Post originally by Banshee at 2003-07-07 06:12:43
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Ok, first off I don't have this suppliment, but I do have the Palladium Compendium of Weapons, Armor, and Castles and the Compendium of Exotic Weapons (which I use extensively for non-Palladium games). If this book is similar to either of those others, its got to be generic enough to import to any game. Sure it has rules for the old Palladium system, its a palladium book. To try and put out a completely non-palladium book would be self defeating.
Second, if your game system requires that you take more than a minute to convert a real-life item to the game, you're playing an overly complicated or abstract game system. The books I have give extreme amounts of detail for any game system BECAUSE of its real world data. Plus it gives meta-gaming information through the Palladium stats. You can see that X gun is better that Y gun because Z factor is greater even though the real world stats say they are the same. I can't attest to the accuracy of any of the stats they post, but its a hell of a lot more complete then what any gamer (or other company) I know would piece together. I own quite a few hunting magazines and gun catalogs which don't even get into details like you mentioned (how exactly do guns work in d20 (and which version?), and how many dice do I roll for a 9mm pistol with 3000 m/s muzzle velocity?).
In short, I think your review was overly critical of the Palladium layout and inclusions of their rules. Sure they COULD have left them out, but how else would they get non-Palladium players exposed to those rules and pique interest in the Palladium system? Also, when it comes to completeness of material, Palladium weapons compendiums cannot be beat. Do you really need a description other than "its a pistol" or color art? If you want a catalog description, get a catalog, but I have yet to find a decent real-world catalog to give me metagame information on body armor AND guns and their descriptions are equally useless.
My last quibble - There's nothing wrong with a black & white book so long as the price reflects this. Now that the price of d20 books are being realigned to reality, I would rather get a not so pretty book with actual usable information then a pretty book that I use 2-3 times (eg. my DMG hasn't been opened since I got it). Given the amount of information that Palladium packs into these books with illustrations of every item covered, the $20 price tag is fully worth the price.
Post originally by Wes Johnson at 2003-07-07 07:03:54
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Good review, but if this is a book that you did not like very much why not flip through it before you buy it? Nobody likes owning a turkey.
There are any number of fire arms supplements out there, I am sure one of them would fit better for you. Guns! Guns! Guns! by BTRC or Leading Edge (maybe slightly different title) by R. Talisorian come to mind. Both are far more generic, but also contain meaty amounts of data.
If you are using a gun calaculator to do damage and such that seems extreme. I go with the premise that guns = bad. One reason why I like GURPS for modern stuff done reasonmable simple or Millenium's End for mind bogglingly difficult...
One commenter said you were being overly critical of Palladium. Last I checked they are not some sacred cow.
Post originally by c1150 at 2003-07-07 08:15:39
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The R. Tal book you are thinking of is "Edge of the Sword, Vol. 1" I don't know if they ever produced the rest of the volumes... I found it to be a good resource in it's very narrow niche, that is, it set out to provide a collection of military and couter-terrorist weapons ca 1990. The few references to civilian weapons are usually just notes that the civilian version has a smaller clip standard and/or is semi-auto. The usage information [as to which countries and sometimes which agencies] is nice when present but not always there. As this is a 'generic' supplement it presents it's own firearms combat rules which are a fairly simple percentage system that takes into account [maybe too much so] the inherent accuracy of a given weapon. It also provides tables converting damage and accuracy rating, if present, to a number of systems.
BTRC's "Guns! Guns! Guns!" [3g3] is great if you want a codified system to represent guns in a roleplaying game. I'm not going to make any judgements about how 'accurate' it is as I honestly don't think I'm qualified. It's very math intensive and frankly a lot of work to get a collection of stats, but if you are like me, it can be really fun to do up a weapon and the start tweaking different things to find the point of diminishing returns.
More Guns! by BTRC is a neat collection of real and fictional guns with interesting text blurbs about each [or most anyway]. the only problem is a large portion of the book is the guns listed over and over again in stats for different games.
If you can find GDW's "Small Firearms Guide" for Twighlight 2000 2nd ed. it has a nice collection of 80-90s weapons and speculative future firearms. It also contains some historical weapons and some setting specific 'homemade' weapons for T2K. There is sometimes an information blurb. The 2nd ed. version also has a few formulas to take real world stats and convert to game stats.
I also enjoy "UtraModern Firearms" from Green Ronin though it could use an update.
Post originally by PhishStyx at 2003-07-07 08:16:20
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Just about the only thing I got from your review is that I know you didn't read the book.
I think you glanced through it in the store, saw that it is black & white, and decided to slam it online.
Well, ain't we lucky, we got you?
Just so you know, the penetration values discussed are NOT the same as combat rules presented in other Palladium products.
In fact, I wish that they would really take up the p.v. rules seriously and use them to enhance the armor rating rules with more detail.
Post originally by Chris Camfield at 2003-07-07 14:53:55
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Well, as was pointed out in the "Comments" thread, there are other gun books out there, which have more complete information, in my experience are also more accurate, and even if still black and white have photographs which are a great deal better than the line drawing in Palladium's books.
I have found quite simply that the stats in the Palladium book are unreliable - sometimes it seems the author pulled numbers out of a hat.
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