Quote:
Originally Posted by Atgxtg
Well, most people who try that either get stopped before they get a statistically significant sampling, or have government backing. 
But, based on the stuff that we found out from wars and firefights, pretty much no one actually dies immediately. There are very few spots on the body that will kill you right away if destroyed. So instant kills are probably less than 5% with all of the above.
That said, the chances of someone dying with a few seconds, minutes, hours, or days without proper medical attention is pretty close to 100% for all of the above, too. And not being killed isn't the same as "up and fighting". Some who is down in 5 seconds and won't wake up for an hour is effectively out of the fight.
There are some differences between gunshot wounds and wounds from other weapons, but all in all the primitive weapons probably have worse complications than bullet wounds. Such weapon leave bigger, more jagged holes, and are not as clean so the wounds go septic more often (warriors are notorious for not sterilizing their greatswords between opponents). |
I pretty much agreed with everything you said here, but wanted to comment that a big part of the effectiveness of modern firearms, especially handguns, has little to do with one shot stopping or killing power; I honestly suspect on a shot-to-shot basis, few handguns are better than a routine melee weapon. Their big advantage is in some forms of penetration, and more importantly, rate of fire; its almost impossible to launch a serious of melee attacks at the rate even relatively slow firearms (such as a bolt action) can do, let alone faster guns. And that's always been modelled poorly in BRP games.