Forums of the Megaverse®

Well a few things -

Doing a spray is a 'Wild Shot' and can only be done with a "long burst" and as you can see on pg34 a Long Burst Spray only inflicts normal damage for ONE round and hits 1d8 targets.


Sounds like he's cherry picking which part of the rules he wants to use.


I'd allow him to do it with the above rule's (that he probably won't like). Basically he will only be doing 1d6 MD to however many targets he manages to hit.

Most railguns say what they do for damage from a single shot, so to say you cut the burst damage in half is incorrect. He's definately up to some rules abuse there. As for area affect fire with a railgun, I would suggest no. This keeps it simple and puts a lid on whatever other potential abuse he's likely to use these rules changes as a stepping stool for.

I like the other suggestion, that he stick to MD machine guns for these kinds of schenanigans. An example of a MD machinegun is with the Bionic weapons. Another example is the Ramjet rounds or the Caseless bullet sections of Rifts Mercenaries (reprinted in the Rifts GM Guide).

Pulse weapons, also, should not follow the "burst" or "spray" rules. Nip that in the bud before it even begins. In fact, you should consider railgun bursts similar in concept to the pulses from energy weapons. They are a built-in feature to the weapon to provide additional shots at a very rapid pace in an effort to increase lethality. These shots are so rapid that it is not possible to spread these "bursts" or "pulses" out over any significant area.

This can lead into thinking that maybe an augmented human could be fast enough, like a Juicer. Just tell him that even a Juicer isn't that fast and leave it at that.

I regularly allow my Phase World players to spray fire with any "burst capable" weapon using the older rule set.

Spray at one target = counts as firing wild, roll to strike, damage would be single shot times 2

Spray a general area (or more than one target) = Counts as firing wild, roll to strike, inflicts normal damage to 1D8 targets (but no target is hit more than once)

Rainguns fire predesignated bursts only. They're factory pre-sets. He has to modify the weapon to fire anything else.

The Flechette Auto-Cannon from on of the South American books has spray capability.If I remember correctly, it does single round damage to multiple targets. I don't believe it's considered a railgun, but you could use the rule nonetheless.

Airborne wrote:Thanks Guys, thats exactly what I needed. I'm not going to allow railgun sprays. If he wants that ability to spray a target area then MD modified machineguns is the way he needs to go.

Thanks again.

Keep in mind that it's not exactly unbalancing; a single shot for a railgun only does 1d4 MD or so, so that's the damage that anybody caught in the spray would take.