[quote=“JimQuaid, post:26, topic:1703”]tl;dr
How about renaming it to “marksmanship”?[/quote]
Winner
So, here’s the skill breakdown:
Basic ranged weapon skills:
Marksmanship - practiced by firing any ranged weapon and throwing, improves aim and weapon handling.
- Represents, hand-eye coordination, target leading, judging distance, ballistics, etc…
Weapon handling - practiced by reloading, applying weapon mods, etc, improves reloading speed, maintenance if we add that.
Mechanics - crafting ammo. There’s no reason to magically learn how to press ammo from handling guns.
Weapon-specific skills - Accuracy, reloading, handling, etc for the specific weapon class.
Rifles - Weapon with a shoulder-stock and sights (irons or scope)
Includes conventional rifles, assault rifles, crossbows, and pistols with a modded-on shoulder stock. Oh, and laser rifles.
Pistols - Weapons with a “pistol grip” and sights.
Glock 19, laser pistols, a theoretical hand crossbow.
Bows - Weapons with an elastic action drawn with both hands.
Longbow, slingshot
Throwing - throwing, and tools that provide throwing assistance.
Thrown items, atlatl, sling
Heavy weapons - Works somewhat differently, more about handling than very high precision, because these aren’t precision weapons. Yes, this is a compromise because we don’t want a proliferation of different skills for every wacky heavy weapon type.
grenade launchers, LAWs, flamethrowers, RPGs
RE: Target practice, I totally agree with William, the “only attacking valid targets” thing is game-y and pointless in our context, for ranged weapons at least. Shooting a target < shooting a moving target < shooting a live target has some validity, but to get good with a gun, you realisticly need to put tens of thousands of rounds downrange, handling guns proficiently is HARD, and you just don’t have that many live targets to shoot at. We aren’t going that far, but as William notes, the trope sticks around because they want an easy way to prevent skill advancement. In our context though, you have real costs of practicing, including time spent (those food/water/fatigue levels aren’t going down on their own), resource expendature, risk of being noticed (currently this isn’t a major issue, but it will be again), and xp/focus expenditure. If you can secure sufficient resources, you can practice all you want, hell we might want a practice action to make it less of a time sink.
If this really annoys us and we think of a good way to do it, there might be a skill that represents combat experience that can only be gained in combat with real enemies, so that someone that stumbles upon a ton of resources and practices for weeks before heading out into the real world would still have something to learn. Keep this in mind, it’s not the case that someone learns ALL the ins and outs of sniping*
from shooting a wall a few thousand times, it’s just that raw accuracy is the only thing we’re tracking right now, and we’re not taking all that other stuff into account.
Melee is a different matter entirely, and I think is the source of the trope. You can learn a lot about fighting without a live target, but true proficiency with any form of melee combat requires a live target. As such you can practice up to lvl 1 by smashing random stuff, then it stops practicing. We might even put a cap on skill gained from fighting certain low-strength enemies, but as it’s quite difficult to reach a point where an enemy presents NO threat, maybe not.
Seperate but related issue is conditioning, even someone who is overall “strong” or “dexterous” still needs to induce a LOT of changes in their body and mind on the road to becoming an expert an any physical endeavor. This is currently bundled up in skills, and that isn’t change any time soon, but it’s something to think about.
*Sniping is a massive bundle of skills and knowledge, only part of which is accurately firing a rifle, examples invlude spotting, determining what areas are likely hiding positions, accounting for wind, judging wind at a distance, preicting target movement, choosing shooting position, assuming a shooting posture appropriate for the situation, target acquisition speed, etc, etc, etc.
