Today, I feel like quoting from a Vietnam War memoir, "Green Knight, Red Mourning," by Richard Ogden, to demonstrate how for a role playing game hideous firearms-related gore is realistic and therefore necessary. After all, how can the players really think about their in-character character reactions if they don't have visceral imagery to react to? The abstract concept of getting shot and killed is something we're all desensitized to but perhaps the only way to get people to really play the role of someone in a violent and stressful situation is to give them a vivid, realistic tableau of the mangling and destruction of a firefight.

Even though pistol knocback is supposed to be nothing more than a nervous reaction, here's an account of knockback (into the air, apparently!) from 7.62 NATO rounds:

"[...] seven or eight feet into the air."
Uhh, wow. Amazing jumpers, those Viet Cong.

There can never be too much sprayed brains, though.

I think I've seen this movie.

I would SERIOUSLY doubt any report of machingun bullets causing that much knockback. There's either something else going on (like they hit a mine at the same time), or the report is inaccurate (due to bad memory, editorialising, or something like that).

A simple energy equation can show it. The energy contained in a 7.62mm bullet, even if absolutely all of it is imparted to the target with no lost energy whatsoever (a physical impossibility that, among other things, assumes zero penetration and zero entropy), will not knock someone into their air. A Mythbusters episode explored the science of knockback, and found that even a .50BMG round with no overpenetration would make someone jerk back... but no more than a few inches.

But yes, gore happens. In my current game, I have quite horrible things happen in combat. Aside from anything else, targets tend not to die instantly, or quietly. A deadly wound doesn't mean the target has been instantly killed; it just means the wound is too severe to treat successfully. So they gurgle and moan out their last moments as blood floods into their lungs, or pumps out the ragged hole in their throats. Be interesting to see how many people decide to shoot them again, or decide they'll try to not kill next time. In any case, I don't do it to discourage killing, or to be gratuitous... just because that's what happens. Killing isn't clean, no matter what the movies tell us.

As for being splattered with blood, yeah, that happens. It's called 'blowback', and will happen regardless of whether there's noticeable blood or not; that is, there'll be a spray of microsopic blood droplets from the wound, even if you don't see anything come out. When hitting just right, the pressure of the bullet striking will force viscera out of the hole as well. Won't always happen, but it can. (So a word of warning to those runners who like execution-style hits: burn your clothes afterwards, 'cause you'll be wearing their DNA.)

Ah, Mythbusters. Nothing like using a pig corpse to demonstrate something a few seconds of math would have sufficed for. Reminds me of one of Tesla's comments about Edison…

~J

Mythbusters is a neat show, as long as people remember it's entertainment, not really scientific experimentation.

It's like "science meets that crazy kid that lived two doors down from you in middle school". I love it.

If they were running downhill I could see a spectacular tumble, but "unreliable witness" is the only other non-explosives-involving plausible scenario I can see.

~J

If the account did not only mention bursts and tracers (and the context, which Wounded Ronin knows better, surely makes it clear that he's talking about GPMGs), the M60s might have looked like this instead of this.

There was a lot of (Al) Gore in Futurama .

But, seriously, the real gory stuff is in the descriptions of the trench warfare in World War I.

...I have a series of medical journal articles which detail gunshot wounds by different types of weapons & ammo. Most of the illos are diagrammatic, but still get the point across as to the amount of internal carnage these weapons can do.

I have used them from time to time in gaming sessions to help players understand just how that seemingly small projectile tore such a big hole in their character leaving them with only a box or two on their condition monitor.

I've pimped Ogrish.Com here before -- they've got a great picture and video archive of corpses that have been corpse-fied by various means.

There's a vast difference between knowing something based on the math/calculations, and having it proven to you. Not in terms of how it actually works in real life, but in terms of how confident people are in the belief that their impression of something is correct.

No, there isn't. There may be a difference between having something proven to you and having something demonstrated to you, but that's a different matter altogether.

~J

The one thing shooting dummies and pigs does not account for is the human's natural reaction when shot (or shot at, for that matter). I imagine that split second when you feel the bullet tearing through your abdomen makes you jump out of pain and fear alone. Of course, I've never seen live people getting shot, so I can really only speculate.

There are quite a few videos of live humans shot to death out there on the internets. Most either look exactly like they've been hit hard in the head (ie. all their muscles give up at the same time and they drop like jello with bones in) or they crumple down rather undramatically.

None jump, that I have seen. Weird shit happens, of course.

i've heard similar anecdotes. if i had to be scientific about it, i'd say that sometimes the shot that kills somebody doesn't kill them all the way right off the bat. they've got a second or two, maybe longer, to go "oh shit i've been shot" and then do something about it. with an adrenaline boost, a dead guy might jump pretty far/high. seven or eight feet? i dunno.

"Seven or eight feet" is also vague. On a good day I can get my chest that high. If they mean getting the center of mass that high, well, that would mean getting shot turns you into a world-record jumper (8 feet, 1/2 inch). I somehow doubt it.

~J

yeah, that's what i was thinking. who knows, "seven or eight feet" might be referring to their outflung limbs, not the amount of empty space between them and the ground.

One thing that would skew my statistics is that most videos about people being killed with firearms on the net are of executions, execution-style murders, and kills by snipers. In a combat situation, all that adrenaline is likely to make a difference.

Still, jumping high into the air doesn't seem like the most probable course of action regardless of how high on adrenaline you are -- certainly no other combat report I've read mentions such a thing. BHD, for example, is full of crumpling people, soldiers and militia falling down where they stood and screaming a lot, that sort of thing, but very light on jumping.

well... back when i was young and stupid, i tried cooking two eggs in a microwave. one of 'em exploded in the bowl, and when i picked up the other, it exploded in my hand. my lethal, military-trained reflexes kicked in, and in shock, i leapt a foot off the ground, straight up.

Medical shock (this kind) can't really explain some people immediately dropping down when they're shot -- there's not enough time there for any tissues to suffer from lack of oxygen. Indeed sometimes when a person falls down when hit there is no injury caused at all -- see this clip (YouTube, you can log in as username Pentti, password pentti if you haven't signed up) for example. For a serious physiological reason, I guess you'd have to look at the reactions, if any, of the CNS to sudden sharp impacts. Else you're stuck with psychological causes.

Hm. Have there been any studies on the "hollywood effect"? Ones with a test group exposed primarily to "invulnerable-hero" type movies would be optimal.

~J

Nah, that's not what I'm saying. We need one group that isn't exposed to popular ideas about firearms, one group that watches "get-shot-fall-down" movies, and one group that watches "get-shot-charge-through-hundreds-of-foes-screaming" movies.

Seriously, though, there's probably a way to set up an experiment without killing lots of people. Do people generally fall down when shot with less-lethal ammo?

~J

Eyewitness accounts by people in very stressful situations tend to be rather unreliable.

i think that have been stated atleast 5 times so far...

Sorry, should've added "I agree that..." on the beginning of it. Just adding my voice.