The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
Better Guns for Dresden and Co.
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--- Quote from: Shift8 on July 21, 2017, 04:53:13 PM ---Not at all. Harry's use of guns is quite clearly one of many many many many examples of the effect not doing anything. Hence why the wardens use them, Vampires them, Fae use them etc. And strangely the just keep on working even when 9000 people are flinging every sort of magic possible at the same time. It is very much the opposite of his singular use.
--- End quote ---
Vampires and Fae dont have a murphionic field, that's only mortal practioners of sufficient Power. And the only Wardens that use guns are the youngest and most inexperienced of them.
And STILL, just because it has not been plot relevant enough to have appeared on stage, doesnt prove that Harry's experience isnt anything less than an extreme outlier.
Mr. Death:
--- Quote from: Shift8 on July 21, 2017, 04:53:13 PM ---Not at all. Harry's use of guns is quite clearly one of many many many many examples of the effect not doing anything. Hence why the wardens use them, Vampires them, Fae use them etc. And strangely the just keep on working even when 9000 people are flinging every sort of magic possible at the same time. It is very much the opposite of his singular use.
--- End quote ---
Harry never uses automatic weapons. To the best of my knowledge, he's used revolvers, a double-barrel shotgun and a lever-action rifle, each of which have far fewer moving parts -- and little to no "automatic" parts.
To my knowledge, we've never seen a wizard firing an automatic weapon. Even the young wardens appear to be using, at most, semiautomatic pistols.
The RPG books put a qualitative assessment on it, with a table on hexing. The higher the number, the more power a wizard has to put into the spell to deliberately hex things. "Conceptually complicated, more modern guns (automatic weapons, etc.)" are listed as 4, in the same category as older cars from the last few decades (like Harry's car) and "The exciting technologies 1967 had to offer."
At 5 are "Some smaller firearms may be affected, though conceptually simple ones still work pretty well, at least for a time."
It's not till 7 -- and the chart tops out at 8+ -- that you get to, "Simple guns may stop working at inopportune moments."
For further reference's sake, Harry's power level circa Storm Front has a base of 5, his rote Fuego spell is a power of 4, and he only gets stronger from there.
So that lays it out pretty neatly. The kinds of guns that Harry tends to use most often, revolvers, require more magic being flung around to malfunction, while more complex, modern, automatic weapons, are nearly half-way down the scale -- and they're right under the threshold of his base power.
(Incidentally, when my players found out about that chart, it made any kind of encounter with mortal hired guns trivial, since they could just cast a zone-wide hex to wreck their weapons. It also made some encounters hilarious, such as when a wizard took out a mortal driver by hexing his airbag into going off.)
Whenever fully-automatic weapons are used, they're always in the hands of non-wizards and they are usually a considerable distance away from the wizards they're firing at. And out of the four instances I can think of where fully-automatic weapons are used in the middle of wizard throw-downs (Storm Front, Grave Peril, White Night, Turn Coat), they're specifically noted as jamming in two of them.
As for Changes, the automatic weapons we see there are in the hands of the mercenaries, who are all up on the walls and not down where people are using magic... and out of those 200+ hired guns, their impact on the battlefield is a grand total of "wound an apprentice with a stray shot, while the wizardly targets shrug off every bullet harmlessly, then literally kill every single one of us with a wave of his hand."
You're right that we don't see wizards having trouble using automatic weapons. But the reason jams don't happen isn't because it isn't a problem. It doesn't happen because everyone who it would affect is avoiding the circumstances that would create the problem.
Nobody in my family has had a skydiving accident. This isn't because there aren't real risks inherent in skydiving, but because none of us are crazy enough to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.
Shift8:
--- Quote from: Mr. Death on July 21, 2017, 05:23:15 PM ---Harry never uses automatic weapons. To the best of my knowledge, he's used revolvers, a double-barrel shotgun and a lever-action rifle, each of which have far fewer moving parts -- and little to no "automatic" parts.
To my knowledge, we've never seen a wizard firing an automatic weapon. Even the young wardens appear to be using, at most, semiautomatic pistols.
The RPG books put a qualitative assessment on it, with a table on hexing. The higher the number, the more power a wizard has to put into the spell to deliberately hex things. "Conceptually complicated, more modern guns (automatic weapons, etc.)" are listed as 4, in the same category as older cars from the last few decades (like Harry's car) and "The exciting technologies 1967 had to offer."
At 5 are "Some smaller firearms may be affected, though conceptually simple ones still work pretty well, at least for a time."
It's not till 7 -- and the chart tops out at 8+ -- that you get to, "Simple guns may stop working at inopportune moments."
For further reference's sake, Harry's power level circa Storm Front has a base of 5, his rote Fuego spell is a power of 4, and he only gets stronger from there.
So that lays it out pretty neatly. The kinds of guns that Harry tends to use most often, revolvers, require more magic being flung around to malfunction, while more complex, modern, automatic weapons, are nearly half-way down the scale -- and they're right under the threshold of his base power.
(Incidentally, when my players found out about that chart, it made any kind of encounter with mortal hired guns trivial, since they could just cast a zone-wide hex to wreck their weapons. It also made some encounters hilarious, such as when a wizard took out a mortal driver by hexing his airbag into going off.)
Whenever fully-automatic weapons are used, they're always in the hands of non-wizards and they are usually a considerable distance away from the wizards they're firing at. And out of the four instances I can think of where fully-automatic weapons are used in the middle of wizard throw-downs (Storm Front, Grave Peril, White Night, Turn Coat), they're specifically noted as jamming in two of them.
As for Changes, the automatic weapons we see there are in the hands of the mercenaries, who are all up on the walls and not down where people are using magic... and out of those 200+ hired guns, their impact on the battlefield is a grand total of "wound an apprentice with a stray shot, while the wizardly targets shrug off every bullet harmlessly, then literally kill every single one of us with a wave of his hand."
You're right that we don't see wizards having trouble using automatic weapons. But the reason jams don't happen isn't because it isn't a problem. It doesn't happen because everyone who it would affect is avoiding the circumstances that would create the problem.
Nobody in my family has had a skydiving accident. This isn't because there aren't real risks inherent in skydiving, but because none of us are crazy enough to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.
--- End quote ---
Lever actions are extremely complex relatively speaking. And again, fully automatic weapons are meaninglessly more complex. Feel free to look this up. Its not like full auto weapons have some ultra complicated mechanism for this. And additionally, you would rarely use full auto anyhow in most situations.
I could care less about the RPG, thanks.
It has been suggested already that the real reason the old wizards dont use the guns as much is they they are just that, old backwards farts. If wizard interference was that good that they could just boink out all the guns, they would do this every single fight. Except they dont.
More to the point, the level of complexity between a revolver and a automatic pistol is tiny really. Unless you think springs are complicated.
Blaze:
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Mr. Death:
Let's try breaking this down to the numbers.
Any gun, regardless of its cycling mechanism, has a chance of jamming with any given shot. This is true in the real world on a normal day. Even with a double-barreled shotgun -- which doesn't have a cycling mechanism -- wear and tear and dirt in the barrel can make an empty shell stick when you go to reload. At the end of a long day of trap shooting, I've seen it happen.
Therefore, the more often a gun is fired, the more opportunities it will have to fail. Additionally, the more a gun is fired, the more likely subsequent shots will jam or otherwise fail, thanks to the accumulation of powder, oil and other grime.
By that metric alone -- totally ignoring the hexing field -- fully-automatic, high-capacity weapons are more likely to jam in the same time frame as single-shot revolvers, shotguns or rifles.
Now let's say, for the sake of argument, that regardless of the gun's cycling mechanism Harry's ambient hexing field creates a flat 5% chance of jamming on any given shot.
Harry's 6-shot revolver, given a 1/20 chance of failure, can be generally relied upon to get off its shots without malfunctioning.
A 30-round assault rifle, given the same 1/20 chance of failure, is much more likely to jam before it gets through all its shots.
To go a little further, if Harry goes through a reload and empties his revolver a second time, he's still looking at pretty good odds of going without a jam.
Harry could certainly fire his revolver 30 times, but he's very unlikely to. If he's fighting something that can soak 30 shots from a .44 (be it one really tough creature or 30 individuals), he's honestly better off running away. Hell, if he fires six shots into something and it hasn't gone down yet, chances are the other 24 aren't going to make much more of a difference.
If he reloads the assault rifle and empties it again, then statistically speaking, he's looking at three jams.
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