Re: GM-controlled Bad Luck points

psychohist wrote:
> Brian Gleichman posts, in part:
> 
>   Few police departments today issue revolvers. Starting
>   in the 80s, automatics became the standard choice. Some
>   departments leave it up to the individual  (within
>   guidelines) and you do see a wheel gun now and then,
>   but they are rare at least in OK, TX areas I travel.
> 
> My understanding is that this was a result of increased reliability of
> semiautomatic pistols.  In other words, Peter's suggestion may be
> dated, but wouldn't necessarily be incorrect, for example for a game
> set in earlier decades.

My personal sweet spot for Modern Action RPG campaigns is the mid 1980s,
because that was when I was a kid, and I have fond memories of a lot of
movies (some might remember that the system's original title, or working
title, was Action Movie RPG - I changed it mostly because it made people 
think of John Woo, which is wrong (and who is wrong, on all possible 
levels)).

But really, the system should be able to handle any action setting. In a
space opera setting, you'd need to add futuristic firearms (and energy
rapiers, although these should be easy), but the character subtype
infrastructure is already in place, with subtypes such as the
Special/Cyborg, Skilled/Spacer, Skilled/Hacker and Skilled/Advanced.

Anything from mid 19th century to very near future should be doable
as-is (just delete or ignore firearms that are too advanced). Anything 
earlier would require the addition ot period-appropriate firearms. A 
campaign set in a pre-gunpowder setting should be doable, because I have 
given quite a bit of attention to unarmed combat and melee weapon combat 
(because both of these are intrinsically cool), although probably more 
than half of the combat rules will deal with firearms, so one would miss 
out on some system elements.

Anyway, if automatic pistol reliability has gone up, I'd need to mention
that somewhere in the rules, but it was my assumption that handgun
technology, in the sense of pistols and revolvers, hadn't really changed
much in nearly a century. So it's very useful and valuable to get that 
kind of assumption squashed...

-- 
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org