in the early rounds was awful and caused misfires all the time. There are many an interview of spec ops soldiers saying how they ditched the M16 for the AK as soon as possible.

Secondly, the reasons the M16A2 came out wasn’t because troops tended to let loose. The A1 was in service for decades before the A2 came out, and it was a collection of improvements. Better handguards,  thicker barrel, adjustable sights, etc. the reason they went to burst is because anything after 3 rounds is so inaccurate it won’t hit.  It was a natural enhancement. 

Also, both 5.56 and 7.62 are NATO standard. So that’s not a reason. You can carry more rounds, but not lots of it compared to 7.62

—me, a veteran who used an A1 in basic, was issued an A2 for years, and have fired hundreds of thousands of rounds in dozens of weapons of both 5.56 and 7.62 caliber. (And others, like .50 cal, 9mm, .38, .40 cal, 40mm grenade, and others, but that’s a different topic)


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## aramis erak (Sep 10, 2019)

Hussar said:


> That's just not how this works.  It really isn't.  You don't prioritize patching up enemy soldiers over your own.  No military ever does that.  And, frankly, coercing information by withholding pain medication?  Ummm, never minding the fact that that's a great way to commit war crimes (we do hang people for that), you also generally wouldn't count on that as being a particularly effective means of gaining information.
> 
> Recovering gear is an issue, but, again, the value of the gear is so minimal compared to the value of that soldier.  Do you have any idea the cost of a modern soldier?  How many hundreds of thousands of dollars in training that goes into a modern combat soldier?  The price of a rifle and some kit is so minor that it's largely a rounding error compared to the cost of that soldier.  There are very solid economic reasons to bring that soldier home and get him or her healthy again.  Recovering kit is so low on the list of priorities that it might as well not even be there.



I've seen primary source documentation of denial of pain meds to prisoners to coerce cooperation.  Both Korean and Vietnam era.

The files are still under army jurisdiction, but are stored in the US National Archives. (where I worked 20+ years ago, so my NDA is expired.)

I've spoken with defectors who saw the Soviet Army do so during WW 2. And Ukrainians who lived through it after WW2.

There are no shortage of folks who will interrogate captives who are injured. If you hold the field, you can interrogate the surviving wounded of the enemy who were unable to be removed by their side in retreat. The US Army did so repeatedly in the US Civil War. And interrogators have only been limited by the Geneva Convention since 1949... The GC says you cannot withhold needed medications, but analgesia isn't medically needed. It's useful, but not essential. So, you can't cut the post-surgical antibiotics, but you can withhold the pain meds.

And if you think people aren't that cold, just check out what's been released of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Withholding pain meds pales by comparison. The reason War Crimes exist in l;aw is because people DO ignore morality and ethicality during war, and even the threat of life in prison is remote enough not to stop them.,

Further, current "enemy powers" are mostly non-state actors - Taliban, ISIL/ISIS, Somali Pirates, extremist groups. They do take captives and try to keep them alive - at least long enough to then publicly execute them, or ransom them, or in some cases, brainwash them and use them for propaganda. This is all stuff that's been in the news in the last 8 years or so.

It's very easy for people to dehumanize the enemy. It's almost like it's a survival adaptation...

And then there's the RFP for the Stoner Weapon System...

All an infantryman needs to do to the enemy is stop his combat effectiveness. Anything more is wasted effort.


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## S'mon (Sep 10, 2019)

Sacrosanct said:


> There’s...a lot wrong here. Firstly, Americans HATED the m16A1 when it came out in Vietnam. It was garbage.




That certainly fits with what I heard.

One issue re psychology - it seems that the bigger the weapon, the more soldiers use it, and the more they fire for effect. Crew served weapons are best, but even SAW type support LMGs benefit from this psychology. I suspect the same effect between light and heavy assault rifles.


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## Imaculata (Sep 10, 2019)

Interesting note, the Vietnameze often refer to the Vietnam War as the American War... and rightly so.


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## S'mon (Sep 10, 2019)

Imaculata said:


> Interesting note, the Vietnameze often refer to the Vietnam War as the American War... and rightly so.




Calling it the Vietnam War would only result in

"Er, which one?!"

Even 'War of National Liberation', well they fought (and won) quite a few!


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## Imaculata (Sep 10, 2019)

When you get into so many wars, that you tend to name them after whichever country you attacked this time...


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## S'mon (Sep 10, 2019)

Imaculata said:


> When you get into so many wars, that you tend to name them after whichever country you attacked this time...




It's normal to name war after the enemy or the location, eg The Peloponnesian War (I'm sure the Spartans called it the Athenian War) or the Boer War (I'm sure the Boers called it the British War or similar).


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## doctorbadwolf (Sep 10, 2019)

Morrus said:


> That wasn't my position at all (not that I disagree).
> 
> What I meant was that being skewered with a sword through the eye doesn't do any less damage to you than being shot in the same place. Both are fatal. Getting beheaded with an axe is not less damaging than being shot in the leg with a revolver. The benefit of the gun is that it makes it much easier to deliver that damage.




This is why damage isn’t based on weapons in my system. There is interplay between weapon types and armor types, but nearly all damage rolls are a simple 1d10.


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## S'mon (Sep 10, 2019)

> > being skewered with a sword through the eye doesn't do any less damage to you than being shot in the same place. Both are fatal. <<




Even this isn't really true - people are much more likely to survive being stabbed through the eye than being shot through the eye, especially by a high velocity round that will explode the brain.


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## Hussar (Sep 10, 2019)

And, there's another point to remember.  Instead of eye, let's use heart.  It's REALLY hard to stab someone in the heart.  All those pesky bones in the way and, even if you do manage to get between those, that heart is a very dense muscle.  It takes a considerable amount of force to puncture a heart to the point where you kill someone.  

Most people who get stabbed die of blood loss.  

OTOH, if I'm using a high powered rifle, and I hit you dead center in the chest, I'm going to shatter your ribs, perforate the heart with the shards and probably blow a fairly large exit wound right out the other side. Sure, it doesn't throw you backwards, but, it will kill you PDQ.  

Yes, you can cut someone's head off with a sword.  It IS possible.  Just incredibly difficult and, outside of ideal circumstances (as in an execution) virtually impossible.  Again, a hit with a high powered rifle to the head or neck is likely going to be fatal unless treated in short order.  

And, again, this is ignoring things like SF weapons where you have a beam weapon that comes with an AI auto aiming system capable of friend/foe recognition and reflexes that make humans seem like sloths.  It's not like weapons get less effective over time.


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## S'mon (Sep 10, 2019)

Really my takeaway is that melee weapons are much much much less immediately lethal IRL than in fiction; guns are only much less lethal. 

Like Hussar says, nowadays death from stab wounds is mostly from blood loss and takes several minutes; indeed people often fight on a while before dropping. In Ye Olden Days the main killers were (a) infection and (b) post-battle execution.


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## Hussar (Sep 10, 2019)

Moving away from the whole gun/sword thing for a moment, one of the bits that always kind of turns me off from SF gaming is when the technology of our futuristic setting isn't even as good as what we have now.  Battletech, as much as I love it, is a prime example.  Hrm, we're in the 30th century (or later), we have giant robots powered by cold fusion reactors, but, we're also firing dumb rockets?  WTF?  We have hand held guided missiles now and have had them for quite some time.  Unguided missile systems?  Weapons that are so inaccurate in the game that you might as well be using harsh language?  It totally breaks my suspension of disbelief.

Put it another way.  Life expectancy after contact for a modern tank crew is measured in seconds.  There's a very, very good reason for that.  You don't miss very often (laser guidance systems in modern tanks are very good) and typically the sabot round you're using to reach out and touch an enemy armored vehicle has a pretty close to flat trajectory and a velocity that is insane. 

Add a thousand years of weapons development and I'm shooting dumb rockets and my battlemech has zero guidance systems?   What do people think this is?  Star Wars?   

It really does jar me completely out of the game.


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## S'mon (Sep 10, 2019)

A lot of tech has seen historical ups and downs - architecture and engineering are prime examples, but also mathematics and other sciences. However weapons tech is the one thing that pretty much always progresses, dark age or golden age alike!


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 10, 2019)

S'mon said:


> Even this isn't really true - people are much more likely to survive being stabbed through the eye than being shot through the eye, especially by a high velocity round that will explode the brain.




Again, you seem to be doing what lots of people do in this conversation: hold a double standard when comparing guns vs melee.  You compare being stabbed in the eye, but are comparing high velocity rounds that will explode in the brain (firstly, rounds don't explode.  Closest thing is a frangible round, but that doesn't explode either, but breaks apart. )  If you're going to use high velocity rounds, then the equivalent melee is being stabbed in the eye with a two handed sword.

Regardless if it's a bullet, dagger, or sword, getting hit in the eye isn't fatal (we have a sitting congressman who lost an eye to an IED).  If any of those enter your brain, you're chances of living are way down.  One isn't worse than the other.

@Hussar , it's a bit disingenuous to say guns are more lethal because you get hit in the chest and your heart.  firstly, because you need a pretty powerful round to do that, so again, you'd have to compare to a larger weapon like a battle axe or heavy sword (which to anyone who has ever watched Forged in Fire, are more than capable of penetrating the chest).  Secondly, you're picking a highly selective area.  By that logic, I can say swords are more deadly than guns, because many people have survived a direct shot in the throat by a gun (my great uncle was shot with by a 30-06 in the throat in a hunting accident and survived), but if you get a direct hit in the throat by a battle axe, your chances are survival are much less because if the bullet encounters little resistance, it does a pass through.  An axe or sword blade does not.

Point being, is that there is no significant difference between a melee strike and bullet strike in general when comparing all weapons and all hit locations.  Therefore, like @Morrus and I have been saying, there is no real compelling reason to have much higher damage ratings for guns than swords.  Every argument so far to do that seems to hold on to that double standard above


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## S'mon (Sep 10, 2019)

Sacrosanct said:


> Again, you seem to be doing what lots of people do in this conversation: hold a double standard when comparing guns vs melee.  You compare being stabbed in the eye, but are comparing high velocity rounds that will explode in the brain (firstly, rounds don't explode.  Closest thing is a frangible round, but that doesn't explode either, but breaks apart. )




No, nothing to do with explosive rounds. The electrostatic shock from a high velocity rifle or MG round makes a brain-filled skull behave like a water bottle or tin can filled with beans - it explodes.

It is possible that a bullet goes in the eye and out through the temple and causes brain damage but is not fatal. But typically either it's a high velocity round that explodes the brain (or at least tumbles through with a fatal wound track & exit wound), or a low velocity round tumbles around in the brain cavity with equally fatal results. Low velocity pistol-caliber rounds hitting the skull from outside quite often deflect off non-fatally, though.

Low velocity impacts from swords, spikes, spears etc piercing the skull are quite different from bullets, they slide through the brain matter and they cause brain damage but are surprisingly often not fatal.


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## Morrus (Sep 10, 2019)

S'mon said:


> Low velocity impacts from swords, spikes, spears etc are quite different, they slide through the brain matter and they cause brain damage but are surprisingly often not fatal.




I have it on good authority that decapitations are 100% fatal. Swords are totally deadly. They're just harder to use.


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 10, 2019)

S'mon said:


> No, nothing to do with explosive rounds. The electrostatic shock from a high velocity rifle or MG round makes a brain-filled skull behave like a water bottle or tin can filled with beans - it explodes.




No, they don't.  I think you need to do some ballistics research.  A high velocity round (I'm assuming you mean like 7.92 or 7.62 since you mentioned MG) will go through your skull completely.  It will not bounce or explode.   Low velocity rounds (like a .22) may bounce around.  But not high velocity.   I don't have my home PC here, or I'd show you a photo of penetrating power of various rounds when I did testing.  A 5.56 round will go through 1/4" thick steel plate cleanly.  It will  not bounce in the skull.  You're repeating these hollywood myths I'm taking about.


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## S'mon (Sep 10, 2019)

Morrus said:


> I have it on good authority that decapitations are 100% fatal. Swords are totally deadly. They're just harder to use.




You said stabbed in the eye, not decapitated.

Slashing attacks can be either more or less deadly than piercing attacks. It depends on *context*.

Edit: Seen some amazing tales of railway workers walking around with iron spikes through their skulls from spiking machine accidents - skull punctured with a lot more force than any human could exert.


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## S'mon (Sep 10, 2019)

Sacrosanct said:


> No, they don't.  I think you need to do some ballistics research.  A high velocity round (I'm assuming you mean like 7.92 or 7.62 since you mentioned MG) will go through your skull completely.  It will not bounce or explode.  I don't have my home PC here, or I'd show you a photo of penetrating power of various rounds when I did testing.  A 5.56 round will go through 1/4" thick steel plate cleanly.  It will  not bounce in the skull.  You're repeating these hollywood myths I'm taking about.




You must have misread me - I was talking about low velocity rounds like .22LR  bouncing.  I talked separately about what happens when a high velocity round hits a skull. It's the material in the skull cavity that is exploded by the hydrostatic shock, the bullet itself goes through (intact) and makes a big exit hole.


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## Fearless Leader (Sep 10, 2019)

Morrus said:


> That distinguishes talking vs fighting, not swords vs guns.




It shows how you can use initiative to affect things. A better example is Call of Cthulhu - old editions had guns firing before melee or movement. Not sure about more current versions.


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 10, 2019)

"Firearms should do way more damage because have you seen what a rifle round does to a watermelon?"
"Ever heard of Gallagher?"


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## Beleriphon (Sep 10, 2019)

Sacrosanct said:


> <bunch of stuff that corrects my understanding>
> 
> —me, a veteran who used an A1 in basic, was issued an A2 for years, and have fired hundreds of thousands of rounds in dozens of weapons of both 5.56 and 7.62 caliber. (And others, like .50 cal, 9mm, .38, .40 cal, 40mm grenade, and others, but that’s a different topic)




I guess knowing really is half the battle.


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## billd91 (Sep 10, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Add a thousand years of weapons development and I'm shooting dumb rockets and my battlemech has zero guidance systems?   What do people think this is?  Star Wars?
> 
> It really does jar me completely out of the game.




Honestly? Your first mistake was even starting to think that mecha would be a good idea that wouldn't be dominated by something more compact and low-tech like a tank. 

The point of the games isn't to really be technologically authentic - stylish is more the idea. Just like the debate between guns and swords in the first place. You set your style, genre, content, and rules follow from there.


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## Tony Vargas (Sep 10, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Moving away from the whole gun/sword thing for a moment, one of the bits that always kind of turns me off from SF gaming is when the technology of our futuristic setting isn't even as good as what we have now.  Battletech, as much as I love it, is a prime example.



 You did notice that the setting is a sort of Dark Ages?  There was a technological pinnacle long before, but contemporary technology barely reached that of the 20th century (and it wasn't too consistent about it, either).  

Really, it was a bit like old-school or 5e D&D with magic items and artifacts floating around that you couldn't make or buy yourself.



> Add a thousand years of weapons development and I'm shooting dumb rockets and my battlemech has zero guidance systems?   What do people think this is?



Gundam, maybe? (I know BattleTech started as a RoboTech rip-off, but RoboTech was lousy with guided missiles, swarms of them crawling around the screen - kinda artsy, really.)  There was a throwaway detail in Gundam, that everyone used some kind of exotic (Google: "Minovsky ") particle to bork guidance systems, so combat was all direct fire and HTH with mecha - except for the jedi-rip-off new-types who guided their weapons ('funnels') psionically.   (more zealous fans of the anime can correct any mistakes I made there)

I guess that's an example of the convolutions sci-fi or science-fantasy can go through to work some excitement, drama, & heroism (and cool visuals) into combat, instead of just "firing Anihilizer at optimal range of 300 light-minutes... sensors indicate target reduced to free quarks... acquiring next target..."  *poof* oops, it appears our heroes have been reduced to free quarks, themselves, episode 2 will introduce some new characters...


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## dragoner (Sep 10, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Moving away from the whole gun/sword thing for a moment, one of the bits that always kind of turns me off from SF gaming is when the technology of our futuristic setting isn't even as good as what we have now.




Star Trek the original series is probably the most realistic: a big artillery system (spacecraft), and sidearms. Everything else, like tanks, will go away due to their logistical footprint being too large to justify their use. This is what happened to the horse, excellent all terrain mobility, but their supply chain from the farm to the battlefield is too large. Similar to the discussion of small arms, the various rifles and their calibers of ammunition; what gets lost in the conversation is the fact that militaries spend a thousand times the amount of money on the ammunition, rather than the weapons that fire them.


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 10, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Moving away from the whole gun/sword thing for a moment, one of the bits that always kind of turns me off from SF gaming is when the technology of our futuristic setting isn't even as good as what we have now.  Battletech, as much as I love it, is a prime example.  Hrm, we're in the 30th century (or later), we have giant robots powered by cold fusion reactors, but, we're also firing dumb rockets?  WTF?  We have hand held guided missiles now and have had them for quite some time.  Unguided missile systems?  Weapons that are so inaccurate in the game that you might as well be using harsh language?  It totally breaks my suspension of disbelief.
> 
> Put it another way.  Life expectancy after contact for a modern tank crew is measured in seconds.  There's a very, very good reason for that.  You don't miss very often (laser guidance systems in modern tanks are very good) and typically the sabot round you're using to reach out and touch an enemy armored vehicle has a pretty close to flat trajectory and a velocity that is insane.
> 
> ...





As I was reading your first sentence, my first thought was Battletech as well.  But not for the same reasons (even though your reasons are perfectly sound).  My big beef is robots in general.  Legs?  Are you serious?  You're gonna build this giant and expensive robot of war and give it vulnerable things like legs?

But they are cool.  Super cool.  In a fantasy sci-fi game, I am all for suspense of disbelief if the concept is cool enough


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 11, 2019)

Imaculata said:


> Interesting note, the Vietnameze often refer to the Vietnam War as the American War... and rightly so.



I believe it's opposed to the French War, which lasted from the end of World War II to 1954.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 12, 2019)

dragoner said:


> Star Trek the original series is probably the most realistic: a big artillery system (spacecraft), and sidearms. Everything else, like tanks, will go away due to their logistical footprint being too large to justify their use. This is what happened to the horse, excellent all terrain mobility, but their supply chain from the farm to the battlefield is too large.




While I totally agree that logistics is a crucial driver of military choices, the horse lasted in transport and logistics through World War II. Really only the US and British armies were fully mechanized. Many German divisions were horse-drawn through the entire war. The last cavalry charge of the US Army happened in the Siege of Bataan. While they're portrayed as being idiots thanks to German propaganda, the Polish cavalry were effective during the German invasion, using the mobility provided by the horse but fighting as dismounted infantry. The Soviet army wasn't fully mechanized until the 1960s. 



> Similar to the discussion of small arms, the various rifles and their calibers of ammunition; what gets lost in the conversation is the fact that militaries spend a thousand times the amount of money on the ammunition, rather than the weapons that fire them.




This is _very_ true. Many decisions are made due to supply chain issues (among other reasons) that have nothing to do with the weapon itself and there are numerous examples of this. It's a very overlooked issue in a lot of discussions.


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## Hussar (Sep 12, 2019)

billd91 said:


> Honestly? Your first mistake was even starting to think that mecha would be a good idea that wouldn't be dominated by something more compact and low-tech like a tank.
> 
> The point of the games isn't to really be technologically authentic - stylish is more the idea. Just like the debate between guns and swords in the first place. You set your style, genre, content, and rules follow from there.




Well, there is THAT.  

But, when the technology is worse than modern day technology, and there's no real reason for it (it's not like they don't have computers), then it's painfully obvious.


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## Hussar (Sep 12, 2019)

dragoner said:


> Star Trek the original series is probably the most realistic: a big artillery system (spacecraft), and sidearms. Everything else, like tanks, will go away due to their logistical footprint being too large to justify their use. This is what happened to the horse, excellent all terrain mobility, but their supply chain from the farm to the battlefield is too large. Similar to the discussion of small arms, the various rifles and their calibers of ammunition; what gets lost in the conversation is the fact that militaries spend a thousand times the amount of money on the ammunition, rather than the weapons that fire them.




Well, it's kind of interesting isn't it?  TOS gets something of a pass because so many of the things we take for granted now weren't really invented then and the writers can't really be faulted for not thinking about it.

But, from today's perspective?  Landing parties that wear absolutely no body armor of any kind?  No drones?  And, given the frequency of unarmed combat, you'd think they'd at the very least carry some kind of taser.  

I always thought Andromeda, as schlockey as it was, was at least making a decent attempt to spackle over the holes.  The ship has on board security measures like gun emplacements.  The sensors are so good that the ship can detect the extra weight of a boarding party and locate them.  Total control over gravity plating to immobilize intruders.  On and on.


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## S'mon (Sep 12, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Well, it's kind of interesting isn't it?  TOS gets something of a pass because so many of the things we take for granted now weren't really invented then and the writers can't really be faulted for not thinking about it.




TOS Starfleet does have some stuff that got lost later, like_ mortars_! For some reason TV/film SF tends to really dislike indirect-fire weapons.

Body armour - well in 1968 it hadn't seen much use in several hundred years, except for fixed-emplacement machinegunners. It seemed a reasonable assumption that offence would continue to outstrip defence. Logically the away teams should be wearing encounter suits vs wildlife & pathogens, but the phaser/disruptor tech makes armour of limited use vs peer competitors.


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## MGibster (Sep 12, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Well, there is THAT.
> 
> But, when the technology is worse than modern day technology, and there's no real reason for it (it's not like they don't have computers), then it's painfully obvious.




Sometimes I think that has to do with practicality more than anything else.  For games like Battletech and even Warhammer 40k, many of the weapons have very limited range based on the scale of the map and the miniatures being used.  In WH40k a Space Marine, who is roughly the size of a human, armed with a bolt rifle has a maximum range of 24" (I think) which would translate to less than 50 yards at scale.  We all recognize that as a ridiculously short range for a rifle in real life.  Battletech is in a similar boat.  You can't have weapons with more realistic range without messing with the scale of the game.  Either maps would have to get huge or the miniatures need to be much smaller.


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## Sacrosanct (Sep 12, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Well, it's kind of interesting isn't it?  TOS gets something of a pass because so many of the things we take for granted now weren't really invented then and the writers can't really be faulted for not thinking about it.
> 
> But, from today's perspective?  Landing parties that wear absolutely no body armor of any kind?  No drones?  And, given the frequency of unarmed combat, you'd think they'd at the very least carry some kind of taser.
> 
> I always thought Andromeda, as schlockey as it was, was at least making a decent attempt to spackle over the holes.  The ship has on board security measures like gun emplacements.  The sensors are so good that the ship can detect the extra weight of a boarding party and locate them.  Total control over gravity plating to immobilize intruders.  On and on.




Pretty much every sci-fi movie is like that though, right? Big panels of buttons and lights from oversized panels from the sixties, to small green text only terminal screens from the 70s to wireframe 3D images from the 80s, etc.  current movies and TV always get really dated when rewatching in the future lol.  At least the Star Wars had hologram chess...


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 12, 2019)

Sacrosanct said:


> But they are cool.  Super cool.  In a fantasy sci-fi game, I am all for suspense of disbelief if the concept is cool enough




I've never been a fan of mecha so for me, "cool concept" has always been elusive. Weirdly, I don't mind things like that in fantasy and I do love me some clockpunk.


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## billd91 (Sep 12, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Well, there is THAT.
> 
> But, when the technology is worse than modern day technology, and there's no real reason for it (it's not like they don't have computers), then it's painfully obvious.




Well, yeah. So what? If the genre mix doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. If you're expecting something modeling reality rather than genre, you're going to be out of luck. 

But I think you're also skating on another problem that comes up - when specialized player knowledge exceeds the game designers' or GM's knowledge. You see it a lot when a game includes something relatively abstract - like a weapon's qualities, AC, or even lumping every equine into a monster stat block called "Horse". Some player with a modicum of more specialized knowledge pipes up with "That's not realistic" and proposes house rules to model their understanding of reality and end up making it too hard to deal with and/or useless. 
My favorite example of this was back in the 2e days when people circulated netbooks of house rule ideas. Someone with too many brain cycles on hand took what would be a fairly simple single proficiency, Heraldry, and blew it up in a multiple proficiency nightmare of specialization because they knew someone proficient in heraldry would have to have a foot in lots of other knowledges and skills and made the logical leap they needed to basically be fully proficient in each one. It was unwieldy and pointlessly nitpicky. The game was better served by a broader abstraction that allowed a character to have a useful bit of skill without forcing them to have dissertations in multiple fields (a bit like Profession skills in 3e/PF as well).

Yeah, based on your (and many other peoples') knowledge of technology, the game may be lagging. Does it really matter? If it does, don't play it. If you still want to play it, you have to acknowledge that abstractions in ways that support the style and genre make the game playable.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 12, 2019)

MGibster said:


> Sometimes I think that has to do with practicality more than anything else.  <..>  You can't have weapons with more realistic range without messing with the scale of the game.  Either maps would have to get huge or the miniatures need to be much smaller.




4E had this with the range of weapons as well.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 12, 2019)

S'mon said:


> TOS Starfleet does have some stuff that got lost later, like_ mortars_! For some reason TV/film SF tends to really dislike indirect-fire weapons.



It doesn't film well I think.



> Body armour - well in 1968 it hadn't seen much use in several hundred years, except for fixed-emplacement machinegunners.



Not totally. At that point helmets had been well-established in the military. Flak jackets were issued in both Korea and Vietnam and were widely used. Again, I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that it doesn't film well. A bunch of guys in green or tan helmets and body armor end up looking all the same. Think of how difficult the characters in a more realistically staged war movie like _Black Hawk Down_ are.

This is why an armored suit type show would really need to have a clear distinguishing mark, like color or heraldry, or something, but even then, it denies the film some of the most emotionally relevant information, the facial expressions. A lot of sci fi computer games have the characters armored up, but often allow helmets to be off so you can tell which character is which. This is despite the fact that it's clearly more _realistic_ to be helmeted.



> It seemed a reasonable assumption that offence would continue to outstrip defence. Logically the away teams should be wearing encounter suits vs wildlife & pathogens, but the phaser/disruptor tech makes armour of limited use vs peer competitors.



The thing I always find unbelievable about away teams is the lack of environmental protection. Of course, a good armored spacesuit would be nice protection against both many physical threats (like good old fashioned getting banged up by falls and abrasions) _and_ pathogens.


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## dragoner (Sep 12, 2019)

Hussar said:


> Well, it's kind of interesting isn't it?  TOS gets something of a pass because so many of the things we take for granted now weren't really invented then and the writers can't really be faulted for not thinking about it.
> 
> But, from today's perspective?  Landing parties that wear absolutely no body armor of any kind?  No drones?  And, given the frequency of unarmed combat, you'd think they'd at the very least carry some kind of taser.
> 
> I always thought Andromeda, as schlockey as it was, was at least making a decent attempt to spackle over the holes.  The ship has on board security measures like gun emplacements.  The sensors are so good that the ship can detect the extra weight of a boarding party and locate them.  Total control over gravity plating to immobilize intruders.  On and on.




These things are all reasonably easy to add, details mostly. Body Armor and Drones might not be effective against Phasers and Disruptors, but OK; Enviro suits could be like the Space X space suits. Still 99% of the budget gets absorbed in spacecraft. Logistical supply chains that stretch from different star systems, one gets around to million dollar bullets eventually, so a lot of weapons might not be the best, but merely good enough.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 12, 2019)

billd91 said:


> Well, yeah. So what? If the genre mix doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. If you're expecting something modeling reality rather than genre, you're going to be out of luck.




True, although sometimes the designers just don't do a good job. There are plenty of examples of abstractions that don't work out. 



> But I think you're also skating on another problem that comes up - when specialized player knowledge exceeds the game designers' or GM's knowledge. You see it a lot when a game includes something relatively abstract - like a weapon's qualities, AC, or even lumping every equine into a monster stat block called "Horse". Some player with a modicum of more specialized knowledge pipes up with "That's not realistic" and proposes house rules to model their understanding of reality and end up making it too hard to deal with and/or useless.




Yes, this is very true. Abstraction is an essential part of a good design. 

IMO it's more important for skills to be _relevant_ and _useful_, which is one reason I'm not very happy with the 5E skill system (such as it is). What actual use does a skill like Medicine have, for example? Almost none unless the DM gives one and even then the Healer feat totally owns it and doesn't require the Medicine skill. 4E had skill powers, which were a nice addition to the game, so being proficient in a skill actually mattered.


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## Umbran (Sep 12, 2019)

S'mon said:


> TOS Starfleet does have some stuff that got lost later, like_ mortars_! For some reason TV/film SF tends to really dislike indirect-fire weapons.




FIlm/TV SF is visual media about characters interacting with the world.  Indirect fire is about them _indirectly_ interacting with things - in visual media, breaking the line of sigh breaks the ability to show the relationship and interaction between the character and the target.

Like, if a character plants a bomb, and runs to a distance... they still usually frame it so you see the character and the explosion in the same frame, even though there's generally no real reason for there to be a line of sight.  Same basic idea.


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## Jay Verkuilen (Sep 12, 2019)

Umbran said:


> FIlm/TV SF is visual media about characters interacting with the world.




Right and that's why armor and helmets are also crummy in film---they obscure the actor, make the characters hard to tell apart visually, and deny the filmmaker and actor one of the most important tools of emotional expression, namely the face and body. Facelessness usually ratchets up anxiety, which is why things like medical face masks are so anxiety inducing. However, this undermines the humanity of the characters to the viewer.

Of course there are heroes like Master Chief whose identity is essentially "faceless mech" but recall that Halo is an FPS, so you're not really looking at Master Chief much. The facelessness also makes for a good "this could me me" aspect that's helpful to an FPS.


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## dragoner (Sep 12, 2019)

Jay Verkuilen said:


> Right and that's why armor and helmets are also crummy in film---they obscure the actor, make the characters hard to tell apart visually, and deny the filmmaker and actor one of the most important tools of emotional expression, namely the face and body.




I remember reading a film exec on the subject, that if the star was in a full face helmet, they might as well be nobody, and they don't pay the stars to act like nobodies. So things like Urban's Dredd will be very rare, only to make a point.


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## LuisCarlos17f (Sep 12, 2019)

This makes me remember the classic controversy realism vs gameplay in the shooter videogames. I play Fortnite: save the world, sometimes with a ninja against gunmen, and the heroes with a melee weapon against soldiers is epic in the fiction, but imposible in a real life, and most of videogames. I remember a gif about Assasin's Creed III. In the expectation there is a cinematic where the hero charges against a squad, and in the gameplay it was practically a useless sacrifice.   

We have to admit it: martial artist from Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters or Street Fighters couldn't defeat shooters from Overwatch, Quake Arena, Team Fortress, Battleborn or Paladins: Champions of the Realm.   

* Other matter is RPGs where firearms are crafted manually, not by machines in factories, because it is a post-apocalypse setting. Here guns and ammo are luxury used only in emergencies. 

* In a fantasy world mini arcanetech motors could be used to reload crossbows. And I say it again, DM could use "bulletproof" creatures (undead, constructs, trolls or werebeasts). 

* Sometimes I imagine a setting where there is a confrontation between warmages (3.5 D&D class) and gunslingers(Pathfinder). How would be the balance of power?


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## Ratskinner (Sep 12, 2019)

dragoner said:


> Star Trek the original series is probably the most realistic: a big artillery system (spacecraft), and sidearms. Everything else, like tanks, will go away due to their logistical footprint being too large to justify their use. This is what happened to the horse, excellent all terrain mobility, but their supply chain from the farm to the battlefield is too large. Similar to the discussion of small arms, the various rifles and their calibers of ammunition; what gets lost in the conversation is the fact that militaries spend a thousand times the amount of money on the ammunition, rather than the weapons that fire them.




hmmm.....congressional-military-industrial complex? Get your economy addicted to silly military expenditure? I mean, we've got some pretty expensive and over-the-top systems here in the US. (Bombers, etc.) Parts of your giant mech are made and assembled on every planet in the Federation!

My favorite parts of it are when the military is before congress telling them that they don't need program X, but instead need lesser spending on smarter programs.... and congress is like "La La La, I can't hear you."


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## dragoner (Sep 12, 2019)

Ratskinner said:


> hmmm.....congressional-military-industrial complex? Get your economy addicted to silly military expenditure? I mean, we've got some pretty expensive and over-the-top systems here in the US. (Bombers, etc.) Parts of your giant mech are made and assembled on every planet in the Federation!
> 
> My favorite parts of it are when the military is before congress telling them that they don't need program X, but instead need lesser spending on smarter programs.... and congress is like "La La La, I can't hear you."




The counter argument is how sustainable is any of that; but basically it's the maginot line: works great until it doesn't work at all, and that's where you sank your budget. Fine for a setting, as it's just a slice of time, and reality bears no onus of making sense, many examples of that. Though if you do have deterrent weapons like giant mechs or nuclear missiles, eventually the players are going to smash that button down ...


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## Ratskinner (Sep 12, 2019)

dragoner said:


> The counter argument is how sustainable is any of that; but basically it's the maginot line: works great until it doesn't work at all, and that's where you sank your budget. Fine for a setting, as it's just a slice of time, and reality bears no onus of making sense, many examples of that. Though if you do have deterrent weapons like giant mechs or nuclear missiles, eventually the players are going to smash that button down ...




Sure...although we'll be getting too political to talk specifics


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