Despite Saturday's brief discussion of the number of bullets in a Glock 17 clip, I have never, ever seen a PC (or NPC for that matter) stop in the middle of combat to re-load his weapon. And, in this case, I really do mean I have never seen this happen. It seems RPG characters live in some sort of wierd John Woo-esque game where guns never run out of bullets.
Now, there are some reasons this doesn't bother me as much as it might:
- Less micromanagement and more fun has to be good, in general.
- It's safe to assume most PCs reload their weapons between combats.
- Many modern weapons have large clips, so are not too likely to run out in most combats.
However, the third assumption flies out the window once we're talking shotguns, revolvers, and weapons used on burst and autofire modes. Additionally, if the damage ratings for weapons are quite close (as they should be - frankly where you get hit is likely to be as relevant to most damage calculations as the size of the round), the clip size should be one of the munchkin differentiators of choice (more bullets = more carnage = better weapon).
So, what's the best way to track ammunition in weapons? Specialised ammo tracking sheets?
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteSadly, the only game I've seen which has got decent autofire rules is Phoenix Command. I say sadly because trying to use that system for combat can make your eyes bleed. It makes sense that they have decent rules for autofire, seeing how they bloody well got rules for everything else you can possibly think about concerning combat. You actually have to aim to hit something, shock horror.
Phoenix command is an excellent system, as long as you don't mind if one round of combat has to involve a calculator, lots of formulas and about 20 minutes of real time.
And yeah, you don't have hitpoints, you just take a certain amount of damage point for each attack, and live for a set amount of time depending on how much damage you have. (A bullet through the eye does 2,000,000 damage and you live for approximately 0.2 seconds after getting hit.)