Damage of an High Explosive/Incendiary Armor Piercing Anti-Materiel Rifle (HEIAP AMR)

Question

Let's face it, mankind is evil. We invented means to destroy one another under the guidance of mages since the dawn of time. We shed off the yoke of the werebeasts during the Impergium and made them pariahs. We launched the first and second Inquisition to drive out the undead. We fortified our holdings with the works of the Order of Leopold. Then the Order of Reason took their teachings and went rampant to fortify its hold on Reality. Humans under the guidance of defectors beat them and their puppets to a pulp in 1945. And Resistance against any such overlords, be they Lycanthrope, Undead or Realitywarper is strong in the social experiment that we call "America".

Anyway. We have come a long way, and our weapons are honed and refined to a point where Norway produces one of the best rounds to go hunting for any supernatural being: The Raufos Mk.211 in .50 BMG, loaded in any compatible Anti-materiel Rifle, is the ultimate weapon for this...

Well, wait, the weapons tables in 20th Anniversary only go up to Rifle using a (30.06) cartridge as their 8-Damage entry ¹, and the only mention I can find for an Anti-materiel rifle is in Hunters Hunted II, but no damage values for it.

The only other weapon in this caliber, the .50 caliber Heavy Machine gun (most likely the venerable M2 Browning), is listed with a damage code of 16. ²

The best rules inspiration for HEIAP I can find is actually in Mage: it lists Flechette (which is akin to the armor penetrator) and Incendiary Rounds ³, which are doing some aggravated damage, but describes them also as "phosphorous" in a table of hypertech weaponry ammo, so possibly not the best analog for a round that punches a neat hole, then detonates in the target. Let alone for being a gun chambered in a cartridge that even without this specialty ammunition is used to shoot straight through a normal vehicle's body, destroy engines and shoot down aircraft. There have been tests of shooting Raufoss Mk.211 it on replica bodies showing it'd detonate inside bodies.

_{Do I miss something that would help in estimating the damage?}

As a result, I estimate an Anti-materiel Rifle to have a damage of roughly the following stats:

Anti-materiel Rifle (PGM Hecate II, .50 BMG)- Damage: 14/L - Range 2000 yards (1800 m) - Rate 1 - Clip: 7 - Conceal N/A - Notes: N/A

Raufoss Mk211 - Damage: - Effects: Reduce any body armor by -4. If a present armor is totally negated: Treat all damage also as fire damage.

Is this loadout balanced compared to other weapons available in the circumstances of a Hunter, or did I overdo it to get to the vehicle-stopping properties and a somewhat good representation of the gun and ammo?

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1 - V20 p.280 ; M20 p.452 ; W20 p.303 ; C20 p.287
2 - M20 p.453
3 - M20 p.454

Answer 1

Bombs fall, everybody dies.

Vampire isn't supposed to be a game where human militaries play a large role. That's part of the point of the Masquerade - vampires are afraid that humans will wipe them out if their existence becomes widely known.

If things degenerate to the point where vampires are getting shot at by miltary heavy weapons, just kill them. If you want to use mechanics, just pull out a big pile of dice and roll them, with every success doing a point of lethal damage. Vampires typically only have 7 health levels, so 20 or 30 dice should be enough to ensure the true deaths of whatever vampire was dumb enough to pick a fight with the full force of the military.

There are rules for military vehicles in M20, and honestly, they're so powerful that a squad of dudes in a tank can fight multiple vampire Methuselahs and win - so much so that one of White Wolf's former designers (unofficially) rewrote nerfed versions of them for games where fighting them isn't meant to be either instant death or a boring grindfest where neither party is capable of harming the other.

Of course, if the PC'S haven't been stupid, and you want to use a hunt by military forces as a part of the game, I'd suggest maybe showing a powerful vampire openly fight the military and getting obliterated, and then running a session of the PC's running and hiding from military vehicles and maybe fighting a squad or two of soldiers with rifles - with the tension of having to take out the soldiers before they can alert their comrades to the PCs' location.

Answer 2

In your question you mention M20 having Flechettes and Incendiary rounds. The same table (p453) also lists explosive shells. Additionally, there's an explosives chart two pages later (455) that includes small rockets and artillery shells.

While maybe not the most directly applicable answer, I also recommend taking a glance at Scion 1e's Companion book, specifically p266-269. While the action tracking (Tick System) is slightly different, the stats are quite comparable to WoD, including that Epic Strength and Stamina can act like Potence and Fortitude respectively. The main consideration is that comparable weapons at military grade levels appear to float a bit higher for damage. Otherwise, it is still a d10 system based on success counting, deals damage in bashing/lethal/aggravated increments, and separates hitting from damage.