The Guns of Psi-Wars

I'm pretty sure I've banged on about this before, but I've made an effort to include more alien races in Psi-Wars (there will be a post on that soon) and I've been exploring the alternate tech of alien groups like the Ranathim Tyranny and the Mug Atheocracy, which has emphasized the need to explore guns, and my own research has begun to finally bear some fruit.  As a result I've found myself confronted with the core issues with the Guns of Psi-Wars. I'm sure I've discussed this before, but there's new material before, so I apologize if this comes across as repetitive.

So, let's start with does Psi-Wars need guns? I think it does, and it needs them in the same way that settings it draws inspiration from all have guns too, despite having access to other, better weapon.  Star Wars has projectile rifles despite having blasters; 40k has slug throwers despite having micromissile "bolt" guns; Dune has Maula pistols despite having lasguns. These weapons tend to be either niche weapons meant to get around a particular problem, or they're primitive weapons used by factions that lack access to better weapons.  I particularly want to explore the latter, because the world of clean blasters and elegant, carbide armor is the Valorian Empire and the Galactic Alliance, not the world of post-apocalyptic techno-savages or primitive aliens.  Guns also allow us to deliver warheads down range.  Psi-Wars definitely has guns in a strictly literal sense in the form of grenade launchers, and weapons that fire poison darts certainly fits some factions well.

So, if we have a need for guns, how do we design them, and how do we make them fit? These two questions have plagued me, but I think I finally have some answers.

How to Design Guns in GURPS

Wow, this is exciting, huh? For me, this has been the holy grail of my vehicle design system and I think I've figured it out.  That said, I suspect the answer will disappoint you; it disappointed me, but it's also one of the realities I've confronted about GURPS design, which I'll get to in a bit. But first, the answer, which is this:

Just use the guns in Ultra-tech and mod them a bit.

I came to this conclusion pretty quickly after I learned a few things, so let me show you how I got there, and let me add some caveats onto that piece of advice.  But by the end of this article, you'll understand what I mean.  If you want a hunting rifle, just use the hunting rifle, etc.

So, you don't believe me and you want to build your guns from scratch, or you have a specific need (like "What does a gun built for ST 15 to 20 SM +1 space dragonkin look like?"). What do you do?  The second answer is this:

Just use the gun design system from GURPS Vehicles 3e

I'm pretty sure I've talked about this before, but the GURPS Vehicles 3e system lines up so close to how GURPS Ultra-Tech stats its weapons that I think if they're using a new system, it's closely modeled on GURPS Vehicles 3e. I used GURPS Vehicles 3e to rebuild several of the GURPS Ultra-Tech guns, mostly with an eye on the pistols and rifles, and here's what I found.

Damage and Weight

Damage and weight are pretty closely tied to one another, and they line up extremely well. For example, if you assume a 10mm pistol with an Extremely Short Barrel for the Heavy Pistol you get... exactly 3d damage. And the weight comes in at 1.5 lbs, which is lower than the 2.5 lbs listed until you account for the ammo weight, and then it's very close. That honestly strikes me as weird, because I would expect a low power round and a very short barrel, which also gives us the same weight, but drops the damage too low.

This pattern repeats with the other weapons. 7.5mm and ES barrel gives us almost exactly the right damage for a medium pistol but too light a weapon, and a 15 mm pistol with an ES barrel gives us almost exactly the correct weight and the correct damage.  If we shift everything to LP rounds and Very Short barrels, the weights remain the same, but damage drops too low.  Perhaps UT has a modest boost on damage? Increasing LP from 0.5 to 0.7 is enough for the Heavy and the Medium, but excessive on the Magnum.

Rifles are less ambiguous.  They clearly use full power rounds: we would expect a storm carbine to have a medium barrel, 10mm bore and normal rounds, and this results in 7d and 6 lbs without ammo, which is exactly correct. Some of the rifles get weird, like the gatling carbine, but generally the rifles fall right in line with Vehicles.

This may also explain where ETC and ETK came from: if ELP rounds are 0.25x damage, and LP rounds are 0.5x damage, then maybe ETC rounds are 1.5x damage and ETK are 2x damage. It's an obvious progression that only makes sense if you're using the Vehicles rules.

Range

Range is all over the place. Using GURPS Vehicles and making the damage/weight line up mostly gives me correct 1/2D, if you assume some rounding here and there.  But it only sometimes gives me max range damage, and it's often off by a little, sometimes a lot.  Storm Carbines and Storm Rifles, for example, seem to just have triple the 1/2d as its max range. But I also wonder how many people even notice the specifics of max range.

RoF, ST, Bulk, Rcl, Cost

The rest of the stats are either arbitrarily declared (Vehicles has a fine system for reloading and their weights, so you can just borrow that if you want).  For Bulk and RCL you just have to eyeball it from similar weapons.  With bulk, you can probably guess from barrel length: -1 to -2 if extremely short, -2 if very short, -3 if short, -4 if medium, -5 if long, -6 to -7 if very long, -8 to -10 if extremely long, but weight is going to play a role too (a very heavy weapon with a shorter barrel will have a higher bulk). Rcl is similar; maybe you can derive it from the damage type: Pi- and Pi weapons are Rcl 2; Pi+ are rcl 3, Pi++ are rcl 4, but this seems to work better for pistols and rifles than larger-scale weapons (and certainly doesn't work with shotguns).

ST is probably intended to be something like sqrt (weight) * X where X is 7.5 for pistols, 4 for rifles and 3 for mounted weapons, but I personally favor the idea of how much power you're sending down range determining how much kick it has so I personally use sqrt (average damage) * 3 for pistols and Mounted weapons and 2 for rifles.

Cost is exactly $300 times the weapon's empty weight. This lines up perfectly with rifles and pistols. It doesn't work with high-end automatics, which look closer to $600 per lb, or shotguns, which look closer to $100 per lb.

But What About...

These numbers don't quite work out as well for the non-rifles and non-pistols, and it fares worse (especially ranges) for extremely light calibers and extremely heavy calibers.  I also cannot, for the life of me, make ammunition work, but I sort of wonder why you'd need to make ammunition work: just use the ammunition in Ultra-Tech. If you want a crazy, UT 10mm pistol, just make that and use the ammo in the book, unless you want something like a 9.25mm or something, but why do that to yourself?

But this starts to highlight one of my concerns with this approach. It's valuable to have a design system to get a sense of the scale of weapons, but as you can see from the ST values, I don't think players will even notice if you use a system that's "wrong" if it mostly gives you more-or-less the same, sensible results as UT. If your weapons "scale up" or "scale down" in a reasonable fashion, your players won't really care where you got the numbers.

This brings me back to my "Just use UT numbers." If you're like me, you're trying to create weapons that feel like variations of UT guns, which means you're trying to recreate UT guns from the ground up, when they already exist.  If a Hunting Rifle is close to what you need, there's no point in recreating almost exactly a Hunting Rifle, but 0.5 lbs less with +50 yards of max range; just declare it lighter and give it additional range and maybe change another couple of stats.  Chances are, you're doing this for specific balance or character reasons, and those will trump any design considerations.

If you are making something weird, like an ultra-tech 15mm, breach-loading musket, then any coherent system that gives you results comparable to UT numbers will work, because you should monkey with those results until you get something workable anyway. So, in that case, you may as well use Vehicles and eyeball the results.

I think in the GURPS community, we tend to fetishize detailed systems. It makes sense: playing with detailed systems is what drew a lot of us to GURPS in the first place, as outside of Traveller: the New Era or EABA there aren't many games that really have this level of detail. But just because you had to crunch a lot of numbers and write an excel formula to get your dice of damage doesn't make that damage value more authentic or better than some number a GM arbitrarily pulled out of his butt, and as long as those numbers "feel" right, players won't know the difference.  So, for Psi-Wars, I'm going to worry less about the particulars of my numbers, and make sure things balance adequately for Psi-Wars.

What Should Guns Look Like In Psi-Wars

Psi-Wars Ammo

Once I reached this conclusion, I thought my job was done: just arbitrarily write out some numbers based on my research and then slap the right ammo types in place and call it a day.  But oh ho no, the gun numbers were but the beginning of the problem.  The trap lurking at the end of the tunnel were the ammunition types, specifically HEMP.

Here's what I mean.  Let us suppose we introduced Storm Carbines to Psi-Wars as the sort of weapon a primitive wastelander might wield and compare it to a blaster rifle. Let us simplify this a bit and compare it to a generic blaster rifle that deals 6d(5) burn against DR 20 (light battleweave), DR 40 (heavy battleweave), DR 60 (clamshell) and DR 80 (Imperial armor).

The blaster will deal 16, 12, 8 and 4 damage respectively.

The storm carbine, with its 7d pi+ damage, will deal 8, 0, 0 and 0 respectively. This is a useless weapon.  What if we give it APHC? Then it deals 7d (2) pi damage. Then it deals 15, 5, 0 and 0. Still worse then the blaster in every way.  APEP? That's a very expensive bullet, but it now deals 7d(3) pi damage: 19, 12, 5, and 0 damage. That's better on the very low end and worse on the high end, which isn't too bad, other than the insane price on the ammo.  What about HEMP? 10mm HEMP deals 8d (5) imp, and so deals 48, 40, 32 and 24.  Uh... woah.  Okay, let's laminate the clamshell and the imperial armor (Imperial is laminate anyway): then we deal 48, 40, 8 and 0. A pretty stark difference, but a little fairer. Still, the only reason to use a blaster is to crack open imperial armor, and there's no reason to use the more expensive APEP.

I've used HEMP in a game to great effect before, but it was a game with gauss weapons, where APEP was essentially free, and people could boost their base damage of their shots out of the gate. In this case, a portable railgun can cap out at 15d+15 (3) pi+ or 8d (5) imp, and in this case, the standard penetrate is often the better deal.  This also explains some of the logic behind ETC and ETK: if normal penetrators can get a huge boost to their base damage, they remain competitive with HEMP.

So, then, in Psi-Wars, I have to nerf HEMP and boost APEP to make these weapons competitive.  Psi-Wars is already such a bespoke system that I cringe everytime I move it away from default values, but I suppose I've done it enough already and it's not like other works (Tales of the Solar Patrol, for example) don't already do this, as long as I provide some commentary on the changes to the ammo types, especially if I keep the base gun stats very similar to what is in UT, which means you can at least borrow the UT guns even if you have to use a different ammo.

So, then, what should ammo look like in Psi-Wars? Well, I personally like the idea of HEMP, as exploding bullets are fun and replacing your base damage with a flat damage value has interesting implications that I think players like to play with.  So let's see if we can balance these things.

Penetrators: Carbide Rounds and Hyperdense Rounds

I like the idea of a core penetrator, because if the character has a weapon that they can boost (which is an idea I like), then using a weapon with a high base damage work well. Hyperdense is an obvious choice: it trades a reduced damage value for AP 5. But what do we contrast it with? I propose a new round, a "carbide" round that is naturally AP 3 with no modifier to base penetration, and that we lean towards pi+ in our weapons.  This means guns by default "leave bigger wounds" on unarmored targets than blasters do, which isn't actually accurate (blasters would leave these massive gashes and gouged out chunks, but we tend to imagine these small, neat, cauterized wounds, like guns would leave these messy, inelegant, gushing wounds).If we assume rifles deal about 6d (3) pi+ damage, a carbide round would deal (against DR 20, 40, 60 and 80): 23, 12, 2 and 0 damage, which is better against low armor targets, but demonstrably worse against high end targets.  A hyperdense round (6d (5) pi) would deal 17, 13, 9 and 5 damage, which is demonstrably better than the blaster, but it's also a much more expensive round, and it's a TL 9 weapon with a TL 11 ammunition (for comparison, a blaster shot costs about $0.2 in Psi-Wars, while a hyperdense round would clock in at about $5, if my excel sheet is correct).  So that might be okay.

Explosive Rounds

I'm not sure what to call these: I've been toying with "Microlance" and "Monex" but I want to give it a different name so people aren't confused by why HEMP suddenly has different values.  If we treat them exactly like HEMP but with AP 3, we get a 10mm Microlance that deals 8d (3) imp and against the usual spread: 44, 30, 16 and 4, and a 15mm that deals 10d (3) imp for 58, 44, 30 and 18, which are both vastly superior to the blaster, but if we double the DR of the armor against it (laminated), we get 30, 4, 0 and 0 for the 10mm and 44, 18, 0 and 0, for the 15mm, which makes 10mm inferior to a blaster for everything except the lightest armor, and 15mm inferior to the blaster on the clamshell and the imperial armor.

Alternatively, we could reduce the damage of the weapon and let it retain its AP 5. If we assume 6d(5) imp for the 10mm round, we get 34, 26, 18 and 10 against non-laminate DR, and 26, 10, 0 and 0 against laminate, and the 15mm round deals 8d (5) imp for 48, 40, 32 and 24 against non-laminate or 40, 24, 8 and 0 against laminate. 

Since this is getting complex, let's table these.  I'll add plasma rifles too:

Weapon	Dmg	DR 20	DR 40	DR 60	DR 80
Blaster Rifle	6d (5) burn	17	13	9	5
Plasma Rifle	15d (2) burn ex	43	33	23	13
Plasma Rifle (Laminate DR)	15d (2) burn ex	33	13	0	0
Rifle (Carbide)	6d (3) pi+	23	12	2	0
Rifle (HD)	6d (5) pi	17	13	9	5
10mm Ex	8d (3) imp	44	30	16	4
10mm Ex (Laminate DR)	8d (3) imp	30	4	0	0
10mm Ex2	6d(5) imp	34	26	18	10
10mm Ex2 (Laminate DR)	6d (5) imp	26	10	0	0
15mm Ex	10d (3) imp	58	44	30	18
15mm Ex (Laminate DR)	10d (3) imp	44	18	0	0
10mm Ex2	8d(5) imp	48	40	32	24
10mm Ex2 (Laminate DR)	8d (5) imp	40	24	8	0

There. That's a lot clearer. So, what pops out is that at 6d, an HD round is literally just a blaster shot. It's a 1-to-1 replacement, so it's probably fine.  The Carbvide round is better against low or no-armored targets, which fits a more low-tech environment, and plasma is better against low armor targets.  Those seem fine, and if I up the damage on the rifles (say, I allow boosted shots of +1 per die) it should allow them to be competitive without breaking the system.

Our not-HEMP seems more balanced at higher damage, but lower AP. 10mm EX is worse than Plasma against low armor targets, while 10mm EX2 is better. Both are worse against laminate (EX relies on its impaling damage make up the difference, as plasma has more raw damage).

15mm is just a great round, but again, EX1 is much worse against high-end targets, though it's a better round than plasma rifles.  However, a 15mm weapon is quite a hefty weapon, so maybe our comparison should be to a heavy plasma gun.

Taken together, this also means we should pay more attention to whether something is laminate.

Other Ammo?

We should really have more options than just penetrator and exploder.  UT includes a Stingray round, which is one of the lamest rounds ever, but if we combine it with the "AP 5 or Surge Arcing" of the neurolash attacks and make it fatigue damage with the same side effect, then "Agony rounds" or "Stunner Rounds" become pretty plausible warheads. We can also go with biochemical rounds, which are highly pertinent for the Saruthim and their Death Serums. I don't think either of these would need much changes (the stingray could get some additional armor penetration, though I suppose it's not strictly necessary).

Plasma Lance is a real warhead in Psi-Wars, so shouldn't they be allowed as well? Well the 10mm plasma lance has exactly the same stats as the EX2 rounds above. Yes, really!  We could redefine the 15mm round to look like the other EX2 (that lowers the damage a lot from 6dx3(???) to 8d) and we would have a slight superior round for the more advanced characters (such as the Mug) and give them an appropriately high cost (which they already have), and we should be rounded out.

Conclusion

I suspect that having read all of this together, dear reader, you start to understand why I say "Just use GURPS UT weapons, or just use Vehicles to ballpark it." In the end, we're going to monkey with the damage numbers to line them up in a well-balanced way.  We can also compare the cost and weights and ranges of the weapon to make them more-or-less fit the sort of weapons we have available.  Ideally, what we end up with should line up closely enough with the UT weapons that players can feel free to grab UT weapons without wading through dozens of bespoke Psi-Wars house rules.

In the end, we're building gameplay, and satisfying arcane equations that probably aren't perfectly correct anyway isn't that important.  Once I realized that, I felt liberated.  So, expect to see some Psi-Wars guns appearing soon on the wiki.