Medal of Honor Scene

[Christopher R Taylor]

The Netflix show Medal of Honor does reenactments and analysis of US winners of this prestigious award, and one of the episodes something happened that has me puzzled.

 

Like all of you, I imagine, when I see a fight, I break it down in my head in Hero terms, and its usually pretty easy to figure out what took place and why.  But here's what happened.

 

Sgt Bertolo after seeing the rest of his squad killed by ambush steps out and fires six shots, killing six Germans, one after another.  Now this guy isn't the Punisher, he's using an M-1 Garand, and while its semi automatic, its still not going to autofire. 

 

So you have a grunt with a rifle, probably speed 3 or so, against grunts with pistols who were probably at minimum equivalent to him in training -- speed, OCV, DCV, etc.

 

Now I can buy he got a presence attack on them by surprise and immense fury so they missed a phase or at least were delayed, or that he had a saved phase and came out shooting, so 2 phases to their 1.  I could buy that he was able to multiple attack.  But six guys?  That's -6 on every single shot for two phases straight.

 

To run the numbers, if they were equivalent in CV, that makes each of them 11- to hit.  At -6, he rolled six consecutive 5's?  OK, you say, they were half DCV, the presence attack and surprise.  But unless your DCV is really big, halving it doesn't actually make that much difference.  If you're 3, its now 2.  If you're 4 or 5, its now 2.  So that's not that much a benefit, at most he rolled six consecutive eights.  I mean its not impossible but an on 3d6 is 9.72%.  Six times in a row and your GM is going to ask to look at your dice.

 

So what did he do here?  Because this really happened.

 

I should add that Bertolo had poor vision and had to wear thick glasses; he was 4-f'd several times and was no warrior.  He didn't have lots of levels, nor was he a sharpshooter, is what I'm saying.  Yes, he may have been just naturally accurate, which could explain some things but I mean even with 2 levels, and the maximum benefit its still a huge stretch.

[Christopher]

I can watch it later.

 

With Warfare I think morale is the most important Stat. In other words: Presence attacks. With each shoot that connected, another Presence attack was made against the germans. Between the phase reduction and OCV penalties, that just was enough to avoid being hit. And the effects compunded too - every one killed without making a hit themself was a additional penalty. A bit less luck at rolling, and he would have died.

[Scott Ruggels]

Then one needs to figure out how the rifle was built. The Germans had semi automatic pistols. Sgt. Bertolo had a semi automatic rifle. The rifle holds 8 rounds.  He stands (half move) and fires. There was a thread in the Dark Champions board about how guns are too slow in HERO and made a few good points. Now the rifle should have a couple/three levels applied to range mods, because it is a rifle, where as the pistols do not. Now looking at the Germans, when under fire, the first instinct is to get to cover, so assay the first phase Sgt. Bertolo acted, included a presence attack, the Germans, then lose that phase. Subsequent phases, the Germans are NOT returning fire, but are trying to extend the range, or otherwise increase their DCVs. Also how many of those 6 pistols had been emptied into the Sergeant’s late comrades, and were useless in this engagement? The timing of ARL events may not compare to the speed chart, and noted shooter, Jerry Michelle (sic) fired a Garand into 5 targets in 3 seconds, hitting them all.  

[Christopher]

9 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Now I can buy he got a presence attack on them by surprise and immense fury so they missed a phase or at least were delayed, or that he had a saved phase and came out shooting, so 2 phases to their 1.  I could buy that he was able to multiple attack.  But six guys?  That's -6 on every single shot for two phases straight.

Now the fire rate in his counter-ambush, was clearly increased to Cinematic levels. Hitting 6 targets in 2 seconds tops is just not possible except for pure luck/some multiple hits from over penetration (the rifle should be strong enough for them, especially as no armor was involved).

The fire rate shown later when he was defending makes much more sense.

 

In reality that fire rate would not have been needed in the coutner ambush, however:

1) He had surprise. That means he got 1 phase where the enemy:
Could not abort

Was at 1/2 DCV (without an option to abort or use CSL defensively)

Migh even have taken x2 STUN and at 1/2 Hit Location penalties.

Getting 2-3 kills is entirely possible at that moment.

 

2) If he went first by the next phase, the enemy was still outside of cover. Even if they could abort now, they had to dive for cover (literally). 2 More kills.

 

3) Now at this point the german squad had around 66% casualties. That is the point were every sane person would get the f out of dodge. When they break, they run. When they run, they are at reduced DCV. Shoot in the back.

 

Now you only need 2 Shoots per round at -2 OCV to actually kill all 6. Maybe 3 shoots at -4 in the fist attack.

It was not even nessesary to get a kill on the hit. A disable (even being stunned) was enough. As long as they were out, the morale effect was there. While being shoot at, discerning if a ally is killed, disabeled or just playing dead is impossible.

 

 

If the game was WestEnd D6 Star Wars, I would say he "spend a force point" to actually buff his skill to the level where he could do that. If you are decent to good Heroic shoot there (6D6), double the amount with a Force point and have a strong gun (Blasterifle or Heavy Blaster), there is a decent chance you can kill 6 enemies with 1 shoot each in a single turn.

 

Shadowrun ranks Mooks by Professionality Level, wich includes a "they flee" threshold:

0: Flee at any one losst

1-2: Flee at >25% losses

3-4: >50% losses

3-4 seems to be a reasonable figure for german army guys. And 66% casualties is way past the 50% treshold.

[Lucius]

9 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I mean its not impossible

 

If it's not impossible, it's not surprising for it to happen - once. Out of all the literally millions of occasions in the annals of war where soldiers shot at each other, there are bound to be even stranger and less likely results than this.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says it would be strange if there were NOT such unlikely events scattered about....

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

 

Now the fire rate in his counter-ambush, was clearly increased to Cinematic levels. Hitting 6 targets in 2 seconds tops is just not possible except for pure luck/some multiple hits from over penetration (the rifle should be strong enough for them, especially as no armor was involved).

The fire rate shown later when he was defending makes much more sense.

 

Two phases, not two segments.  At speed three that's around four seconds time, enough time to empty a clip.  They were too close for range mods to matter.  Its a semi-automatic rifle, not bolt action, and it fires as fast as it cycles, which is well under a second.

 

Quote

The timing of ARL events may not compare to the speed chart, and noted shooter, Jerry Michelle (sic) fired a Garand into 5 targets in 3 seconds, hitting them all.  

 

Yeah there's something to the "guns are too slow" concept.  You can easily pump several rounds a second off with a pistol, and I've literally seen with my own eyes, someone doing so much, much faster.  And accurately.

 

There was no time to run.  It was over in seconds, and the Germans were pretty much frozen in place, from surprise, fear, intimidation, confusion, whatever.  They didn't dodge, they didn't even react.  Now, this was a reenactment, so perhaps in the real life event some of them turned to run or whatever, but with as fast as things happened, I suspect the reenactment was pretty much as depicted.

 

By the way, part of the way they do the Medal of Honor investigations is by asking the enemy what they witnessed, and only things they can confirm and support with facts and witness statements get into the report.  This happened.  So did the subsequent 48 hours of one dude lying in a street with some rubble for cover literally holding the German army off in a town single handed.  They even threw a tank at him.

[Christopher]

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Two phases, not two segments.

I wrote 2 seconds, no two segments. That is how long that part of the scene maybe took.

 

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Yeah there's something to the "guns are too slow" concept.  You can easily pump several rounds a second off with a pistol, and I've literally seen with my own eyes, someone doing so much, much faster.  And accurately.

There is target and combat shooting. I asume a old grandma can fire a pistol accurately on medium rangs on a shooting range. But I do not expect her to do the same thing in actuall life or death combat.

 

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

There was no time to run.  It was over in seconds, and the Germans were pretty much frozen in place, from surprise, fear, intimidation, confusion, whatever.  They didn't dodge, they didn't even react.

Unfortunatel that means in Hero terms, he shoot them in 1 phase. That would require some combination of the following factors:

• total surprise (wich I asumed even before seeing it)
• bullets penetrating one target and hitting the soldier behind that one (something hero afaik does not model)
• one heck of a OCV or some naked advantagee to pull off a 6-attack autofire/AoE attack (at wich point he was just build on way more points then the opposition)
• once in a million luck

 

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

So did the subsequent 48 hours of one dude lying in a street with some rubble for cover literally holding the German army off in a town single handed.  They even threw a tank at him.

That is the part I just take at face value. He had a strong defensive position that could not be flanked. Those things happen in warfare all the time:

http://www.cracked.com/article_21307_the-94-most-badass-soldiers-who-ever-lived.html

 

It is only the part were he killed 6 soliders in 2 seconds witha semi-automatic rifle that seems unlikely.

I mean 20 with a MP seems sensible.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

Unfortunatel that means in Hero terms, he shoot them in 1 phase. 

 

No, other scenarios were explained above, such as presence attack that made them lose their phase, then moving before them second phase.  Plus, he probably had a held phase, moved out and shot on phase one, then shot on phase 2, when they would normally be able to move.  Held phases can be in consecutive segments.

[massey]

On 1/19/2019 at 10:50 AM, Christopher R Taylor said:

The Netflix show Medal of Honor does reenactments and analysis of US winners of this prestigious award, and one of the episodes something happened that has me puzzled.

 

Like all of you, I imagine, when I see a fight, I break it down in my head in Hero terms, and its usually pretty easy to figure out what took place and why.  But here's what happened.

 

Sgt Bertolo after seeing the rest of his squad killed by ambush steps out and fires six shots, killing six Germans, one after another.  Now this guy isn't the Punisher, he's using an M-1 Garand, and while its semi automatic, its still not going to autofire. 

 

So you have a grunt with a rifle, probably speed 3 or so, against grunts with pistols who were probably at minimum equivalent to him in training -- speed, OCV, DCV, etc.

 

Now I can buy he got a presence attack on them by surprise and immense fury so they missed a phase or at least were delayed, or that he had a saved phase and came out shooting, so 2 phases to their 1.  I could buy that he was able to multiple attack.  But six guys?  That's -6 on every single shot for two phases straight.

 

To run the numbers, if they were equivalent in CV, that makes each of them 11- to hit.  At -6, he rolled six consecutive 5's?  OK, you say, they were half DCV, the presence attack and surprise.  But unless your DCV is really big, halving it doesn't actually make that much difference.  If you're 3, its now 2.  If you're 4 or 5, its now 2.  So that's not that much a benefit, at most he rolled six consecutive eights.  I mean its not impossible but an on 3d6 is 9.72%.  Six times in a row and your GM is going to ask to look at your dice.

 

So what did he do here?  Because this really happened.

 

I should add that Bertolo had poor vision and had to wear thick glasses; he was 4-f'd several times and was no warrior.  He didn't have lots of levels, nor was he a sharpshooter, is what I'm saying.  Yes, he may have been just naturally accurate, which could explain some things but I mean even with 2 levels, and the maximum benefit its still a huge stretch.

 

That's why he got the Medal of Honor.  Really good rolls.

[Toxxus]

I've seen a similar level of output on a show that was like Deadliest Warrior where they were pitting cowboys vs. mafia.

 

The cowboy rifleman fatally wounded 5 targets with partial cover in 4 seconds flat.  On a per second basis he out damaged the hand grenade and finished the contest with a better kill rate from a safer distance.

 

A skilled rifleman is a very, very scary thing.

 

In HERO terms you have to consider that nobody is wearing armor and the military grade weapon is probably doing 2d6K (or more) per shot.  That's 7 body (aka impaired or dying) with each hit.  If God is using the realistic killing damage rules then it's 14 body (near instant death) per hit.

 

[BoloOfEarth]

Caveat:  I haven't seen the show nor do I know the details, so I'm just going off things said in this thread.

 

I'd guess that you could explain it with Bertolo having a bit of Combat Luck.  The fact that he survived the initial ambush could be explained by that.  In a normals-level WWII era game, those could be 6 very well-spent points.

 

Assuming he has Combat Luck, then even if, during the counter-ambush, one or two of the enemy scored a hit, if the BODY+STUN rolled was low enough (and with the Germans having pistols, is possible even if Bertolo only had 3 rPD, 3 rED Combat Luck) in effect they don't actually hit him.

[Christopher]

6 hours ago, Toxxus said:

I've seen a similar level of output on a show that was like Deadliest Warrior where they were pitting cowboys vs. mafia.

 

The cowboy rifleman fatally wounded 5 targets with partial cover in 4 seconds flat.  On a per second basis he out damaged the hand grenade and finished the contest with a better kill rate from a safer distance.

 

A skilled rifleman is a very, very scary thing. 

I guess we can all agree that real life has a terrible game balance. I mean every normal can kill 4 people with wild shooting

 

In all seriousness, I think the imbalance is really hard to model. If you unbalance stuff like that, it is usually the characters that will suffer the most.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

I'd guess that you could explain it with Bertolo having a bit of Combat Luck.  The fact that he survived the initial ambush could be explained by that.  In a normals-level WWII era game, those could be 6 very well-spent points.

 

Nah, the German soldiers never got a shot off against him in that initial burst.  After that, he made really good use of cover rules, darkness, surprise, and being prone to give a smaller target to the approaching enemies.

[Scott Ruggels]

An M1!Garand.shot fast and accurately. Courtesy of Gerry Mickulek 

 

 

[shuddemell]

Miculek is an anomaly, he is super fast and super accurate, but definitely proves that a motivated and skilled rifleman can accomplish more than a machine gun nest. You should see what he can do with a 1911 Colt.... 27 rounds in 3.7 secs, on target.

 

[Sean Waters]

Hmm.  So, how about this:  ambush takes place, the Germans think they've done it, they drop out of combat.  When Bertolo pops up they are Surprised and Out Of Combat, so half DCV.  I'm assuming everyone is a trained soldier and equally competent, so they may have OCV and DCV of (say) 4.  So Bertolo is attacking at 4 OCV, they are defending at 2 DCV.  A generous GM might also give Bertolo a Surprise Move bonus.  Say +2.

 

Bertolo makes a Multiple Attack, shooting at three of the opponents.  He is at -4 OCV, but it is OCV 6 due to the Surprise Move and they are DCV 2, so he only needs 11- on each shot to hit.  Tricky but not impossible.

 

That leaves him and three opponents.

 

Hero is not clear about what a Surprised character can do if they are Out of Combat, but let us assume they either miss a phase or, if they do return fire, they miss.  We have completed Segment 12.

 

Everyone is the same SPD, say 3, so next phase is on Segment 4, and Bertolo gets a PRE attack in first.  To be really effective he needs to get EGO +20.  Let us assume that everyone has PRE of 10, so Bertolo needs to score 30 on his roll.  He gets 2d6 to start with, and I'm going to assume he makes a good roll and averages 4 rather than 3.5 per die.  He is going to need 8 dice, or 6 dice in bonuses.

 

He was loyal to his squad, so we'll give him a strong psychological complication bonus.  That is +2 dice.  Four to go.  He has just killed three men right in front of them, so I'll give that an Extremely Violent Action, for 2 more dice.  2 to go.  The targets were surprised and still shaking that off, so another +1, maybe he makes a great soliloquy for another 2.  Technically he is still at a disadvantage (which is -1) because he is still outnumbered, and it is arguable whether the Germans are in combat yet (which would be another -1 if they were) but we are about there.

 

The Germans miss their next phase and are 1/2 DCV.

 

Bertolo could do what he did before and Multiple Attack the remaining three OR he could play it safe and just attack 2 (at 13- to hit each); if he does that it is then one on one and he has an even chance of finishing off the last opponent.

 

Of course all of this requires the shots to do enough damage to put the Germans out of the fight, which is another factor, but if you are using all the optional rules for heroic games, that isn't impossible.

 

Yes it requires luck, but it is a very unusual event, so luck almost certainly played a part.  I think HERO can explain it well enough though    Stranger things have happened!

[Christopher]

6 hours ago, shuddemell said:

Miculek is an anomaly, he is super fast and super accurate, but definitely proves that a motivated and skilled rifleman can accomplish more than a machine gun nest.

Machine Guns were never intended to kill the enemy. Supressing them is their job. Intentional machine gun hits were extremely rare.

[shuddemell]

That was definitely true in WWI and WWII, though I believe that role has changed somewhat in Modern Warfare, due to increased accuracy and sustainable rates of fire.

[Anaximander]

You can't overlook the way adrenaline can make people super human sometimes.  I'm not sure how one would do an adrenaline surge unless you assume that everyone has a suppressed Aid power that can kick in under extreme measures.

[Killer Shrike]

It's not as impossible as you seem to think. Notable, of course, but not unicorn shitting rainbows impossible. On the KD (known distance) rifle qualification course, we had up to 60 seconds to put 10 rounds into the black on a "dog target" (head and shoulders) at 200 yards sitting and at 300 yards prone. It wasn't difficult; I did 10 out of 10 at both distances and with time left over every time I qual'd, and I was only a marksman level shooter.

Firing at a full-sized person from closer range would be faster. We did something similar on close quarters shooting drills. This video is from the current era, but it's similar enough to how we did it 20 years ago to demonstrate the point.

 

 

 

Practically speaking, there is also the fact that pistols are less accurate than rifles. It's pretty normal for pistol battles to have many more misses than hits. A rifleman with even basic marksmanship ability and fire discipline is very dangerous.

 

 

 

_________

 

Games are not like real life (obviously). Real life is not perfectly predictable per a SPD chart going in DEX order. There is a lot more chaos and friction than most game systems "simulate". But letting that pass you're making some assumptions...that people are interchangeable.

 

"So you have a grunt with a rifle, probably speed 3 or so, against grunts with pistols who were probably at minimum equivalent to him in training -- speed, OCV, DCV, etc."

 

The likelihood of 7 soldiers all being equivalent is spurious; there would be variation. Perhaps our hero was exceptionally fast (or hyped up on adrenaline and fear) and was operating at a faster reaction time than normal thanks to the heightened situation; and perhaps at least some of the antagonists he got the drop on were slow, or caught off guard, or sleep deprived, or malnourished...were they all aware of the protagonist and had their weapons drawn and pointed at him and were they in an optimal spread such that they all had clear line of sight to the protagonist without risk of friendly fire? Or were some of the baddies looking elsewhere, didn't have their weapon drawn, didn't have a round chambered, didn't have their weapon's safety disengaged, couldn't fire without hitting a friendly fighter, etc? Did any of them freeze up or go into fight / flight mode? And so on. 

 

 

 

[Christopher]

4 hours ago, Anaximander said:

You can't overlook the way adrenaline can make people super human sometimes.  I'm not sure how one would do an adrenaline surge unless you assume that everyone has a suppressed Aid power that can kick in under extreme measures.

This becomes a mater of balance:

 

On 1/26/2019 at 1:40 AM, Christopher said:

I guess we can all agree that real life has a terrible game balance. I mean every normal can kill 4 people with wild shooting

 

In all seriousness, I think the imbalance is really hard to model. If you unbalance stuff like that, it is usually the characters that will suffer the most.

[Sean Waters]

We play a game that involves dice: that is how you model weird stuff that actually happens in real life.  I mean, this whole thing could be represented by Bertolo shooting and hitting every time and any return fire missing entirely or doing very minor damage.  This is not a scenario where, in a Hero game Bertolo is likely to succeed, but then in real life he wasn't likely to succeed either.  In both Hero and real life he can/did.  Sometimes real life is cinematic as all hell.

[Christopher]

42 minutes ago, Sean Waters said:

We play a game that involves dice: that is how you model weird stuff that actually happens in real life.  I mean, this whole thing could be represented by Bertolo shooting and hitting every time and any return fire missing entirely or doing very minor damage.  This is not a scenario where, in a Hero game Bertolo is likely to succeed, but then in real life he wasn't likely to succeed either.  In both Hero and real life he can/did.  Sometimes real life is cinematic as all hell. 

The problem is that 90% of all people in that situation tried the exact same thing and died, never to report of it.

And a  9/10 dead quote is not a chance most RPG players will take.

[massey]

56 minutes ago, Christopher said:

The problem is that 90% of all people in that situation tried the exact same thing and died, never to report of it.

And a  9/10 dead quote is not a chance most RPG players will take.

 

I don't see that as a problem.  The original question was how do we describe this in Hero, given how unlikely it is.  I think you've explained it.  The guy won the Medal of Honor because it was so unlikely.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

 

But letting that pass you're making some assumptions...that people are interchangeable.

 

The likelihood of 7 soldiers all being equivalent is spurious; there would be variation.

 

 

I wouldn't say so much interchangable as functionally equivalent.  That is, there's not enough granularity in the Hero system to measure the slight differences between human beings, and two people with the same basic infantry training and time in combat are going to be very close in stats, so much so as to not make a lot of difference.  But, I mean even if he had +1 OCV over the Germans, its not going to make a huge difference in terms of the math.

 

If anything, Bertolo was at a disadvantage because he wasn't a physical specimen and Hitler did throw some of his best soldiers into the Bulge (that's who these guys were) and they were pretty fresh.  He'd been up a long time waiting in a blown out building on watch for hours, covering the retreat of his side.  They were moving up with high morale advancing on a retreating enemy.  All the advantages in terms of personal ability and situation were on their side.

 

Here's what I figure happened based on discussion here and some thought.

 

Bertolo had a saved phase, because he was waiting behind the wall with cover when his buddies were suddenly and shockingly killed (they were trying to disarm and take the Germans prisoner and the Germans pretended to surrender then used sidearms to shoot them all).  He gets so enraged at losing his buddies that he steps out, surprising the Germans which gave him the first shot and action, no matter what their relative DEX. 

 

Bertolo does a presence attack without any soliloquy, a surprise, violent action, extreme aggression, etc.  He manages to roll well enough that he causes the Germans to only get a half phase action and Bertolo gets to move first next phase.  On his saved phase, Bertolo fires his rifle three times in a multiple power attack at -6 OCV per attack, but manages to hit each unarmored German in the body badly enough with a 2d6+1 killing attack.  The Garand is semiautomatic and has a +1 stun multiple (x4 stun on average 8 body for torso hit), so each German drops where he stands, unable to respond because of the held phase, and they are unable to act yet.  They aren't necessarily dead, but are unconscious and bleeding to death rapidly.

 

Second phase.  The Germans might have reacted, but again Bertolo fires three times, rolling a hit each time again.  An average hit will put down a soldier bleeding 2d6 each phase and with a center of mass body shot, they aren't going to recover until at least a turn has passed and in that time very likely will take significantly more stun from the bleeding effect.  They're down and without medical care are not getting back up.

 

As for the rest (the parts where he got the MOH from) that's a very long sequence involving several days using cover, darkness, a very narrow choke point, and being prone to protect him from most hits.  And nads big as train cars.

 

And as an aside, one does not earn a Medal of Honor for doing the improbable, you get it for service actions which are above the call of duty, involving great courage, for the good of your fellow soldiers, in an action of great personal sacrifice which distinctly set you apart from other people.  Doing things which are unbelievable or surprising isn't a criteria; that guy who made a sniper shot at the longest distance on record (over 2 miles) didn't qualify.