Kevin Rose

Re: Firearm Muzzle Energy Well, yes. Nobody with a clue voluntarily brings a pistol to a gunfight. They bring a carbine or a shotgun if they show up. It's even cleverer to do something else that day. I have been thinking about this more and decided to see how something like that worked. At the same time I'd keep base damage from pistols low due to the fact that the vast majority of people who get shot once with a pistol survive, most with no significant effects once they get out of the hospital. You either have to be unlucky or the guy shooting you has to be good to get killed with a single pistol bullet. I'd use pistols as D3, with shifts based on a random factor, location and by how much you made the attack roll. Rifles as maybe 2D6, shotguns as 4D6 (with lots of limitations), HMGs as 4D6 and cannons starting at 5D6. The issue with armor is that people who are wearing the appropriate body armor take effectively no damage from bullets that it can stop and gain almost no useful effect (I've seen arguments that it actually increases the severity of the wound based on statistics from Vietnam) from wearing armor that won't stop the bullet. That messes with hero in a major way.

Re: Firearm Muzzle Energy Yeah, it's both a virtue and a flaw. The problem I have is that I like Hero generally, it just doesn't do real guns very well at all without lots of work in one form or another. If I'm going to run a realistic game I want to run vaguely realistic combat. It's too bad that Steve put so many pages into the worthless tables and not much into really thinking about the issues and how to fix it. In terms of trying to fix it, I also feel that if people want to try to model the reality (vs movies) of gunfights they need understand how science thinks things work vs tales that a couple of gun writers say they have collected and like to pretend are scientific. Trying to use the data the gun writers say is important is like ancient astronomers using the Ptolemaic model of the sun and planets rotating around the earth to understand the solar system. It seemed reasonable, was useful for predictions, and as a result people spent years perfecting their nested levels of epicycles. It turns out that there are no epicycles and the actual motion of the planets is around the sun, which is pretty much the case with wound ballistics today.

Re: Firearm Muzzle Energy I'll believe Dr. Martin L. Fackler, Colonel, U.S.A, one of the foremost experts in wound ballistics research, over a couple of guys who collect squirrelly data to write books touting the bullets that their friends’ companies sell. See the Letterman Army Institute of Research's Institute Report No. 239 from 1987 "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WOUND BALLISTICS LITERATURE, AND WHY" http://www.rkba.org/research/fackler/wrong.html. Essentially all pistol bullets suck. They just do not do enough damage to reliably drop someone unless you get a central nervous system hit. Even when they do incapacitate someone, they are not nearly as fast as typically shown in the media. Hero has issues with how it does damage because of the superhoro basis. My personal approach is that bullets that tend to kill people reliably should do enough damage to do so, so .50 BMG at 4D6 or more seems reasonable. You could probably model all pistols as D3 (or worse) for everything from .32s to .45s and be roughly accurate. Single hits don't typically stop attacks in any caliber unless you get a central nervous system hit or convince the guy that he doesn't want to fight to to the death. For example, I was reading through the most recent FBI Law Enforcement Officers Killed report on the FBI site. One guy got shot 12 times and recovered to stand trial. Last night a judge nearby got in shootout in his yard with a nutcase. Shot the guy 3 times in the stomach and twice in the chest with his 6 shot revolver, then ran into the house. The nut emptied his revolver at the judge and then reloaded before collapsing and dying. An ex-nypd detective talked about shooting a thug 11 times with a 9mm (during which the thug shot the detectives partner) before he collapsed, then getting indicted for it by the DA who'd watched too much TV. These are all people not wearing armor. Hit location is probably the most important element. If can get a bullet into the "brain-housing group" the fight is over. You sever the guys spine, the fight is over. You bruise the spinal cord and the fights over (he might be fine a few hours later, or not, but the fight is over.) This is the drop like a puppet with the strings cut effect. Typically anyhow, as I have been told of a guy who got half his brain removed by a police sniper with a .308 and still shot two cops before he went down. Motivation, aggressiveness and willingness to drive on is next. People have been killed by totally survivable wounds because they decided they were going to die, others have continued on after getting horrible wounds. I've heard of VC sappers continuing to fight after taking a burst of M-60 that blew an arm off. Lots of bad guys decide when the fight goes to guns that they are not going there. An ICE inspector mentioned that every time he has made an aggressive presentation on a bad guy that the bad guy decided that he didn't want to play that game. Even more decide that when they get hit that they really don't want to get killed and surrender. Some fight to the bitter end and keep operating effectively with fatal wounds. Platt took a fatal wound in the first few seconds of his shootout and still went on for 4 minutes shooting 5 FBI agents, collecting 11 wounds before he got shot in the spine and died. In Hero, EGO should be far more important that it is typically shown. After that, it's more hit location. Hitting major blood vessels or the heart will take someone down fast. But it's not instant; it takes several seconds to knock you unconscious if you don't choose to drop out of the fight. More than one cop has drawn and shot a dirtbag dead after being fatally shot through the heart by surprise. As Michael Platt demonstrated in the 4 minutes after getting a hit from Dove that severed his brachial arteries and veins and damaged the main blood vessels of and collapsed his left lung, some people are hard to stop. Again, it’s EGO. Past this the effects seems to be cumulative damage. Large holes in a person do more damage than little holes. Whether you drill them with a pistol or an electric drill, 7/8th inch holes placed essentially at random through someone’s torso have a better chance of hitting something important than 1/4 inch holes. Enough holes will stop anyone. Eventually. (People have killed attacking grizzlies with .40s and 9s, though it takes a lot of holes and isn't typically recommended.) I have seen autopsy pictures of a guy who took over thirty FMJ 9mm rounds, it looks in the poor B&W picture like he had a case of big measles. This is where bullet type becomes critical. Good modern 9mms expand well, like .40s and .45s, but not as effectively. Federal LE Wounds Ballistic Workshop notes at http://le.atk.com/Interior.asp?section=1&page=pages/federal/downloads.asp show that top quality .45 and .40 get about the same expansion (.9 inch), with the heavy 9mm round penetrating significantly better than the light, fast 9mm while both expanding to .6 inch. Stable FMJ bullets do far less damage than the same round that expands. Real body armor is really hard to model in hero without either hacking up the system a lot or going to complex disads like points of piercing, reduced penetration, etc. Anyway, it’s getting really late. If you haven’t looked at a bunch of bullet tracks, you should do so. It’s pretty obvious what is more effective and why. Look at the Emergency War Surgery Manual’s selection http://www.vnh.org/EWSurg/ch02/02Projectiles.html To see just how much bullet type matters when you get serious velocity see 7.62mm FMJ http://www.vnh.org/EWSurg/Figures/Fig07.html 7.62mm soft point http://www.vnh.org/EWSurg/Figures/Fig11.html 5.56mm FMJ http://www.vnh.org/EWSurg/Figures/Fig12.html Compare these to the pistol profiles. There are a few extra cross-sections here, at the bottom of the page: http://www.firearmstactical.com/wound.htm I’ve seen some more, like the 5.7mm one, but it doesn’t seem to be easy to find on the web.

Re: HUDSON CITY: What Do *You* Want To See? Look at http://www.mgmtargets.com/shothouse.htm

Re: Firearm Muzzle Energy If you want to stick to useless but easily measured values that it certainly your option. I'd suggest that gun weight is even easier to find and measure, and has about the same correlation to effectiveness. Killing the opponent is not the typical objective of bullet buyers, it’s stopping the opponent from doing whatever made you shoot at him. The opponent dying from a bullet wound two weeks after he beat you to death with his bare hands isn’t the ideal outcome. So what I’m saying is based on the idea that you want to stop this guy right now from doing something bad. Muzzle energy is predominantly determined by velocity. The most significant velocity effect on a human is a larger temporary wound cavity. Temporary wound cavities are not correlated with any combat significant effect unless the cavity: 1) is huge compared to the target size (for example, very high velocity varmint bullets blowing up small critters), 2) strikes a confined area like the head. If they disrupt the kidneys, liver, spleen, pancreas - the few organs that are susceptible to this - it may well kill the target, but it's likely to take hours or days. And this isn’t too useful when he's shooting at you now. In particular, pistol class bullets do not produce significant effects from temporary cavities. Rifles can, but you need impact velocities at over several thousand FPS with a good sized bullet to get the tearing and shredding effect that do useful things. Until you reach cannon round size and velocities, a through and through peripheral hit on a determined opponent won't do anything useful. If a bullet hits "the good stuff" the caliber is pretty unimportant. A CNS hit with a .22 or a .458 will both drop the guy right now. The likelihood of striking major blood vessels is really pretty much the same between a 9mm bullet and a 17mm bullet per MacPherson. Arteries are can be blown out by a small bullet or a large bullet, they are not that tough. If you strike a major blood vessel the guy should drop in short order. (Except when he doesn't, like Michael Platt didn’t that day in Miami.) These effects are determined by bullet placement, not caliber. If you assume that the bullet doesn't hit anything particularly exciting it appears that the predominate incapacitation mechanism is the permanent wound cavity. Essentially, how big a hole does the bullet drill into the target and hence how much tissue is destroyed by the bullet. Velocity doesn't really matter except that the bullet has to be able to penetrate any barriers and still penetrate deep into the target. Wide, shallow wounds are not very effective in forcing someone to stop attacking. Bullets that sail right thought the target don't add anything. What you are doing, as a shooting instructor once said, is “depressurizing their circulatory systemâ€. You put enough bullets in them the blood loss and shock, broken bones and other bad things that this causes will eventually cause them to go down. So, fundamentally, it's the actual bullet diameter inside the target and how much tissue it crushes that determines how effective the bullet is. Not the velocity or the energy. But bullet placement is even more important.

Re: Guns, guns and more guns The wound channel it causes looks quite a lot like a .22 hollowpoint. Not a particularly effective bullet.

Re: Guns, guns and more guns And AP rounds with increased armor pentration combined with less body and greatly reduced stun.

Re: Crime and Punishment Her world is not internally consistent and changes based on the plot. So there are lots of issues with what she says that are never explored or thought out as they need to be in a game. This was true even before it became the "Antia Blake, vampire slut and S&F freak" series about book 8.

Re: Crime and Punishment

Re: Urban gang warfare This is more generic, but useful. Chicago Crime Commission's "Street Gangs: Public Enemy Number One". The links don't work, it's all on that page. Its' from 1995. This is missing the pages of gang data, like the dozens of street gangs in Chicago and their symbols. I think I have that somewhere. The 20,000 members of the Black Gangster Disciples Nation make an "interesting" problem for a game. http://www.velocity.net/~acekc/CCC%20Gang%20Book%20-%20Main%20Text.htm You might be able to get the actual report from the CCC, it was online once.

Re: Firearm Muzzle Energy I'm not really sure why you want this, as muzzle energy is really poorly correlated to anything useful. For example, a good roundhouse has more energy than many bullets. A 2x4 can easily deliver more energy than a .38 special. But here is one that I found in a quick search. http://www.powernet.net/~eich1/sp.html Not sure how comprehensive, but it looks ok. This data set is also the Marshall and Sanow "data" on stopping power, which is basically worthless bit twiddling at best and clearly deceitful at worst. If you are tempted to use the "Success" column look at these two articles as to why it's not reliable: http://www.firearmstactical.com/marshall-sanow-discrepancies.htm http://www.firearmstactical.com/afte.htm

Re: Heroic Campaign Guidelines & Equipment chopped up quotes Remember Indiana Jones, the swordsman vs the gunman? That's my idea of a martial artist against a gun. All personal taste however. I've found that most characters who are combat oriented do tend to have some HtH skills as you can end up in situations where you don't have superblaster handy or have learned that questioning the smear on the wall doesn't work well. One minor thought: As a photons move at the speed of light all the time is it really dark in there when you turn it on? If not, will a laser ignore it just like the room lights do?

Re: Sin City

Re: We're Gonna Need Guns Simulating semi-realistic wound effects is a hard problem. It's just not easy to do as it is not deterministic. The South Carolina cop who shot a guy 5 tmes with a .357 magnum hollowpoints at less than 10 feet didn't do any really serious damage to him, though it did hurt him enough that he didn't get away. He was a big fat guy and the bullets didn't reach anything vital. The second .22 the guy shot killed the cop when it entered his arm and cut an artery in his chest. The other .22 was stopped by his vest. I know a guy who had to shoot someone 11 times to cause him to stop shooting at him and his partner. The FBI's Miami Massacre had three FBI agents killed by a guy who had taken an unsurvivable wound in the opening volley. He ended up being killed by a wounded FBI agent who emptied his revolver into his head a few minutes later while he was trying to get away. Some people take a lot of killing. People keep fighting with wounds that should incapacitate them and still kill their opponent. Some people take a flesh wound and go into shock and die. For Hero this would suggest a lot more emphasis on body and/or ego rolls to keep operating when hurt. And even if your heart is destroyed you can still act for several seconds. Cops have drawn and killed people who had just shot them through the heart before dying. There was one case I heard of where the cop got shot and the ambulance had a trauma surgeon on board. He and the bad guy (who was also shot a bit by his partner) where being worked on. The doc tells him that there is nothing he can do and he's going to die in a minute or so and is there anything he wants to say. The cops tells him to tell his wife that he lovers her, draws his gun and shoots the guy who shot him in the head and then dies. The body armor problem is much easier to fix as the actual mechanism is well understood. However it requires some significant changes to the rules. The problem is that Hero gloms together the weapons "ability to hurt you" and the weapons "ability to penetrate armor" into a single statistic - which is somewhat of the reverse of reality. This can be somewhat fixed by making handgun bullets reduced penetration (and ignoring stun for non penetrating bullets) or by fully completely reworking armor into classes of armor with weapons having a fixed penetration value.

Re: We're Gonna Need Guns Cool idea. I'd probably prefer that you still get skill levels (in some fashion) even at a run but no dex based OCV. I saw an IPSC master/grand master put a hammer into 3 targets one handed as he ran past them. Only 3-6 yards away, but very impressive. So I'd argue for full or 1/2 skill levels with dex OCV of zero and range mods of -1 per inch or so. Which works pretty good against DCV 1 or 2 paper targets. I find that moving and shooting has serious effects on accuracy even at close range, at least for me, even while moving at a shuffle. I can't imagine effectively shooting at significant range while moving. I'd probably argue for range mods that made long range shooting much tougher and close range somewhat harder. Say range mode of -1 per 2" and 1/2 dex based OCV?