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RPGs

Machinegun Shoot

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Today was the first time I ever fired an automatic weapon. I have a 12 gauge shotgun, a bolt action rifle, the Mosin Nagant, and two 9mm pistols – a Taurus PT-99 which is a clone of the Beretta, like the pistol the military has used since 1982 when it replace the 45 cal 1911. My other pistol is a Sccy CPX-2. I have fired several other semi-automatic rifles and pistols, and revolvers. I have a Concealed Pistol License, so I know what is involved with carrying a pistol everyday. I live in Michigan, where open carry is legal and have open carried often.

Today was also the first time I ever encountered bad ammo, had stovepipes, or other major fails to feed.

I shot an AK-74, different caliber than the AK-47, an M-4 (basically same as an M-16), P-90 (Ever see Star Gate?), 1919 30 cal Browning BMG, 50 Cal BMG, 50 cal Barret sniper rifle, 9mm Uzi, 45 cal Thompson Submachine gun, 9 mm Sten Gun, and I think one other, but I am drawing a blank.

I just wish I could have got pics or video of my shooting.

None of them had the kick that I expected.

The Thompson submachine gun did climb, but it is so heavy it did not have much recoil.

The 50 cal Barret semi auto sniper rifle has less kick than a 12 gauge shotgun.

All the hand held firearms were not hard to aim if using single shot or just bursting a few rounds.

The P90 uses such a small caliber that it has no kick and there is no drift from your target on full auto.

Unfortunately, unlike the movies, a 30 round magazine is gone in seconds.

They had a full auto Glock pistol, but I did not shoot it. I did get video of someone else shooting it and of someone else shooting the Barret.

The 50 cal rounds were $5 each. The 30 cal BMG rounds were $1 each. Depending on the gun, the price for a full magazine went from $20 to $50.

I was the first to fire the 50 BMG today, and my second round did not eject and the brass got stuck in the barrel and it took about an hour to get it so I could fire my last eight rounds. I then had my 5th remaining round not eject and the 6th remaining round got jammed in it, but thankfully it was easy for the owner to remove from the chamber. Later, the case stuck in the barrel happened to another person firing it.

I plan to do this again. It was a lot of fun, but expensive.

Until today, I did not have real world experience to compare to rules I have encountered for automatic weapons. For example, Top Secret, had a rule for the 45 cal Thompson Submachinegun that it could do 5 shots a round, but each successive shot got harder to make. In reality, it is not that hard to put all 5 rounds on target if you are trained in the weapon. I figured this out after putting one 30 round magazine through one. It is a heavy weapon and does not have much kick, but it does tend to drift up. If you lean into it and know how to use it, it is not hard to get every round on target.

Machineguns on a tripod are very accurate and the bullets go where you want, provided you have it set up correctly. This just emphasized what the armies of the world learned in WWI. They are very loud and you feel the shock wave of each round when you are close enough. Basically, if you are within about 30-40 feet, you will feel the shock wave from a 50 caliber round. Smaller caliber rounds did not have this effect.

The Barret 50 cal was the semi-auto version with a ten round magazine. The owner had a suppressor, what most people call a silencer. It was a LOT more quiet and it stopped the shock wave. I could not feel it in my chest when he fired suppressed rounds. That was very cool. Unlike TV and the movies, a suppressor does not make it silent, but reduces the level of noise such that hearing protection is not needed.

I don’t think you can or should make a rule for every possible weapon or combination of weapons. If you try to model absolute reality in a tabletop RPG, you have so many rules and tables to consult that you get bogged down in the rules and play crawls or halts. There should be very few pauses in the game, ideally only for snack and bathroom breaks.

I will end with a PSA.

I know that the movies, TV shows, and the media have a lot wrong when it comes to firearms, especially gun safety. How many pictures for movie and TV promotions show the actors holding guns with their fingers on the trigger and/or the gun pointed in an unsafe direction? The way people run around on TV and in the movies with their fingers on the trigger, why aren’t they firing all the time when they don’t mean to? You don’t put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot. It would take a very heavy trigger pull to make running with your finger on the trigger not discharge.

The rules of gun safety:

  • Treat every gun as if it is loaded.
  • Do not let the muzzle cross anything you don’t want to destroy.
  • Be aware of your target and what is beyond it.
  • Do not touch the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
  • Store guns and ammunition separately and inaccessible to others.
RPGs

Godzilla

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I saw Godzilla today.

It was good, but I was expecting more Godzilla.

I heard part of a movie review on NPR driving home the other day, and they always tell what happened in the movie instead of reviewing it.

If I wrote a book review in high school or college and just paraphrased the book, I would get a failing grade. Why can’t they do a review that makes me want to see or not see a movie instead of telling me the bits that aren’t in the trailers?

RPGs

Play Time

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My son and his girlfriend came over last Saturday and played D&D while they did their laundry.

We had a great time. Wish I had time to write it all up.

I can’t wait until we can do more.

I am busily working to flesh out things they had done/encountered, just in case they change directions in what they are doing, or expand what they are doing.

RPGs

Calendar And Random Generation

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Having a calendar that suits itself to easy generation of random dates by a die roll is something that I find very useful.

This idea dates back 20 years or so to my brother Robert’s campaign.

12 months with 28 days, for a year of 336 days. There are four seven day weeks in each month. It is easy and simple. Roll 1d12 for the month and 3d10-2 for the day of the month. Use it to determine the data a character was born. It is useful for determining when aging effects kick in and when to celebrate birthdays, if that is a custom in the game.

This simple system can determine any random date with a quick roll of 4 dice. One always knows what day of the 7 day week a given date falls. The months of the seasons fall with the first day of each season as the first day of the first month of that season. Spring is used as the first day of the year.

I even built an HTML page with the names of the months and days of the week Robert uses for his calendar. I printed one up all nice and fancy and give it to him, and he tells me that there is a festival between the last day of winter and the first day of spring. I pointed out to him that the method we had used for over 15 years never let anyone be born during the festival, or any random events happen then. He laughed and just let it slide.

I like the simplicity of twelve months of twenty-eight days. So what if years are shorter? It is a game.

To get a year closer to that of Earth, one can do 13 months of 28 days and get 364 days. One then needs to make a d13, or come up with a balanced way to roll for 13 possibilities. I’m sure someone is better at this and can just think of it and get the answer. If you do, let me know.

Another option that is close to the Earth year, is twelve 30 day months, for a year of 360 days. The months don’t line up , but the year comes out. For generating a day in a 30 day month use a d30 or a d6 to generate the tens to add to a d10. For example, 1-2 = add 0, 3-4 = add ten, 5-6 = add 20 to the number rolled on the d10.

If you have to have 365 days, then you need a way to roll or account for any festival days between months, or at the end of the year so that those days can have an event.

One can determine any random date in a year for incidents, war, battle, invasions, natural disasters, weather, etc. This can be used for the past as well as the current year or the future.

One thing I like from Oriental Adventures besides some of the weapons and spells are the yearly and monthly event tables. They give ideas for building one’s own tables.

Once you have such tables, you need to decide what date something happens. Then just determine what time of day something happens, if it is important for the exact time. I recommend staying with 24 hours days, unless you want to do a lot of table building, etc. You can roll a D6 for AM/PM and a d12 for the hour. Or roll a d6 and divide 24 by the result to get 4 hour increments, or a d8 for 3 hour increments, etc.

If you want to get down to the minute, roll a d12 to get within ten minutes and roll to determine if it is plus or minus 1 to 5 minutes from that point. Repeat for the exact second. This would be handy for a ritual that must begin or end at the right moment of an eclipse and determine when the hero have to act to stop the bad guy, assuming the bad guy is the one doing the ritual.

I found this article on making a grid like that of graph paper using Excel. I have not tried it with Libre Office or Open Office yet. I used it to build a blank calendar that I can name and number and note events and mark off days elapsed. I have 6 months in a column with room to the right of each month for some notes. If more room is needed, I could do 6 months on one side and 6 on the other.

If you use training to go up a level, players can fly through weeks and months, so planning out what happens in advance can make it interesting if they have to break training to deal with an emergency.

I’m old school in that computers were expensive when I was young and I’m used to paper. I work in the computer industry and find them very useful for gathering and storing data, but they become a hindrance to use during play. I do have a tablet with my PDFs of manuals I purchased through DriveThruRPG, if I need to find something fast and do a search. When I play online, I use it to hold my character sheet since I only have one viable monitor on my home computer.

I am sure that one could build a program or script to generate several millenniums of weather and events in a few minutes, but it takes a lot of the DM’s tweaking and tuning out of it. One does not need to generate every scrap of anything that could ever happen or has happened in the past.

What do you use for your calendar and random date generation?

RPGs

Festivals

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There is a lot of talk about Cinco de Mayo today. I’m not sure why it happens on May 5th, every year. 😉

It got me to thinking about festivals and celebrations in-game. Be it a religious or secular celebration, like a founding of a great temple, or the founding of a city.

It has to fit into the game and can provide opportunities for players to do city/town adventures.

An interesting twist could be the festival/celebration/human sacrifice of an evil religion, whether it be humans, orcs, etc. What if the adventurers come upon it in the caverns/dungeon?

RPGs

May the 4th be With You.

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I had thought about a Star Wars Marathon today, but I no longer have my old videotapes or a VCR to watch them.

I might have one DVD somewhere.

I did not find any Star Wars movies on Netflix. There is the Clone Wars series, but I was not in the mood for that.

Instead I watched season 1 of Continuum and the first 3 episodes of season 2.

I don’t have cable, so I am not up on a lot of shows.

I found it to be pretty good, but it does move fast, like most types of shows anymore.

It seems like a lot of series are into the story and tying everything together. They all try so hard to build the story to get the fan base behind them.

It seems like they are all trying to avoid leaving the characters stranded in a situation left by a cancelled show.

Not all achieve the success of Star Trek and resurrect via movies and follow on series.

Continuum deals with issues of time travel to explain how one character does not cease to exist when his grandmother is killed. It must be a new thread of time, or our models of time travel don’t know all they need to to explain it.

In general, I am very leery of time travel. It seems like all the Star Trek movies and series after a certain point came to rely on time travel. They made it too easy. Some of their stretches to make it work made it difficult at times to suspend disbelief to get into the story. So far, Continuum has done a good job with it.

There are a lot of “flashbacks” to the future to help explain the action in the current episode and it helps fill in gaps for prior episodes. There is a major trend in flashbacks in a lot of TV shows. I guess that is one way to fill in the back story for those who want more. So far, I think it works for Continuum. We’ll see how long it takes me to finish the rest of season 2.

RPGs

Weekly D&D Game

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Wednesday night is the AD&D 1st edition campaign I play in. We all just hit second level after we roll played selling loot and dealing with the aftermath of being famous, and getting training. A lot of loot is now gone thanks to training, so back to the adventuring life! We go from 8:00 PM to about midnight Eastern. Tonight was our 7th session.

We get 150 XP for a session write-up and take turns for that. We just started getting 10 XP for each NPC and location/business when add to the campaign Google+ site.

Google+ Hangouts and Roll20 is what we use. We use theater of the mind instead of maps. We use tokens for characters and monster placement. We use the whiteboard pen to mark where things are, but not mapping.

It has worked rather well.

We lost one player after two or three sessions, and another player dropped out a few hours just before our session. So we are looking for two new players. The DM is in charge of that. Hopefully, we get someone who fits the group.

Last week it looked like we were headed for a TPK, but we started to roll just good enough to win.

RPGs

One Page Dungeon Contest – 2014

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I had thought about doing an entry this year. I had several ideas, but just could not get it to come together to match the high quality so many others will have.

I also found it frustrating that others were posting what they did. I ignored what they had, so it wouldn’t cloud my own efforts.

It’s now after midnight, so I missed it.

I’m not upset. I did the A to Z challenge this year, I play in a regular weekly online D&D game that just had it’s seventh session. I have maintained my other activities and interests and going to work everyday.

Life is good. I also have to start fitting in lawn mowing and gardening into my schedule now that my part of Michigan is warming and greening. If it doesn’t rain, I need to mow tomorrow.

I am looking forward to warmer weather so I can get back out in my kayak.

I can probably make my one page dungeon entry at any time before next April, so that I have it. I could even do more than one.

I like looking at all the entries, and all the maps, and ideas. I just wish that I had time to use them all. Now THAT would be fun!

RPGs

April, 2014 A to Z

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Well, I made it. Doing 26 posts is not too hard. The hardest part was coming up with a topic for each letter of the alphabet. I did not have a them, other than RPGs for this blog and genealogy for my genealogy blog.

I scheduled each letter ahead of time, so if I did not have a topic, I could add it when I got to it.

I had my RPG blog done well before the end of April. My genealogy blog I had a couple I let slip up on me and I did them that day.

I should have kept a backlog in my scheduled postings, but I did not. Now to build up a buffer to tide me over for the days I am busy.