Under the Hood: Weapons

Hey! Who wants to see some actual game content?

When I decided to run another Interesting Times game, I wanted to use it as an opportunity to play with weapons, how weapons work, that kind of thing. In the past, we've just sorta randomly grabbed damages for weapons when we needed them, and didn't bother to do any research about the kinds of guns that would have been available at the time.

Since I use IT games as a sandbox to try out new ideas, I figured that starting with real-world weapons would be a great way to think about how guns work and how to make them more interesting. That being said, this is the weapon list I developed for the players the day before our first session.

Word and Blogspot aren't playing nice, so here's a .pdf link!

So, most of these weapons are based on real firearms that would have been available at the time. I took a little bit of creative license to fill some gaps in the lineup, and to make sure that similar rifles didn't feel too 'same-y.' Prices were either estimated around similar era prices, or made up to represent the quality/damage of the gun.

So, on to some of the special rules. All pistols, unless otherwise noted, can be "burst" fired. When you burst fire, you can hit multiple targets, suppress them, or focus fire on a single target to gain the Traumatic property (more on that in a moment). All Rifles have the Sharpshooter property. When you take an action aiming with a rifle, you roll an additional damage die if you it. All shotguns have the Traumatic property (see, told you so). Traumatic weapons roll explosive damage die, i.e. roll the die again and add to the initial result if you roll the target number. So, if your gun has Traumatic (8), a roll of 8 or higher is rerolled and added.

Some of the other special rules confer additional bonuses. For instance, Quickfire allows you to burst fire without the normal to-hit penalty. Other special rules add complications to the weapon's use. Complicated Reload requires an additional action to reload the weapon, while Heavy has a Strength requirement to use the weapon normally - otherwise, you have to spend an action readying yourself to fire it.

If anyone has any questions or comments about the way weapons currently work, feel free to post a comment and I'll try and answer anything you're curious about!