Well, I do like the SR4 rules but one thing always catch me as buggy: the automatic weapons rule, for me, when you "spray" an area with bullets your are trying to hit at least one bullet on the target but, nevertheless, in SR4 the more bullets you "spit" at a target, the harder it gets to actually hits it!

I'm in the mod of trying a new simple rule: instead of wide burst reducing your oponent's dodge roll it adds to your dice pool for the to hit roll, so, if you get agility 4 and Firearms 4 and are shooting at someone with an assault rifle in full auto and, by some mods, got a recoil compensator of 6 your combat poll will be: 4 (agility) + 4 (firearms) +9 (full auto bonus) -4 (uncompensed recoil) - whatever modifiers you see fit. This way its getting more easy to hit the target and, by adding the sucess on the roll to the damage, you can up your damage potencial too.

Please show me your input on this. And sorry for the broken english.

I don't like it. The only reason it gets harder to hit stuff when shooting more bullets is because of recoil. I don't think the increased potential of accidental hits does anything to make up for the decreased accuracy.

No way man . I'm a swede, I've never seen a gun that's not designed to shoot ducks or moose.

I've just seen you and the other gun experts talk alot about this stuff, and made my assumptions from that. Also, friends who did military service have told me that it's really tough to hit anything with auto-fire.

Further more it makes sense. If I were to fire a gun or rifle sort of aiming in the right direction, moving my aim to cover an area like I would with a wide burst from an automatic weapon—I could stand there all day without hitting the mark. One thing I do know from personal experience is that you're more likely to hit with one concentrated shot than with a whole mag of winged shots. That lesson can be learned from shooting airguns at the funfair.

A swede here also and I have triggertime with a lot of weapons not designed for hunting

There is a reason for not firing short 3-4 shot burst with a 7.62x51 MG and instead firing 10-20 rounds.

Also, there is a hell of a difference between firing full auto with a silenced MP5 and a vanilla G3KA4. The rules make no difference at all.

There is a time for single shot and doubletap and there is a time for burst and full auto. SR:s rules are quite horrible at anything except single shot/semi-auto.

SR3's searching fire rules covered that pretty well, didn't they?

Well, it's better than nothing. The biggest problem with SR3 Searching Fire is that it only gets you a few more dice, which doesn't really help you against high TNs. It seems to me that RL automatic fire is most useful for increasing your hit probability in situations where the TN would be very high -- like firing at quick moving objects or targets that are concealed. Whether that could be reasonably simulated with the SR3 rules, I'm not sure, but (surprise surprise) I think my SR3 autofire house rules make a better job of it than the various options in canon SR3.

Reconsweden

From your experience, how would you make SR4 more match the different firing capabilities for RL?

I would be curious to see any ideas you have if you are interested in doing this.

brahm, the thing is, that's only true if there are no other penalties to the shot. with rain, darkness, etcetera, even wide bursts quickly knock you down to 0 dice. in real life, autofire is best when there are impediments to accurate shooting.

i wasn't making fun of you, or anything, mintcar. just, y'know, found it amusing.

mfb: No problemo. Had an urge to respond to save face, that's all.

that's only true if the shooter is above-average, Brahm. an average shooter, with 6 dice, is going to be SOL firing a long wide burst in any conditions besides a clear, sunny day at a target with no cover. even a short wide burst is going to put an average shooter up the creek at night.

Even in the light of all this enlightened testemony, I don't like the original poster's suggestion. It would make it the best choice in all situations to shoot as long bursts as possible.

honestly, that's as it should be. the biggest reason to not just use full auto all the time should be ammo considerations.

It just doesn't seem all that fun to have the rules work that way, though. The rules as written largely satisfy action movie concepts of how guns ought to work, while injecting small doses of reality (exact dosage varies). I'd hate to lose that.

the game designers feel the same way. i prefer more realistic SR games. one's not better than the other, inherently--but if you're looking for realism, that houserule isn't a bad place to start.

If I understood it correctly, the rule as mentioned by Juca Bala does have one serious problem: it would only ever be worthwhile to fire bursts of as many rounds as you have points of Recoil Compensation. Every additional shot fired in the burst beyond that would not give you any advantage. Wide bursts would be completely useless unless you had Recoil Compensation.

that's still not as good a model of reality as the proposed houserule. it's not just high-end weapons that benefit low-end shooters using autofire. the SR4 rules work okay for higher-end shooters, but not for lower-end shooters. (i personally don't think the SR4 rules benefit even high-end shooters enough, but that's just my opinion.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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

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 ), 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

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.

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.

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?

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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?