Considering how quickly automatic weapons spray out bullets is it really realistic to let a player say something to the effect of, "I discharge seven rounds...three on the first guy and then I walk my fire over to use four on the other guy."

Would it be more realistic to change the options a player has to, "semi automatic shot", "three round burst", "~ten round burst", "~thirty round burst", "~fifty round Rambo rage"?

The options available for a given firearm would depend on whether that many rounds being discharged in under three seconds is possible based on the cyclic rate of fire. Hence something like a M3A1 would have less options than a SAW.

To make it even more realistic maybe the amount of rounds actually discharged would be modified by plus or minus ten percent of what the player wanted to discharge.

Would that be realistic? Would it be too cumbersome to be cool? What do you think?

Simple answer: Yes, it's completely reasonable to specify the number of rounds for most weapons.

In about five minutes with the SAW, I could reliably choose any number of rounds between one and ten, and fire a string of that number repeatedly with a margin of error of maybe 1 round every three to five strings.

I say most weapons, because we've all seen the Phalanx.

And while some semantics monkey will come in here and "completely blow my response out of the water" or some such, my overall answer is "yes, for the purposes of playing Shadowrun, there is enough realism to choosing a number of rounds to fire that it shouldn't really be an issue."

That's not to say you couldn't try out a system like the one you're proposing. It's just no more realistic.

That's no margin of error! Your margin of error was ±.25 rounds.

~J, semantics-monkey

Thanks, Kage. I knew I could count on you!

And I said "after five minutes", most of which was learning the mechanics of it (loading, clearing a jam, etc.). It's really pretty easy. (Which was also part of my point.)

A suitably skilled gunner can choose the number of rounds he is firing, obviously not every SR character is at that level of skill however. ( I will assume that eidolon has significant experience with fully automatic weapons in addition to 5 min familiarization with any specific weapon)

With a smart link trigger (fire buy thinking not buy pulling physical trigger) exact selection of rounds fired would be trivial, but not everybody in SR uses an implanted or DNI smart link.

So in the case of sub professional skill level characters (skill 2 or less) that lack a DNI smart gun it is unrealistic to be able to accurately choose the number of rounds. This however is a game and worrying about the mechanics for choosing rounds fired is more detail than I want to worry about.

Edward

yeah, on the firing range, i had no problem spitting out 3-round bursts with my M-249, once i got used to it--and even when i was still getting a feel for the weapon, i generally kept it with in 1-2 rounds of the number i was trying for. what you might do, though, is say that if someone glitches, or blows a surprise test, they accidentally fire off a full ten-round burst instead of the 3 or 5 or whatever they wanted to fire. or a flaw negative quality that makes you always fire the maximum number of rounds available whenever you shoot during combat.

heh.

i knew a guy who obsessively fired only one round per burst, with his SAW. i figure it's not a huge stretch for there to be guys who go to the other extreme.

It's not that hard to fire 1,2 or 3 shoots with a machinegun or an assault rifle on full auto, in non-stresss situations. I think I would have had problems with, for example, firing exactly 7 rounds.
In SR, people using smartlink have no problem with firing the exact number of rounds. Assuming high firearms skill allows to do this without smartlink, that only leaves less skilled people. Those are likely to miss anyway, so I won't bother making complicated rules for those .