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Can someone help me make more sense of automatic weapons in game?

Example: John Johnson and Tom Thompson are working together. John has an M249 SAW and Tom has an AK-47. They encounter some bad guys. John lays down a wall of lead while Tom is firing 3 round bursts at them.

If you're on the trigger for an entire melee round, do you deliver all of your damage at once? Do you deliver damage action by action? If you commit to a full melee round blast, and the bad guys all die, do you waste the ammunition?

Can someone make some more sense of automatic weapons fire in game context?

Ok from the above text.
Ak guy. Rolls to strike each attack.
Saw man. Is firing a full melee burst if targeting one thing or spraying to cover an area.one roll to strike.

Hope that helps. Some what.

They do it as one strike, but the timing is off because of the round robin melee round. The rules, i believe, have you do the roll on your action and resolve all the hits (its a random die roll) right then and there, but you are out of actions for the rest of the melee.

The way I'd do it...is i don't do full melee bursts. I have them dedicate an attack to suppression or spray or whatever, and every attack they devote to it gets a chance to hit multiple targets. If they dodge an attack, they're out their next action, so they can't spray, as is normal for dodging. Auto dodges still work normally. Yeah, juicers can suppressive fire like a mofo while they twitch dodge.

Which makes sense. Juicers are nasty......fir a short time anyway.

Pretty much depends on who they mess with. /smirk

True enough.

One of the main things that almost everyone forgets is that for the entire round that John is firing the SAW (personally I prefer the M240b) is that yes he makes "one attack" the entire round is that it is a continuous attack. So anyone crossing between his target and him is also subject to the attack {if he is firing at a single target}, or entering [or re-entering] the spray zone. That is one of the places that the Palladium combat system often fails.

It happened in one game I was playing in. I was covering a hallway and fired a full belt burst with my MG as suppressing cover fire, the GM ruled that any and everyone who entered the hallway was subject to the attack. He might have gone a little far in that he had them take the attack for every action the took running down the hallway.

We had a warwhouse battle go similiar, cutting corners, lines of fire, cover fire and firing from cover.
Award for awesomeness went to the guy that snuck through the rafters dropped a grenade and the picked off a sniper with his pistol, while hanging upside down. The dice gods weren't so kind to me. Lol

ANy good house rules to fix the automatic weapons fire?

Yupyup. Fire once per attack. Burst or spray because you do run out of ammo

Reread my post above, Aaryq. It's not spelled out super simple, but you basically fire spray every attack until you run out of ammunition (a few seconds for most rifles, more for machine guns, as i'm sure you're aware) or have to dodge. Each spray attack can hit variable targets and is shooting wild. Sustained fire would use a quarter of the magazine per attack and would deal short burst x2 damage, but probably -3 instead of shooting wild's -6, unless you were braced/prone/bi-pod, something like that.

I use this rule, but obviously i have to swap things on the fly for circumstances in game.

I believe anything less than 50% of your ammo is only one action.

I think that depends on how much ammunition is 50%. There are weapons that discharge 30 rounds in 3 seconds, others that fire more, done less, others have 150 rounds to fire at a similar rate. It really depends.

Alrik Vas wrote:I think that depends on how much ammunition is 50%. There are weapons that discharge 30 rounds in 3 seconds, others that fire more, done less, others have 150 rounds to fire at a similar rate. It really depends.

We capped it at 20 rounds or half the mag whichever is less for a short burst 5 rnds minimum x3 damage. this makes high capacity mag or belt fed weapons more inline with standard capacity weapons. You must spend 2 actions for a long burst 30-50 rnds x5 damage single target, x2 for a spray. +1 action for every additional 30-50 rounds in the burst for an additional x5 damage single target {x10 for 3 actions, x15 for 4 actions...}, x3 for a burst. Spray beat zones are 10' wide and can be expanded at double the size for half the multiple [round up]. This allows us to account for weapons up to and including a 7.62 Mini-Gun. We also have a 3 rnd burst for x2 damage to a single target.

That all makes a good amount of sense. Thanks for sharing.

Aaryq wrote:ANy good house rules to fix the automatic weapons fire?

Yeah....a trained machine gunner would fire in short controlled bursts (as mentioned before one burst per attack/action), he wouldn't just hold down the trigger continuously for fifteen seconds. I was trained to fire 5-10 round bursts with a .50 cal, and 5-8 round bursts with a Mk19. With a fully automation SMG like an UZI or Colt 9mm (DSS had both and we fired them at the range often) you would fire off a 5-6 round burst. Some people might argue that you would count rounds while in combat and they are right. BUT if you trained to fire X number of rounds per burst you will instinctively do that most of the time in combat.

I treat damage different when it come to bursts. Simply roll the damage of one bullet/round and multiply it by the number of rounds fired in the burst. A low damage roll would represent only a few bullets hitting the targets, while a high damage roll would represent most of the bullets hitting the target.

Also for characters without military training (i.e. formal training to use short controlled bursts), and when firing wild I use the following formula to determine how many bullets are fired per each action. I get the Rounds per minute off wikia (as well as the ranges and other stats for modern weapons instead of what's in the books).

Rounds per minute divided by 4 (this gets you how many bullets would be fired if holding down the trigger for an entire melee), and then divided by the number of attacks/actions to the character has. Keep in mind that this results in a lot of rounds being sent down range......

Aaryq wrote:Can someone help me make more sense of automatic weapons in game?

Example: John Johnson and Tom Thompson are working together. John has an M249 SAW and Tom has an AK-47. They encounter some bad guys. John lays down a wall of lead while Tom is firing 3 round bursts at them.

If you're on the trigger for an entire melee round, do you deliver all of your damage at once? Do you deliver damage action by action? If you commit to a full melee round blast, and the bad guys all die, do you waste the ammunition?

Can someone make some more sense of automatic weapons fire in game context?

First, You would state which setting you are asking the question about so everyone would be looking at the canon rules for that setting to answer your question. Because different settings have different "canon" rules about automatic firearm fire/burst firing.

Rifts and Modern Era (BTS, N&SS, Heroes)

Aaryq wrote:Rifts and Modern Era (BTS, N&SS, Heroes)

Each of which have their own automatic-fire/burst fire rules. And...Rifts has two sets of the rules depending if you use the RMB or RUE as the canon for your game.

Burst that count as One Attack or Two Attacks will 'count' as delivering their damage all at once. unless the target is wearing body armor getting shot 'should' do some APM penilties on the target.

For 'full melee' Spraying Automatic fire, I would have it that the targets get hit when they come out of cover to shoot. And don't forget the hit bystanders roll. And thus they ether have to take the hit or dodge before they can shoot.

Remember that the targets do not know if the PC rolled high or low on his attack roll and will ("should") react to a hit or a miss roll the same way. Ether deciding to risk taking the hit to be able to shoot back or to dodge back under cover.

Aaryq wrote:Rifts and Modern Era (BTS, N&SS, Heroes)

In RUE would typically have to be firing single shots, 3-round bursts, or 6-round bursts, as described under the weapon proficiency in question.
In the RMB, you'd be using the Spray rules from p.34.

SpiritInterface wrote:

Alrik Vas wrote:I think that depends on how much ammunition is 50%. There are weapons that discharge 30 rounds in 3 seconds, others that fire more, done less, others have 150 rounds to fire at a similar rate. It really depends.

We capped it at 20 rounds or half the mag whichever is less for a short burst 5 rnds minimum x3 damage. this makes high capacity mag or belt fed weapons more inline with standard capacity weapons. You must spend 2 actions for a long burst 30-50 rnds x5 damage single target, x2 for a spray. +1 action for every additional 30-50 rounds in the burst for an additional x5 damage single target {x10 for 3 actions, x15 for 4 actions...}, x3 for a burst. Spray beat zones are 10' wide and can be expanded at double the size for half the multiple [round up]. This allows us to account for weapons up to and including a 7.62 Mini-Gun. We also have a 3 rnd burst for x2 damage to a single target.

I agree with Alrik Vas It makes sense. Thanks for sharing.

Thinyser wrote:

SpiritInterface wrote:

Alrik Vas wrote:I think that depends on how much ammunition is 50%. There are weapons that discharge 30 rounds in 3 seconds, others that fire more, done less, others have 150 rounds to fire at a similar rate. It really depends.

We capped it at 20 rounds or half the mag whichever is less for a short burst 5 rnds minimum x3 damage. this makes high capacity mag or belt fed weapons more inline with standard capacity weapons. You must spend 2 actions for a long burst 30-50 rnds x5 damage single target, x2 for a spray. +1 action for every additional 30-50 rounds in the burst for an additional x5 damage single target {x10 for 3 actions, x15 for 4 actions...}, x3 for a burst. Spray beat zones are 10' wide and can be expanded at double the size for half the multiple [round up]. This allows us to account for weapons up to and including a 7.62 Mini-Gun. We also have a 3 rnd burst for x2 damage to a single target.

I agree with Alrik Vas It makes sense. Thanks for sharing.

My pleasure, glad to help

This thread started a discussion with our group on how automatic weapons use has changed since its advent especially with Machine guns.