Re: (TFT) Doing damage modernly in the magical world of cidri

["John J Hyland" <johnnyboytmm@juno.com>]

-- Peter von Kleinsmid <pvk@oz.net> wrote:----------
I have a couple of suggestions to your list from the realism side, which hopefully wouldn't hurt the playability side. I'd be curious to hear your reaction.
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A quick recap. 
            My Avg [my spread]  your avg {your spread

Light pistol   -  7    [2-12]     6   {0-16}
Heavy pistol   - 10    [5-15]     11  {0-26}
Shotgun (shot) - 13.5  [6-21]     13  {0-56} armor works
Shotgun (slug) - 13.5  [6-21]     16  {0-36}
Rifle          - 14    [4-24]     14  {0-34}



Your damage results in essentially the same averages, but a much larger spread of possible results (as you clearly intended), and the multiplying (instead of adding more dice) increases the likelihood of getting the outlying results.

Again, with the same avg damage you'd get very different behavior, since charging the rifle weilding bad guy with my halberd might not be suicide anymore, since I might get just a flesh wound.  And a 45 strength unarmored giant is just ripe for the plucking with a full damage blast from a shotgun.

All at the cost of a slightly odd looking damage description and an incremental multiplication in the damage roll.

I'd say, depending on the game, that seems a small price to pay.  If I were to have an artifact shotgun show up in my current game, I think I'd use your rules.  If I were going to introduce future soldiers with shotguns I'd use mine (since my players built characters with the normal weapons damage progression in mind).  If I were to start a free-wheeling, cross genre, universe hopping game (and use TFT instead of say Lords of Creation) I don't know what I'd do, probably ask the players which version they wanted.
 

-------------PVK regarding burst fire----------------------
How about for multiple bullets that might hit from the same gun, double the damage but also the armor?
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I think modern guns fire off 3 rds in a pretty tight pattern (1/1000 of the distance traveled, or 4 inches at 100 yards) so if one bullet hits they probably all will.  

Naturally I went with the simplest answer I could think of, but rolling damage for 3 bullets, with armor's effect on each one, would be fine too, just not quite as simple.



------------One last PVK quote--------------------------
The "5 damage for -2 DX" rule doesn't remove the small chance for the 
axeman to chop the pistol guy - it just makes it a little harder if he gets shot. No?
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You are correct of course.  I just find myself rooting for the barbarian is all.  Plus for some reason as I typed my earlier post I was thinking the dex minus was -4, which would be brutal for the barbarian, even though I know full well it is only -2.  Just a little brain freeze-up.

John

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