New Rules for automatic weapons, The title says it all Options

[Eryk the Red]

Actually, in the case of using Edge for a Long Shot, the shooter benefits from using the longest burst he can, so he can get all the benefits he can. Then he rolls his full Edge rating. That might sound a little twink-y, but I kinda like the image of that. The desperate guy who's hurt and/or a poor shot unloads all the bullets he can, because he's doing bad enough that more lead flying can only help him.

I admit it's kind of a backwards way, and a little bit of a cop out, ("just use Edge!"), but that, in some small way, does represent how autofire benefits the poor shot.

[Lagomorph]

one problem I see with that house rule is that you'll end up doing more damage overall with wide bursts and a rediculous amount more with narrow bursts.

A wideburst with +9 dice to hit is going to on average do 3 more points of damage, and a narrow burst will do around 12 more than just the gun + ammo + normal hits. If hits didn't add to damage like they do, I could see this working, but if hits on the attack roll are representative of a well placed shot, why should you have better placed shots by doing a spray and pray?

[Brahm]

[mfb]

if you really want a less accurate weapon in SR4, simply assign a -1 die penalty for using it. as it stands, an AK-97 is just as accurate as an Ares Alpha, if you're firing single shots.

[mintcar]

If you were to increase the chance of hitting with automatic weapons, I would suggest making it more difficult to hit all around. Not a bad idea. There's generally to few misses occuring to be realistic. Of course it might be boring to go round after round without anybody hitting anything unless they're blasting everything with a machinegun.

[hyzmarca]

[Brahm]

[TinkerGnome]

If you wanted to get really into it, you'd have to come up with a mechanic for determining the number of bullets that strike your target rather than just adding to the DV. So a three round burst might result in one, two, or even three hits.

One of the biggest problems with the current rules (and the SR3 rules, for that matter) is that firing a lot of shots somehow makes the first bullet less accurate.

A "true to life" system might be to roll for each shot, applying cumulative recoil to each. So the first shot is at no penalty (from recoil) the second shot is at -1 (unless compensated, etc.). This completely screws up the dodge mechanic, of course, and it makes you roll ten times for a full auto burst, but it's "realistic". It also does not play well with the glitch rules.

Personally, I'm lazy and just use the stock rules.

EDIT: For all of its other flaws, the ranged combat rules in CP2020 were vastly more accurate than the SR rules. Burst fire gave you a bonus to hit at close and medium range with a random number of bullets (each damaging seperately). Full auto hit with a number of bullets based on how well you managed to hit (with to-hit bonuses at close range and penalties at longer ranges).

[Deadjester]

I think its hard with the present combat formula that they have to make shooting realistic.

[Thanee]

In SR2 I've used a system that worked that way.

We had used the dice modifiers (instead of TN modifiers) back then already, and a burst gave +4 dice (but no increased weapon damage), and you would hit up to three times all figured from the same roll, with minus two successes successively (succ succ :D), each of those totals compared to the targets dodge roll (I don't quite recall how dodging worked in SR2, tho, was it just combat pool?). IIRC full auto was +1 dice per extra bullet and otherwise the same.

Bye
Thanee

[mfb]

recoil penalties just don't make much sense, if you're trying to model real life. if you fire a ten-round burst, recoil isn't going to make you miss your target completely. what recoil is going to do is make less than ten rounds hit your target, assuming your aim is perfect (and remains perfect during the entire burst).

and, honestly, recoil is a useful tool. if you have zero recoil, you have lost a lot of your ability to hit targets with bursts. recoil jitters your weapon, spreading your rounds out a bit--kinda the way shotgun pellets spread, and useful to you as a shooter for the same reason. if you fire a burst, it doesn't matter if your first round misses, or your second, or your tenth. one of those rounds (or more) is probably going to hit.

[neko128]

[mfb]

yeah, but as discussed above, the dice pool penalty for making a burst in the first place somewhat lessens the effectiveness. i will say that the SR4 autofire rules are a big step up from SR3 autofire rules. yeesh.

[Ophis]

Just a thought from someone wh has never fired an automatic weapon...
I guess that the reason autofire is really good for hitting fast moving targets is because it puts so many bullets near them they'll get hit by one of the right?
If this is true the SR4 suppression system would cover it well, choose area (a cone coming out from the shooter) make agil+weapon skill test anything within area at time or moving through it must roll reactions (=dodge/gymnastics if on full def) beating firers sucesses or get hit for base damage of weapon.
Only flaw I see is SRs standard if I have more actions I use more ammo thing as written but that should be fixable by applying some sense to it right?

[mfb]

suppression is nice, but to my mind, autofire should never make you less likely to get a hit.

[Juca Bala]

Well, in really I made this rule in a hurry and never actually had the chance to try it but I still do think that putting more bullets in the general direction of your target will make it more likeable to be hit and now I saw that when you shoot more bullets than the weapon recoil compensation you're actually wasting bullets... well, I'll try to think about a fix for this.

And I just thought about another issue that came from the SR 4 autofire rules: when someone is shooting at you with an fully automatic gun in the wide setting you can't even think about dodging, if your dodge+reaction poll isn't at least on the ten's (and you take the full defense action) you can as well be just standing motionless and the damage will be the same...

[mintcar]

If someone has you square in their sight with an assault rifle, it's a good time to spend Edge.

[TinkerGnome]

Alternate suggestion:

Autofire grants dice bonus to hit at short and medium range equal to the number of bullets fired. The base DV is unmodified. Successes on the attack roll may be used to either boost the base DV or have additional bullets (one per two net hits) hit the target, but not both.

Thus, if you go full auto with a tripod mounted Ingram White Knight (6P, -1, RC 12), you'd throw (normal pool) + 10 dice. If you got 4 successes, you could either hit with three bullets (each resisted seperately) for the base DV or boost the DV of a single bullet to 10P.

Since each shot is resisted seperately if you choose to hit with multiple bullets, you'll get less effect against heavily armored or high body foes than if you just boost the DV of the single shot.

[Raizer]

I had a rule I created in SR3 where you basically added 2 dice per 3 bullets fired as bonus dice up to your STR + Recoil Comp (representing controlling the spreay) and Recoil Comp added to your damage (representing a tight grouping). However, you always dodged off of a target # of 4. This worked really well in SR3 for my group. Maybe something similiar can be modified to work with what you are trying to achieve with SR4 automatic weapon rules.

[Shrike30]

Automatic weapons don't really make it easier for poorly trained people to hit what they're aiming at... they just make it easier to put a lot of lead downrange. I'd field the American draftees in Vietnam (M16, M60), or the Russian conscripts in WWII (PPSh submachinegun) as examples of this. Poor fire control and lack of fire discipline meant that these troops were using what the system would describe as "wide bursts" or "suppression fire" pretty much all of the time, and the number of rounds fired compared to the number of people killed should be pretty good indicators of how well this works with untrained troops. If you're at close range, then yeah, it's kind of hard to miss with that much lead in the air. Beyond that, it's an awful lot of lead not doing a lot of good.

The problem is that unless you want to start letting people mix their bursts (where they figure out how many rounds they want to fire "wide" (for the -dodge) and how many they want to fire "narrow" (for the +DV)), you've got to really hack the existing mechanic to get something reasonable. And if you do let people mix their bursts, you're going to end up with more numbers to screw with.

A variant I might suggest would be to handle autofire as a series of 3-round bursts (which you end up doing if you're engaging multiple targets anyway). The player gets to decide which are narrow and which are wide.

Another suggestion would be to simply modify the "tracer ammunition" rules, and integrate aspects of them into normal shooting... every 3 rounds fired gets you a +1 to hit at close range, then have tracer ammunition provide its (identical) effect of +1 per 3 rounds at longer ranges. I might actually incorporate this one, although I'd have to decide if I was going to do it for both types of burst, or just wide ones.

However, I'm a fan of the current mechanic. Players get to decide if their aim is good enough to rip off a burst into the target, or if they're going to have a hard enough time hitting him that they open up a bit more, "spraying" the target. Suppression fire, of course, is a really general-area kind of shooting, but a good way for really unskilled people to get a chance at hitting multiple targets, since you take no penalties for doing it. Narrow bursts are so incredibly deadly as-is that the thought of making them any easier is a little disturbing.

[b1ffov3rfl0w]

I don't have my book with me right now, but would it work to use the rules for suppress(ing|ive) fire under circumstances where the "aimed" fire would have a dice pool of 0?