Weapons And Armor, Crafting And Design

[NuSoardGraphite]

This is true. There'a catch though - we now have a vast trove of data on injury and death from firearms that shows very clearly that in real life, muzzle energy has very little correlation with the ability of a weapon to kill or maim. And damage dice, inasmuch as they measure anything, measure the ability to kill or maim.

 

It's pretty easy to see why - the same model of gun, firing the same ammo, can have dramatically difference muzzle energy outputs, depending on the length of the barrel, even though that has no effect on the lethality of the weapon. Depending on the ammo used a .45 can have a higher - or lower - muzzle energy output than a .357 magnum. The KE delivered by a slug varies hugely depending on the distance from the muzzle, etc etc.

This is largely why damage in rpgs is variable and not usually a static number. This represents grazing, KE loss over distance, flesh wounds etc. For the detail nuts, it wouldnt be all that difficult to figure out range brackets for each weapon to determine at what range the round looses 1DC. (I prefer to interpret based on the damage roll)

 

So it's a measure which is easy to quantify, just one which is largely irrelevant to calculating damage. The fact that all of these similar weapons - in real life - seem to have similar effects and that there are so many contributing factors which can't easily be modeled, to me says that we should ignore the unimportant details (and that seems to include the vast bulk of the minutae about weapons) and focus on the important ones. All that seems to be important in real life is penetration and placement. Slugs with more KE (as long as they don't fragment too easily) penetrate better, so there's no question that a weapon with more energetic projectile should do more damage (on average). But the difference seems to be pretty coarse. 5.56 or 7.62? Real life data says "same, same". .45, .44, .357, .5? Again, real life data says "no measurable difference, even averaged out over hundreds or thousands of hits". But there is a difference between a .22 and a .45. So there are differences, just not between basically comparable weapons - so the differences are pretty coarse.

I mainly use KE for consistency. Also, if I want to convert a real life or fictional weapon, conversion is easy with little angst as to where the weapon should rank.

 

Also, this is why I support the +1DC = x2 energy model. It keeps weapons with relatively close KE statistics within 1DC of each other generally, which means a 9mm glock 17 isnt much less lethal than a .45 which isnt much less leathal than a .50 (in general a 1DC difference between them. Average damage for the 9mm is 4.5 body. For the .45 is 5.5 body and average damage for the .50 Desert Eagle is 7 body) and even between the 5.56 and 7.62 rifle rounds, there is only a 1DC difference between them. But this is sufficient for the way damage works in HERO and is plenty lethal enough at the Heroic level, especially when factoring in hit locations and impairing and disabling wounds, yet the variability of the dice rolls allows for grazes and flesh wounds on a fairly regular basis. The rate of lethality might be a bit higher than in real life, but I feel this is a more desireable outcome when mimicking adventure fiction. If one wants a less lethal game, one simply allows for greater defenses available. Flavor to taste.

 

But I've already found out that gamers, who have grown up with the idea of finely differentiated weapons tables, apparently find this very hard to accept.

 

cheers, Mark

They do. Hero gives such individuals fits because of its inherently exponential nature (which many of them work dilligently to deny or ignore). I simply desire consistency, so that technology I represent in my games is reliable and predictable to a reasonable degree.

[Lucius]

But I've already found out that gamers, who have grown up with the idea of finely differentiated weapons tables, apparently find this very hard to accept.

 

cheers, Mark

I put tons of detail into designing weapons for fantasy, and then found we mostly ignore it at the table. Neither I nor my players remember things like the initiative bonuses, the fact some weapons need to be "readied," etc.

 

I've thought about scrapping what I have and starting over with the idea of keeping it as simple as possible from the start. Obviously though there needs to be some distinction between weapon types, I can't believe players will accept a sword, an ax, a pick, and a hammer, that are functionally identical.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says of coruse Alexander's First Rule of Weapons Tables should always apply

[Markdoc]

Yeah, weapon complexity that isn't used is not only no good to anyone, but it's a relatively common feature of game design and has been for a long time. Hands up all those who remember AD&D's weapon modifiers? I don't recall anyone, even among the most rabid of fans, using those. We actually used a homebrew character sheet (courtesy of Fitz, on these boards) that had them written in and we still didn't use them.

 

With regard to weapon damage, I agree that there should be some differentiating factors between weapons like a sword, an ax, a pick, and a hammer. But I'd be wary about anything that starts with "Obviously". Obviously how? Do you have personal experience in using these weapons on people? If not, obvious based on what data? We actually know very little about the effects of these weapons in real life. My feeling that they should be differentiated is based on an appreciation of the fact that as armour evolved, the weapons used changed, and they changed in a way that actually moved against social/cultural pressure.

 

As an example of what I mean, in both Europe and Japan, swords were prized, not just as weapons, but as status symbols. For a long while while they were also the preferred close combat weapon (usually alongside a reach weapon like a spear or lance). But as armour improved, swords became less and less the preferred close combat weapon. They were still carried and still prized, but as armour became heavier, one handed swords assumed a secondary role - axes, picks, maces and hammers became much more popular than they had been. Then, as armour retreated in the face of firearms, suddenly swords came back into fashion again as a primary close combat weapon, while the impact weapons again became secondary choices. The fact that this happened across multiple cultures, in different timeframes tells me that there is almost certainly a physical difference at work, and that difference almost certainly affects battlefield lethality, since it is battlefield use that changed, not cultural preference. But is there a difference between in the lethality of an ax, a pick, and a hammer? As a gamer, I'd like to think so, but I can't think of any data that supports the idea. We need to be wary of the fact that as gamers we have been culturally conditioned to believe there are differences.

 

I'm at work now (taking a quick cofee break), so don't have time for a detailed response, but I'll post some more data tonight that shows just how cautious we should be of things that "seem" obvious to gamers - but turn out to probably not to be real.

 

cheers, Mark

[Lucius]

Yeah, weapon complexity that isn't used is not only no good to anyone, but it's a relatively common feature of game design and has been for a long time. Hands up all those who remember AD&D's weapon modifiers? I don't recall anyone, even among the most rabid of fans, using those. We actually used a homebrew character sheet (courtesy of Fitz, on these boards) that had them written in and we still didn't use them.

I met one person who claimed to have used them, explicitly when her group had decided to experiment with actually using all the rules in the book and following them to the letter. She didn't say how long they'd kept at it but it didn't seem like it was for long.

 

 

But I'd be wary about anything that starts with "Obviously". Obviously how?

Obvious in that I know how I, personally, feel when I see a game system list "melee weapon" as a single line (and it's probably a telling detail that I haven't seen that very often.)

 

Also obvious when I stop and put some thought into it and realize that players want to feel that they have meaningful choices, and if all weapons are identical, the choice of weapon becomes meaningless - in a sense, it's a form of "railroading."

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Obviously a palindromedary tagline

[Markdoc]

Obvious in that I know how I, personally, feel when I see a game system list "melee weapon" as a single line (and it's probably a telling detail that I haven't seen that very often.)

 

Also obvious when I stop and put some thought into it and realize that players want to feel that they have meaningful choices, and if all weapons are identical, the choice of weapon becomes meaningless - in a sense, it's a form of "railroading."

 

Oh sure. I feel the same way. But is that because it's true or because we have been programmed by TV and films and games to feel that way? People can be trained to believe very strongly things that are not true simply by repeated exposure and assumption.

 

In Grettir's saga (written in the late 1200s/early 1300s, when people still had plenty of experience of actually using medieval weapons) he is delighted when he gets a shortsword. It immediately becomes his primary weapon, replacing his battleaxe. That suggests that to the people of the time, a battle axe was not obviously a better choice. Now maybe Grettir's response was a status thing, but I have never seen an RPG where the shortsword would be a better choice, which suggests to me that our fixation on the idea of "bigger weapon = more dangerous" may not in fact, be true.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

To follow up on this, would it be any more satisfying if in a modern game, players had a choice of handgun or rifle for firearms? It sounds ludicrous to us, but read on.

 

Nusoard suggested a simple model to calculate handgun damage (I know this is the fantasy board, but bear with me: unlike medieval warfare we have reams of data on the effect of modern weapons and it nicely illustrates the gulf between what we think, and what we actually know. Also, guns are easy to compare because a bullet is a bullet - different calibres are still closer to each other (I think) than a mace and a sword).

 

Now I understand the appeal of a simple, easily scaleable model, believe me. And the approach outlined has the advantage that it "feels" right - there' an easily traceable logical thread. But there's a problem with the idea that you can map DC to muzzle energy - which is that it utterly fails to produce results that match real life. Professionals have spent decades trying to tweak this very approach and by now have pretty much all given up on it. My experience has been that when a model fails to match reality, it's not generally reality that's the problem. Now if you don't care that it's unrealistic (it is after all, as noted, consistent, easy to use with a variety of weapons, etc) and just want a method that works for your games, then cool. I can see that.

 

 But it's not what I'm looking for.

 

There is additionally the problem that some of the powerful handguns can generate muzzle energies 8x that of a typical .38 round, so you're looking at a 3-4 DC spread just for handguns, and with rifles, you're going up from there. This exactly what leads to the problem we have now where squad-level weapons put out superhero-killing or building-levelling amounts of damage, and vaporize ordinary humans. In turn, you need skyhigh levels of DEF to resist mundane weapons which leads us back to air-deploying Hero system tanks without the need for parachutes.

 

I've talked about real-life data. Here's what we have. Greg Ellifritz did an analysis of over 1800 US domestic shootings where the outcome and weapon used was documented. He looked at number of hits, hit location, etc. I'm just posting a couple of examples here.

 

.22 (short and long) Hits that were fatal - 34%. One-shot-stop % - 31%. Actually incapacitated by one shot (torso or head hit) - 60%

 

.45 ACP. Hits that were fatal - 29%. One-shot-stop % - 39%. Actually incapacitated by one shot (torso or head hit) - 51%

 

Interesting, no? In real life, the .45 was no more lethal than the .22 (it might look like it's actually less lethal, but there's enough variation in the samples that statistically, these numbers are identical). The same level of lethality is found for .44 magnum, .38, 9mm, etc. If there was anything close to a 1 or 2 DC difference, it'd show up with sample sizes this large. But it doesn't. He also looked at rifles and shotguns, and these weapons were significantly more lethal than any of the handguns. His conclusion?

 

" For me there really isn't a stopping power debate. All handguns suck! If you want to stop someone, use a rifle or shotgun!"

 

We even have a sort-of controlled study. Between 1978-1979, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office used 0.38-caliber pistol ammunition of different designs. The police used 150-grain Winchester round-nose bullets and the sheriff's office used 110-grain Federal jacketed hard-point bullets, with the two rounds bullets having different muzzle energies. The differences are instructive - namely that there was no difference at all. There were a very similar number of shootings by officers of each service, and the number of rounds fired per incident was the same, the number of hits was the same, the number of fatalities was the same.

 

If that wasn't enough, the British army did a detailed analysis (published by Owen-Smith in the journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1981, vol 127:31) of over 2200 casualties during the hostilities in Northern Ireland, broken down by location of the wound, outcome, and where known, weapon used. Their results are almost precisely the same as Ellifritz's with one important difference. The British soldiers wore light ballistic armour. In the analysis of weapon penetration, the .22 rarely penetrated the armour and perhaps for that reason, there were no fatalties caused by .22s, though there were wounds. But all the other handguns had essentially the same chances of penetrating the body armour and the same chance of causing fatal wounds, regardless of calibre: .38, .45, 9 mm - didn't matter. Rifles, on the other hand, were significantly better at both penetrating armour and causing lethal or serious wounds than handguns - but again, they were all pretty much the same as each other. Calibre and muzzle energy didn't seem to have any measureable effect. I should mention there was one exception - the venerable .303 - but I wouldn't put too much weight on that since there were only 7 shootings with .303s identified in total, and they were used exclusively as sniper weapons, unlike the other weapons - so most of the hits were headshots.

 

So basically, all the data we have shows that there is a significant difference between side arms and long arms, but that within those categories, the differences are too small to measure, even with hundreds of examples; certainly there's no difference as big as 1 DC. Further strengthening the analsis is the fact that the British data on long arm lethality matches very well with US data from WW2 (the Bouganville study), from Korea, Vietnam and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and here we're talking about tens of thousands of casualties, so the data is very, very strong. Basically, we have a lot of data, and it's all remarkably consistent.

 

To loop back to the sword/axe/hammer example, you could match the real life data on firearms far better by having just two categories of weapons - handguns and long arms - than you could with the current Hero system line up. You could get an almost perfect match by having just 3 categories - smallbore handguns (.22, .25) and medium/largebore handguns (basically everything else) and then long arms, with squad-level projectile weapons having even greater lethality.

 

Now I'm not sure we actually want to go there, and I also have a pretty good hunch why the data looks the way it does, but if you told any gamers that there's little difference in the damage done between a .22 and a .45 and they'd throw a fit. But that is what actually we see in real life. It makes me treat my own instinct to say that medieval weapons "must be different" with some caution.

 

cheers, Mark

[Old Man]

Now I'm not sure we actually want to go there, and I also have a pretty good hunch why the data looks the way it does, but if you told any gamers that there's little difference in the damage done between a .22 and a .45 and they'd throw a fit. But that is what actually we see in real life. It makes me treat my own instinct to say that medieval weapons "must be different" with some caution.

If you think gamers would throw a fit, try the gun nuts. You want to start a fistfight in a room full of gun nuts, just casually mention that .45 sucks.

 

I've noticed the phenomenon that you describe here and I think it's mainly because the damage in question is piercing. In particular, if a bullet has enough energy to get through armor it's pretty much going to do what it would have done if there wasn't any armor. Even if the armor takes off some velocity the resulting hole will be about the same. For higher energy rounds there may be some hydrostatic shock effects, but I wonder if that would even count as BODY damage.

 

For cutting and impact damage, in general, I would expect armor to reduce damage more in line with Hero mechanics. But overall Hero does not make much distinction between types of damage. There's normal and killing, which is a really blunt mechanic, and then there are the advantages that you can put on the KA and the armor. But the modeling of different armor types versus different damage types is a patchwork.

[mhd]

It hasn't been that long ago, when "obviously" was often followed by references to Asian martial arts, and these days it seems we get a new influx of Thalhoffer-jutsu dudes and dudettes claiming the same universal absolute knowledge. And the proper science side of things isn't really all that better, as experimental archeology is still pretty new and the amount and rigor of tests is, well, maybe on the level of the social sciences...

 

But at a certain point, I'll just have to say "screw you realism, I like my pawns and rooks". Arms, armor and their use is highly complex, turn-based combat is inherently flawed and when you're outside of a duel and in a pitched battle, nobody knows what's going on anyways. And after that you add your trolls, dragons and spells. So it's actually not unlikely that a mixture of OD&D's "every weapon does the same damage" and Tunnels & Trolls "every group rolls their weapon dice, we add them up and compare them" is closer to realism than a hyper-complex combination of initiative, maneuvering, armor, weapons with distinct penetration and tissue damage for weaponry.

 

Yet to some (me included) those bits and pieces are fun and nice to reason about in a "gamistic" way. You get a "+X bonus to stage Y of the combat flowchart". That might be called "initiative" or "parry" in games that aim for at least a bit of verisimilitude. In a Kung Fu or D&D 4E game, it might be something more exotic. And they're probably vastly unrealistic or at least dubious oversimplifications.

 

And I'd say that that's perfectly okay. In a game, there's nothing obviously wrong. Or right...

There's a whole spectrum of "wrongness". Just like when you look at "real" fighting, where actual mortal combat is on one side, chess is on the other, and martial arts, football, movie and stage fights are somewhere inbetween. I for one, like watching people duke it out more than people moving wooden pieces around, but also like Jackie Chan jumping around more than sweaty hairy dudes choking each other.

 

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

[Markdoc]

If you think gamers would throw a fit, try the gun nuts. You want to start a fistfight in a room full of gun nuts, just casually mention that .45 sucks.

 

I've noticed the phenomenon that you describe here and I think it's mainly because the damage in question is piercing. In particular, if a bullet has enough energy to get through armor it's pretty much going to do what it would have done if there wasn't any armor. Even if the armor takes off some velocity the resulting hole will be about the same. For higher energy rounds there may be some hydrostatic shock effects, but I wonder if that would even count as BODY damage.

 

Oh, I know. American gun nuts love the .45 – other countries have their own holy weapons. A few years ago, I shared my dad’s opinion of the .45. He said “It’s a good gun, very heavy. By the time you’re close enough to kill someone with it, if the bullets don’t do it, you can throw the gun at them”. American gun fandom was outraged, and plenty of slurs were tossed at my dad and his opinions. Here’s the funny thing though: he was a highly decorated veteran, and an army marksman with 5 years of combat experience including a great deal of close quarters combat. He had used the .45 in combat and had killed people with it (in fact, the very last person he killed in the war was with his .45 – I think I’ve told that story on the boards before). The people who were outraged … had done none of these things. Kind of like the current discussion, they were outraged because his real life experience did not mesh with how they imagined things. It’s also interesting; given the points in this thread, that my dad’s experience was that you carried a handgun as an absolute last-resort backup: for close combat he far preferred a Thompson submachine gun and for anything else a rifle - the same as Ellifritz's conclusions 60 years later.

 

As for the point about excess enegrgy, that's exactly right. Hydrostatic shock is apparently another advertising copywriter's myth to go in the dusty archives alongside knockdown power and "kinetic energy dump". Not only is there no actual evidence that it does any damage - it leaves no evidence in tissue, but these days we routinely use medical techniques to generate shockwaves in tissue 2-3x more intense than that you get from a high powered rifle bullet, without any harm to the patient.

 

That leaves us with good old-fashioned tissue damage. and I think the reason that the handguns have similar lethality in real life data (regardless of calibre) is because in the situations measured - ordinary shootings in the US - typically occur at close range. The US federal police did a study of 6000 shootings back in the 1970's and reported the ranges as: Contact to 3 feet ... 34%, 3 feet to 6 feet ...... 47%, 6 feet to 15 feet ..... 9%. At those ranges, even a .22 is going to shatter bone (I can attest to that part personally!) and penetrate through most if not all of an adult male's chest cavity. So in those conditions, it's just about if you hit a vital organ or not. And it turns out that more powerful handguns have only a very, very minor advantage (too small to measure, even in hundreds of shootings, and therefore way less than 1 DC) in that situation. The guy who runs the FBI ballistics program essentially said the same thing, saying that when coomparing rounds and handguns, most of them performed at a very similar level, but that they were looking for the slightest advantage: differences that might occur 1 time in a 100 or less. To see that, you need to fire thousands of rounds - and it's too small a difference to model in any  RPG I know of.

 

cheers, Mark

[Old Man]

it's too small a difference to model in any  RPG I know of.[/font][/size]

I'll have to dig out my copy of Phoenix Command someday.

 

I think there's something to hydrostatic shock--if you see how much it displaces and disrupts organs I can definitely see it knocking a person out or even sending them into actual shock. But in Hero terms that would be more like +STUNx than added damage. I think rifle rounds probably do inflict more damage against bone than handgun rounds would, though I'm much less certain of that.

 

I've taken a couple of abortive stabs at modeling different types of damage and armor in FH. Mail works best against cutting attacks, padding works best against blunt attacks, plate is best for piercing. But it tended to run aground on the simplicity of the DEF/BODY mechanic for inanimate objects--I was going to have to define (at least) three different DEFs for every object type, so forget it.

 

Still, you can see this play out in the evolution of European weapon use through the Middle Ages. Swords were straight-bladed for much of their early existence, reasonably useful against both unarmored peasants and barbarians in mail or brigandine. Then as armor got heavier, so did swords for a bit, until the armor just got ridiculous and the sword was relegated to ceremonial or backup status while the weapon of the day became the pike or polearm. Then as firearms caused the phasing out of armor altogether, the sword became a mostly-slashing weapon, used with devastating effect at Waterloo* before finally fading into obsolescence.

 

 

*By the English; the French cavalry sword at Waterloo was still a stabbing weapon.