Hmmm.
1) I suspect that if the sole rationale was effect based then what we have is a system of firearm damage based on anecdote. Which is what seems to have actually happened. The designer wanted a certain amount of lethality (too much for pistols according to Badcat's friend and not enough for rifles and larger weapons according to others) What happens is that different rounds and different guns end up with the same damages when they shouldn't. The .458 and the .50 have very different muzzle energies mainly because the .50 is twice the size of the .458 and can pack significantly more powder into the case. Yet this is not modeled.
In CoC guns don't work well against the Mythos so after a certain point it doesn't matter if the modeling breaks down. We now have a different paradigm with BRP. Mostly this is a designer gripe- if the expectation is to use the new edition of BRP to create new games then it behooves us to have systems that model well for many aspects of firearm use and not just for the vision of one horror game that needed to downplay the effectiveness of guns.
2) Stopping power seems to be intimately linked with shot placement, the surest stop being one that disables the central nervous system. Delivered energy has quite a bit to do with it but there is still quite a bit of controversy over what -exactly- stops people but more E does seem to be better.
3) Basing gunstats on the reported effectiveness of shooting people gives us a very one dimensional view of the guns. It tells us nothing of the effectiveness against materiel for instance. And that boogers up any future development of firearms for other genres that await development. If we don't have a way to model energy/penetration and the effect on the target now what is a more milataristic (modeling WWI, special ops, future conflict with aliens/superdudes/mostali etc) game supposed to do? I would certainly like for there to be scalability built into this so that substantially the same system can be used to resolve pistols and tank shells.
4) The "elephant problem" is not that you can't drop an elephant it is that two guns with very different RW stats do the same damage. I find it unrealistic to have the .458 at ~5000 ft/lbs ME be the equal of the .50 at ~13000ft/lbs ME.
5) I really don't understand objections to making firearms, especialy long arms, model RW behavior better. If you like that they are deadly how does making the big ones deadlier hurt that?
6) I tried the 3G3 conversion last night and while not exhaustive I did find evidence of what the HyperBear blog spoke of. Compared to 3G3 stats CoC pistols are overpowered and the .50 cal is under powered while the elephant gun (taken as a .458 Mag) is overpowered. The numbers are all over the place and, in this small sample, defy finding a formula to base further expansion of firearms or any other projectile damage on.
Will this sort of stuff bother people? Well, yes it does bother many that have some idea of what guns do. The arguments about the effectiveness and modeling of firearms I have heard from the first time I played CoC.
If BRP is the new baseline then it should have looked to improving the modeling of things that have been known to be a problem.
Joseph Paul
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