How much damage would a single bullet do?

[Jazath]

You know, I'm wondering, how much damage would a single bullet do when fired from a hand held pistol?
Then should that number be multiplied by, I don't know, 500 to a 1000 for a machine gun in one round?
Since a single bullet is fired five hundred to a thousand times in one minute, a single turn of firing a gun would be 50 rounds in six seconds. SO multiply the damage by 50 times would get your average damage die for a single round of continuous bullets.
Is this math correct?

[Quertus]

A quick Google search said that an ak47 fires at a rate of 600 rounds per minute.

Of course, given that its standard clip only holds 30 rounds, I strongly suspect that *30* is your upper limit for bullets per round.

Of course, this being D&D (or, really, an RPG), that might well have no bearing on how much *damage* it deals.

[Thurbane]

Trying to translate modern fully automatic weapons into 3.5 will be problematic, particularly in terms of game balance. All of a sudden any bozo with an Uzi deals more damage than an ubercharger or half the wizards out there.

Maybe look at how d20 modern handles it.

[Firebug]

A single bullet could be from a Nagant M1895 Revolver (https://aonprd.com/EquipmentWeaponsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Nagant%20M18 95%20revolver)(modern firearm) or a muzzle-loading pistol (https://aonprd.com/EquipmentWeaponsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Pistol)(earl y firearm) which are both 1d8 in Pathfinder. Early and Modern are keywords which mostly determine the range for targeting Touch AC and reloading.

Pathfinder also has the Maxim M1910 Machine Gun (https://aonprd.com/EquipmentWeaponsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Maxim%20M191 0%20machine%20gun) and Madsen Light Machine Gun (https://aonprd.com/EquipmentWeaponsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Madsen%20lig ht%20machine%20gun), which are from a particular Adventure Path where you timewalk/planeshift to one of the world wars. Maxim is 2d8 and Madsen is 2d6. As "Modern" firearms they target Touch AC at the first 5 range increments (increment for maxim is 120' and madsen 100') and normal AC for increments 6-10. The "automatic" quality means it attacks all creatures in a line(to maxium range) as a burst of 10 bullets with a maximum of 1 bullet per target at a -2 to hit. It ignores concealment(and mirror image). It cannot fire individual bullets. It cannot misfire unless all of the attacks misfire. You can make a burst for each attack you would normally do (iteratives, rapid fire, haste, etc).

So if you had Haste, Rapid Shot and BAB 16+ you can get 60 bullets down range. But only 6 attacks per target in that line.

Applying physics and just multiplying by 50 ignores recoil, misfires(from over heated barrel at least) and game balance.

[HouseRules]

Slings since Stone Age, Arqubus 1465, Matchlock 1500, Wheellock 1540, Misquelet lock 1541, Snaplock late 1540s-1640, Snaphance 1550, Doglock 1600-1720, Flintlock 1610, and Caplock 1820.

Rapier 1500.

Slings and Arquebus does less damage than longbows and have shorter range.
Matchlock continues to have lower fire rate, around 2 minutes reload rate.
Wheellock (used in lighters) has a reload rate of 30 to 90 seconds.
Misquelet, Snappock, Snaphance, Doglock all use flint stone as source of spark. Once Flintlock appears, they all became obsolete.
Flintlock has a reload rate of 30 seconds, but American Civil War siege condition has 1 shot per 8 minutes because of morale check failure.
All muzzle-loaders cannot reload faster than 30 seconds.

Capslock is used in all modern weapons, as it is the only breech-loader. The Primer is a different explosive that could explode using less pressure than smokeless powder.

Since Arquebus and Matchlock must exist since Arquebus came before the Rapier, and the Matchlock at the same time as Rapier.
An Arquebus should be somewhat like a short bow, while a Matchlock should be somewhat like a longbow; that is in terms of range and damage.

[Elkad]

Misfire from overheated barrel?
It's super rare, even on an air cooled MG. You can get the barrel hot enough to soften, which causes a catastrophic failure, but you'd have to rip 300-1000 rounds through it in a continuous burst.
US Army standards say for emergency continuous fire to change the barrel every 200 rounds. (M60)

And on a water cooled mg, it never happens. If you full auto it continuously, the barrel wears out in 10,000 rounds or so, but that's it.

Plenty of other ways to misfire, but that isn't one.

[HouseRules]

Soldiers take up 40 foot squares, Post-WW1 and WW2 regulations. So other-sized characters must take up reasonable spacing.

Colossal = 160 foot square instead of 240 foot square
Gargantuan = 120 foot square instead of 160 foot square
Huge = 80 foot square instead of 120 foot square
Large = 60 foot square instead of 80 foot square
Medium = 40 foot square
Small = 30 foot square instead of 40 foot square
Tiny = 20 foot square
Diminutive = 15 foot square instead of 8 foot square
Fine = 10 foot square instead of 4 foot square

That's how to deal with machine-gun, and true indirect artillery.
Of course, the creatures still take up the amount of spaces they normally do, but have to spread out manually by the DM and Players.

[Elves]

You wouldn't find the damage by bullet*600. It would be something more abstracted like 6d8 AOE. Material damage is what you would use as a baseline for realism, since creature hp are too abstract.

[smasher0404]

For the sake of completion, the Dungeon Master's Guide technically has rules for weapons from different eras (including the Renaissance and Modern Era) starting on pg. 144 (although they do leave a lot to be desired). By those rules, a Renaissance-era pistol does 1d10 damage and has a x3 critical, while a Modern-era revolver does 2d8 with a x2 critical (and an automatic pistol does 2d6 with a x2 critical per "attack").

[Kelb_Panthera]

Your question is pretty unanaswerable, honestly.

First and foremost, how much damage is done by two of the same type of bullet from the same gun is going to vary pretty dramatically by where they hit you. Then you get into different ammo types, different calibers, and different configurations of barrel length, weight of the bolt and carrier, and reciprocation method.

A .22 rimfire being shot from a short-barrel, direct blow-back semiautomatic is going to do -dramatically- less damage than a .50 BMG fired from the triple-action thunder with an extended barrel. The former isn't guaranteed to kill some modestly sized nuisance animals like a coyote unless you get 'em in the right part of center-mass. The latter will leave an exit wound the size of soft-ball in an armored soldier and keep going until it hits something properly solid like a berm or a concrete barrier over a foot thick. They're both pistols though.

Then there's hit-rate on single shot vs burst fire vs full-auto. The first tends to be as accurate as your training will allow. The second, somewhat less so but you'll usually get at least a portion on-target if you're good. Full-auto though? There's a reason the phrase "spray and pray" is a thing; it's nearly impossible to hold the weapon on-target for more than a couple rounds before recoil has you spraying down a whole area around the target. Great for suppressing fire, terrible for actually doing damage to a target unless that target is the broad-side of a barn or you've got the barrel practically pressed to the guy's sternum.

Honestly, just go with the D20 modern/ pathfinder rules. They're passable enough.

[King of Nowhere]

You know, I'm wondering, how much damage would a single bullet do when fired from a hand held pistol?
Then should that number be multiplied by, I don't know, 500 to a 1000 for a machine gun in one round?
Since a single bullet is fired five hundred to a thousand times in one minute, a single turn of firing a gun would be 50 rounds in six seconds. SO multiply the damage by 50 times would get your average damage die for a single round of continuous bullets.
Is this math correct?

wrong.

sure, if you were to hit with all 50 bullets, then you'd deal 50 times the damage. if you shoot that at a person, they'd turn into a fine red mist and chunks that you'd need pliers to pick up.
however, recoil ensures that you won't hit with 50 bullets. in fact, that kind of burst fire is very rarely used in practice. when one is using that kind of burst fire, then either A) the shooter is an amateur, or B) they are just trying to saturate the area with bullets and hoping to hit something by chance.

with mounted guns you can get quick fire and precision, though. and that's why miniguns can destroy tanks, even though the individual minigun bullet cannot penetrate the armor. have 50 bullets hit all together in the same place, it's very different.

[Thurbane]

You also need to factor in we are playing a system where a person can stand there and be thwhacked with an axe a dozen or more times before they die. Sure, HP can be said to be modelling dodging etc., but D&D HP are an abstract concept. Bear that in mind when saying a spray from an automatic weapon would wipe out your average human IRL.

[HouseRules]

You also need to factor in we are playing a system where a person can stand there and be thwhacked with an axe a dozen or more times before they die. Sure, HP can be said to be modelling dodging etc., but D&D HP are an abstract concept. Bear that in mind when saying a spray from an automatic weapon would wipe out your average human IRL.

The damage is not uniform. 1 HP could equal losing 1 milliliter of blood, or 1 liter of blood depending on circumstances.

Note that with a soldier in a "40 foot square" is really saying that you are aiming at 8x8 "5 foot squares" or 64 squares to attempt to the target. If you shoot 30 bullets per round (more like a standard action against a 30 foot square), you only hit 30 of those 64 squares, not even half, 46.875% rounds to 45%, or roll 12 to hit.

Edit: wrong role, roll, row.

[Drelua]

Yeah, as others have said, you might fire 500 shots in a minute, but there's no way in the abyss you're hitting your target 500 times, unless your target is 'over there.'

[Thurbane]

Just trying to imagine a Rogue with a suppressed Mac 10 making 120 attacks rolls per round, each with sneak attack if he can catch the enemy unawares. :smalltongue:

[Kelb_Panthera]

Just trying to imagine a Rogue with a suppressed Mac 10 making 120 attacks rolls per round, each with sneak attack if he can catch the enemy unawares. :smalltongue:

Anyone else suddenly in the mood for spaghetti?

[Yanagi]

Real world "logic" of lethality and game abstraction don't really mix well. The point of the latter is to make something tidy, safe, and at least nominally fair that feels like the combat of heroes in folklore and genre fiction. The former includes the possibility that anyone can die or be permanently crippled by falling off a toilet.

An attack is not necessarily synonymous with a single hack, slash, or trigger pull; it's an abstract representation of the equally-abstract process of doing damage to hit points. With missile weapons it is generally understood that a single attack is the release of a single projectile...but that's the case for non-firearms, with guns there's often a rate of fire pegged artificially to action economy: two thirty-round magazines thus does not mean sixty attacks per round even if that is mathematically correct when one compares rate of fire for an automatic weapon to the standard "a round is 6 seconds" metric

Damage dice are also abstract, but 1d4 equates roughly to "...will kill most 3.5e normal people with one good (high roll) shot" and others weapons have higher die because they're bigger things more purpose-built to hurt people with a few levels and some armor. Firearm damage dice fall into this same lethality estimate--a plinker is still a 1d4 and thus lethal to runaday NPCs--though it's a more complicated with all the minutiae of different ways a bullet can be lethal with the ruleset's abstraction: old gonnes that have time penalties for reloading tend to be granted high damage dice for balance's sake, while newer designs that reload fast and "realistically" should have equal lethality are pegged lower.

["Realism" is basically impossibly to simulate, since bodies are terrifyingly fragile except for when they're eerily durable, and literally everything can kill you arbitrarily with no forewarning. Reality is just endless save-or-die checks a DM is making behind a screen. The edge of a porcelain toilet bowl does have a 18-20 critical range, though.]

Rate of fire is also pegged to the necessities and niceties of an action economy. Fast-firing and high-damage weapons often have a "rounds expended per attack" ratio that isn't 1:1. In games with lots of guns, there are often multiple options for rate of fire that are equivalent to special combat actions like Trip. Pertinent to the current situation: emptying a magazine is generally presented as a full round action that either (1) does a great deal of damage but has heavy penalties to hit a single target, (2) is an area-of-effect attack in which each target gets damage from an against-AC attack roll but is somewhat penalized (and sometimes somewhat boosted damage); or the resolution of the attack is done by a save and the damage looks more like a spell. In neither case is it presented as one bullet, one damage die.


Just trying to imagine a Rogue with a suppressed Mac 10 making 120 attacks rolls per round, each with sneak attack if he can catch the enemy unawares. :smalltongue:

On the other hand, consider how often adventuring amounts to advancing on a fixed position with little to no cover. Every single dungeon would just have one narrow hallway that looked like the Somme.

[Crake]

The d20 modern rules treat full automatic as an AoE effect, from memory, a 10x10 area is targetted, and enemies in the area make a reflex save or take 1 or 2 hits? I can't quite remember exactly, but either way, you're not doing each individual shot as a separate attack roll, even burst fire has a single attack roll, that increases the damage, rather than giving you multiple attack rolls.

[ShurikVch]

Note: there are already existing official rules for automatic fire:
Call of Cthulhu d20 (WotC publ., with official D&D adaptation) - autofire is 3 bullets per round, with -6 penalty on attack rolls (which can be reduced with the feat)
"Pulp Heroes" (Dungeon #90) - exactly the same as the aforementioned
d20 Modern - AoE (10' x 10'; or 5' x 20' - with a feat) costs 10 bullets, and with -4 penalty on attack rolls (which can be removed with the feat); alternately, with a feat, it's possible to fire 5 bullets into a single target - it will add 2 damage dice to a "single-shot damage" (3 bullets may do the same - if it's your last 3 bullets)

Also, there are "Double Tap":
Call of Cthulhu d20 - 2 bullets per round, with -4 penalty to attack rolls (which can be reduced with feats)
d20 Modern - (with a feat) it will add 1 damage die to a "single-shot damage", with -2 penalty on attack rolls

[Jazath]

You wouldn't find the damage by bullet*600. It would be something more abstracted like 6d8 AOE. Material damage is what you would use as a baseline for realism, since creature hp are too abstract.

This makes sense, thank you.

Thank you all for this information that I can devour and spit it all back at my DM's and fellow PC's

Perhaps I learned a valuable lesson.