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[kj1225]

Actually magic guns could work if you made it so it's more a reward to people who put in the time and effort to get them. Also you could make guns as expensive as they are powerful and in addition everyone who doesn't have a reason to know how to shoot properly could take massive debuffs until they get experienced with the guns. And really any fight is boring if the GM doesn't write it well enough.

[Remuthra]

You can also make guns extremely deadly, so that a firefight carries a very real risk of death. This is also closer to real life.

[kj1225]

If you ever look at exit holes of bullets then you would never doubt this.

[Fniff]

I think I have an idea for a system based off Akylon's idea. Basically, there is a list of "gun tricks" similar to skills that the players can suggest as well. These could include "Melee firing" where you use your fists and feet in conjunction with your gun, or "Parkour suppression" where you can maintain accuracy while performing agile feats. However, you must spend a point in the gun trick in order to use it: without a point in the gun trick, you get a massive debuff. Once you spend the point, you get a bonus when you do the gun trick, but it's a specific situation that requires it.

Anyway, I'm more a proponent of the idea that a game should be fun rather then realistic, and I find players don't like realistic firefights behind cover that only end once someone rolls high and blows the enemy's brains out.

[Remuthra]

Yeah, the point of realistic firefights is to discourage gun combat.

[Fniff]

I don't want to discourage gun combat. That'd be like discouraging sword combat by making it horribly boring. I want to make it fun and interesting with proper mechanics.

[kj1225]

Also two problems with the 'roll high and headshot someone' one a lethal shot does not have to be a head shot and really you don't even need a kill shot to make someone stop shooting at you. Number two is that headshots have a small chance of letting the target live and are inefficient. Body shots are much better. Also most people can run from a firefight due to the fact that most people don't know how to lead a target.

Also news flash weapons are made to make things go really fast and are pretty boring in general.

[Fniff]

First person shooters aren't boring, neither are action films. Both of them feature guns as a main part of them. Why can't roleplays be as entertaining as them? I've had a few exciting points in combat sequences in roleplays where I had a gun, so it's not like roleplays with guns are automatically dull. You said it yourself, it's all about how the GM does the fight, and mechanics are pretty much laws the GM obeys to make things easier...

[kj1225]

You're comparing Roleplays to things that are very different. Simply put you can't really make the exciting by applying the same tatics, I, and I'm using myself as the example because I don't speak for anyone else, would prefer to have my shots, slices, and bashes described realistically, not 'you shoot him and do enough random points of something to kill him' because that's boring, if I don't severely cripple someone by shooting them in the gut then something is wrong.

[Fniff]

Basically, I think we're going for two different things that are really hard to reconsile. You want a realistic RP that where firefights lethal and quick, like real life. I want a cinematic roleplay that has firefights that are varied and dramatic, like in a film. Both of these are equally valid, but I prefer the latter because it allows for cool scenes to happen and generally doesn't restrict the players to a few tactics, and also because the former is quite lethal and killing player characters tends to annoy the player in question when it's too sudden, since players tend to get quite attached to their characters and prefer for them to have a proper death.

[Kadzar]

I can't think of any ideas about how to make gun fights more interesting in general (besides watching some action movies with extended gunfights and trying to come up with mechanics that emulate what happens in them), but I do have some ideas about ammo tracking.

For starters, you don't have to have explicitly magical guns to avoid tracking bullets. If ammo is plentiful and the characters can reload quickly and without problems, you can forget about tracking ammo. And even if those things aren't exactly true, but those things don't lead to any sort of interesting situations, you can ignore them as just the specific level of abstraction the game is using. Unless you keep meticulous track of the amount of calories players take in and use up in a day, you can probably get away with just asking them to buy a certain unspecified quantity of ammo every month to replenish or bolster their stocks.

If, however, having to reload or running out of ammo in any capacity would in any way be beneficial to the game (not necessarily the players), you can instead roll to ammo. Either as part of the attack roll or its own separate roll, you can roll to see if you're out of ammo, which could either mean you need to reload or you need to think of something to do that doesn't involve bullets. For reloading, you can adjust what number range you want avoid rolling (and maybe the dice rolled itself if using a separate roll) based on the size of the gun clip to differentiate them, possibly including different chances for different firing modes. I'm not sure I'd actually recommend rolling for your total bullets on hand, though it might be Fun if you rolled to run out of bullets and then had to scrounge around your person to find some more ammo.

On a somewhat related note, if you're still tracking inventory by weight, stop that immediately and use this system instead. Not only is assigning items to slots quicker and easier to use than a weight-based system, you also become keenly aware of where exactly you're keeping everything, rather than having everything fully accessible in some nebulous hammerspace. You could even adjust this system so that some slots easier to reach than others, meaning that when things get rough, you might have to quickly fumble with a thigh pocket to get another reload in.

If you feel like actually keeping track of individual bullets, instead of just clips, I would encourage you to make them somehow scarce (either in general or just for the fight at hand). One idea I saw in another forum was that there was a zombie outbreak and the PCs only had 13 bullets between them. Or maybe you might have certain special bullets that are armor-piercing or magic or something; you'd keep track of those and abstract the rest. Basically, if you're keeping track of bullets, you should have a good reason for it.

[Bdthemag]

I've always wanted to run a game where individual bullets were counted, and players had to spend time loading their bullets into clips/magazines. Would add a layer of depth so if they didn't take the time to load up their magazines beforehand, they'd be caught in a firefight with little to none loaded magazines.

Although this really only fits in a game striving for some kind of realism, and it's usually much better to either have infinite ammo (But just count how many shots are left in a magazine, I tried this once when running Only War. It was okay.) or just forget about ammo and shoot stuff.

I find the idea of a realistic game pretty interesting, in which everyone has the same amount of hitpoints and guns do massive amounts of damage, killing players and NPC's alike in two to three shots.

[Remuthra]

I'm doing something like that in my new RPG, in that combat is done as realistically as possible. This is in part an attempt to make straight fights undesirable to the player, to encourage non-combat and stealthy approaches. The idea is that shooting someone should be your last option, and going around killing people at random simply isn't a viable way to play.

[Nerjin]

I do like the idea of counting shots. Adds tension.

[kj1225]

And Dirty Harry references are better.