Quote:
Originally Posted by kcdusk
Warsaw had been nuked, but the reality hit harder than expected. This was destruction.
Five soldiers amble along a road in the drizzling rain, approaching what would have been the central business district. Shrubs and weeds are reclaiming the road and pavement, there was no sign of human activity after the firestorm that racked this part of the city almost 12 months earlier.
Hills of rubble obscured visibility. But a sniper located on the 3rd floor of a 4 story building tracked the soldiers progress through her scope. As the group moved into what would be "medium" range, using V2.2 ruleset the following happened;
The sniper took an action round to make an aimed shot with her Russian made SVD semi-auto sniper rifle. In the following action round ...
... The first shot is fired (aimed). Hit. Killed.
Same action round using semi-auto the second (quick) shot is fired. Hit. Kill.
Third shot fired. Recoil is starting to add up, but. Hit. Killed.
Fourth shot. Hit. The solders helmet rolls across the road, his rifle falls out of reach as he hits the ground stunned, confused and badly injured in the middle of an exposed street.
Fifth shot fired (semi-auto remember) and flies high and wide (due to recoil accumulation). The lone remaining un-injured soldier dives for hard cover. Laying prone and out of site, his mind racing how he can assist his fallen friend.
One action round. 5 seconds and five shots result in an almost total-party-kill. Could this happen in your game, with how you play the rules?
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Probably not. The issue here is TIME. The original initiative system is somewhat "broken" in the way it treats activity OVER time. Let's look at the performance of this sniper in a "real world" time frame. Assuming that ALL of the shots were taken at a ROUGHLY average range of between 100m and 150m by a reasonably competent shot, the time required for each "snap" shot in a real-world setting would be about 2.5 seconds... or more than TWO combat rounds for ALL FIVE SHOTS. GDW's "mistake" is assuming that ALL shots take EXACTLY the same to fire AND travel to the target. This simply isn't true.
The quick fix using the RAW initiative system is to give everyone a number of actions based on their Initiative Score. I'd give the players pistol rounds/spent brass, checkers pieces, or poker chips which they then hand back as they perform various actions during the round. Each ACTION represents ONE SECOND'S WORTH OF ACTIVITY. Each INITIATIVE STEP (the 1 thru 6 steps you count down) represents ONE SECOND OF TIME. Everyone who has an Initiative EQUAL TO OR HIGHER THAN the current Step can surrender a token and act. All participants act through the current Step BEFORE you move to the next lower Step. In essence, EACH STEP BECOMES A "MINI ROUND" to perform ONE ACTION. This means that your high Initiative Characters may get one or two Actions and then they will be "swapping fire" with any lower Initiative participants. No longer will they be "gods among men" dropping five guys with gunfire before anyone else can react.
Once you begin to consider each Initiative Step as an "element of time," you may want certain Actions to take MULTIPLE Steps to complete. The reload of a pistol for example. Most people can speed reload (ie drop the empty mag on the ground) a pistol in about 3 Seconds/Steps. A good pistol shooter can do it in 2 Seconds/Steps and a MASTER Pistol Shooter in IPSC/IDPA can reload in ONE SECOND/STEP.
In my own system, I rule it takes 1 Second/Step per Range Band to make a Snap Shot (double this for Aimed Shots). In other words;
- 1 Second/Initiative Step for an attack at Short Range.
- 2 Seconds/Initiative Steps for a Medium Range attack.
- 3 Seconds/Initiative Steps for a Long Range attack.
- 4 Seconds/Initiative Steps for an Extreme Range attack.
This takes into account the time it takes to aim, fire and for the bullet to travel to the target. For instance, that SVD has an 800 meter per second flight time so a shot at 100 meters would take 0.12 Seconds to reach that distance. One-Tenth of a Second is a "perceptible length of time" to most humans (ie the shooter can "perceive" the delay between the shot and the hit).
Treating EACH STEP as a mini-round will also help with Autofire. As I have posted here on several occasions I figure ROF by dividing a weapon's cyclic rate by 100. Thus an AK (600rpm) has a ROF of 6. This is the MAXIMUM number of bullets that weapon can fire in a SINGLE INITIATIVE STEP. It represents 6/10th of a second of actual (real-world) fire. It is much easier to roll 5 or 6 dice per Step than 25 or 30 once per round.
Randomizing Initiative:
I'm a fan of random turn/round based Initiative systems and I now use a system we tested some months ago for Twilight. We roll 1D6 and add the Initiative SCORE to it. We then DIVIDE by 2 ROUNDING UP to get a "randomized" score from 1 to 6 (occasionally 7 for REALLY high scores). This is the Initiative Score/Actions for that character or NPC for that round. We then give the player that number of poker chips for his activity.
If you want to see more of my initiative system, just search the posting Thoughts on Initiative by AdmLee. I have a lot of it posted there, especially the time in seconds for a number of actions.