Just curious, You can fire up to 3 short bursts from a full-auto weapon for a complex action. Do you have to decide at the start of the round and state that you are firing the 3 short bursts? Or can you say you're going full auto, and firing in short bursts, but say, if the target drops after the 2nd one, stop firing?

What if its a weapon mount and remotely controlled (by a pilot program)?

The text from the rulebook simply states that the player declares their actions at the start of their phase. Since my group has been playing DnD for so long (where you can take a full attack action, then stop after the first attack if desired or switch targets during iterative attacks) that I might not take that literally.

So, couldn't the player declare that he is going to be using full-auto as a complex action? He could still fire 2 shorts and stop before the third.

Sounds reasonable to me. Your action is "Firing on full auto". Don't think it says you have to designate your *targets*.

Doesn't work that way. You can either fire in Burst Fire for two short bursts, or Full Auto, which you can divide into a Long Burst & Short Burst, or 3x Short Bursts against targets within 1 meeter of each other. The only way to do 3 Short Bursts with Full Auto is against three separate targets standing next to each other. Firing in Full Auto also takes 10 bullets regardless of how you divide it up.

Long bursts are a use of full auto, they take 6 bullets, not 10. Also, it says to treat the attacks as separate burst attacks, which means that you would not use 10 bullets for the multi-burst attacks, you'd use 9. (6 + 3 for long and short, or 3 + 3 + 3 for 3 shorts.)

You're right though, I had posted before I looked at the rules, and you can't fire 3 short bursts at one target as a full-auto action, there would have to be 3 separate targets.

The declaration would be more along the lines of "i'm going to long burst that guy, and short burst the guy next to him with full auto).

We really need a term for an all-out full burst (all 10 or 15 or 18 rounds available). Maybe Big Ass Burst.

How about Full-Auto.

Where is the 18 rnds/pass gun?

Earlier editions had guns with insane rates of fire.

As for 'full-auto', as you said yourself ...



You use the term 'full auto', but do not use it to describe a single, maximum-round burst at a single target, which is what I was referring to in my post.

The "with full-auto" is not necessary in that declaration of actions. It merely makes it more clear that you are using the multiple bursts section of full-auto to accomplish the bursts.

If I were to say "I'm going to go full-auto on that guy" I think most everyone would agree its clear that it is an attack using the max number of rounds possible.

On this topic, is there any reason to have burst fire on a full-auto weapon, or fire short bursts in burst fire if you have full auto?

The option to fire bursts at a single person? Full auto you can do a long burst, or full auto vs one target. You can fire a long and short against 2 people, or 3 shorts against 3 people.

You can't fire a short burst, at a single person, unless you have the BF option.

Pg 143, under "Full Auto".



I assume that's talking about regular bursts.

You're right. There is no point to have BF and FA.

Or only 3 rounds left in your clip.

You can still use full-auto, because it says as noted above, and as they are noted above, a short burst uses only 3 bullets.

The BF / FA thing really irritated me actually, which is why I house ruled the way bursts work.

I treat long bursts as 5 rounds, taking a simple action. In FA mode you can either fire a long burst (5 rounds) as a simple action, or a full burst (10 rounds) as a complex action. This way a guy in FA mode can fire two long bursts, using two simple actions, if they wish. They cannot, however, fire short bursts (3 rounds). For that they need to switch to BF mode.

This also makes a lot of sense in real life terms, since professional combatants using fully automatic weapons are taught to use 5 round bursts.

(and if you can't work it out yourself, 5 round bursts have 4 recoil for the first, 5 for the second, and add 4 to the damage, or subtract 4 from the target's defence pool. It's always 1 per extra bullet on those things anyway).

Another question this brings to mind, is that by the book, tracer rounds add nothing to surpressive fire. Should they?