Quote from: Lynn;547179I just picked up Anomalous Subsurface Environment, and have the Kickstarter Lamentations of the Flame Princess coming. And after reading reviews of DCC with its Androids in its monster section, am noticing that more tech / sf elements are being dipped in the OSR chocolate than I recall being the norm back when I was first playing 1E / BB (except for Expedition to the Barrier Peaks).

If you have an OSR campaign going, how much do you add? If you've introduced guns / blasters / shooty things, do you make them extremely deadly or just another d8 of damage?

I don't like mixing my Fantasy and Science Fiction except for one-shots and mini-campaigns. My limit is about the level of Iron Kingdoms type settings. Occassional planar jaunts from Labyrinth Lord into Mutant Future are OK, but not as a regular thing because it becomes a little too gonzo for my taste.

(Although as a caveat, I have had a nice supernatural cyberpunk game using Cyberpunk 2020 and Night's Edge. Cyberpunk and horror seemed to mix well.)

I usually extrapolate from magic items. A blaster is a reskinned wand of lightning bolts (6d6 damage) that anyone can use, and that can malfunction in interesting ways. This usually means that they inflcit a lot of damage, like Black Vulmea's.

I should really look up Metamorphosis Alpha one of these days.

Quote from: Benoist;547322I can see that working, plus the d4 is pointing and looks like a projectile so... LOL

Anyway, the point is that exploding dice work best when we're talking about the same die type. If we have several die types involved with this same mechanic, then the probabilities become funky.

Lol, welcome to Earthdawn, where all the dice explode!

The 3rd edition got rid of the d4 and the d20 to collapse some of those problems. Now we only see them in very low "single die" Steps vs very low difficulty numbers (not too common outside of Initiate level characters). Josh Harrison has some articles examining the Step System (pre-3rd Ed) on his site over here:
http://www.loremerchant.com/?page_id=51


[Edit] I do have plans for steam mecha and fire-arms for the ED/Greyhawk mashup I'm running. Think Howl's Movign Castle and Iron Kingdoms... Haven't seeded any hooks into the game yet. Although I do have 2 new Disciplines in the works (the War Engineer, and the Dragoon/gun-man).

Quote from: Benoist;547318I'm guessing you guys are using all-d6 for damage when talking about these exploding dice, correct? Because between a d4 and say a d8 exploding on a maximum result, you run into probability problems in which the lowest die type actually may have a greater chance to explode with a greater average damage.

d6s for pistols, d8 for rifles.  I've never had any notable problem with that.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Aos;547190Some people use an exploding die mechanic wherein if you roll maximum on you damage die you get to roll it again.

Exploding dice. Wish I thought of that for ASE1.  I am instantly adopting this and will update the gun rules in ASE2-3.

Quote from: PatW;548819Exploding dice. Wish I thought of that for ASE1.  I am instantly adopting this and will update the gun rules in ASE2-3.

Hey Pat! Welcome to the boards, mate!

Exploding dice seem to be very popular in this thread. I remember first encountering them in AD&D 2e's Ravenloft: Masque of Red Death setting (had tons of funs with this. Someone should probably put together a retro-clone of this! )

However, I'll play Devil's advocate here. Pseudoephedrine posted a while back on his blog a nice counterpoint (complete with links) to the idea that firearms are significantly more lethal than swords or crossbows: http://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com.br/2012/04/abolishing-exploding-damage-for-guns.html

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine's blogI'm not an expert on the subject, but from what I have read it's totally possible to be shot and hit many times, at least by handguns using modern rounds, without experiencing incapacitation. While guns can and do kill, I'm not convinced that they are deadlier than melee weapons, or that a round hitting a person incapacitates them more quickly than a sword hitting them does. I'm especially not convinced of this with regard to unrifled black powder weapons firing musketballs.

(Don't miss the links! They're very, very good reading on the subject, and further develop the idea of "stopping power". Pseudo does his homework.)


My own experience as a surgery resident in an inner city hospital with a busy ER generally conformed to this. In common parlance we usually divided GSWs into "low energy" (stuff like easy to acquire .22 or .38 revolvers) and "high energy" (actual assault weapons like SMGs and assault rifles).

Low energy GSWs are a pretty routine affair, but the thing with high energy projectiles is that they don't just injure the organ they've lodged in; they transfer massive amounts of kinetic energy and heat (by way of friction) to surrounding solid tissue. This results in much more extensive and lethal injuries; where a .22 rounds might barely break the abdominal wall and cause a small, non-surgical liver hematoma, a 5.56mm assault rifle round will tear through the abdominal wall, the liver, the retrohepatic vena cava and/or hepatic veins, and leave through the lumbar region leaving an exit wound significantly larger than the entry one. Sometimes you'd reoperate on a high energy GSW patient 24-36 hours after the initial incident to find new injuries, e.g. late-presenting bowel perfurations because of thermal (burn) action and delayed necrosis on small bowel loops.

And even then we're faced with people with multiple GSWs who still cling to life. Sure, my sample is biased, in that I only get to see those who didn't die immediately or en route to the hospital, but there you go.

In plain English: I have no reason to believe that low-energy gunfire is significantly more lethal than a sword or an arrow, once you land a hit. I might be misremembering, but I seem to recall that ease of use, rather than heightened lethality, was the main historical reason for armies to adopt personal firearms (consonant with the rise of professional armies in detriment of the traditional role of hereditary nobility as a warrior class, circa C16-C17 in Europe, or C19 in Meiji Japan as portrayed in the movie The Last Samurai). High-energy projectiles fired from modern assault weapons, however, might be better served by the "exploding dice" mechanic.

I only had two goals with guns:

a. They had to not screw up the game
b. They had to be better than medieval weapons

So I gave them bonuses to hit, but damage ranges that were in line with other weapons.  That way, 30+ years of proven successful game rules weren't going to be disrupted by sniper rifles doing 3d12 damage.

After some months of use, I am less enthralled with that because guns aren't awesome - they're definitely better, but there's no visceral thrill from a +2 to hit.  Occasional damage spikes will make them more awesome but it won't happen often enough to screw up the game.  Seems like a really good solution, I'll introduce it to my players tonight.

Quote from: The Butcher;548947In common parlance we usually divided GSWs into "low energy" (stuff like easy to acquire .22 or .38 revolvers) and "high energy" (actual assault weapons like SMGs and assault rifles).

Dr. Martin Fackler at the wound ballistics laboratory is probably the go-to guy for this, but the short version is that there are two types of damage a bullet does going through a human: shock and tissue.

Shock damage is dependent on velocity; as the bullet travels through the body, the kinetic energy imparted creates a localized shockwave that causes the tissue to recoil away from the wound channel.  This is the immediate "I've been shot!" damage that will drop you, but is also the damage most likely to be masked by adrenaline, drugs, or other things that will allow people to shrug off acute pain and shock effects.

Tissue damage is determined by the size of the permanent wound channel, which is determined almost entirely by the size of the bullet and its longitudinal cross-section, as the bullet tumbles when it enters the body.  (Kinetic energy has some contribution, as the bullet will go farther within the body the more energy it has to dump on the way through). This is the damage that kills you.

(The history of the M1892 New Model Colt vs. the M1911A1 in the Phillipines is instructive; the muzzle velocities are the same, but the .45 ACP is twice as big as the .38 Long Colt).

In short, once you've got enough velocity to get the bullet all the way through the body, increased velocity only adds logarithmically to shock damage, not tissue damage.

tl;dr: Accuracy aside, a lot of relatively low-velocity black powder muzzle loaders are deadlier than modern rifles because the balls are bigger and do more permanent damage going through.

Given that, it's apparent that HoL's damage ratings--one for pain, the other for injury--are actually more accurate than most RPG systems ever published.

In my current D&D game the "home base", an orientalist middle-eastern steppe city called Yam, has a functioning (yet very not-busy) spaceport staffed by robots. And there's a robot PC.

Quote from: Planet Algol;549012In my current D&D game the "home base", an orientalist middle-eastern steppe city called Yam, has a functioning (yet very not-busy) spaceport staffed by robots. And there's a robot PC.

Are you going to start posting session reports again?

Quote from: Planet Algol;549012In my current D&D game the "home base", an orientalist middle-eastern steppe city called Yam, has a functioning (yet very not-busy) spaceport staffed by robots. And there's a robot PC.

That reminds me of the old 7th Saga NES RPG. Awesome.

http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/7752/lux7shv7.jpg

Quote from: Planet Algol;549012In my current D&D game the "home base", an orientalist middle-eastern steppe city called Yam, has a functioning (yet very not-busy) spaceport staffed by robots. And there's a robot PC.

Yessss! I can almost forgive you that... warforged... in the party.

Quote from: PatW;549032Are you going to start posting session reports again?

EDIT: Made a thread for it buddy.