[Home Base]

Guns jam. And, Murphy’s Law being the foremost physical law of our universe, it’s virtually certain that they will jam at the worst possible time.

So it makes sense to incorporate something to do with weapon reliability into the system. The problem is, anything that adds too much complication or paperwork to the game system will just not be used.

For the last ten years, I’ve been using this system. It’s worked quite well, thank you. It may not be as richly detailed as a lot of my gun nut friends might prefer (and I’m a gun nut, too!), but it adds the desired level of realism to the system.

It goes something like this:

• When firing the weapon, if a natural 20 is rolled, the user rolls again using the table shown below.

 If the user rolls UNDER the number in the table, the shot is resolved normally.

 If the user rolls EQUAL or GREATER to the number in the table, the weapon is jammed.

 On subsequent turns, the character must roll against Difficult for the approprate weapon skill (the skill used to fire the weapon). If the character rolls a catastrophic failure, the weapon will require the ministrations of a Gunsmith to get it back in service.