Hi All -

I’m think­ing of uti­liz­ing the Blade of the Iron Throne sys­tem for an Old West set­ting, mostly because this is the best com­bat sys­tem I’ve ever used and there really isn’t a lot of con­ver­sion needed other than updat­ing the skill list and chang­ing the pri­or­ity sys­tem a lit­tle.

One ques­tion I have is the appro­pri­ate dam­age rat­ing of firearms.

There are a few entries for a Hand­gun and an Arque­bus already, but of course the Old West had more and bet­ter firearms than those. So my ques­tion is:

What is the max­i­mum dam­age rat­ing a firearm should have using this sys­tem?

I fig­ure I’ll use that rat­ing for the biggest rifles and then scale it down from there.

Thanks for the help!

No answer for you, except search for some­thing that may have come out for TRoS. Pos­si­ble fan prod­uct or even the offi­cial books. I can search the old books if you dont have them?

I would say the stats shouldn’t dif­fer a whole lot from the firearms given in the books, except prob­a­bly a boost to armour pen­e­tra­tion. A wild west bul­let is prob­a­bly going to cause more trauma than an arque­bus pro­jec­tile, but not much more. When you increase the speed of a pro­jec­tile, you kind of get dimin­ish­ing returns, except in terms of armour pierc­ing, although size does make a con­sid­er­able dif­fer­ence obvi­ously. The main boon of wild west guns over renais­sance guns isn’t dam­age, but speed, accu­racy, and resilience.

Also think of this from a game design per­spec­tive. When DR’s get too high, you come to a point where every shot that hits is caus­ing level 6 wounds, those being extremely debil­i­tat­ing. How­ever, we know from real life that, although bul­lets are very deadly, they can be rel­a­tively eas­ily tem­porar­ily shrugged off, and later patched up, so long as it doesn’t hit a vital organ. You want to keep open the high pos­si­bil­ity that a shot is taken, and pow­ered through until the fight’s end.

In short, I’d say that your high pow­ered rifles should go no higher than say 8 DR, but with a deal more armour pen­e­tra­tion, say a gen­er­ous max­i­mum of 4. The addi­tional effect that fire­harms have (addi­tional shock equal to half wound level) should be kept as is. These are what I reckon to be your upper bounds, for high pow­ered rifles of the time.

I have never played with firearms, nor did I put a huge amount of thought into these num­bers. They are sim­ply my reck­on­ings based on my feel for how guns com­pare, and the mechan­ics of the game. So, do a bit of pon­der­ing your­self over that, but don’t take me at my absolute word.

My most sound piece of advise would be this: be con­ser­v­a­tive with your buffs. It’s bet­ter to under­power your guns than over­power them. Even if you miss the mark and they end up being unre­al­is­ti­cally weak, that’s not a prob­lem. Fun takes prece­dent over real­ism; shoot­ing a bad guy in the head, only for them to get back up and make an escape, that’s fun! Hav­ing a player bleed out after a shot to the arm that didn’t even roll that well, not fun!

I would agree
I was think­ing 10 or even 12 for a rifled bul­let, but it starts get­ting deadly.
The best counter is to make them dif­fi­cult to aim, clouds of smoke with the cap and ball, until the later bul­let tech.
Accu­rate reload, that will really slow down how much lead is fly­ing. Most games of the genre totally fudge this aspect.
And if you want to get really seri­ous, build in a fear fac­tor, with shak­ing aim, if fac­ing of against another gun armed oppo­nent. Really depends how Hol­ly­wood you want to make it.

Thanks for the responses!

I agree with pretty much every­thing you all said regard­ing firearms, in par­tic­u­lar the part about it being more com­pli­cated than my overly sim­pli­fied state­ment. I was basi­cally just say­ing the fol­low­ing:

1) There were a greater vari­ety of firearms in the Old West than just ‘Hand­gun’ and ‘Arque­bus’. For instance, there were many dif­fer­ent types of revolvers used, all of which would prob­a­bly have sim­i­lar, but still dif­fer­ent stat blocks from one another.

2) Firearms in the Old West were more devel­oped than the two types listed in the book in a vari­ety of ways, many of which you listed.

I agree that to make a ranged com­bat sys­tem with guns as good as the melee com­bat sys­tem would be a mon­u­men­tal under­tak­ing. It is also out­side the scope of what I was plan­ning.

I was basi­cally look­ing to run a short cou­ple story ses­sion in the Old West, more as a ‘proof of con­cept’ game than any­thing. I’ve always loved the Old West but have had a hard time run­ning it, mostly because:

1) I couldn’t find a sys­tem that fits my par­tic­u­lar pro­cliv­i­ties

2) I admit­tedly run short on story ideas to keep up an ongo­ing game.

Recently I’ve been read­ing up a lot on the Old West for enter­tain­ment pur­poses, and stum­bled upon some resources that gave me some ideas for adven­tures to address prob­lem #2.

Since I love Blade’s com­bat sys­tem, I thought about giv­ing it a whirl in a West­ern Set­ting just because I could then try out my ideas with­out hav­ing to do too much heavy lift­ing.

I wasn’t plan­ning on going into any­where near the level of detail you men­tioned for this project. I was sim­ply going to use the Pierc­ing Dam­age Tables for Firearms Dam­age, and cre­at­ing some new weapons tables to give a bit of vari­ety across a cou­ple dif­fer­ent types of firearms, hence the gen­eral sim­plic­ity of my ques­tion.

How­ever you all raised a num­ber of great points that lead me to decide to hold off on this project for now. In par­tic­u­lar, I was strug­gling with the dam­age rat­ings result­ing in instant kills on a reg­u­lar basis. But avoid­ing that prob­lem and account­ing for guns in more detail requires a num­ber of fac­tors I’m not really inter­ested in com­ing up with from scratch.

I think I’ll just wait until Aces and Eights: Reloaded comes out and take a look at that. If I ever do come back to this idea though, I’ll be sure to hit you up/​keep you posted!