Back in the day...
.32 caliber pistols were considered "enough" for "social" occasions. Today they are not.
Why?
Because back in the day, there were no antibiotics. Getting shot with anything that could pierce clothing and skin gave an excellent chance of starting a fatal infection that no doctor in the world could treat.
I think most everyone knew that the .32 wasn't going to kill someone dead-right-there most of the time, but it was still a deterrent. Knowing you'd die days later in excruciating pain probably made one hesitant to start stuff.
Back in the day also didn't have much for laws forbidding people from carrying guns (or very little enforcement if they did). Well... if you were white, but that's a different topic.
Is .32 still considered viable in a world with mages who can cast healing and cure disease spells? Magical healing is far superior to anything available today in the real world; where antibiotics, imagery and surgery mean that for many gun shots as long as you don't bleed out before getting to the emergency room, you've got a good chance of living through it (assuming you're not dead-right-there).
The emphasis today is more along the lines of a gun that can stop the fight immediately, because the criminal knows how good trauma medicine has gotten. And it's not as good as magic! Even someone who survives and recovers from a gunshot today is likely to have lasting impairments.
Magic cures injuries like they never happened.
I might also add that magic in nearly every game world is normally cheap and readily available.
If you're rich you can have your underwear enchanted to give it the same DR as 14ga hardened steel. That's DR 5 and that stops pretty much any 1d attack and is excellent protection from most 2d attacks!
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I've done a lot of thinking on high tech magic and its implications on the world. Couple of things I came up with was a drastically increased availability of enchanted stuff, even for the not-that-rich. That "Electricity into Magic Power" spell vastly increases the usefulness of "quick and dirty" enchanting, as does the use of rune magic or similar to make a magic equivalent to the psi boosters. Build it right and you can embed the casting for a spell with varying degrees of permanency into hardware. Put the two together and you can have factory style enchantment mass production.
ReplyDeleteIf every first-aid kit includes a magic/alchemic pill of 1+ hp healing to instantly stop all bleeding, suddenly only being instantly killed outright actually is likely to put someone in the ground (and, depending on what goes into a resurrection spell, even that might no be as big a deal). Add in mass production of charms of shielding or some such thing and life in general gets a whole lot less lethal.
Of course, the same boosts to capability go the other way, with enchanted weapons and ammunition being equally a thing with its own regulations and such. Using just a raw, unenchanted gun/ammo when costs are relatively affordable is probably the realm of the poor
GURPS: Technomancer (for 3e) is an outstanding treatment of the topic.
DeleteAn ointment might be better than a pill, since it wouldn't require the casualty to be able to swallow. Even better would be an autoinjector contained in an armband or the like, that the wearer, or his companions, could activate with a hard slap. Less blood loss that way, compared to having someone going to a first aid kit.
DeleteOn the subject of GURPS: Technomancer, one bit of flavor text that I always enjoyed was the passage stating that, in the state of Louisiana, a felon could be sentenced to life at hard labor, plus 10 years. Upon the death of the convict, he would be reanimated for another 10 years of hard labor. "Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time...."
They'd look at "The Walking Dead" as a prison break movie!
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