New Combat rules proposal

[Blue Ghost]

So, I was going to formulate a chart based on real world data showing how much energy various types of handguns had verse real world body armor values. And from there propose a new hit / penetration chart for the old CT rules. It would not replace the basic 8+ to hit roll, nor the range DMs, but it would replace the DMs due to armor by letting the players compare the energy of a round to the energy that could be absorbed by a targets armor.

However, doing some research over the night shows that there's a huge array of energy or power from a variety of handguns themselves in our TL7 or TL8 existence. I imagine the energies would be increased the further you go up in tech level, making such a chart a difficult and almost unwieldly proposition. The game is afterall meant to be played by pre-teens and older. That, and it's a lot of work for something I'm not sure is needed.

The energy levels range from 81 ft-lbs to 780 ft-lbs for a .41 Winchester Magnum. I thought of simplifying the chart by only including pertinent calibers, but such a chart would have to take into account magnum weapons, and it struck me that such a rule set needs to be simplified even further or it becomes too unwieldly.

For a game like Traveller with it's basic to hit throw and no real armor mechanic, would you want something that compared the energy of a weapon or its projectile to the energy absorption of your armor for your Traveller gaming session, or would it be adding an uneeded layer of complexity?

 

[mike wightman]

If you are interested in such things I recommend you take a look at:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

it is for Modern War/CE

 

[Original_Carl]

Have you checked out Millennium's End from Chameleon Eclectic? In my view, it's the most sophisticated RPG gun combat system. v2.0 is up on DriveThru RPG, but I can't speak for v2.0, having only read and played v1.0.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Well, I put it here because when I used to play a lot I couldn't stand being able to hit and damage an imperial marine in full battle dress with an M1 rifle or .22 pistol. So it was my thinking that a simplified weapons' energy verse armor rating could be added to the old basic combat rules.

It might be formed as a chart with the old combat matrix, but with energy given verse energy absorbed, and be modified by the tech level of both weapon and armor. Such that someone using a ... I don't know ... Colt Navy or Dragoon firing at someone wearing 1920's body armor would have less chance of damaging someone wearing an Imperial combat environmental suit (TL 12?).

But the weapons and energies are various.

 

[whartung]

If we've learned anything over the years regarding bullets and ballistics, nothing is settled.

There's pistols and rifles. And with rifles there's long range and medium range (i.e. heavy cartridge vs a lighter cartridge).

"Stopping power" seems to be a myth, shot placement is more important. President Reagan had a life threatening wound from a .22 that ricocheted, so it wasn't even full power.

The .357 Magnum cartridge can kill pretty much anything in North America, including moose. Grizzlies are the biggest exception.

There's "light" body armor that readily stops pistols, there's heavier, more encumbering armor that can stop medium rifles. The body armor either stops the rounds cold, or they go through it like butter. There's not much middle ground.

I wouldn't want to be shot by any of them.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Well, the idea is that like D&D's THAC-0, where a hand weapon or arrow is put up against a player's armor, so would it be that shots or blows from PCs and NPCs would have a certain amount of energy and compared against an armor value. That would determine whether the armor protected you or not if it hit you, and if it hit the armor.

Shot placement might be an optional rule a-la a Challenge or Journal article from many years back.

My kind of knee jerk reaction thinks that it may be just too much of a rule set for the kind of combat that the old game was supposed to present, but I think something that's shy of MT's hit verse penetration mechanic might be something people would want.

Just an idea.

 

[whulorigan]

Well, the idea is that like D&D's THAC-0, where a hand weapon or arrow is put up against a player's armor, so would it be that shots or blows from PCs and NPCs would have a certain amount of energy and compared against an armor value. That would determine whether the armor protected you or not if it hit you, and if it hit the armor.

Shot placement might be an optional rule a-la a Challenge or Journal article from many years back.

My kind of knee jerk reaction thinks that it may be just too much of a rule set for the kind of combat that the old game was supposed to present, but I think something that's shy of MT's hit verse penetration mechanic might be something people would want.

Just an idea.

I very much prefer to import the T4 Armor/penetration mechanic into Classic Traveller:

1) Each point of armor "eliminates" one damage die. The remaining non-eliminated dice go thru to penetrate and do damage
a) If it is hard armor, the eliminated die is eliminated completely
b) If it is "soft" (i.e. "flexible") armor, the eliminated die is reduced to a single point of damage (i.e. bruising)

2) No one will take actual damage (after penetration) in excess of 3D hits (i.e. any remianing damage dice after 3D will over-penetrate and go clean thru the body)). Some weapons will ignore this rule based on individual weapon descriptions.

So if someone is hit with a heavy wepaon that does 8D, and they are wearing 2-point armor:

* The armor eliminates 2 dice, leaving 6D to penetrate
* The 6D that penetrate can only do a maximum of 3D to the target, leaving 3D to exit the other side of the body
* If the armor has a back plate, it will remove another 2 dice as it punches thru, leaving 1D of damage to continue on and possinbly strike something else. behind the original target.

 

[Dragoner]

Here is an interesting read on the subject.

 

[whartung]

Well, the FBI suffered famously in the Miami Shootout, which prompted all sorts of changes.

Also, back in the day, the Army had bad results with .38 caliber pistols against fanatical Philippine warriors (prompting the development of a modern .45).

But, here's the thing.

In the past 100 years, while the calibers haven't changed, the bullets, powders and cartridges have. The "wonder 9" 9mm that were downplayed by gun writers and the such throughout the years today are back in the field. The FBI took the lesson of Miami to create the 10mm (which is roughly equivalent to the .357 Magnum, but in an auto cartridge), which turned out to be too much cartridge for the general population, and was subsequently reduced to the .40 S&W (which is basically a shortened 10MM and coincidently fits really well in 9mm frames).

But, today, the .40 has lost favor and everyone is back carrying 9mm, but with modern, expanding ammunition (i.e. hollow point bullets). Even .380s are making a come back with modern ammunition, but mostly for their conceal-ability. Ball ammunition in most any caliber tends to over penetrate.

From a game point of view, I think it just breaks up in to 3 categories. "Light" (ala .22, .25, even ball .38 etc.) "Medium" (most modern 38/9mm-ish, and the .45 -- it's fat, but it's slow), and "Heavy" (.44 Magnum, those crazy .50 caliber cartridges). Outside of those zones, it's mostly quibbling.

 

[McPerth]

I very much prefer to import the T4 Armor/penetration mechanic into Classic Traveller:

Repeating myself from various posts (in different threads), I don't like any system based on damage reduction only, because it makes (to give an example) good penetration power to a shotgun, as it has many dice damage. Simple armor multipliers (as in T2K 1E)solves it to a point...

Specifically about T4, I hated the maximum 3d damage, as it means a single bullet can never kill an average person (777).

Of course YMMV

 

[HanleyTucks]

"Stopping power" seems to be a myth, shot placement is more important.

Yes. Which is why comparing it to body armour is problematic: the body armour never covers 100% of the person or any large location like "trunk", the person could be leaning one way and it goes in through a gap around the armpit, and so on. This is why you see people with body armour covering their ribcage area, but not their belly - a shot in the belly might kill them, but slowly, long enough to get them medical care, whereas a shot in the chest might kill them very quickly indeed.

All of which is why we have the dice. In my game Conflict, we have levels of firearm +1 to +4, and 4 levels of body armour +0 to +3. If the weapon level exceeds the armour level, the person counts as unarmoured; if it equals it or is less, the person counts as armoured. Then there's a chart where the player throws for hit location and effect - minor, severe or mortal wound. You can still get wounded if armoured, but severe and mortal wounds are less likely.

In this I was influenced by the article Hitting Them Where It Hurts. That was based on data from conflicts up till 1982, so armour was an either/or proposition and they didn't go into further detail. Conflicts since then have given us some more data, so we can see for example that there exists armour which will stop a handgun round but not a military rifle, and so on. I thought four levels were reasonable, and it's also what I use for the attributes. Basically: shit, suck, good, great.

I don't believe it's useful to go into much greater detail than this. Bear in mind that we are using (both in CT and Conflict) a 2d6 system, where a +1 or -1 is a big deal. Very small differences are not resolvable on a 2d6 scale. And I don't think we need finer scales than that, because player actions and the dice are far more random than the effects of firearms. Over the year I have played and Millennium's End, GURPS4e, CT and of course Conflict, and I didn't really find any difference between the end result in each case: dumb players get killed quickly, smart players do well, but a bit of bad or good luck can swing it either way for both.

All that really changes with adding complexity is taking longer to get the same results.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Bear in mind that we are using (both in CT and Conflict) a 2d6 system, where a +1 or -1 is a big deal. Very small differences are not resolvable on a 2d6 scale.

One way this could get resolved would be to use a threshold system in more of a hybrid dice pool style arrangement.

Roll dice for incoming damage and roll dice for the armor defense.
Die results that exactly match between the attack and defense rolls "cancel" each other out and are removed from the totals.

For example:
A 3D6 attack damage versus a 3D6 armor.
Attack dice = 2, 5, 5
Armor dice = 3, 4, 5
A "5" result from both the attack and the armor rolls match, so they cancel out, yielding the following results:
Attack dice = 2, 5
Armor dice = 3, 4
The remaining 3+4 can be combined to block the 5 damage result, leaving 2 damage to penetrate and injure the target because there is no more armor capacity to block that damage result.

Note that in this example the added value of the dice was identical (2+5+5=12 vs 3+4+5=12) and yet because of the way the damage system works in a "consume dice to block" scheme it is possible for an attack to still penetrate for minor damage (what amounts to essentially bruising in this instance).

You would probably need to rework the weapon damage vs armor system to exploit such a "roll to block" type of scheme, but it does allow for a rather open "competition of dice rolls" on both offense and defense, where you in effect "strike" the die results that match before then working out which combinations of remaining armor results will need to be chosen to "block" incoming damage results on a die by die of damage basis. Once the armor dice for blocking are exhausted, any remaining attack damage penetrates and does the damage of those attack damage die results.

What you wind up with is a system where armor can "leak" damage into a target while still protecting them from a substantial amount of potential damage, but it isn't quite so simplistic and merely rolling dice and then adding/subtracting (which in the above example would have yielded a 12-12=0 damage throughput).

 

[HanleyTucks]

There are many things you can do, whether you should do them is the question. It's not just a matter of statistical reasonableness, but also how it feels. And the more charts you look through, the more dice you roll, the abstract it all starts to feel. This is one of the issues with the World of Darkness system's dice pools, for example, and we found it was an issue with Millennium's End, GURPS and so on.

 

[whulorigan]

Repeating myself from various posts (in different threads), I don't like any system based on damage reduction only, because it makes (to give an example) good penetration power to a shotgun, as it has many dice damage. Simple armor multipliers (as in T2K 1E)solves it to a point...

As we are discussing adapting the T4 armor system to CT as a house-rule, it is a simple enough modification to state (as I noted for specific exceptions of specific weapons) that shotguns have damage reduced at a rate of 2 dice per armor point, and that there is no 3D over penetration limit for them. (Meaning that shotgun is easily stopped by armor, but rips apart an unarmored person).

Specifically about T4, I hated the maximum 3d damage, as it means a single bullet can never kill an average person (777).

But this is essentially a problem for almost all versions of Traveller, as most pistols, carbines and rifles do 2D to 3D (entirely independent of the armor question). I think we colud agree that any of those weapons in the real world could kill with a single shot. So what is really necesary is some type of critical hit damage or bonus damage for accuracy (much as MgT adds the "effect" of the attack roll as a bonus to the damage done).

You could also bump up the max damage dice before overpenetration to 4D or 5D.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I bought the sourcebooks for T4 from Imperiumgames, but I never read the combat rules. I just didn't take to the setting, and therefore never sought a group to play with.

I guess my idea was to assign an "energy" value to body armor, and compare that to a projectile's energy for every round that scored a hit. Less energy = no damage. I guess the problem with that is that if you rattled off a magazine in panic fire mode, you could hit with every round, but not score any damage even if someone was just wearing a Vietnam era flak vest. So ... I think I like Spinward's dice-shunt concept.

A new system ought not replace the 8+ to hit system, but ought to reflect the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of armor to protect a character. Champions' (a notoriously dice heavy game) has a power activation roll for certain types of defenses. Where I think rolling an activation roll to see if your armor protects you from every bullet or what-not that hits you is too unwieldly and would slow down gameplay, I think something that reflects your armor's limitations is appropriate. I'm not sure what else to add here.

 

[Blue Ghost]

So, doing some quick wrangling based on Spinward's and Hanley Tucks' ideas, I came up with a conceptual chart;

Calibur	Energy	Penetration	TL Modifier
Light	100 - 350 ft-lbs	?	?
Medium	400 - 600 ft-lbs	?	?
Heavy	700 - 1500 ft-lbs	?	?

I'm thinking a base armor value starting at TL1 with bronze age breast plates and grieves, and then working up to TL15 with appropriate modifiers to represent advancements in material science. And that there might be another roll that's done per attack and not per round to keep it simple to determine whether the hit scored on the armor or the wearer.

What do you think?

 

[Blue Ghost]

p.s. I loosely based the data off of Chuck Hawks chart of hand gun energy chart. I'm not a big gun enthusiast, so I don't know howe accurate his data is, but it's here; https://www.chuckhawks.com/handgun_power_chart.htm

 

[mike wightman]

There are many many youtube videos that debunk the myths behind the FBI shootout and the search for a perfect pistol calibre. They also debunk the idea of stopping power.

Shot placement trumps pistol calibre

 

[Fovean]

Shot placement trumps pistol calibre

Which is where the Mongoose Effect mechanic is really effective, no pun intended. It sort of bakes in a hit location mechanic regardless of target armor, without the need for an additional roll/table.

I don’t recall right now what exactly Mongoose does with shotguns but there are some limiting traits applied as a nod to their true effectiveness.

 

[Blue Ghost]

So, maybe a combat round for a firer goes something like this;

Trigger pull(s);

Figure DMs for range, environment, and aids (scope, stock, gyro stabilization, etc.)

Roll 8+ with modifiers.

If hit; roll location.

Determine Armor effectiveness

Apply damage if any.

Here's a "new" chart

Handguns	Energy	Penetration	TL modifier (to hit / damage)
Ultra Light	100 - 200 ft-lbs	verse armor type	-2 DM to hit / -X to damage
Light	200 - 400
Medium	600 - 900
Medium Heavy	600 - 900
Heavy	900 - 1100
Super Heavy	1100 - 1500

Rifles	Energy	Penetration	TL Modifier
Ultra Light	900 - 1100	verse armor type	+ / - based on TL, damage TL
Light	1100 - 1500
Medium	1500 - 2000
Medium Heavy	2000 - 3000
Heavy	3000 - 4000
Super Heavy	4000 +
50 cal / Anti-material	12000+

LASER / High Energy Weapons, Gauss or EMG and possibly SNUB might have their own hit chats ... but I'm not sure. This is just conceptual thinking or brainstorming.