DC III and recoil

[ReHerakhte]

I'm rereading various DC books because I might have a good chance to get a campaign started with my gang of friends. My preference is to use DC III because it's had the benefit of many years worth of player experience with previous editions, to update and tweak the rules.
So, recoil.
Recoil has always been a bit clunky and time-consuming in the GDW system whether it's Twilight: 2000 2nd or 2.2 editions, Dark Conspiracy, Cadillacs & Dinosaurs or Traveller: The New Era.
I don't have any particular problem with the way DC III handles recoil in regards to its effect on a characters ability to hit the target but there are other aspects to the way recoil is handled that are... ah, shall we say, "interesting".

DC III uses the concept of having recoil make the Task to hit a level of difficulty harder if the amount of recoil exceeds the character's strength attribute.
I prefer this idea over the earlier editions because it's much quicker to implement and I don't want to have to stop the game flow to calculate specific Task numbers based on reducing the number by the result of cumulative recoil minus Strength score for each successive shot.
So yes, DC III is less fiddly.

However...

According to the DC III rules, recoil also affects the damage done by a weapon. This is where, for me, things get seriously derailed.
How? Seriously, how does recoil cause a bullet to do less damage?
If it was recoil affecting hit location I could understand it, but damage? No way.
Here's what the book says (Conspiracy Rules, page 119): - EDIT: I should point out that this is in regards to automatic fire

In addition, the ability to control the burst also causes the damage to be modified based on recoil as well.
For each range band beyond Medium Range (Long and Extreme) the base number of damage dice is reduced by one (1).
For example, once the cumulative recoil is greater than the character’s strength, the Base Damage is reduced by 1 for Long range and 1 more for Extreme range.
The minimum number of damage dice due to recoil is always one (1).
However, penetration can reduce this number to zero (0).

I think I understand why that was done, but it is, in a word, nonsense. The ability to control the firearm has absolutely no impact on the damage done by the projectile, should the projectile actually hit the target.
So, am I missing something here, have I misunderstood the intent, is this an attempt to reduce the abilities of "gunbunny" characters with stupidly high gun skills?

I have no intention of implementing that part of the recoil rules because most of my players won't want to fuss about with numbers in the middle of a session if they feel that that part of the rules seem a bit off.
Plus the idea of recoil causing less damage is absurd.
However, I would still like to hear other people's thoughts on this.

[Morthrai]

As one of the team on that version the best I can tell you would be to ask Norm, but that's not really an option That's not shifting blame or responsibility by the way, he was the one who did all the rules mods. If it were me I would have reduced the number of hits by 1 due to the spread at the longer ranges, but never less than 1.

[ReHerakhte]

See, that's the thing, reducing the number of potential hits because of recoil exceeding the firer's ability to control it, makes sense. You can easily understand how that would happen - you're not strong enough to handle the recoil, thus you can't keep the weapon on target, thus you'll probably miss the target. Easy.
Reducing the amount of damage because of recoil is... well, I've already described it as nonsense and absurd, I'll leave it at that.

[Morthrai]

Reducing the amount of damage because of recoil is... well, I've already described it as nonsense and absurd, I'll leave it at that.

Absolutely

[Linden]

Recoil has always been a bit clunky and time-consuming in the GDW system whether it's Twilight: 2000 2nd or 2.2 editions, Dark Conspiracy, Cadillacs & Dinosaurs or Traveller: The New Era.

Slightly OT but I always thought the dice 20 (not D20 ) version of the House System was one its better mechanics. Wasn't difficult to get your head round. Plus gave players some options as to how much lead they wanted to pour out during combat. A couple of well aimed shots, a load of wildly inaccurate ones, or something in between? That's leaving aside fireams skill being linked to strength (why? The game already has a perfectly serviceable recoil mechanic) and some fudging of the rating system - e.g. I've heard the MAC-10 has high recoil when fired on full auto but it's not clear how GDW arrived at the FA recoil rating they did, doesn't seem to fit the formula in Infantry Weapons of the World.

[ReHerakhte]

Yes indeed. There's some discrepancies here and there so that while the formula from Infantry Weapons of the World works overall, there's enough outliers to cause some head scratching.
It got to the point that I would search for videos of people actually shooting the firearm in question so that I could gauge the recoil. I'd then use that based on the various firearms I've used myself and make a decision on recoil. Sometimes my result was the same or similar enough to what GDW had listed but sometimes, it was very different.

For example, the HK G11 is listed as ROF 3 but I would have assigned it two ROF settings, 3 for the 3-rd burst and a 4 or 5 for full-auto firing (based on it's cyclic rate). GDW gives it just one ROF and thus just one Burst Recoil result (of 3).
But the rifle has two auto-fire settings - 3-rd burst and full-auto.
I would not disagree with the Burst Recoil of 3 when firing on full-auto because it appears that the rifle is quite controllable in that mode of fire.
However the 3-rd burst mechanism was created in a manner to allow all 3 projectiles to leave the barrel before the recoil was felt by the firer.
In 3-rd burst, the Burst Recoil should probably be 1.
None of that factors in to what GDW put on the weapons card but it is specifically what makes the HK G11 unique and for an infantry soldier, makes it very desirable.