I’m curious how weapons stats were created. On the surface it looks like there’s some kind of Commonwealth bias in the stats - 9mm HP Browning does more damage than a .45 caliber M1911, and the Lee-Enfield does more than an M1 Garand.
The 9mm parabellum is a much more powerful and faster round, but the .45 weighs a LOT more, so it seems to me that they should do the same damage, if not favouring the .45.
Furthermore, the M1 fires a .30-06 and the Lee-Enfield fires a .303. similar grain bullet and nearly identical muzzle velocity.
Are these stats temporary, or set in stone?
Pre-ordered the games, and loving what I’m seeing so far. I just think the damage of the firearms need some revising.
All the best, and keep on rolling! Modiphius is my favourite!
Having shot both of the pistols you reference, I agree they should have their stats flipped, and I would probably add the criticism that the one shotgun we get has the “inaccurate” quality, which is exactly the opposite of why shotguns exist and how they work (even though the actual rules for Inaccurate are…tolerable for a scattergun, so I can see leaving it in). My edit would be to bring the Winchester up to 7d Stress and add the Munition quality.
OTOH: I adore how the gear-■■■■-addict part of me is sated by the way stats for weapons are very well balanced between weapons, giving no one weapon an obvious or huge advantage, so my non-gun-nut players can pick something cool or flavorful and know it’s going to be useful at some point.
I’m not knowledgeable about firearms.
Maybe, some firearms experts could give their recommendations about better representing the actual historical weapons in A!C 2d20 stats?
A collection - in this thread or another - could be helpful for GMs who want to introduce them as house rules for their A!C 2d20 campaign.
Yeah, I’m developing an RPG of my own, and I really wanted my weapon Stats to be somewhat realistic, if not believable, so I got a whole bunch of books to devise a system that measures muzzle velocity, bullet weight (grain) and the power of the cartridge.
Using those metrics I was able to get consistent stats for any gun by knowing the basic stats of the gun.
I hope they revisit this, because they have the Lee-Enfield doing one more point of damage than the Bren, despite it having a slower muzzle velocity, and firing the same cartridge.
I think this is such an interesting question because I think it would be very hard to house-rule the firearms/weapons stats for this game without losing the excellent design success they achieved in terms of creating interesting and cool choices for players by keeping stats, overall but also in individual cases, equitable.
You’d really have to massage things carefully–right now it’s a Jenga tower halfway through the game: not every part is symmetrical on its own, but the whole thing is still nicely balanced.
Since there has been no comment from Modiphius on this, I suspect I’ll have to redo the stats once I get the hardcopy. I will post them here for whoever is interested.
Here is what I think the gun stats should be in Achtung Cthulu. Mostly it’s making things consistent, many of the guns do different stress levels despite using the same bullets. I’ve fixed that.
Thanks for making this! I hope it gets good use in your group.
I can tell you though that my group will not. There are now absolute clear “good” options and “bad” options, which means the “bad” ones may as well not exist (for the players) in any game. I don’t think the current RAW is perfectly historically accurate / realistic (in a game with nazi sorcerers…) but they are balanced for interesting player choices, which trumps it for my game group.
I agree. There’s not enough other things to make the weapons different so making the M1911 much better than all the other handguns will just make all player choose it unless they want to gimp themselves for roleplaying purposes. Making M1911 five stress makes it as powerful as the full size rifles. There’s actually a printed error (I hope it’s an error) so the Lee-Enfield does 6 stress and the other rifles 5 stress. The Lisle Carbine actually shoots pistol ammunition (.45 ACP) to keep it subsonic so that should do less damage (but see below about supressors). The M1 carbine shoots an intermediate caliber, weaker than full size rifle ammunition but more powerful than pistol ammunition but seeing the other rifles does 5 and the Lisle 4, there’s no 4½ also the StG44 also shoots intermediate and does 5 stress. So the M1 carbine should probably have it’s stress increased to 5. The pistols also have some strange stats. The luger and Walther P38 both shoot 9mm luger but the luger does 1 more stress? FG-42 inaccurate? Not realistic but might to balance out stun instead of vicious but I don’t see stun that much better? The M1911 gets the hidden quality despite beeing a fullsize pistol at least as big as most of the others in the list if not larger? Why would anyone choose a concealed pistol when you can just pick the M1911? The Espen is a .22 so I can see that having lower stress, but the difference of 9mm vs .454 webley and .45 ACP is really a whole point of stress?
Then about the integrally supressed weapons. They all have 1 higher restriction rating and 1 lower stress. I guess this is to balance them against the loud weapons…BUT you can get a supressor restriction rating 2 and put on any pistol, rifle or submachinegun. And the supressor has no disadvantage. The only negative is that you need to use up 2 requisition points for it, but if you pick the right choices you can have a supressor and another not integrally supressed weapon and do more stress than a purpose built supressed weapon. A lot more if you pick the enfield. And if we’re talking realism, only .45ACP and .22LR can be supressed enough for covert work with a non integral supressor since all other ammo is supersonic and will make a loud sonic boom crack anyway. Integral 9mm supressed weapons have holes drilled at the start of the barrel to bleed off some gases and energy to slow it down to subsonic. Also the supressed .22, .45 have the same muzzle velocity as non supressed and the slightly slowed 9mm would not make enough difference to change it’s stress either.
You can buy subsonic 9mm rounds today, and they were around in WWII for use with suppressors. Or load them yourself. Not familiar with their reliability on automatics, however. Modern .22 LR subs are very reliable in my experience.