Re: GM-controlled Bad Luck points

gleichman wrote:
On Aug 7, 8:18 pm, Peter Knutsen <pe...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Cops, on the other hand, often are alone.

Again, it beats teeth. And past experience showed more officers lost
due to slow reloads than jammed weapons. Thus one goes with the odds.

Also the first shot out of a semi-auto is as certain as one from a
revolver. Semi-auto failures are mostly feed/ejection failures and
that happens after the weapon fires.

I thought about that, earlier, but wasn't sure about it. It makes a lot of sense, though, that the first shot usually goes out and THEN your gun jams.

I want
something in-between, even if it is contrary to reality, because if I
get that, then I make "Immediate Action" a meaningful character ability.

Understandable.

There's a principle, from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, about chose-able abilities. They are said to be broken if they fail the "but wouldn't everyone take it"-criteria, or if they fail the "nobody would take it"-criteria.

It's a good place to start, but I'm not convinced it must always be applied. Some abilities simply mark the character out as an experienced fighter, or as having military training, and thus standing out from those other party members whose only combat training comes from a pistol shooting club, or a martial arts dojo.

Also, of course, learnable abilities can be acquired after game start, either to correct a player mistake in not taking it, or to simulate the fact that a character becomes familiar with combat, or combat-related skills, over the course of the campaign.

GURPS famously has the (learnable) Combat Reflexes advantage. In several discussions among veteran GURPS users, it has been said that it is underpriced at 15 character points (even by the primary designer and line editor, Sean Punch), and at least one GM has reported that he tried raising the cost to 20 points in a campaign, then to 25 points in the next, but his players still bought it for their characters immediately.

Still, not every GURPS player character has Combat Reflexes, and that's good.

Interesting data point. But might that not have more to do with a desire
for a high volume of fire (seeing as most handgun shots fired doesn't
hit the target), rather than a concern with the cop's ability to pull
his gun, in an emergency, and be almost absolutely certain that a bullet
will come out of the barrel, so that he can stop a perp at point blank
range?

I spoke to this in other posts but to expand upon it, the answer is
that it depends. During the rush to high capacity 9mm in the 80s that
was indeed the thought in many police departments. They looked at the
stats and found that the typical police gunfight had around 6 rounds
fired per officer on average (of which only 1 hit) and decided that by
increasing the number of loaded rounds they could be more certain of
their officers having enough ammo at hand to gain multiple hits.

Makes sense.

Afterwards they found that the number of shots fired on average
climbed up towards whatever new capacity they had put in place and the
hit rate dropped almost to match. People in a gunfight (often for the
first time in their lives) just like to empty their gun in the
direction of whatever caused them to decide upon the use of deadly

I've already got a rule in place in MA RPG, where you can chose to "rush" a skill-dependent action, lowering the Action Point cost in exchange for a huge penalty to the skill roll. Thus you can squeeze a shot off at 3 AP cost, compared to the normal cost of 4 APs, at 1/2 skill value, or pay 2 APs for a shot at 1/4 skill value. It's a pretty stupid choice to make, but it's there; perhaps mostly for desperate and inexperienced NPCs who will die anyway.

force in the first place. Thus ammo capacity relationship to
effectiveness is highly distorted.

Hence my comment that things are often driven more by perception than
reality.

There's a wonderful quote in Quentin Tarantinos blacksploitation homage, "Jackie Brown", where the African-American weapons dealer says something very similar. Whenever a particular brand of firearm is featured in a major movie, demand goes up and he can sell it for more, even if it is a fairly worthless gun.

I'll try very hard to squeeze that quote in somewhere in the text, although of course the Samuel Colt quote has to be the one to introduce the Firearms sub-chapter. It's just that good.

Current trends are the reverse. The 1986 Miami Shootout was the
turning point as the failure of the 9mm there resulted in a move
towards more powerful sidearms and rejection of the "spray and pray"
methods of the high cap 9mm pistol. Many of the most elite police and
military forces in the US have returned to a variant model of the
1911 .45 ACP pistol (including Marine Force Recon, FBI Hostage Rescue

Originally adopted in order to take down "amok runners" on some Pacific island? Or at least that's what I remember having read in GURPS Martial Arts.

It's too bad I don't have any kind of stopping power simulation in MA RPG, or bullet stun, but it makes it too easy to take a PC out of the fight with one shot, so I've gone with a hit point attrition model instead.

Team, Delta, various SWAT teams nation wide) and many police
departments offer it as an option. With 7 or 8 round mags, ammo cap
isn't it's driving advantage.

With no rules about PCs being able, or unable, to "keep their cool", 7 or 8 carefully aimed shots should be plenty to take down several foes.

Another example, which I read in Hans-Chrisian Vortisch' new "GURPS
Seals in Vietnam"-PDF, is that many SEAL groups would have the point man
carry a shotgun, because they found that it was really good for getting
that first shot in, at very close range. That set me thinking about
point blank-shooting, and whether various gun types should have
different bonuses. So that's one way in which my mind, and my approach
to game design, works. I read or hear something, and it gets me thinking
about including it in the design.

HERO System includes in its optional rules (Dark Champions book) a CQB
(close quarters battle) modifier which modifiers one's DEX for
determining action order at congested close ranged encounters. Faster
weapons take less of a negative modifier.

I actually have the latest Dark Champions, but I've never noticed that. I'll have to get out that book and try to find it.

Sagatafl does something similar already, with "fast" weapons giving a bonus to the character's Reflexes roll to determine initiative order, and "slow" weapons giving a penalty. Heavy encumbrance also gives a penalty.

MA RPG uses a different model, where Action Point rolls means you often get to take multiple actions per combat Round, so my solution is to have different costs for different weapon types, for the binary skill to reduce the AP cost per shot (from 4 APs to 3 APs for a single shot).

Thus Faster Shortarm Shot might cost 8 points, Faster Subm. Shot might cost 12 points, and Faster Rifle Shot might cost 16 points.

I'd be inclined to charge 16 points for an ordinary shotgun and 12 points for a sawn-off shotgun[1], and then handle the situation with a bonus to the roll for very-short-range shots (a rather bigger bonus than what other weapon types get), because the text seemed to suggest to me that it wasn't about shooting first, but about being pretty sure you'd hit (with the pellets scattering and all that).

[1] Probably so that you pay 12 points for the sawn-off binary skill, and then you can upgrade to all shotguns for a further 4 points. Charging separately for each type would be absurd.

--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
.

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