You’d never point a gun at your own face, right? Well, with some guns, you have to.
I was perusing some of the fun stuff over at MyArmoury, and found this nifty page of wacky historical combined weapons. Guns with axe heads. Daggers with spring-loaded blade-catchers. Weapons that sprout… more weapons.
And pictured here: fancy-schmancy eating utensils with built-in flintlock pistols. Critical miss on your dinner roll. Take 3d damage. (Unless, that is, the barrels point away from the eating end; it’s hard to tell from the pic. If that’s the case, your dinner date eats the damage instead. It’s the Quicker Breaker-Upper! [tm])
It looks like James Bond and Q would have fit in just fine a few centuries earlier. Hmm, I haven’t kept up to date on recent GURPS books; anyone know whether the system has tackled the mixture of muskets and melee weapons?
4 Comments
Diomedes
HT has the Elgin Cutlass Pistol, and some others, and mentions that “anything can be built for a price.” MA also has a section on combining multiple melee weapons.
tbone
Thanks for the note, and sorry for the slow reply; I’ve been out of town a bit.
I checked out the combo weapon rules on MA 214, and it’s nice to see those options. I wonder whether the rules aren’t a wee generous at times, adding no demerits to odd combos beyond extra weight, cost, and Min ST. For example, an epée with a 4-yard chain attached will have higher cost, weight, and Min ST – but that Min ST will still be well within comfort for a typical fighter, and the chained epée will be every bit as usable and agile as an unencumbered version. Hmm, I suppose it’d be easy enough to rule in, say, a -1 skill for odd balance etc., when the weight of add-ons exceeds some percentage of the original weapon weight…
That question aside, it’s fun stuff!
Diomedes
Indeed, personally I think the RAW doesn’t make as much use as it should of skill penalties for “awkward” weapons, like the -2 for the trident. It allows more variation.
tbone
Just checked out trident again in MA. Interesting blend of merits and demerits; pretty good write-up overall. Like you say, that “awkward” penalty could be applied to many more weapons – including odd combination weapons, like that epée with chain. Using trident as a model, any weapon with the “awkward” trait would take a -2 TH.
MA even allows for the removal of “awkward” penalty via a perk, so it need not even be a big disadvantage, just a need for a little extra training.
Anyway. looking at the huge list of melee weapons in BS and MA, I sure wish 4e had gone the route of a weapon design system that would have generated all those weapons and any others that can be imagined! Oh well, as I know from experience, it’s probably impossible to create such a system that doesn’t also muck with well-known stats for many classic weapons that have been in the game from its beginning (and I don’t blame the 4e team for hesitating to do that).