A little over a week ago (the same day I last posted, actually), Shamus Young posted an interesting article on his site, Twenty Sided. I knew I wanted to blog about it, but took a while getting around to it — with the result that my friend Knightofhope beat me to the punch by cross-posting his comment there to Shhhh.
I’m still writing this post, though, because I have a lot to say. Settle in. Grab a drink. Mark this for followup later, if you don’t have time right now. Or heed the warning and leave, possibly never to return.
The Problem with Guns
In essence, Shamus Young’s article examines a bunch of problems guns have in tabletop games, and concludes (well, strongly suggests) that it’s just better to leave them out. While I agree with most of his points, I disagree with his conclusion. There are two major reasons for this, the first of which being the point I don’t agree with:
3) Guns are deadly. If you’re slashed by a sword (as opposed to being run through) then it’s reasonable to imagine that bandages could close the wound. But gunshot wounds are rarely so simple to deal with. The trauma they cause takes a long time to heal, and you generally need surgery after you’ve been shot. Again, this works against your epic tale if a member of your party needs to go to the hospital and spend a few weeks in rehab every other fight. (Assuming they aren’t killed outright.)
Guns are deadly. No doubt about it. But I’m not on-board with the assertion that they are more deadly than swords. Having grown up around swords, I really have problems with that one. As does the very first poster at Twenty Sided (OEP, quoted here in entirety):
I agree with most of your points except one. “If you’re slashed by a sword (as opposed to being run through) then it’s reasonable to imagine that bandages could close the wound.”
As a physician and a martial arts practitioner I assure you that melee combat with sharp implements is a deadly affair. In real life there is no such thing as a flesh wound.
Unless using dueling weapons such as epees, sword combat is quite lethal, or at the very least, leading to permanent injury. Even low velocity wounds with sharp implements on the extremities can lead to severed tendons and ligaments which would cause permanent injury or severed arteries leading to exsanguination and death. We frequently have to take people to surgery to repair accidental wounds from kitchen implements, never mind the results from armed combat. The trauma from knife wounds usually requires surgery as well.
Plenty of people have died from knife wounds.
I guess my point isn’t that guns aren’t deadly but that melee combat in RPG’s is pretty silly as well.
I thoroughly agree. And generally, when I run a modern game, swords and guns alike tend to be deadlier than in D&D — largely because, in most modern campaigns, there’s no such thing as Cure Light Wounds. I mean, seriously — run a guy through with a sword, cast Cure Light Wounds on him, and nine times out of ten he’s just fine. As far as I’m concerned, if it can handle a sword wound, it can handle a gunshot wound. I’m not even going to get into the absurdity of hit point systems, other than to assert that they’re a pleasantly serviceable abstraction.
The second major reason I disagree is because I run games with guns in them. I’ve run (and enjoyed) D20 Modern, the system I suspect he means when he refers to D&D Modern. I’ve run Call of Cthulhu (mostly the D20 variety, to be sure), and firearms have officially become rampant in my Zosias games. I’ve run a lot of homebrew one-shots and minicampaigns with firearms. I’ve definitely had problems from time to time, but by and large it’s worked out pretty well. I wanted to talk a bit about that (and here at my blog, who’s going to stop me?)
Guns in D20 Modern
The other day, I linked Kat to the article. She replied, “I’ve actually often thought that gun rules have to be a little silly to work, otherwise you just get your face blown off, and that’s no fun.” And she’s right. I would extend this to say that tabletop combat rules in general have to be pretty silly — but we’re talking about guns here.
D20 Modern’s gun rules are pretty silly. Which is to say, D20 Modern guns work just like any other weapon in D&D, following the same rules with the same stats, and so most people can squeeze off no more than one shot per six seconds no matter how hard they try. But you know what? It works out pretty well. Imagine that the rounds are progressing a bit faster, and accept people taking multiple hits in the same spirit you’d accept it in an action film, and you’re rolling.
Unless, of course, the action film in question is Inglourious Basterds.
Guns in Call of Cthulhu D20
Call of Cthulhu sits, more or less, at the other end of the spectrum. In all its incarnations, this game is infamous for not pulling punches. Of all the D20 games I’ve played, I think these rules come the closest to modeling modern firearms. As I recall — and I don’t have the sourcebook handy as I write this — you can take several extra attacks (albeit at various penalties) with semi-automatic and speedier weapons, and guns typically deal around three dice of damage. In a game where your massive damage threshold was your Constitution score, any combat — but particularly firearm combat (or combat with nasty creatures-that-should-not-be) — tends to be swift, brutal, and lethal. Which fits Call of Cthulhu perfectly. In fact, I’m tempted to say that the Call of Cthulhu flavor of D20 combat would be my preference should I ever run an Inglourious Basterds-themed campaign. That movie has one of the best — and most realistic — firefights I’ve ever seen, and if you’ve seen the movie you can probably infer which one I’m talking about. I’m straying dangerously close to spoiler-land here, so I’ll move on.
Guns in Zosias
For those who don’t know, Zosias is a homebrew world that grew out of a campaign I started years ago. Myself and a few friends have been working on a rulebook for it for a while now.
Firearms in Zosias are treated much like any weapon. That’s a bit of a misleading statement, though, because of some of the rules that affect Zosian weapons — and some of the Zosian weapons themselves. In a world where rotary-crossbow-wielding mercenaries firing an essentially unlimited collection of 5d6 fireballs square off against Amryth junkies moving at speeds that put Haste to shame, most firearms — Renaissance-era weapons dealing around 1d8-1d12 damage — are frankly a bit weak. They deal pretty good damage for their size, but reload times and the availability of Shiner crossbows mean that they could be excused for taking a back seat. They don’t, though, partially because I’m a bit partial to them. See such monstrosities as the infamous Kotech 2 1/2-inch pistol- a 2 1/2-inch-bore gun with abominable accuracy (a 5-foot range increment, to be precise) that hits for 5d12 damage. Oh, and it might break your arm.
To say nothing of the possibility of enchanted ammunition for the weapon.
One thing I’ve had to get used to, running Zosias, is the sheer unadulterated lethality of the characters. Most decent eighth-level adventurers can mow down regular soldiers all day long, with enough time left over for a few coffee breaks.
Zosian combat is way over-the-top, but there’s an infrastructure holding it up. Magical healing tends to be easily available — and in most games, death is really not much more than an inconvenience. If you die in the Redshore area, you pretty much get resurrected, no questions asked — how that works, and how I keep it from breaking the game, is a topic for another day.
Guns in Other Homebrews
I’ve run a lot of games, though, and not all of them have worked out as well. The Zosian lethality, carried into other games, can be . . . problematic.
When running truly modern games, the D20 Modern gun rules are almost always the ones I turn to. I’m pretty comfortable with the stats; the rules work well. I’ve never had huge problems with the system — but there are a couple of things I want to address. One is the whole “slap a bandage on the gunshot wound” phenomenon that Shamus mentions. Quite simply, I don’t truck with that. Yes, you can heal a bit of damage with a Heal check, but the amount healed is fairly trivial compared to the damage gunshots usually do. Frankly, after a gunfight, the characters are just going to be down and out for a little while — and that’s how I like it. If they’re rushed, if they’re having to storm multiple enemy strongholds in a couple of days, they will be running in with wounds. If they can take time to recover, well, it’s easy enough to say “A month goes by and, while the hand’s still a bit stiff . . . ” I’m fine with them living through being shot lots of times over their career. Happens in TV and movies all the time.
Sometimes, though, I’ll use other systems. For instance, I have a book called Arsenal that dates from the D20 Glut era. (There’s another one by the same folks, called Factory, which I want really bad but have never managed to procure.) It’s essentially just a book full of technomagic guns. Hideously overpowered technomagic guns. I’ve run some glorious games with that book — such as Loadout, in which the characters played the equivalent of a batch of space-marine-types in a faux-future technomagic fantasy world. The trick to using stuff like that is to give it to the enemies too, and make sure the players have access to cover and good armor. (I generally use armor-as-damage-reduction rules in cases like this.) It never hurts to be willing to fudge things a bit for the sake of the game, and having some sort of action points or hero points helps. (In Zosias I use luck points, which let you reroll checks.)
Not that I came upon those tips overnight, or the easy way. The first couple of games I ran with Arsenal were unmitigated disasters. Carefully-tooled high-level villains could be dispatched with a casual shot-from-the-hip in mid-dialogue, while a hyped-up crackhead with a blaster could easily – and accidentally – dispatch a PC. There were other games I ran, using similar systems, in which early TPKs were the rule of the day. This problem even plagued a lot of early Zosias one-shots. In short, I was running up against all the problems Shamus Young mentions in his post. Painfully. I tried going back to regular medieval fantasy, but — well, I like to run things a bit differently. Never do I get a stranger campaign than when I try to play it straight. Ultimately, I decided that — no matter how broken they might be — technomagic pistols, oversized boomsticks, and fireball-spraying crossbows were just too darned cool to leave alone. The question, then, became: “How do I run a fun and fair campaign with these elements?”
Generally, My Approach to Guns and Other Stuff
The answer is: I work at it. In any roleplaying game, how much fun you have ultimately comes down to the people playing the game. Shoddy rules can be shored up by a good GM and players willing to work with him or her; and even the most balanced systems can will be abused in absurd ways, especially if the GM lets the players do so. (Frankly, I don’t mind so much when I get a power-gamer in my games. I’m a bit of a power-gamer myself, and it gives me an excuse to min-max a couple of villains.)
As a baseline, I try to put in rules that give the players a fighting chance. Zosias has dodge rolls, the aforementioned luck points, all the usual armor rules, and a collection of fun abilities to increase survivability. Many times, the players are able to keep themselves afloat just fine with that. But sometimes the dice just aren’t on the players’ side, and that’s when I have to step in and be proactive as a GM. This can mean “fudging it to let the players win–” but it doesn’t have to. In many cases it shouldn’t mean that. And this applies to a lot more than just guns — prepare to wander a bit off topic.
Take, for example, my wife’s character. Adriana works in Redshore with a crack government agency called UPS. Pronounced “Ups–” not spelled out, in other words — the Urban Pacification Squad, far from delivering packages, deals with the nasty jobs that the regular city guard (and similar agencies) can’t or don’t want to handle. Things like people going nuts with heavy-duty warmachines in the residential district, or amryth junkies with rotary crossbows going on killing sprees. In a city with free resurrection, this happens more often than you might think. Adriana long ago lost her arm to a true-death sword, so it doesn’t come back even after resurrection; instead, she has a delightfully steampunk arm with a built-in Kotech 2 1/2-inch, complete with Shiner Crossbow-style enchantments. As in shooting fireballs. (Other things too, but c’mon. Fireballs.)*
On a day-to-day basis, she essentially kicks ass, no questions asked. I mean, she’s a member of a crack law enforcement agency. Putting down punks is what she does. When she’s in the city, I like to open a game with a quick vignette of her latest operation: a couple of sentences of exposition, and a couple of rounds of combat right at the very end of the encounter. Wrap it up and move into the meat of the session. In these, the opponents tend to be hilariously outclassed, and I usually play the rolls pretty straight — if something bizarre happens and the criminals take her out then she wakes up at the office and has a bad day, but most of the time she takes them out and brings them in. They’re throwaway encounters: ultimately, they don’t matter. They’re just there to warm up the dice and set the stage.
Then it’s on to the regular session, which may or may not include a few combats, depending on the tale of the day. Let’s be honest here; most of the time, going into an fight, the GM will know which side should probably win. Most of the time it’s pretty well planned out. It’s just a matter of tweaking things so it plays out in a fun and convincing manner.
The interesting stuff happens once you get into an important fight. Let’s say — for the sake of argument — that her character has, after several sessions of work, tracked down a fellow who’s been causing entirely too much trouble in the Duchy. Smuggling wintermist. Stabbing people with true-death weapons. That sort of thing. In this scene, she’ll ideally walk in, pull a couple of neat tricks, have a tough fight, and walk out with his soul in a gem.
Left to its own devices, the scene never works out that way. I mean, you can carefully stat him out so that the fight’s likely to go that way, arrange the battlefield for maximum effect, knock out his guards, and let her get the jump on him — and then she’ll fumble her shot, he’ll get initiative, toss his true-death sword as a last-ditch gambit, crit, and turn her soul into so much black smoke. Happens every time.**
In a case like this, I have to look at the combat and think. Frankly, I don’t want the characters to win every time. I also don’t, as a general rule, want them all the way out of the picture. I’m not a GM that kills characters willy-nilly: like a long-running anime or TV show, these characters often have years of story behind them, and the game would lose a lot of emotional depth if they started getting replaced every few sessions.***
Finally, I don’t want to fudge more than I have to. If I just arbitrarily decide, “Well, you’ll lose this one,” it sucks the tension out of the game almost as efficiently as if I just say “Well, you won’t lose any of them.”
So I look where the dice are pointing, I fudge a little bit if necessary, steer just a wee bit, and see what happens. I try to let the characters fail enough that failure remains a real danger. In a game where No One Ever Really Dies, it’s easy to think that failure has no consequence. One of my first jobs in a new campaign is to make sure players are disabused of that notion. Maybe a bad shot has an unintended effect. Maybe a baddie gets away when he should have been caught, or pulls off his maniacal scheme despite being brought to justice in the process.
Then again, maybe — just maybe — a character I’d planned to milk for a couple of months’ worth of animosity has a bad day and gets caught. I’ve had that happen a few times, and I’ve noticed that it’s really fun. Adriana has a really bad relationship with her father, who is the worst kind of shadow mage. After all the buildup, you’d think that double-shot-spawn-critting him off a ledge last session would have been a bit of a letdown. Trust me: it wasn’t.
Ultimately, the game is in your hands. The trick to having fun is to make it fun.
I originally planned to close comments on this and have discussion occur in the guns thread on
Shhhh. (At the time of this writing, account creation should be pretty simple.) However, this went a bit beyond my original scope for the post, so feel free to discuss gunnery there and otherwise comment here.
*You’d think this would be hard to keep up with. You should have seen her
last character.
**Does not actually happen every time.
***Not that there’s not a place for such games, or that I don’t like running them; I just usually choose not to.
