Pistols in Close Combat

Hello out there!

I have two questions which I would like some opinions on. First question is how Resilient works vs. a Pistol shot. I know what the rules say, but they doesn't make sense in this specific case. In my opinion a shot at close range (melee) shouldn't be worse than a shot at short range, which is why pistols ignore the Resilient rule in our house rules. However, this gives some balancing issues imo. How do you handle this in your own games?

Second question is how to handle yet another 'unbalance', which is the dual-wielding modifier a lot play with to balance two hand weapons. Again, we found it strange, that pulling the trigger with the left hand should be so much harder than with the right hand (I don't live in the U.S. though, so I wouldn't know much about it), compared to fighting with another melee weapon in your 'off-hand'. However one could probably argue, that the dual-wielding modifier should apply to pistols as well, since it might be a bit harder to hit. At the moment we don't play with a modifier on this, making pistols very strong in our campaign (though they don't shine as much as they theoretically would anyway), when put together with the 'ignore resilient'. The question here is whether to 'f**k logic', and just go with it strictly by our rules, or find another solution?

Hope someone can assist with this

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How do you handle this in your own games?

We play it as written. We have not worried about the sense of the rule, as that way leads to madness, I mean you have magic and self-loading wheel-lock pistols...

Isn't the dual wielding thingy supposed to be a 'balancer'? Or is it a realism thing? I always get that confused too. Again we just don't worry about the whole dual wielding thing, which solves the problem.

If you DO worry about the dual wielding thing, then I would suggest consitency, i.e. it applies to firing 2 pistols as well. This makes realistic sense as firing 2 pistols at once is notoriously inaccurate even with modern weapons.

One of the guiding principles that my group uses is that Mordheim is a game, not a simulation. Sometimes you just have to accept a few odd occurrences for the sake of consistent abstraction. There is a sliding scale of accuracy vs simplicity and where your group falls on that scale is better known to you than to us, but in the context of Mordheim I would recommend going with the simplicity.

You can always bend the flavour text to match the rules, for example resilient will apply in melee with pistols, but not from range because in melee you have the opportunity to push the barrel aside. The resilience reflects the fact that you don't have to push the barrel so far out of line before you are getting a flesh-wound or graze instead of a real significant hit.

Pulling the trigger is just as easy with the left as the right, but *aiming* is a whole different matter. If you are introduing rules that apply to the off-hand then there is no reason they should not apply to pistols just as much as they apply to any other weapon.

Thanks for your responses!

We've agreed on adding the dual-wielding modifier to pistols, so that's a start. The Resilient haven't been decided yet, but we'll get there