The Shot Is Easy
2nd Amendment Borg and the Hard Part of Guns
There is a one-page roleplaying supplement on itch.io called 2nd Amendment Borg, written by Karl Druid, the designer behind Frontier Scum: Acid Western Roleplaying. It is printed in black and yellow. It has a distressed American flag on it. It lists eight guns with damage dice and prices. It contains, in the middle of its rules text, one of the most honest statements about firearms I have encountered in any medium: attacks with guns hit automatically, without a roll, unless the shot is tough.
That's it. That's the rule. The shot is easy. Everything else is harder.
Frontier Scum is a game about outlaws dying in the Big Nothing — a frontier somewhere between the American West and a fever dream of it, where the currency is silver, the mood is bleak, and the tagline promises "helter-skelter gunfights in guttermucked streets and dying 2d6 days later." It is a lean, atmospheric game that trusts its players to bring the genre to the table and gets out of the way. Its combat system reflects this. You don't roll to hit by default. You roll damage. The uncertainty lives in the consequence, not the attempt.
2nd Amendment Borg extends this design philosophy into contemporary firearms — Glocks, AR-15s, pump-action shotguns, a .50 cal sniper rifle — transplanted into the dying world of Mörk Borg, another game in the same design tradition. The result is a single page that maps real-world weapons onto a system that is, deliberately and honestly, about what guns do rather than whether they work.
The contrast with earlier approaches to the same problem is instructive.
Two favorites from my teenage years — Twilight: 2000, GDW's 1984 post-apocalyptic RPG, and Cyberpunk's Friday Night Firefight system both used three-roll combat resolution: a roll to hit, a roll to determine where or whether the round penetrated, and a roll for damage. Compared to Druid's one-pager, these presented a different contract with the player, inherited from wargaming traditions where granularity was the point. These systems wanted to know what an AKM does to a flak jacket at 200 meters. They were modeling ballistics, and they were aiming to do it accurately (pun intended; you're welcome). The three rolls represented a genuine attempt to simulate the physics of the thing. Players in that tradition wanted the hit location table. Hit location determined severity. That severity was noted in the ledger, and onto the next round of combat.
Both approaches are honest, but in different registers. The tactical simulation systems show you the mechanism. 2nd Amendment Borg shows you the result. What they share — what any honest treatment of firearms in games shares — is the acknowledgment that the outcomes are lethally unpredictable and the situation deteriorates faster than anyone plans for.
I have been a range coach and firearms instructor. I have helped beginners put their first rounds through paper targets. I have watched people who had never touched a gun before, within a single afternoon, place 12 shots in the A-box from 3 to 10 yards.
I have not personally witnessed what a projectile does to a human body.
This is a tension I carry. There is something that gets glossed over in the gap between competence with a tool and the full consequence of that tool's terminal use. I am grateful for the gap — genuinely, uncomplicatedly grateful — and I am also aware that the gap exists and that it has a shape. Teaching responsible firearms use means holding the consequence present in the room even when the consequence is absent. It means saying, clearly and without flinching: it is ludicrously easy to shoot someone, including yourself, with a gun. To do so as a responsible and accountable armed citizen is substantially harder.
That asymmetry — mechanical simplicity on one side, full weight of outcome on the other — is exactly what 2nd Amendment Borg builds into its rules structure. Attacks hit automatically. That is the easy part. The GM's judgment calls, the situational modifiers, the exploding damage dice that occasionally turn a routine engagement into something irreversible — that is everything else. The rules don't editorialize. They build the asymmetry in and let it sit there.
The deterrent argument for civilian gun ownership lives in this same asymmetry, and so do the contradictions of how consequences and accountability are distributed in America. The tool is simple. The responsible use of it is not. The gap between those two facts is where most of the important and unresolved questions live.
There's a conundrum for game designers that I call the "devil's toy problem" — the challenge of mapping real consequences onto dice. Dice abstract outcomes by design. That is their function. d6 damage doesn't know what it represents. The abstraction is useful precisely because it's incomplete, because it makes the unmanageable manageable at the table.
But the thing being abstracted has weight that notation cannot carry. This is not a flaw in the design. It is the honest limit of what design can do.
What Karl Druid articulates, in one page, in black and yellow, with a distressed flag and eight guns and a rule that says the shot is automatic — is that the game's job is not to simulate the consequence. The game's job is to put the player in the position of having to decide whether to take the shot. The consequence belongs to the narrative. The decision belongs to the player.
The best firearms instructors and the best game designers are solving adjacent problems. Both are trying to make people understand consequences they haven't experienced yet. One of them can use dice.
The other one can't.