Holy Schnikies!!! What did I do? It was an idle question for what was a light conversation. I did not know it would cause such an uproar. I know that the firearms rules were made specifically to avoid such a headache and am fully against actually TRYING to implement such a thing...just wondering in vague terms, specifically sense we were talking "vintage', if anyone had any thoughts on the matter to further the conversation.
Wow, next time Ill keep my mouth shut.
Nothing to apologize for, man. It's just a conversation, man, no big deal. It's the whole reason we're
here, isn't it?
Personally, I enjoy mentioning caliber from time to time in my fiction. A part of me likes that there aren't necessarily game rules for it, but the real-life shooter in me likes the ability to add some detail to descriptions when I'm writing, so it's not at all uncommon for me to mention gauge or caliber when describing a firearm in fluff/casual writing.
Generally speaking -- and please, this is nothing official, or even anything
I always keep consistent with -- I traditionally call most light pistols and some SMGs 9mm. .45, .40, or 10mm for some of the higher damage code SMGs and most heavy pistols. .357 is another possibility for a heavy pistol, but the traditionalist in me prefers it for wheelguns over automatics. Shotguns in my fiction are 12 gauges because they all should be in real life (
) and when in doubt I describe most assault rifles as .223 or 7.62, just for simplicity's sake, but sometimes I'll sneak in a 6.8. Anything smaller than a light pistol, or bigger than an assault rifle, you can get a little crazier with it because such "niche" ammo is more likely to vary, in my opinion, than the somewhat standardized stuff in between. When you get to the more specialized large (or small) rounds, you get some really crazy outliers. When you're talking about the more moderate and popular stuff in between, there's more standardization in my experience. .308 is a popular sporting rifle AND sniper rifle round in real life, but other than that you can just have some fun making up a crazy high (or crazy low, for hold-outs) number and runnin' with it.
They're just vague earmarks that folks might sometimes see me use in my own fiction, many of which are holdovers from SR3, and which are often influenced by whatever gun I'm lusting after in real life at the moment. Astute readers back when I posted regularly on SL could probably tell what I'd rented at the range, what I'd just bought, or what I
wanted to buy, based on what I had some characters use.
And there are always exceptions -- weapons with a weird damage code compared to everything else in their class, for instance, or ones that are obviously based on a real-life gun with a strange caliber (like FN's 5.7 rounds) -- and that's where the fun comes in.
I figure it beats writing something like "With a feral grin, Tyler squeezed the triggers on his matched Ares Predators and sent a hail of Power 9 (Moderate Damage) rounds flying at his would-be assassin," or "The hitman lined up his shot carefully, and felt the sniper rifle buck against his shoulder. He fought down the recoil with an expert's practiced ease and the rifle's natural balance, and kept his cold-eyed gaze focused through the scope; his mark's head exploded as he took 8P damage right to his ugly face, and another contract was completed."