The Sound of Silence(r)

The spy creeps through the building, making no noise whatsoever. Even ninjas would have marveled at his stealth, cunning, and patience. At last, he enters the room containing his prey. He extracts his silenced pistol, levels it at his target’s head. He will destroy the man, and sneak out the way he came, no one the wiser.


The custom-tuned 9mm pistol is well balanced in his hand, and he gently squeezes the trigger.

BLAM! The 130 dB noise that results is as loud as the percussion section at a symphony, a jackhammer, or a pneumatic drill. The entire house wakes up, the spy is caught and executed on the spot. His sponsoring organization goes down in a terrible scandal.

At that point, the spy’s player starts pelting his GM with dice and beating him with hardcover copies of the Basic Set. The supporting cast, who helped get that spy into position, are looking at him with that sort of flinty gaze that promises the GM will be footing the bill for pizza, chips, and soda himself for a while if he wants to keep the group running.

This actually happened to me, sort of. I was running an adventure I called OMEN TOWER, which was an adventure I’d written for a Black Ops campaign (and turned into my first prospective e23 supplement, but that is a tale of misery and woe I will not repeat at this time) involving sneaking into a Chinese Army base that was the site of a Grey weapon’s manufacturing plant. My wife’s character opened up with a .300 Win Mag or .338 Lapua Magnum . . . some monstrously powerful rifle . . . that had a “silencer” on it. I knew that most such devices would take the report of such a weapon and tame it by 20-40dB. But magnum rifles like that are still very loud, especially if it’s pointed at you!

So, I put my own expectations on the gun and the noise. My players had theirs – strongly informed by Hollywood. They were so upset with the resulting consequences that they agreed to stop the mission and RESTART the entire thing, with the now newly available “Anti-Noise Active Suppression System” provided by the Tech Ops that actually WERE Hollywood “silencers” instead of real-world suppressors.

And everyone was happy.

******

I tell this story because it struck me as pertinent:  A commenter posted that he thought Jeffro’s review of The Deadly Spring was off the mark when Peter linked to it in a post recommending my blog to others (thanks, Peter!).

That made me think of the above story, because what Jeffro is saying (I think), is that TDS is just too complex and fiddly to use at the gaming table. It breaks his own expectations for the amount of work he’s expected to do in order to provide a good, fun story to those around the table.

In fact, I agree with him completely. The Deadly Spring is not meant for at-the-table use. It was originally slated as a 2,500-word article that did the same thing for bows as my guns article did, and how hard could that be, really?

Well, 11,000 words later, I found out. And I built a spreadsheet, so no sane person would have to suffer like I did (and like Steven did in reading and editing the thing) to create such things.

What was the end result? An article that, as the review says, allows you to go through iterative gymnastics to maybe design a bow that shoots an arrow that does 1d+1 imp. Um, so? Well, that bow is probably a 150-lb bow (ST 17 or so?) firing an arrow that weighs as much as some hamburgers (about 0.2 to 0.25 lbs; 1500 grains!). OK, blah, blah, realism; blah blah effectiveness of guns vs bows.

But again: I agree with him. From a narrative purpose, if you will accept all the crap that comes with a semi-realistic bow with cinematically high armor penetration (but you still need a few seconds to draw, ready, and shoot an arrow, and the Acc isn’t that good, but the range penalties are large), then having penetration be cinematically high relative to a 9mm pistol which can fire 3 or more times per second, is easier to aim, and can fire for six rounds or more (and by that time, someone’s dead)? Sure, let the bow guys have their fun, and it’s way easier to just look up “thr+2” and know your thr damage is 1d+2 with ST 17, giving you 1d+4.

So, Jeffro’s expecations are (a) don’t let the crunch interfere with the story, (b) keep it simple and fast, and (c) let people have their proper fun; don’t penalize a player based on expectations clash.

My purpose in writing the rules was to be able to model bows better (it started during the Low-Tech playtest, where I had like a three-line set of equations that worked, sorta, but only within the case of wooden self-bows, and there were some oddities that cropped up even then), and get them scaled more properly vs. firearms (which you should be able to easily do, since you know the energy and diameter of the shaft).

That sort of thing, though, is best kept off the table.  I still may wind up taking up the challenge on the wish list (Low-Tech: Archery) at some point, since it should be fairly straight-forward to execute. That might meet Jeffro’s needs: it would have columns for cinematic damage, realistic damage, AND a number based off of thr+N for those who want to do it that way. Perhaps.

The other thing to do is look at your expectations and assumptions.

Are the players going to load up with Heroic Archer, Weapon Master (Bows), Strongbow, and Special Exercises (Arm ST +3)? With an enchanted Elvish Longbow of Smiting firing Puissant arrows also enchanted with Penetrating Weapon? If that’s the case, well, “realistic” bow damage based on the square root of kinetic energy just ain’t the point, now, is it?

If your goal is to ensure that if you put a warrior in a full-faced helm and high-quality “double-mail” or some such and want him to look like a well-protected porcupine (safe, uninjured, but looking a lot like the shields at 2:59 in this clip from 300), then you’re going to want to ensure that the damage for powerful bows is on the right scale with the armor used.

Back to the silenced firearms thing: I’d pitched the game as “realistic” Black Ops. That meant “only” 350-400 points instead of the 800-1000 required in Fourth Edition to mimic the original 3e templates (Start at this post, and go from there). But as you notice, 300-400 points is well into the Action or Monster Hunters territory; realism just ain’t really in it. Gritty, yes, sure – can be done.

My players took one look at their abilities, and said “this is Jackie Chan meets the X-Files” and well, they probably weren’t wrong. I’d know better now, and I believe that Black Ops should be a spin-off of Monster Hunters, rather than a stand-alone.

So they had characters that could pull off amazing stuff, and a background of super-science tech in the game as well. Hollywood Silencers are appropriate here, not my realistic silencers.

As a final nod: two of the best treatments of suppressors in GURPS both came from the same author: Hans-Christian Vortisch. First, in GURPS Modern Firepower, and then recreated for Fourth Edition in GURPS High-Tech (pp. 158-159), where I’m pretty sure Hans wrote the suppressor part.