Automatic Fire for Brikwars 2005

[IVhorseman]

Hey! IVhorseman here, reminding you youngin's that we've got ourselves some rules for automatic fire! these rules have been playtested, debated, and voted as the official (community) rules for automatic weapons in brikwars (not necessarially the ones for the rulebook, but the ones we here agreed on)! Hope you enjoy.

The Basics

okay, let's be honest. firing one bullet at a time is nice, but action movies have proven to you that some guns fire MANY bullets in short periods of time! action movies and brikwars go together like popcorn and nesquik, so you want to plop these bad boys into your game ASAP, right? well how are you going to treat them? furthermore, brikwars only has two types of ranged weapons (the pistol and the rifle). we both know that there are ALL kinds of sick guns that shoot several bullets a second, so why don't we include those too? all in time, buddy.

Tossing em in

alright, here's the fun stuff. let's say your minifig is holding an assault rifle. normally, you'd just say "that's a rifle", and give it rifle stats. but we both want to kick it up a notch. normally, a rifle has a UR of 3 and a damage of 1d6+1. awesome. now, let's bump it up to automatic fire! to make a weapon automatic, you add a few CP points (I don't use CP and therefore never came up with a fair addition for this. go ahead and use what you think is fair) and know that you can now fire a fully-automatic weapon! this trait can be added to any minifig weapon that you want to make automatic. yeah, i guess even a sword if you wanted to.

Attacking

When you make an attack with an automatic weapon, it works mostly like any other attack. pick a target, roll against UR, and do damage.

remember that Automatic is just a setting applied to any weapon. when you make an attack that's using automatic fire, the UR of the weapon is decreased by 1. this is to compensate for the fact that since more bullets are fired, you're more likely to hit. if you successfully hit the target, apply normal weapon damage, and then add in how many points you beat the skill roll by (example: the UR of your automatic pistol is 2 and you roll a 5. your damage would be 1d6, normal pistol damage, plus 3, the amount you beat the roll by). remember that your bonus skill rolls will apply to the damage as well!

however if you miss your shot with a critical failure, the weapon becomes out of ammo! your minifig must spend an action reloading the weapon for it to be usable again.

friendly fire

now, keep in mind that you just fired several bullets into a single target, and are assuming lots of them missed. in fact, so many missed that everything within one inch of the target now takes normal weapon damage! keep that in mind when you fire at a crowd of minifigs.

hitting multiple targets

"wait a minute," you might be thinking by this point, "even though my minifigs are firing lots of bullets in a single turn, they can still only hit one guy!" Well hold on there buddy, let's not get carried away. there actually IS a way for a single minifig with an automitic weapon to hit lots of targets at the same time, by simply spraying several bullets in a wide arc and praying that he hits something.

first, the player announces that he's going to pull a spray n' pray. spraying bullets in a wide arc will potentially hit a target, but your chances of hitting them are lowered if the angle of your arc is wider. Now, some people would bust out a protractor here, but Brikwars is not a game about precision. We use Fingercones, dammit.

Spread two of your fingers (adjacent fingers, buddy. and not a thumb) apart from eachother. see the angle it makes? your minifig is now targeting everything that falls into the angle created that's in range! now, to determine the skill penalty, count how many fingers you're holding up. two. the minifig takes a -2 to skill. want a bigger angle? use more fingers! you can get up to a -5 if you toss in your thumb (if and only if your other fingers are used up), and use the same rules! it's that simple!

moar

no really, that's it. if you want more fun with clip sizes, check out my homebrew rules for HMGs and Miniguns here.

[Theblackdog]

Three round burst mode:
Minifigs with automatic weapons can also choose to fire them in three round burst mode. If a minifig fires a three-round burst from an automatic weapon, increase the UR by 1 -- the recoil is tripled but the minifig still has to keep the gun more or less aimed to hit. There are two big advantages to three-round bursts:
1. you get three chances to hit -- useful if an enemy Hero is trying to dodge fire with a Stupendous Feat.
2. All of the shots which hit are treated as a combined fire attack. If two shots from your burst hit the target, you do 2D6+2 damage; if three shots hit, you do 3D6+3 damage. This is useful when attacking larger vehicles.

In my opinion this was one of the gems of the old 2001 rules, since it allowed you to destroy heavy vehicles without resorting to wildly inaccurate giant guns.

[IVhorseman]

Three round burst mode:
Minifigs with automatic weapons can also choose to fire them in three round burst mode. If a minifig fires a three-round burst from an automatic weapon, increase the UR by 1 -- the recoil is tripled but the minifig still has to keep the gun more or less aimed to hit. There are two big advantages to three-round bursts:
1. you get three chances to hit -- useful if an enemy Hero is trying to dodge fire with a Stupendous Feat.
2. All of the shots which hit are treated as a combined fire attack. If two shots from your burst hit the target, you do 2D6+2 damage; if three shots hit, you do 3D6+3 damage. This is useful when attacking larger vehicles.

In my opinion this was one of the gems of the old 2001 rules, since it allowed you to destroy heavy vehicles without resorting to wildly inaccurate giant guns.

the damage + (skill bonus damage) is specifically meant to portray a burst of bullets, and deals with all of it in a single skill roll, keeping the game moving. Notice that this rule only requires one die roll for skill and another for damage - greatly reducing the amount of time spent adding crap up.

personally, i don't think using a single minifig's machinegun fire to efficiently destroy enemy vehicles is a very good idea at all. if machineguns could do that, why would we ever use the giant innacurate weapons at all?

[pesgores]

If another 15 pages thread is going to start, you can just use the old one.

[IVhorseman]

If another 15 pages thread is going to start, you can just use the old one.

well i mostly made this one because i just noticed that the actual rules, if anyone wanted to look them up, were buried pages deep across three different threads.

[Cpt. Zipps]

I just made a really simple rule. to make it auto the extra cp is (ws)x2 cp or 2 cp for minifig weps. and then all you do is use a finger cone rather than a single target. ITS SO SIMPLE

[Professor Ken]

I don't really use automatic fire that often. When I do, I pump up the Use rating, triple the damage and use a fun little effect called "overkill" (one of my personal favorite rules!). It's simple and satisfying (particularly if you just say, "What the hell", and assume you made the required Use roll).

For example, say that Master Chief wants to take out 2 evil Jaw-Jaws with his submachinegun. The fiends are close enough to one another that he can reasonably target both at once. He rolls a 6 for use-- excellent! Now, he rolls 3d6 for damage (three times the weapon's standard damage), getting a 5, a 2, and a 3-- a total of 10 damage. The first Jaw-Jaw rolls for defense, getting a three-- oh, too bad, he gets completely cut to ribbons. The remaining bullets, totaling a damage value of 7, slam into his companion, who gets a five but is still killed by the burst. With no enemies remaining, the 2 damage worth of bullets either harmlessly slam into walls or are buried in the still-warm body of the second Jaw-Jaw.

[IVhorseman]

I just made a really simple rule. to make it auto the extra cp is (ws)x2 cp or 2 cp for minifig weps. and then all you do is use a finger cone rather than a single target. ITS SO SIMPLE

and overpowered.

The automatic fire rules are actually pretttty damn simple, I'm just not as good of a rules explainer as, say, Mike Rayhawk. It could be written a lot shorter, but I wanted to get everything clarified.

[Dr. X]

Very nice. I'm using these rules in today's Battle of the Pink Flowers.

[birdman]

Personally, i think you guys are making this all to complicated...at least for the current 'relaxed' edition of BW.
How about this:
So, you got an AR with a UR of 3. Your commando has a skill of 1d6+2. First thing you do is define the area you're firing at. Since automatic weapons can in theory (and at least for BW) fire at any area imaginable, just select an area with targets in it. Let's say the commando chooses a bunker with 5 visible trooper targets in it. THe firing area is therefore from one end of the 1st trooper to the opposite end of the 5th trooper. That gives you 5 targets, to reiterate. Make your skill roll vs. UR 3. The commando gets a 14 (bonus roll). Subtract 3 from 14 and you're left with 11. That's 11 shots to be distributed as wanted to those 5 targets. Short, sweet, simple. I'd say about 5 extra CP for automatic, with a reload at the end of each burst (unless the weapon is obviously too big to need to do that, like a chaingun or some vehicle-mounted HMG).

Cheers,
Birdman

EDIT: Oh cool. This was my first post, picking an argument with IV.

[IVhorseman]

are you telling me that you think distributing 11 shots in one turn among different units is balanced? On top of that, if you were to actually do that, you'd have to make eleven rolls to see if those shots hit, and another eleven rolls for damage, and another eleven for armor. that's 33 rolls for one unit, Holmes.

Honestly, read through the rules. It's more or less like yours in the beginning, but with the difference that instead of having 11 shots distributed among a bunch of units, the commando would just do +11 damage. Shorter, simpler, and faster for gameplay.

[birdman]

are you telling me that you think distributing 11 shots in one turn among different units is balanced? On top of that, if you were to actually do that, you'd have to make eleven rolls to see if those shots hit, and another eleven rolls for damage, and another eleven for armor. that's 33 rolls for one unit, Holmes.

Honestly, read through the rules. It's more or less like yours in the beginning, but with the difference that instead of having 11 shots distributed among a bunch of units, the commando would just do +11 damage. Shorter, simpler, and faster for gameplay.

Yes, i do happen to think that's balanced. The reason? First off, that's a bonus roll, and while it does happen, 11 or more shots aren't going to come rattling off every single turn.
Secondly, this would actually speed up gameplay. I'm not talking about multiplying the number of shots fired, i'm talking about multiplying the number of hits made. Realistically, when a unit with an automatic weapon fires at another unit, it will hit, eventually. My method merely distributes a realistic number of hits between units. If the players cooperated by rolling damage and armor at the same time, my method speeds things up considerably. I've playtested this principle, and it works.

[warman45]

I have an idea

there are 2 really cool types of auto weapons

-submachine guns

-automatic rifles

we would normally split them into pistols (SMG) and rifles (geuss)

why don't you just do that BUT allow the minifig to attack 2 targets or the same target twice. then if your using CP then just double it or something.

[IVhorseman]

Because that's a) stupid and b) already accounted for.

Any minifig weapon can be made automatic with my rules. Hell, you could even have a fully-automatic sword if that was your thing.

[birdman]

Because that's a) stupid and b) already accounted for.

Any minifig weapon can be made automatic with my rules. Hell, you could even have a fully-automatic sword if that was your thing.

IV, can you do anything but shoot down ideas? Not meaning to be mean, per se, but I think that all the ideas on this thread, including yours work fine and dandy and the player should choose which one to use, if any.