Help! Question about guns!

[Taem]

If I were going to make a chart for a PnP game, I think you are on the right track, but you may want to consider some sort of "called shot" and or "range" mechanics, and that would give you some fun things to do with muzzle velocity, projectile speed, scatter patterns. You could do it all with relative ease as well.

Thanks for the input, from everyone, but I choose you to respond to first. I spent the last two night up till 2am (no kidding) researching this stuff, and I was so fascinated, I just didn't want to stop reading, but I knew I had to work the next day so I forced myself to go to bed, lol, but I still couldn't stop thinking about it, and all morning.

RE: Shotgun; I have the shotgun's maximum efficiency (range) at 50-meters and dropping in size category for every 1--meters past the initial 10-meters. Shotguns are interesting animals doing massive damage at close range, but quickly loosing kinetic energy. The would be an ideal choice, IMO, for swat teams having to enter close quarters and not knowing where their targets are. I definitively have plans for damage with projectile speed and type of bullet, i.e. hallow point vs. slug.

Here's an image of the part of the chart I'm currently working on. It's still very unfinished. I foolishly though the item section would be the easiest so I saved it for last, but it's turning out the be the most difficult of the entire book, lol. Go figure.



EDIT: Old image wasn't working, not sure why. GoogleSites seems to save files differently because I could see the image on my computer, but not from this work computer. How annoying! Anyways, updated!

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There are a lot of things that go into the damage a firearm can do above and beyond simple caliber or millimeter although those are good general basics to start with.

To get a real understanding of what damage a firearm could do you not only need to know the caliber/mm size barrel the weapon has but what individual ammunition you are using in the weapon. Full/Total metal jacket = Greater piercing damage through armor while Soft Tip or Hollow Point = Greater damage to unarmored targets.

Range to target is also a big factor in many standardized cartridges. A standard 5.56x45 NATO cartridge, which is the preeminent cartridge in NATO assault rifles has particular issues when related to muzzle velocity and length down range leading it to not achieve the required velocity for fragmentation. This leads it to produce less than optimal damage in many situations, creating wounds instead of kills.

There are a ton of factors that can be analyzed depending on how deep you really want to go with your systems.

Right, I got that. I think the best way to quantify all this into a simple to understand game has got to be to go with caliber (mm) as the defining damage source with modifiers to the damage based on "bullet energy" and of course the type of bullet used versus the type of target hit, or in other words, certain types of armor will suffer less damage overall from a shotgun blast than say an unarmored individual hiding behind a refrigerator.