I was reading the Ballista Firearms Upgrade and saw the rules for reliability. It made me think. I've never used rules for reliability.

What are your rules (if any) for firearm reliability?
What is your general experience playing with them? - How has it been?

Thanks in advance.

I would only use the rule of 1 when it comes to firearm reliability, If the player rolls a handful of ones the gun could jam or caseless ammo suddenly detonates etc.

Well: As characters with high firearms skills are presently less likely to have an accident happen, you could just say that the skill incorperates the skill for maintaining the weapon.

[overcomplicatedrules]
If you wanted to make accidents happen more often, you could have something go wrong whenever more 1s happen than non-1s are scored on some skill check or skill rank, +1 1 needed for every 6 combat pool spent rounding up. Something always goes wrong when the rule of 1s hits.

IE: If I have a firearms maintenance skill of 3, and a firearms skill of 4 something goes wrong when I roll more than 3 1s, or 4 1s if I add 1-4 combat pool.
[/overcomplicatedrules]

If you want to get really complicated, you could use something like a check every X rounds fired against TN 2 with 2 dice (1/36 chance of failure). X would be determined by type of weapon -- low (~50) for mediocre-quality pistols and high (~500) for high-quality MGs or revolvers. TN rises by 1 for every X shots fired without maintenance. Maintenance (TN 2 weapon B/R test for a minute or few) would drop the TN to 2.

Or if you want to get even more complicated, you could let X be determined by type of weapon, and amount of dice by the quality/reliability of the particular gun.

Note: I do not suggest that anyone should use such rules. I do not use any rules for weapon malfunction, though I might make it happen if someone ever Rule-of-One'd a firearm check. The above is a realistic/believable/logical set of rules, which might work for any realism-freaks out there who don't mind extra book-keeping. To make any realistic/believable/logical rules for weapon malfunction, you are pretty much forced to do something similar.

[Edit]The rules on the site you linked might work, if you rather roll lots of extra dice instead of book-keeping. Auto-fire and any other occasions where lots of shots are fired in a short duration cause serious problems for that system, however.[/Edit]

My GM actually rules things like that based on what we do outside of actual combat. If you use a weapon and don't specify that you clean it after the run (nothing is assumed) he keeps track. The longer you forget, the more likely there'll be a problem with the gun itself.

I think that there's also a possibility to have weapon malfunctions based on how the character acquires ammo. If their dealer is something less than reputable, there's always a possibility that the ammo will be blanks, or something more or less dangerous than was intended. It could even be something that would be detrimental to the gun itself. . ..

I think that weapons malfunctions (or in some cases, equipment malfunctions in general) can be explained with good roleplay and very little roll play.

well if you want to look at this in the context of modern firearms then I wouldn't worry about any kind of reliability rule unless the guns are subjected to unusually harsh environments like sand dumped on the action, dropped in toxic waste, underwater etc.

There are more than a couple guns today that have been torture tested with anything you can think of, frozen with liquid nitrogen, run over with trucks, buried in sand for a week, they still had a very very low instance of malfunction.

In just straight forward firing, there a few guns that only have a handful of malfunctions in 100,000 rounds.

So I'm thinking firearm design hasn't taken any steps back in 60 years so they can only be better.

that all depends on the gun too...

I fired a browning semi-auto pistol at the range and the darn thing jammed on every third bullet. it was a factory defect in the gun and needed a gunsmith to fix it. it was brand new and other guns like it worked just fine. but if you go around buying guns on the black market, I could see you ending up with factory rejects or just lemons.

not as likely as it used to be, but you could always throw it in for dramatic effect (as long as it is not overdone), plus some guns might not be manufactured to tight or useful tolerence at the factory at all, crappy guns for cheap, but a cheap gun is better than no gun says the gutterpunk...
-Mike R.

One of the reasons I miss the old-style FASA books was the comments left by the 'professionals' concerning the various items. I used to make use of the comments about firearms to determine just how often and how dramatic the weapon quality affteced the characters in combat.

heh. Or that fuel line defect on the left hand side of a Devil Rat. Yeah, I miss those books, too...

It would be funny if the players in the game with the GM who imposes gun jams, had imps in a new weapon at some point. I'm sure they'd all think it was the gun malfunctioning, but instead it would be infected with little people. Man, I gotta use those on my group sometime. Keep forgetting.

I miss the old FASA books as well. The shadowtalk was a real treat and totally painted the mood of the SR world for me.

It also gave hints at the storyline that wasn't necessarily covered.
Though I do find it disturbing when I come across a poster using a handle identical to some of my NPC's