(c) It would make characters randomly starting with weapon skills less common in peaceful jobs, while still letting gang members and police officers start with good skills.
-I really don't see a co-relation
-This is kinda sad to me that we can't just make all the weapons have their own advantages and disadvantages. Though I guess it is because of the way the game is... Sure you can sneak weapons into a location, but if you were actually planning on using them you were better off blazing in with guns out.
Does the game's STRUCTURE primarily revolve around combat?
Let me explain a little more about why I proposed merging the weapons into such high level abstractions.
One of the principles I have for weapon skills is that it's important to ensure the skill names are very clear and descriptive. When you pick up a pistol, does it use your pistol skill, or your guns skill? If you pick up a TEC-9, is it a pistol or an SMG? The US Government classifies it as a handgun, but it was originally designed to be a cheap military submachine gun. Does it switch categories depending on whether it's an automatic weapon or not? Then you have a problem with a person who is ace with an automatic TEC-9 sucks with one that only shoots once per trigger pull, and that doesn't make much sense. If SMG is merged with assault rifles, but not with pistols, it makes the problem even more significant.
You can sit there and come up with reasonable answers to these questions, but you shouldn't have to. You should never have to ask which skill is used for a particular weapon. For this reason I'm very reluctant to make the weapon skills MORE complicated by adding general skills that are coexistant with specific skills, or doing partial merges to create classes of weapons that are kind of nebulous. You could argue for an automatic weapons skill, but what about the semi-automatic AR-15 rifle, which is essentially an M16 without burst? Why should that be a totally separate skill from the M16? The more weapons I've added, the more these issues have come up.
I would suggest that the key question here is really whether distinction between kinds of combat builds is a focus of the game, rather than combat itself. Abstracting guns into a single skill wouldn't change the core mechanics of combat at all -- this is an issue of skill building and recruiting. And in this area, when I think about a liberal radical group, it makes sense to me to have people more coarsely cut into gun experts, rather than shotgun experts, assault rifle experts, pistol experts, etc.. That feels more suiting of a sort of mercenary game than one based on left-wing radicals, and one of the core aspects of LCS is that feel.
LCS is gritty, and think it's valuable to the feel of the game that you can grab various real-world weapons to do things with, but I'm not sure that the current skills for combat are as useful. "Guns" is much more a liberal buzzword than "shotguns" and "pistols" and "assault rifles" are, and so it can be more fundamentally striking from the perspective of a liberal group that you're training people up with "guns", while breaking it down into "shotguns" and "pistols" and "submachine guns", while grittier, seems to be so much so that it loses the liberal perspective on things.
Still, here's an alternate idea, mainly being a couple things I was planning on trying out anyway:
One approach to solve some of the issues (though not all) could be to keep high distinctions between combat skills, but heavily penalize using a skill when you have a skill level of 0. For example, there's a sword skill, but if you don't have any skill with swords, you effectively have a skill of -5 or -10 rather than 0. Perhaps something clever like [-15 + agility] or 0, whichever is lower, or -10 + improvised weapons. Once you hit skill 1, you are back rolling with a skill of 1. In this way, it becomes much more important to assign the correct weapon to the correct person, or train people first. Perhaps accidentally hitting people is much more likely with no skill as well.
To avoid the explosion of hippies with weapon skills, certain skills would either be very rarely or never given out randomly -- so submachine guns would not be a thing that you could expect to find in the repertoire of skills possessed by fast food workers. This way, if you want to move into using SMGs, you'll want to specifically seek out and recruit someone who can train your people in them, as otherwise they'll be starting out extremely inept with the weapons and likely to get hurt or killed before learning to use them well. Generally speaking, combat skills in character creation get more useful as well -- which is probably a good thing, as they're currently pretty lame.
We'd have a general skill for firearms. Then we'd have a percentage value for how familiar someone is with how to shoot a shotgun, SMG, short automatic, rifle, or pistol.
PS: Thanks, Twerty. I'm surprised anyone on here knows it's my birthday. ;D
Dividing them into short and long arms solves that problem. An SMG is a long arm. A tec-9 is a short arm. Long arms and short arms are totally independent of automatic/semiautomatic capability - how fast they fire is irrelevant. Firing three shots with an M16 takes as much skill as firing one shot - all it does is lower accuracy.
Weapon Familiarity.
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Thoughts?
Johnathan, I don't really like the idea of generalizing the weapon skills too much. Because then it takes some of the individuality out of the liberals. Now, we have this guy being a master with the sword and that guy is pretty kick ass with pistols, and that guy over there knows how to shoot a shotgun while that teenage girl learned how to use the rifles we picked up off the CCS guys. Under your proposed system (not the second one with the penalties, that one's just awful) then I'd be reduced to having a sword guy and a bunch of gun people. I don't have to care for them and make sure that my favorite liberals had enough ammo, I'd just give them whatever I had and tell them to shoot people with it.
As a vaguely related note, it seems like the AK47 is underrepresented. I think that mercenaries and CCS guys should have AKs either instead of or in addition to M16s, partially for flavor and also because AK47s are less useful since you can't run around with one in an army uniform.
This is kinda sad to me that we can't just make all the weapons have their own advantages and disadvantages. Though I guess it is because of the way the game is... Sure you can sneak weapons into a location, but if you were actually planning on using them you were better off blazing in with guns out.
Weapon Familiarity
It was listed on the Calendar at the bottom of the forum page as an "upcoming event". ;)
I've always been a fan of gun "behaviors" rather than gun "types".
I'd be interesting in hearing how others combine their weapons and skills, whether it's picking guns based on the people you have access to, or picking guns you want and then finding people who can use them, or just picking guns you want and then giving them to anything warm and breathing.
Also, in re: Fallout, I had that in mind when I suggested the 5 skills I did upthread. And to that effect, I'll note that Fallout 1 & 2 also has throwing, though FO3 axed it.
You want to know how I handle my liberals' weapons? I give them one type of weapon in the beginning and I stick with it forever. Some may get a melee skill and a gun skill, but that's it. Tommy over there can kill anything with a katana, Joe can beat you with a hammer, and Sam can gut you with a knife or blow your face off with a shotgun.
Like I said before, they lose some of their individuality when the the pistol guy and the shotgun guy become interchangeable. I find the three-skill option tolerable, though I would still like a slow-raising, small-bonus guns skill because even if you don't know how to fire a shotgun, if you've been training with a pistol real well then you're not going to completely suck.
Perhaps three sets of skills: Small arms, which would be all the pistols,