Shootig Fools in the Face

[Username17]

So at some point you want to shoot people in the face. It doesn't matter what RPG you're playing, because any story has the possibility of getting to violence. Even My Little Ponies totally kick their enemies. But the mechanics that govern shooting people are going to vary depending on the needs of the system.

Bang! You're Dead!
No no no no, you see it's a gun fight. We both have guns. We aim, we fire, you die.

When you're in a gun fight at the OK Corral, it is rather expected that he who shoots first, lives. It is for this reason that characters in Dead Man's Hand have a Reaction Attribute. People make that initial Reaction test at the start of combat on the very real fear that if they don't make it they won't stay standing long enough to get a shot off.

For this reason, one can imagine that at the close ranges and snap conditions that people shoot each other with hand guns and casters in that setting that people have a very real chance of just killing you outright and are extremely likely to hit. And so it is that people's soak values are pretty likely to mean "fuck all." So the actual mechanics flow pretty smoothly from our goals:

You all make Reaction tests, then you shoot in order of result (ties go off simultaneously, joy!) and your shot has a to-hit roll of Agility (~2-5) + Firearms (~1-4) + Gun Accuracy (~1-4) and you hit and start staging up damage if you get 2 or more hits. So chances are pretty good that you'll connect with a shot, because you're rolling 8 or more dice (more if you're some sort of gun cowboy ninja) and you only need 2 hits to shoot the guy across the street. Then we get to the soak phase, where almost no one wears any armor in the setting so people just roll their strength to reduce the damage. That's like 2-5 dice, so you figure that base gun damage is about 2 or 3, then you're figuring that a single shot is quite likely not only to hit, but to dish out a net damage value of 2 - 4.

Since we're using the old standard of 1 net damage = 1 box, 2 net damage = 3 boxes, 3 net damage = 6 boxes, and 4 net damage = 10 boxes, we can figure that people dropping from a bullet to the chest will be a pretty common occurrence.

And now we can throw around modifiers for cover and movement and such so that we can get to the other western standby: the shootout over barrels. These modifiers affect the to-hit threshold, not your dicepool. This means that if people are running around behind a bunch of cover and shooting over the tops of water troughs, they have to get like 4-5 hits to get a bullet in, so you can have a lot of gun smoke going off.

Monster Hunting
"Lycans are allergic to silver. We have to get the bullets out quickly, or they end up dying on us during questioning. "

When you're putting bullets into werewolves, you genuinely don't care that much about reaction times, because it doesn't much matter. Honestly, vampires and werewolves have a certain amount of regeneration they can do in battle, so you are going to get a little into D&D 4e style sumo fights. As such, Reaction is just not even an attribute in AWoD. That being said, shooting people is handled on much the same game mechanics as in DMH, it's just that the expectation is that people are going to have tricks to survive like Regeneration and Edge. And while we're on the subject - since you don't make a Dodge test, Luminaries in AWoD can spend an edge to force an attacker to reroll their hits.

Zap! Pow!
"I have a gun in my room. We could go get it, and just shoot him!"

Meanwhile, people in Fantastic! shoot each other over and over again, often to little effect in the immediate term. And yet, when you shoot a minion, he's supposed to fairly frequently just drop right away. This can be arranged with hit points, but only at the cost of running into stupidity like the 4e Fomorian Minions and their amazing random nose dives when fighting halfling slingers.

So what we're doing instead is roll 3d6 to-hit and 3d6 for effect. To-hit chances don't vary that much by power levels, but effect thresholds do. And what this means is that when you shoot an opponent who is a mook, he goes down on some perceptible number of die rolls. But a real villain gets popper in the face and never goes down on the first hit, because you can't roll high enough to drop him unless and until you get some bonuses coming your way from hitting him multiple times.

-Username17

[KauTZ]

Ok, two things are confusing me.

You keep referencing an amount of hits required to actually... hit a guy. Why is this? It makes sense, but is this coming from another game system? Or are you just using common sense to develop this mechanic.

The second is the "old standard of 1 net damage = 1 box, 2 net damage = 3 boxes, 3 net damage = 6 boxes, and 4 net damage = 10 boxes". I have no idea what this means.

[IGTN]

Hit is a 5 or 6 on 1d6; it's from Shadowrun's dicepool system.

The standard he mentions was posted earlier, and I think he said it also comes from SR. Basically, everyone has a set number of hit boxes (hit points, but represented as checkboxes).

Each hit worth of damage you do checks off one box more than the last one did, so the first hit does one box (one point) of damage, the second two (more, for a total of three), and so on.

You don't get extra hit boxes ever, instead getting the ability to soak damage better (meaning you take fewer boxes of damage from any given attack)

[virgil]

Could you be a bit more clear regarding the damage arrangement. Will a gun hitting do flat damage, with a bonus based on net hits, subtracted by hits from the victim's strength test?

eg. Dice are rolled, giving us 3 net hits. The gun does a base of 2, and thus a total damage of 5 is unleashes; reduced by 1 per hit of the victim's Strength test (needs to 2 hits to even be allowed to survive).

EDIT: Judging by what you've been talking about lately, I assume your notes on TNE is on the backburner while you focus on DMH/AWoD and Fantastic!?

[Username17]

So when you shoot a fool in AWoD, you're expecting things to look like this:

• Declare shooting: Say "I'm gonna shoot that guy, in the face."
• Determine Dicepool and Modifiers: So you're going to be adding your Agility to your Firearms to your Gun Accuracy to any Magic Bonuses that apply, and you're going to take off wound penalties, movement penalties, positional penalties, and whatever. This will determine a dicepool.
• Roll your dice, count your hits: 5s and 6s count as hits.
• Do you want to use an Edge? You can spend an Edge to reroll your missed dice.
• Does your target want to use an Edge? Your target can spend an Edge to make you reroll your hits.
• Determine Threshold: The standard threshold to hit a dude is 2. Range increases it, as does cover, movement (of the target), restricted visibility, and so on. If you get hits equal to threshold, you hit. If you exceed the threshold, you do boosted damage with the Net Hits.
• Soak Damage: The target rolls their soak pool, which is generally just their strength. But it may be modified by armor and magic powers or whatever.
• Does the target want to spend Edge? They can reroll missed dice on their soak, and possibly use magic power.
• Determine Wound Level: The Wound Level is the base damage of the weapon (example: many guns are 3) plus the number of Net Hits minus the number of hits on the soak test. A wound level of 1 is called Light and fills in 1 Box. A wound level of 2 is called Moderate and fills in 3 boxes. A wound level of 3 is called Serious and fills in 6 boxes. A wound level of 4 is called Deadly and fills 10 boxes. A wound level of 5 is called Fatality.

So yeah, that's a longish list, but in practice it seems to go by quickly.

And for those of you who want to put together a 40K setup, it probably works pretty similarly. The main difference is that armor gives you automatic soak hits. The reason this happens is because the number of dice you're running around with on soak tests would be stupid large without that. So you do Wound Levels of Weapon + Attack Net Hits - Armor - Soak Hits. And since things are supposed to be slogging and epic, most hits are going to be averaging Light or less on the wound scale.

As such, it looks to me like 40K could use being Strength, Agility, Intuition, Logic, Charisma, Willpower like AWoD rather than Strength, Agility, Reaction, Willpower, Intelligence, Perception like DMH.

-Username17

[zeruslord]

That really depends on which game of 40k you're playing and on the setting conception. Space Marines are playing something like d20 or TNE, probably with a title like Space Marines: a game of action, adventure, and asskicking in the dark world of the 41st millennium. Inquisition: the Heresy is a White Wolf or AWoD game with edge, guns that kill people sometimes, and crazy powers for the group. Guardsmen aren't going to work as well as an RPG, given that the only ones worth anything are at best a few officers in a regiment of thousands. Eldar play Fudge or even Wushu.
edit: looking at the beginning of the 40k thread, it looks like Inquisitor: the Heresy is what you were talking about. Even then, not all armor should be flat bonuses.

[Koumei]

That looks good.

Incidentally, can I get a link to the thread on the AWoD? I tried searching for it, but only found the thread where we discussed how Morrigan is better than "I vont to sock your blot!" vampires and snake-people are awesome.

[Username17]

That looks good.

Incidentally, can I get a link to the thread on the AWoD? I tried searching for it, but only found the thread where we discussed how Morrigan is better than "I vont to sock your blot!" vampires and snake-people are awesome.

I don't think I have put out a thread for all of it. Currently, my main text document is coming in at about 20k words, and it'll probably end up at more like 60k. So even though I have functional base mechanics, I don't have a proper post because currently the paths of magic are just in a notebook in pen with the names and magic source associations written out. So while I have a grasp on what the Descent of Entropy and the Flash of Mirrors do, I haven't worked out mechanics for them in a printable form.

But the core mechanics are really easy to explain:

Basic Mechanics

When you perform an action, you roll a pile of d6s called a dicepool. Dice which come up as a 5 or 6 are hits. A task will normally require a number of hits to succeed equal to the Threshold, and any hits gained in addition to that are Net Hits. If you get 4 or more net hits, you get a Critical Success. This basic terminology will be most familiar to those who have played Shadowrun, but it is really not much different from the Storytelling System (save that it uses d6s rather than d10s, and critical success is measured by how much you exceed the threshold rather than by getting an arbitrary number of hits and exceeding the threshold).

Dicepools: Your dicepool is generally speaking Attribute + Skill + Equipment. If you are using Magic, you will often be able to add Discipline to that as well. As such, it is expected that supernatural critters will roll more dice on actions that their powers apply to than normal humans do.

Basic Attributes: Physical, Mental, and Social

• Physical Attributes:
• Strength: Strength determines how physically strong and tough you are.
• Agility: Agility is a combination of precision and speed.
  Mental Attributes
• Intuition: Intuition is a combination of empathic and physical perception.
• Logic: Logic is a combination of scientific know-how and logical intelligence.
  Social Attributes
• Charisma: Charisma is one's ability to convince and ingratiate.
• Willpower: Willpower is a combination of determination and domination.

• Why no Body or Reaction? Those familiar with the SR4 system will be quick to note that the attributes of Body and Reaction have been omitted. That is not an accident. Those attributes are used by almost no skills and primarily exist to add extra granularity to combat. Combat is hopefully not the point of most World of Darkness games, and in any case the granularity of “normal humans” in combat isn't even especially desirable. Folding Body into Strength and Reaction into Agility makes for a simpler system while losing relatively little. After all, granularity is being added back into the system with the physical disciplines that are in the hands of many player characters.

Special Attributes: Edge, Magic, Power

Edge in AWoD is structurally similar to Edge in SR4. You can spend it to reroll dice that fail or to purchase a number of dice equal to your Edge attribute to improve any test. Edge refreshes between sessions.

Power in AWoD is a parallel attribute similar to Edge. Rather than being spent on any test, Power is spent to activate specific supernatural abilities that a character might have. Power by itself doesn't do anything and does not refresh. Characters will have things to do with their Power and ways to refresh it if they are a supernatural creature.

• For example: Genevra is a vampire with the discipline of Celerity. As a vampire, she can spend Power points to increase her Strength for a scene. In addition, she can spend a Power point to take extra actions during a scene with her Celerity discipline. Because she is a vampire, she can refresh her power points by drinking blood from other people through their necks.

Magic in AWoD functions much as it does in SR4. When sorcerous powers are employed, one uses the Magic attribute to determine the base dice pool. All supernatural creatures have a Magic of at least 1.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Cool, thanks!

That looks pretty good, really. So the human PCs in Sisters of Battle: the Spanking would all have Edge but not Power, and enemy psykers/daemons would all have a "Magic" rating and Power, but no Edge, and human stats work on the 1-5 rating, with skills working the same and basically being the Shadowrun list?

So various guns would have different damage ratings, along with special rules here and there, and Mastercrafting adds dice due to the superior accuracy. Would auto-fire add extra dice to the pool ("one of them has to hit!"), or subtract from the dice pool (due to recoil), or change the number of hits needed, just add damage?

And the kind of person who has Power Armour would, on a 1-5 scale, have a Strength of 3 at the minimum, probably 4. That's without saying "Power Armour gives +1 Strength". So, naked, they're rolling 3-4 dice to soak, and a bolter round will on average do something very serious to their anatomy. So they get 1 success to soak and the exploding round has a basic value of 3-ish. A net hit or two was probably rolled, meaning about 4 levels are taken - she doesn't walk away from it, but medical attention can prevent death from following.

That looks pretty good right there. In her Power Armour, she's supposed to flip the finger when bolter rounds explode, scratching the surface. So it probably has an automatic soak value of what, 3? That way, combined with the 1 Soak she rolls, if they get a couple of net hits then she takes a Light wound. Again, looking pretty good.

Huh, it's pretty easy to work out how individual numbers should work, looking at it like that.

[Username17]

Your skill list is going to be highly setting specific, and Shadowrun has too may skills in it anyway, but both it and nWoD have skill lists that you can look to for inspiration. Heck, even the old Necromunda lists are pretty good for inspiration. But you'll still want to tailor it to the setting.

One thing that 40K stresses that most RPGs do not is the idea of very large confrontations that your characters are merely part of. So it is that skills like Logistics, Command, and Tactics are all going to loom large. Heck, you probably want to cut Perception up into chunks that let you spot clues and ambushes; detect psychic power and chaos wyrding; and interpret tactical movements by enemy forces.

So just off the top of my head, you'd want stuff along the lines of:

Strength Skills:

• Athletics
• Endurance
• Martial Arts
• Steady Weapon

Agility Skills:

• Firearms
• Pilot Vehicles
• Stealth

Logic Skills:

• Artisan
• Logistics
• Medicine
• Technology

Intuition Skills:

• Empathy
• Investigation
• Perception
• Tactics

Charisma Skills:

• Deception
• Expression
• Leadership
• Persuasion

Willpower Skills:

• Command
• Faith
• Intimidate
• Survival

And you could expand that by throwing in stuff like Bureaucracy, Targeting (for launch weapons), Navigation, Mechanics, Larceny, and so on. You could easily split up Athletics, Technology, Faith, and Pilot into multiple skills. The more skills you have, the more granularity you get and the more often you'll be struck with wonder that someone can do X but can't do Y.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Good thinking. Perhaps Dodge as the other Agility skill?

So, let's see, players will have...
The six stats, 1-5 each, (starting at 1, spend points)
Edge (1 unless points are spent)
Init (derived value)
-
Skills (a small handful for each stat, starting at 0, max 5, spend points)
-
Qualities/Advantages/Disadvantages (kept to a fairly small amount, like SR)
-
Equipment (spend points, get credits/Imperial Points to spend on gear, limits for starting characters so we don't have someone with a Land Raider and nothing else, or whatever)

Ten health boxes (does not grow)

---

I forgot Necromunda had skills, hmm. That could work, though many can just be folded into existing ones, as opposed to having specific Jump Back, Cat Fall and the like. But some could certainly fit in.

I like the idea of skills to handle "There's a group of us, a huge area, a million enemies, and a few squads of Imperial Guard who are helping us out. Tactics-time!" Because even when they're not on the proper battlefields, there's likely to be a large area for the combat, with a lot of people involved.

[Username17]

Definitely don't have Dodge as a skill. It causes problems, since you aren't going to have a dodge die roll step.

For your fourth Agility skill you're going to probably want some skill that lets you pick locks or escape from ropes or both. I'd want to call it "snarkiness" but of course you'd end up calling it Larceny or Gadgetry or whatever.

As for individual shooting, I would suggest giving static range modifiers for all weapons. So attacks beyond X range (tempting to call these distances "table inches") have to deal with higher attack threshold. These range penalties can be offset by spending actions to aim. Also, guns are rated at distance accuracy, which is a separate rate of attack threshold increases that can't be compensated for with aiming.

Thus, a bolt pistol is kind of useless beyond a rather short range, and you can brace yourself and shoot the hell out of someone from far away with a long rifle.

-Username17

[Mr. Bane]

Been a while for me, but here are some problems I see:

Athletics & Endurance : What will be the difference? Normally Athletics is attributed to endurance.

Leadership & Command : Same as above

Logistics & Tactics : Same problem as above.


Steady Weapon : Really, why does this need to be a skill?

Faith : Same as above.

Tactics in Intuition & Artisan in Logic: Switch places please!

Also, there seems to be a "grouping" problem. Firearms covers all firearms. There's a lot of different types of firearms and they don't all work the same way!

So ok, cool, easier just to throw down firearms. Whatever.

But then you split up "Socialize" into: Deception, Persuasion, Empathy, and a few other skills.

What gives?

[Mr. Bane]

To add something constructive:

I think there should be 3 basic skills to each attribute, each that might help out on an "scenario."

[Username17]

Steady Weapon is the skill for stuff like Flamers, which in 40K land is a big deal. People who can use those things properly are specifically different from other people.

Faith is important in 40K, because reciting litanies to the Emperor can banish daemons to the warp and tell the future. It's willpower based, because the exactity of the rituals don't even seem to matter.

Splitting Athletics and Endurance works fine in D&D 4e.

Leadership in this case could have been called Comraderie, it helps put together units. It's a team building skill. On the other hand, Command is a skill used for rallying troops and directing traffic. Totally different skills in a game where rallying troops is actually important.

Logistics is all about harnessing supply trains and getting people food and ammunition. Tactics is about interpreting troop movements and positioning your forces in response. If you've played Heroes of Might and Magic, Logistics is Logistics and Tactics is Tactics. Both have their place, and they are not the same.

-Username17

[Mr. Bane]

Isn't it Acrobatics and Endurance in Dnd4?

[Mr. Bane]

(Double Post)

For that matter, even if Logistics and Tactics represent two different factors, it seems like a strange split considering using a Machinegun and a Light Pistol are one in the same skill.

Even though they have two very different applications.

[Mr. Bane]

Skills

Strength
[*]Martial Arts
[*]Endurance
[*]Acrobatics
[*]Heavy Weapons

Agility
[*]Firearms
[*]Projectiles
[*]Stealth
[*]Pilot

Logic
[*]Science
[*]Medicine
[*]Logistics
[*]Research

Intuition
[*]Artisan
[*]Perception
[*]Tactics
[*]Empathy

Charisma
[*]Deception
[*]Persuasion
[*]Leadership
[*]Expression

Willpower
[*]Religion
[*]Command
[*]Survival
[*]Concentration

[Heath Robinson]

The granularity of the skill system is set to match a set of assumptions about the setting. For example, tending to and leading large bodies of troops is assumed an important aspect of the game. Shooting people in the face is less of one.

For the same reason that Shadowrun has a highly segmented weapon skill set, and lumps all aspects of building a car under a single skill.

[Mr. Bane]

Ah, see, I thought the skill list was for the first post (The basic stuff) and not specific to 40k.

[Koumei]

You'll quickly realise that 40k hijacks everything, as do I.

And really, Steady Weapon can cover heavy weapons, so machineguns (assuming the equivalent of a heavy stubber - no idea on actual modern weapon names. "The kind you mount on a tripod while lying on the ground, or put on a tank") would be a different skill to pistols. If we're merely talking about assault rifles, then that can be folded in with pistols - Shadowrun does it, after all.

I would rename Leadership as Camaraderie, just to help distinguish it from Command.

As for Snarkiness, Snark is a portmanteau of Snide and Aardvark Remark. Doesn't have much to do with escaping ropes and picking locks. Besides, I hate the word "snark", it seems to be one of those "Internet dickhead" sayings, the kind of thing used all the time on LJ to describe "He said a mean thing!" But I'm assuming this is just "I find it funny to call it that", similar to how I'd call Deception "Swindle", as it gained so much popularity with the advent of the 5-foot swindle.

I was wondering if there should be something to cover knowledge of the various Xenos and Chaos things, but then it occurred to me that this might not actually be that useful.

"Hey, that's a Chaos thing."
"How do you know?"
"I could make a skill check, or we could agree that seven-headed fire-breathing human-goats are beyond the realms of simple mutations."
"What do we do?"
"I could roll a check to find out, or we could just use a multi-melta to reduce it to a carbon shadow."

[name_here]

heh.

But actually, in SR4 rules, that's a different thing. Knowing that this particular chaos beast eats his cereal with multi-melta fire would be a knowledge skill, not an active skill.

[Heath Robinson]

I was wondering if there should be something to cover knowledge of the various Xenos and Chaos things, but then it occurred to me that this might not actually be that useful.

"Hey, that's a Chaos thing."
"How do you know?"
"I could make a skill check, or we could agree that seven-headed fire-breathing human-goats are beyond the realms of simple mutations."
"What do we do?"
"I could roll a check to find out, or we could just use a multi-melta to reduce it to a carbon shadow."

It could be an alien. What, it could!

But, as a notable priest of the Imperial Cult once said on the topic,
"Kill them all, Chaos knows them that are theirs."


Still, some kind of knowledge skill for dealing with Xenos and Chaos would be useful in a variety of situations, but it'd be extremely heretical.

[Username17]

Figuring out the difference between a genetic aberration, an alien species, and a mutation is extremely difficult for people in the Imperium. But making that determination is part of what Faith lets you do. You use the tarot , fast, compare mass against water foul, or just flagellate yourself (or the suspected mutant) until the emperor reveals the answer to you. Failure and the Campaign Organizer seriously flips a coin secretly ad just tells you that it's a thing of chaos or not.

As for knowledge skills in general, I think that people should probably just have tags of stuff that they know about. If it's important, you roll 8 dice to know "stuff" within fields that you know about. This also means that people can just buy 2 hits. If you double tag it, you're an expert, and then you get 12 dice (and can buy 3 hits).

---

As a first approximation, I think you could do a whole lot worse than just setting the base Damage Value of any weapon to the weapon's Strength and then set the base Armor Value of any armor to the number of pips on a d6 that the armor save grants (or for vehicles: the AV of the vehicle side -4). So for example: the Bolt Gun and Power Armor would both be base 4 rather than 3. This puts them in the same ballpark relative to each other, but puts them on firmer ground vis a vis generating new content.

I rather imagine that Terminator Armor is going to want to be more than AV 5, but whatever.

-Username17

[Meikle641]

Slight hijack here, but...I remember reading the original Dead Man's Hand thing just a couple months ago, then it seemed to vanish. All links, such as this: http://bb.bbboy.net/thegamingden-viewth ... ght=Anansi go to some bullshit maintenance thing. Am I missing something here, because most (all?) old links from stuff for here brings me to that.