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View Full Version : Modern M60 weapon damage.



SDF
2007-05-22, 06:07 AM
In the modern book the M60 machine gun is listed as doing 2d8 damage and uses the 7.62 round. Rifles with 5.56 all do 2d8 and ones that do 7.62 do 2d10. I thought that they may have lowered the damage for the machine gun, but then I noticed the .50 heavy machine gun does 2d12, the same damage as the .50 rifle. Is 2d8 a typo, or is there a reason it is lower?

Neon Knight
2007-05-22, 06:29 AM
The damage values assigned to D20 Modern weapons seem to be assigned at random. Just take a look at the Weapons Locker book. Two weapons fire the same round but do two different amounts of damage. Of course, that's not the biggest problem I have with D20 Modern firearm damage.

My personal umbrage is that the only apparent difference between an AK-47 firing a 7.62 x 39mm bullet and an M-16 firing a 5.56mm NATO bullet is range.

I guess they wanted to reserve 1d10 for high powered rifles and keep 2d8 for intermediate cartridges, but would it kill them to put a +1 on the tail end of the AK-47's 2d8?

You'll also notice that 9mm, 10mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP all do the same damage.

I realize that some abstraction is necessary since there are dozens of firearm cartridges with similar effects, but I feel they stretch that at times.

Whoops, off topic. Sorry bout that. Anyway, the M60 is listed as doing 2d10 in my Weapons Locker book. So it may be an error.

SDF
2007-05-22, 07:46 AM
Okay, that sounds right then. We always houserule 3d4 for the .45 and .357, I agree that the Modern weapons aren't thought out the best.

SpiderBrigade
2007-05-22, 09:49 AM
I don't think there's really a way for modern weapons to really "make sense" in a d20 game anyway. I mean, HP are so very abstract, and heroes have so many of them. Seriously, a level 5 tough hero can take a burst from an AK and live. Maybe that could happen in the real world, but I doubt it.

Yes, different rounds and different weapons have different effects on bodies IRL. But how does one map that to dice of HP damage? I think any distinctions like giving the AK47 a +1 on it's damage become kind of silly. That is, unless you can give me some rationale for why the difference between the AK-47 and an M-16 is exactly 1 damage?

The thing is, the HP system isn't really granular enough to model that kind of difference in firepower. This is especially true because there is no penalty for taking damage until you hit 0. As mentioned, even a low-level character could be shot with a handgun and walk around like nothing had happened. I think even the weakest pistol IRL would require rapid medical attention.

I guess my point is that the way firearms are handled in D20 Modern is necessarily a serious abstraction, and therefore it doesn't make sense to get bent out of shape about how certain weapons should be doing more or less relative damage. At its heart, it's an RPG not a tactical simulator.

I think it would be very reasonable to create stats for general categories like Pistol, SMG, Assault Rifle, etc. and make them all the same, reducing the different makes and types of round to pure flavor. Is that unrealistic? Yes, but no more so than all longswords doing the exact same damage. In fact, I think this would be the best way to handle it, because it drops all pretense of being "realistic" or "based on the actual weapons," which it isn't in the first place.