In role playing games, should firearms damage decrease with range?, My thoughts after a lesson with a firearms instructor this morning Options

[Wounded Ronin]

So, this morning, I spent a few hours out in the desert with a firearms instructor training to hit targets 200-500 yards away with an AR.

The instructor explained to me a little bit about ballistics, various types of firearms, and effective firearms ranges. Since we are apparently both history buffs he also talked about the evolution of various weapon systems and tactical aids going back to the 2nd world war.

One point he explained to me was how in many cases while it may be possible to hit a person who is outside of your firearms effective range in many cases depending on what kind of round you're using, your round could have lost a lot of power by that point, and might not cause a deadly injury on the person you luckily manage to hit. For example, if you got freakishly lucky and somehow hit a person standing out at 500 yards with a 9mm handgun, the round might not hit him hard enough to really cause the kind of damage you want, that you might get if instead he were much closer.

If this is true, does it have implications for how firearm damage should work in role playing games? Should the damage code or rating of various weapons drop in role playing games as the targets approach the maximum range of the weapon?

Another issue he touched on was how some weapons are inherently more accurate than others. Even if you have a very high level of skill, you're always going to get a certain amount of displacement at certain ranges with certain weapons and ammunition. It will not be possible to have the same degree of success hitting a small target with precision if in one case you're using a weapon designed for that task and in another instance you're using a weapon that is inherently much less accurate. (In this case he was talking about the difference between using a SCAR-H and a basic AK 47 firing Russian ammo.)

How would you implement something like that in a role playing game? Perhaps the weapon with the greatest potential consistiency is more likely to scale damage up, or more likely to get a critical hit. A weapon with loose tolerances would have a very low chance of scaling damage up or getting a critical. This would reflect the reduced chance that a skilled operator can get a precise shot to the eyeball.