One thing that I noticed when the PC's went up against very big nasties
in DarkCon was that even those big nasties were very vulnerable to high volumes
of low power fire.
For example, assuming that an Elephant has 80 hits, it would stand up to
exactly 22 9mm hits, or 6 7.62 hits. That mean that the poor trunkist is
down after five or ten seconds when faced with 5 PC's with semi-auto *pistols*.
So, I have experimented with a rule that limits the damage done by small
weapons against large targets: ie you might be hitting the elephant and it
might die of blood loss in a few hours, but you need a very powerful weapon
or a very high volume of fire to bring it down quick.
The Elephant rule: (Perhaps it should be renamed the 'Jurassic Park rule':)
If the damage points aborbed by an being with just one hit location is more
than the damage value (ie # of dice after armour) times N then divide the
excess by five. -1 is counted as equal to 1 for the purpose of this rule.
N is dependent on the system, and should be equal to the NPC hit capacity
(aka 20 in T2k2 and 40 in TTNE).
Example: T2k2: The first 6 bullets that hit the Elephant will inflict
6 * 3.5 = 21 damage points. 1 * 20 = 20, so everything above 20 should be
divided by 5, so they really inflicted 20.2 damage points. Getting the
elephant to 80 points would take 85 more rounds, and it will be quite pissed
the whole time.
So if you want to take down an elephant, use an aimed shot from an elephant
gun, and not bozos with uzis.
- -bertil-
- --
"Desert Eagle! Desert Eagle! ... Minimi! Minimi! ... Light 50! Light 50! ...
HEAP! HEAP! ... Run away! Run away!" PC's encountering an animated statue
in a Dark Con combat that used the Elephant rule.