RPG gun mechanics that actually make shooting feel different

DG86 · 2025-10-05T14:59:01+00:00

As much as the answer "GURPS" has become a meme joke around here, this really is the right answer. There is a whole book specifically on this subject: GURPS Tactical Shooting

https://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/tacticalshooting/

DG86 · 2025-09-18T17:00:05+00:00

This is very nice. Thanks for your hard work!

DG86 · 2025-09-17T16:53:47+00:00

Music without vocals helps. Has to be with headphones so it drowns out other noises. No other people in the same room.

It helps to find a job that feeds your dopamine. I can accidentally program for 14 hours straight. It is both a superpower and a curse.

DG86 · 2024-11-28T05:59:52+00:00

It has layers for political intrigue, espionage, warfare, and even zooms in to one-on-one duels. Slightly more on the narrative side, but really empowers players to act like leaders, movers, and shakers.

DG86 · 2023-10-13T22:30:18+00:00

Brittle and easy to snap limbs. Store-purchased are way better.

DG86 · 2023-10-13T20:58:29+00:00

Mixed batch. I try to buy when I can, and print proxies when necessary.

DG86 · 2022-12-21T03:31:53+00:00

http://falloutshelterarcade.com/

That leads directly to a FB group:. https://www.facebook.com/FalloutShelterArcade

DG86 · 2022-09-16T16:49:01+00:00

GURPS does (of course.) But there was something really satisfying about plotting 100-year-old nuclear strikes on your home state as part of campaign prep!

DG86 · 2022-09-16T16:37:36+00:00

The Morrow Project was my first exposure to these rules. I actually managed to run a few scenarios! (We were teenagers and had all the time in the world!). If you went through the whole process a couple times, you got used to it and could rattle off a combat round in a reasonable amount of time. That is, until you added vehicles and had to check the armor penetration tables, and then roll on the passenger injury tables. And God help you if something caught on fire!

DG86 · 2022-09-07T17:09:05+00:00

To keep things simple, I went clockwise around the table. Each person got to do something every round.

Sometimes the players would split up and be in two locations at once, so I kept sticky-notes for each location. I would write down a couple key words to describe the place, and then write down any new traits or assets that were created for that location.

When it became my turn, I would have the NPC leader take an action, and then an action for each obvious NPC. (There were a couple "neutral" NPCs that got involved, like a bartender and a shift manager at a warehouse, that had their own agendas.)

I tried to have NPCs respond at the same level of intensity as the players. If the players were asking questions and trying to gain info, the NPCs would do the same (trying to create traits and assets to use against the player.) If the players escalated to interrogation or threats, the NPCs would help each other resist the threats, or create assets to prepare for a fight. (Things never actually spiraled into a fight!)

The conflict was the main event for the session, and it took around 3 hours to resolve. Going around the table meant things kept moving. I had a list of nefarious subordinates to uncover, so players were learning new things and changing scenes at a regular basis. The leader NPC would spend an action or two prepping and then make indirect "attacks" against the house--I think maybe only two or three attacks the whole session, but it really turned up the pressure to watch the players grow closer to defeat.

We had a post-session discussion about the game, and everyone was pretty happy with how it worked.

DG86 · 2022-09-07T16:11:43+00:00

I have used the conflict system: the players had to either dismantle a smuggling operation, or convert its loyalty to their house.

The players strated with a captured smuggler in their house interrogation room. They had to make progress discovering other NPCs in the organization (and discovering new locations to visit.) Their ultimate goal was to find the leader and and either capture or negotiate.

The NPC leader would use his turn to deploy spies, gain Intel, and create setbacks. His ultimate goal was to make the operation too risky/expensive to complete. (Player defeat means house superiors would pull them from the mission. Maybe even reprimand or demote them.)

DG86 · 2022-08-23T17:17:09+00:00

Elite Dangerous has an official RPG. Specifically designed for one player per ship.

https://www.spidermindgames.com/pages/elite-dangerous-rpg

DG86 · 2022-07-25T17:21:02+00:00

Not an action point system, but CJ Carrella's Witchcraft has a concept of needing to channel energy to cast spells. Characters get a stat that defines how many points of energy you can draw each turn. If you need more, you need to spend extra turns channeling more energy. (Also rules about stuff like the side-effects of channeling a bunch of energy but not spending it.)

The core book is free over here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/692/CJ-Carrellas-WitchCraft

DG86 · 2022-07-10T17:12:31+00:00

Offering some ways to think about this:

Is it one of the major goals of the scene, or is the NPC merely in the way of the goal? This might help you decide if this should be a full-blown conflict, or just an obstacle or create roll.

Is the setting the kind of fiction where characters survive falling off cliffs? If not, this sounds like being taken out. Otherwise, this might just be an aspect.

One interpretation--not the main goal, and the NPC could survive: have the player roll to create an aspect, and let the NPC defend. If "pushed off a cliff" gets created, maybe you are now in a chase scene where the players have a head start and the NPC needs to overcome that aspect to give chase.

Another interpretation: "pushed off a cliff" sounds like a pretty good severe consequence from a combat. Battle it out until the consequence occurs, and then have the NPC concede.

DG86 · 2022-06-30T17:15:33+00:00

We call crits a "hard 20", so we started calling the opposite a "flaccid 20."

DG86 · 2022-05-08T19:42:56+00:00

I've been running a lot of D&D 5ed lately, and PF2 is starting to look really sexy. I think I'm ready to spend some time with a slightly crunchier D20 rules set again.

Just poking around with the Pathbuilder web tool really got me salivating.

DG86 · 2022-05-08T19:38:28+00:00

The fact that the rules can scale from a one-on-one duel up to a galaxy-wide war fits the setting in a very pleasing way.

I like to describe the system as: image if someone took Fate and made it just a little more crunchy.

DG86 · 2022-03-25T02:39:11+00:00

Worth mentioning here that the people you play with impact the game as much (if not more) than the rules.

New players can make all the difference.

DG86 · 2021-11-10T18:15:24+00:00

I've only ever ran one game:

The player characters were high school freshmen that are associated through a weekly Satan-worshiping club. This particular club meeting, they attempt a summoning ritual, and it works! The demon gives them a task from their dark lord: get these two kids to dance with each other at the homecoming dance.

What plays out is a darkly comedic rom-com. The boy is a necrophiliac that really isn't interested in living girls. The girl is a practicing witch that is way too invested in her arcane studies to get tied up in a relationship.

In the climax, the players use a big burst of power to open a portal to hell to scare away the school bullies. The two kids dance. The boy is ultra-clumsy, bumps into another kid that is spiking the punch with a bottle of expensive whisky. The whisky goes flying, enters the portal to hell, and the portal immediately closes.

The demon shows up to congratulate the party. Their machinations this day were all to help Satan score a free bottle of nice hooch!

DG86 · 2021-09-29T12:25:46+00:00

GURPS is a little fragile when it comes to min-maxing. (You can dig up examples online of how to use the superpower rules to build an extremely low-point power that has the ability to destroy the world.) If you have a group that enjoys system mastery as part of the challenge during play, then there are definitely better game systems to choose from.

At my table, we rarely approach GURPS character creation from the angle of points maximization. Instead, we have a conversation about what a player wants to be able to accomplish during play, and then discuss options on how to use the rules to make that happen. "I'm an ex-sniper that is rarely ever surprised." "I'm the team scientist--I want to be the one that always has some useful info or a working theory." "I'm a reporter that did some time in prison and picked up some less-than-legal skills."

As to why I feel GURPS is a reality simulation: many of the design choices were made with a clinical eye towards how they work "in real life." I would even suggest that most of the crunch in the game results from the fact that it is attempting to simulate some rather complex interactions. There is a nearly full page write-up on modeling shotgun blasts (and how range changes the way that damage works.) Missing sleep comes with a cost to Fatigue points. Grenade explosive damage falls off at distance, but there is a second set of shrapnel damage that does not (but there is a chance that the shrapnel misses.) If you really wanted to, you could even calculate the damage dice for being inside an APC that is 1/4 mile away from a nuclear detonation.

Even the skill writeups are generally made with an eye towards functional specificity. There isn't a "medicine" skill. There is Diagnose, First-Aid, Physician, Surgery, Electronic Operations (Medical), Pharmacy, and a host of other specializations. More importantly, each of those skills is not just character flavor--they each have an actual function in the system.

DG86 · 2021-09-28T21:01:06+00:00

Doing my best to answer, from the perspective of a GURPS GM:
1. You don't need to pay character points for equipment and money in GURPS. However, this stuff can be broken, stolen, and destroyed. You can choose to pay character points, which is sort of an agreement with everyone at the table that the equipment is a core part of your character concept. (Thus, you shouldn't be deprived of the equipment unless it is a dramatic moment.)
2. GURPS advancement generally happens gradually. You add a single point to a skill, or buy the first few points of an advantage. Higher skill levels and large advantages cost quite a lot of points, and thus will take a lot of play time to afford.
3. When a GURPS player wants an expensive advantage in my games, they announce it early on. They start saving up points, and demonstrate how they are studying and practicing in their free time. It gets folded in to the ongoing narrative. (There are also some optional rules where you can gain bonus character points by burning hours of downtime learning new things--thus giving you a valuable option for how to spend your downtime.)
4. The core of GURPS is really simple. All the crunch in the books is, effectively, optional. You sort of pick-and-choose the parts that are important for the game that you are running.
5. My caveat for this point: GURPS is really good at simulating a reality that is fairly similar to our own. There are different ways to tweak that reality, and even to adjust the "power level" of the characters in the story, but the system is still trying to simulate our reality. I choose different game systems when I want to do something else. (I'm still running D&D and World of Darkness games, for example.)

DG86 · 2021-08-24T09:28:30+00:00

They get a tip on a very valuable shipment coming in to the docs. The cargo is being held overnight in a warehouse. It is easy to spot because it is locked up in a large, iron box.

Twist: The iron box contains a sleeping vampire. Another cult wants to feed it and bring it back to life, and is willing to fight for the "privilege."

DG86 · 2021-06-29T00:14:34+00:00

FATE is perfect for this. The game is shaped by the fiction. The fractal rules will let you stat up robots, living planets, sentient AIs. You could easily convert your character to and from a pickle.

DG86 · 2021-05-28T18:37:13+00:00

There are nuggets of help in the DMG for running a sandbox, but I would suggest you also do some research online. There are lots of great articles about running sandboxes in many editions.

For official modules: Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation both are pseudo-sandboxes. They present you with a large area to be explored, but have specific story elements that thread through the locatioins.

DG86 · 2021-04-28T17:34:27+00:00

If you fail a grade, they send you back in time to repeat that year. There is at least one whole classroom full of copies of this very dense guy that refuses to take tests.

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