Kevin Rose

Re: Firearm Muzzle Energy

This is simply a thin line to walk, and there is no right way to do it. In a game where combat is foremost and lethal, an accurate representation of this would have all characters carrying long guns of some kind, because they are much more efficient and effective and killing the enemy. Game mechanics that reflected this would push players toward totally ignoring the pistol charts, and everyone taking a FAMAS or 7.62 carbine, or whatever.

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.

1-2, Flesh Wound... damage done is reduced to 1 Body and 1 Stun, and round passes through without reducing it's damage. Blow Through.

 

3-4, Damage as normal. No mod.

 

5-6, Critical Hit... Total damage multiplied by 1.5 (Both Stun and Body, which have already gone through the hit location multiple) . . .

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

I agree with most of your points. What I'm saying is that HERO is not necessarily the game for this type of realistic model. HERO is about cinematic action, including where people take knockback from pistol rounds.

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?

How about a mapped out combat shooting range (similar to danger room, but for firearm training).

Look at http://www.mgmtargets.com/shothouse.htm

Re: Firearm Muzzle Energy

Because it is a readily available measuring method to compare differant bullets and it is not convieniant for most people to go out and conduct live fire trials on living subjects. Since there is no real reliable way to measure bullet effectiveness its as good as any other. I think you know the bowling ball, 2x4 analogies are bogus anyway, like most things its how you use it.

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 5.7mm really should be compared to a 9mm Parabellum or .45 ACP, since those are the calibers it is trying to replace, it is nowhere near the power of even the 5.56mm NATO (of course it is also much smaller with less recoil). Its ability to penetrate Kevlar is its only claim, from what I've heard it isn't even close to the 9mm for "knock-down".

The wound channel it causes looks quite a lot like a .22 hollowpoint. Not a particularly effective bullet.

Re: Guns, guns and more guns

Sometimes I think the hollow-points and similar rounds would be better simulated with increased Body damage, but reduced penetration...

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.

In the Anita Blake (necromancer and vampire hunter) novels, ordinary crimes are treated as usual, including capital crimes. The trials, appeals and whatnot for capital cases can drag out for years or decades, just like in the real world. It's...different for supernatural types.

 

Lycanthropes are considered varmints in several states, and can be killed with impunity (as long as a post-mortem test proves the dead guy was a lycanthrope, you're golden).

 

Vampires are too powerful--physically and psychically--to be held in prison safely. Therefore, there's only one punishment for vampires: death. And the death warrants aren't hard to come by once a vampire is discovered to have committed a crime.

 

As for magic--the use of magic against an unwilling victim is a capital crime, and self-defense is NOT a defense to this charge. And dangerous magic-users, like vampires, are just too damned scary. Someone convicted of using hostile magic will have his conviction appealed immediately, to be either affirmed or overturned, and then the sentence carried out WITHIN A MONTH.

Re: Crime and Punishment

Actually' date=' a policeman has no greater authority to kill than any ordinary citizen. He is entitled to kill only in self-defense, or in defense of another. In fact, very little that a cop does involves powers that a normal citizen doesn't have, although an ordinary citizen who attempts to arrest a fellow citizen is more at risk of finding himself sued for it and doesn't have the advantage of job- or union-provided legal advice and protection.[/quote']

 

No. A Policeman has an obligation to act that a citizen doesn't have. He can use deadly force in slightly wider cases than a private citizen can - fleeing felons (techincally a citizen can do this, but justification is harder). In addition he gets the benefit of the doubt by the other cops, the DA and the papers.

Re: Urban gang warfare

Posting this for a friend:

 

-----

Does anyone know anything about the methodologies of urban gang

warfare? Or have a link handy they could send me?

 

Bill.

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

Can anyone point me to a comprehensive web-based resource that lists the muzzle energies of a variety of firearm types? Many thanks.

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

 

+ Still make HTH combat useful. One problem I discovered is that no PC wanted to be a strong guy or get martial arts. The wimpiest blasters did WAY more damage.

 

To get it to work I created a new gadget called the kinetic shield. Essentially these are shields that prevent fast moving objects from entering but allow slower moving objects to pass through.

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

I think DC should work the same way. If your PCs are a SWAT team' date=' you don't need to worry about playing the 6 months between dangerous missions. Maybe have an off session where players talk about what they do over those 6 months (spending their experience?), then right back into another "big" mission, 6 months later.[/quote']

 

 

IMNSHO the main issue with trying to run things like SWAT teams is that the players can't/won't play the part. It's pretty hard to get players to act as a real team. It's even harder when the way to succeed is to carry out very carefully planned tactics and drills that require very close cooperation, take very little time and don't lend themselves to player creativity. Very few will even have a clue as to how a team clears a building effeciently and most won't really care. At least at first.

 

Without this you will tend to get exciting results, as gunfights at 6 feet are exciting. It really gets the players attention when they start with a PC getting shot in the back of the head by a bad guy because the players have no clue how to cover each other.

Re: We're Gonna Need Guns

Lots of interesting stuff here. I'll just put in a few basics about wound ballistics. Firearms work by exposing the inside of the target to the outside enviroment, in other words letting air in and letting 'juice' out.

 

The deeper the wound the more, different tissue is exposed. Given the same depth of penetration the larger the diameter of the hole the more effective the wounding mechanism. The larger diameter also increases the likelyhood of 'clipping' something vital.

[snip]

 

As a general rule of thumb protective body armor defeats handguns and rifles defeat protective body armor.

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?

One suggestion, re: the idea that gun combat in Hero system is much more accurate than it is in real life. Add an optional rule called "combat stress", for gritty, heroic games.

 

This is simply that you only get your full OCV when concentrating. If you want to stand still (DCV 0) then you get your full OCV. If you want to move slowly and take aimed shots (1/2 DCV) then you are at half OCV. If you want to take snap shots while moving (full DCV) then you are at 0 OCV.

 

I tried this in a Sci-fi con game and it had the following advantages.

 

1. It's realistic. My personal experiences suggest that a shooter under any kind of stress has their effective range (ie the range at which you can normally expect to hit something) reduced by about 75%. My dad, a decorated vet with extensive combat experience, was a bit crueller - he reckoned a 90% reduction was closer to the truth.

 

2. It gives an extra advantage to automatic weapons. If you are at half DCV you can still do suppression fire on a hex with a reasonable chance of causing someone grief - even if you are at 0 DCV, you can make them worried. This makes automatic fire the method of choice in assaults - just as it is in real life. It also encourages the "everybody shoot the crap out of the windows, while we run up to the building" approach, with its concomittent wastage of ammo. It also ensures an "emplaced" automatic weapon (even if it's just a guy lying down at the corner of a wall) is way scarier to assault. These are also true to life.

 

3. It places a high priority on cover. If you have to be at DCV 0 to take that shot the length of the street, you're not going to want to do it standing up in the open.

 

4. Just like in real life, it differentiates the weapons suitable for the "stalk and shoot" approach from those suited to "spray and pray" and rewards tactical thinking. All too often the tendency for Dark Champions players is to take "whatever does the most damage" because weapons work equally well at the range most combat occurs at.

 

5. It reflects the truism that in combat 10% of the soldiers get 90% of the kills. These are the guys who are prepared to stick their head up and take their time for a clean shot - in other words, the ones who are briefly at DCV 0.

 

There is one negative aspect: players hate not being able to take down the bad guys from a half klick away (although they still can, if they stand still and aim)

 

Cheers, Mark

Re: DARK CHAMPIONS: What Do *You* Want To See?

I don't mean "does less damage", I mean overall worse. For example:

 

Gun#1: +1 OCV, 2d6K, Str Min 10, cost 100

Gun#2: +2 OCV, 2d6K, Str Min 8, cost 75

 

Someone who chooses Gun #1 is penalized by the game system -- higher Str Min and cost, lower OCV bonus, while Gun #2 has no game-mechanic disadvantage.

I'm confused - An objective of the Hero system is to allow characters of equal point values to be more or less compatible. How does a less effective gun cost more points? A quick look at the book doesn't show any similar examples.

I can argue from personal experience that Hero guns at best only vaguely model the way real weapons work on several different levels, but you seem to be talking about something completely different. Could you explain using actual weapon examples from the book?

Re: DARK CHAMPIONS: What Do *You* Want To See?

I think HERO combat is sufficiently bloody without penalizing people for dodging bullets. As for moving and firing, 5th Edition already penalizes that by making Rapid Fire a Full Phase, 1/2 DCV action, and by requiring various special maneuvers to be bought in order to make Autofire really effective.

 

JG

Being in a position where people are shooting at you is inherently a fairly dangerous thing. In particular, "fair fights" with guns are for idiots. Players should be encouraged to engineer situations that are not fair fights. They should feel a strong urge to not participate in fights in ways that are likely to get them shot. People who want to dance around in the middle of the street having a shootout with a gang armed with M16s will tend to get shot. I don't see this as a drawback. Whether you would depends on the game style you want.

If you lower the OCVs this will tend to reduce the number of hits. Bullets that miss don't tend to do much damage. Typically in most games the chance to hit is far too high. Hero is no exception. In reality gunfights (with pistols) at 3 ft are really ugly, as most anyone can and will hit. At 30 ft the number of hits drops greatly and skill becomes far more important. This isn't really modeled well. Having a bonus for really short range would tend to help.

And stress really screws up shooting. An way to model this in an interesting fashion is to apply a -4 OCV penalty (or negative 6 + [ego/5]) to anyone who is being effectively shot at. This makes ambushes much more worth it, as the ambusher have no penalty (at first) and the ambushees do.

If you fix body armor that would also help.

Re: DARK CHAMPIONS: What Do *You* Want To See?

A rather obvious issue is that, unlike comic books, people can't dodge bullets. In particular, if you are busy ducking etc your ability to shoot back goes completely to hell. Essentially, accurate shooting requires the gun be stable. I'd suggest that your OCV get reduced by 100-150% of your dex based DCV that you are using. Hence things like range and cover become important. Using your full DCV on the run from the middle of the street to behind the fire hydrant makes perfect sense, but shooting back effectively does not.

Even moving and shooting gets a bit complex, and moving fast makes it really tough. I have seen an IPSC expert who could shoot accurately at a full run against multiple targets 8 feet away as he ran past them, but that was very impressive and unusual.

Re: DARK CHAMPIONS: What Do *You* Want To See?

So, what do you wanna see in the book?

Tactical Entry stuff

Explosive breaching. Linear shaped charges, water shots, and det cord can do all sorts of interesting things. For example, the use of door or wall breaching charges. These can be used in fairly close proximity to an entry team (if the guy who designed the charge knows what he's doing) and have, when used correctly, relatively little danger to people on the inside. Which isn't exactly how champions "models" explosives.

And speaking of breaching, shotgun breaches of doors? Hand and power tools (Hurst tools, battering ram, rescue saw)?

Possibly some mention the the differnce between the fairly carefully calculated LEO approach to explosive breaching that the rather more agressive military combat approach. The LEO typically opens THAT door using the RIGHT amount of explosive, the infantry typically opens ANY probable door using ENOUGH explosives in a prepackaged unit.

As most players seem fairly clueless on this, some info or references to fairly easy to find refences on how a team or a pair of people should move and why. The real-world back-to-back search mode isn't something people see on TV.

More realistic ideas of how people open things

For example, how long does it take to actually pick a lock? I have no idea, and I suspect it depends greatly on skill of the attacker and how good a lock is, but some information would be useful.

Safe cracking is similar (except that it's a totally different skill that is typically know by the same people), but with the major change that it's basically impossible to open a decent modern safe by manipulation. You have to use tools to cut, drill, blast or burn your way in. It's knowing what tools to use where, but even then, it takes a while. The only benchmarks I have was that a locksmith who opened a lot of safes once mentioned that it took him just two hours to open a very serious bank vault, but that was due to his being given the plans of the timelock location by the bank so he could hit it on the first try with his drill. Otherwise the secondary locks make this really tough. A "good" gunsafe he could do in 15 minutes with a drill.

And of course the typical shadowrun trick of attacking the electronic keypad or prox pad on an electronic access control system just doesn't work. The logic is in the the controller, not the pad. The controller, inside the place you are trying to get inside of, just notes that lots of bad attempts have been made (or other unusual things have happened) and does whatever it's programed to do, either ignore it, ignore attempts for a while, or sound an alarm. At my job this focuses a camera on the doorway, sounds an audible alarm in the monitoring center and brings up a floorplan on the computer for the guard to know where the door is and what it protects.

There are other ways of attacking electronic access systems, but not as is usually presented.

Re: Behind Bars

Both the Department of Justice and FBI have civil rights task forces dedicated to investigating such crimes.

USC Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 13

 

My favorite is 18 USC Sec 241. The good part is the phrase "go in disguise on the highway".

18 USC Sec. 241 01/22/02

-EXPCITE-

TITLE 18 - CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE

PART I - CRIMES

CHAPTER 13 - CIVIL RIGHTS

-HEAD-

Sec. 241. Conspiracy against rights

-STATUTE-

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or

intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth,

Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any

right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of

the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same;

or

If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the

premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free

exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured -

They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than

ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in

violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an

attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit

aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined

under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life,

or both, or may be sentenced to death.

Your PCs don't wear masks or disguises, right?

Re: Vigilante Cops and IA

Depending on how realistic you want to be' date=' it's my understanding that in most places an officer is investigated whenever he/she fires a weapon. They don't even have to hit anything or injure/kill anyone. If you end up in front of a shooting review board on a weekly basis, I'd imagine they'd can you just for liability reasons, even if you hadn't done anything illegal. Sooner or later, the city would probably get successfully sued or at least have to settle something out of court.[/quote']

 

A firearms instructor I had was a NYPD detective. He and his partner got in a shootout with a bad guy. His partner got shot, Pat had to shoot the bad guy 11 times before he stoped shooting back. The Brooklyn ADA decided to charge him because "you shot him 11 times!" Before it came to court the ADA got moved to another area and the new ADA decided that; as there was no evidence, there was a cop shot, and dead guy with a multi-page record; that this wasn't a good case to take to a jury.

Re: DARK CHAMPIONS: What Do *You* Want To See?

I'll second RDU Neils request and expand it to a request for a discussion of overall combat psychology to cover not only can character keep their cool in combat' date=' but also things like do they have the ability to kill other humans at close distances (the old saw from WW2 was that 10% of the soldiers were doing 90% of the killing).[/quote']

 

The numbers you cite, from SLA Marshal's "Men Against Fire" have been pretty conclusively shown to have been made up by Marshal. He never asked the questions needed according to the men who accompanied him on his interviews. And it doesn't jib with the memories of combat infantrymen. New editions of the book admit this.

 

http://pages.slc.edu/~fsmoler/amheritagemarshall1989pageone.htm

http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallfire.htm

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/03autumn/chambers.pdf

 

Sorry for the diversion into military history, but the Marshal "ratio of fire" myth is a pet peeve of mine.

Re: DARK CHAMPIONS: What Do *You* Want To See?

the Mission Impossible TV series generally got through each mission without a single shot fired or punch thrown. Real-life SWAT teams are often called out and do little more than show their willingness to use extreme force -- basically a massive boost to one officer's Persuasion roll.

In the real world nobody plays fair. Cops doing a raid plan to achieve effective dominance so fast that there is no chance for the bad guys to resist. They use large teams, careful planning and lots of training. Same thing with a SoCom operation. (Except for the lack of handcuffs) People on your side get killed in a fair fight.

I've found that most players don't seem to get this unless you have their characters killed when they try a fair, standup fight. And getting players to actually work in the way they need to to be really effective is like herding cats.

Re: We're Gonna Need Guns

So long as the terms "clip" and "magazine" are properly used, as well as "automatic" and "semi-automatic", I'll be happy. (I seldom see these two terms consistently used properly in gaming supplements....)

 

Then there are the "Shadow Run" idiots that got cyclic rate and velocity confused.

The other issue that I see with people trying to use guns in hero is that the concept of how fast you can fire it isn't well represented (vs a semi-competent attempt in Shadow Run). There are reasons that people who carry guns for a living don't carry Desert Eagle .50 AEs to a gunfight. I can put several hammers into a target before a typical person with an .50 AE (or similar huge round) gets the second round off.

However, if you are carrying a gun to deal with Grizzly or Kodiak bears then a pistol chambered in .50 AE is lot more convenient than a rifle. They are really slow to shoot follow-up shots due to the recoil, but damned accurate.

Equally, if you weight 350 lbs and are proportionately strong it might work also.

Re: We're Gonna Need Guns

Armor and Bullets:

Armor in hero doesn't work like it should against bullets. In general, bullets either are stopped by armor (with no effect on the target) or go right through with no beneficial effect from the armor. I've seen arguments that wearing the old Vietnam flack jackets INCREASED the severity of wounds from AKs. {There are exceptions, when a vest stops a round it isn't rated for, where the wearer will sustain significant blunt trauma. I've seen pictures of a vest that was not penetrated but has significant blood on the inside due to this effect. But it's rare.}

A typical description of being shot wearing a vest is being poked by a strong man’s finger. The hero body die rolls allow a very good chance of a typical pistol round to penetrate a vest and also a good chance of the person getting knocked unconscious by attacks that would possibly leave a bruise in reality and often wouldn’t be noticed in a fight.

Part of the issue is that Hero links “ability to incapacitate†to “ability to punch holes in armor†and they are actually quite different. For example, a 9mm pistol round is much harder to stop than a .45 pistol, despite it doing 1.5 pts less on average (and 4 pts less maximum) damage in Hero.

The logical way to fix these sorts of armor issues has severe compatibility issues. So, without having to redo everything an approach that might work that doesn't require gross changes to the system would be to assume that handgun bullets are always "reduced penetration". This takes care of much of the issue.

This still leaves the issue with AP bullets. I don’t have a great fix for this without remodeling the gun chart. You could redo the gun chart and make roughly similar pistols (9mm, .40, .357, .41 .45) differ by stun multiple instead of base damage. Or not.

Similarly buckshot would always be 1/4 penetration and slugs are normal penetration (with options for AP rounds). For people who are not wearing armor it has no effect, but it makes body armor effective.

Rifles would do normal penetration, SMGs would do reduced. Though the bullet from an SMG should do more damage than the round from a pistol. Typically has a SMG has a rather higher muzzle velocity.

Armour piercing ammo also has significantly less ability to incapacitate an opponent. The whole point of an AP bullet is to hold together and remain stable - which produces a small, clean "through and through" wound channel, while incapacitating someone the optimal effect is a giant hole punched deep into them and all the bullet energy being absorbed by the target, none exiting. The obvious way to model this in hero is two levels of reduced stun multiple, countering the AP modifier.

I'd also suggest that pistol AP is limited in effectiveness to only light armor. No matter what, you can't shoot though the armor on a Bradley using a pistol with AP ammo.

Modern, high quality hollow-point ammo behaves pretty much the same as FMJ ammo for purposes of punching holes in things other than people. The FBI tests pretty much require this. FMJ ammo will do less damage to a person or critter, so treating it as AP ammo for damage purposes (but not penetration) would make sense. It's not point-cost effective to use - life is hard. Don't take training ammo to a real gunfight.