Need Help reasoning out Guns

[garrowolf]

Okay I'm working on my Nexus d20 game and I've gotten stuck on how to deal with something and since you guys have been so great in helping me I thought I would ask here.

Basic concept for my game is that you only roll once for an action. There is no separate damage roll. Weapons have a set base damage and you add the margin of success to the damage total. This works great for martial arts and melee.

The problem is with weapons with burst or full auto. I've tried a couple of different ideas. One was a burst multiplier. Basically you multiply your margin of success by the multiplier and add that to the base damage. The base damage represents one bullet of a certain caliber.

The other thing I could do with the burst multiplier is add it to the accuracy instead of as a multiplier if someone is doing a wide burst instead of a narrow one.

The problem I ran in to was scaling. I've got a personal scale, a vehicle scale at x5 the personal scale, and ship scale at x50 the personal scale. The numbers don't seem to work as I go up.

I thought about having a multiplier based on 1/5th of the base damage but then the burst rate of fire would get lost. I had a version where you used a burst multiplier up to a certain rate of fire number and any amount after that you just added the margin of success however this was confusing to players.

I am trying to figure out something that would be simple to apply and not bog the game down but be able to scale up effectively.

Any ideas?

 

[garrowolf]

Shadowrun has this concept of a burst value that you subtract from the accuracy (negated by recoil compensation) but that is added to the damage so your damage is base damage + burst + margin of success. I thought about this as a possibility. I have been using base damage + (Burst x Margin of Success). However I can see how the other way would be a bit faster.

I don't know if I am underestimating the damage to let them last longer with one way or if I am overestimating the damage and kill them off too quickly another way.

 

[GandalfMithrandir]

to a certain extent, in real life, if soldiers get shot once or twice they're out of the fight, because it hurts a lot and it's hard to work around that, bullets also kill you faster than knives and other similar slashing/piercing weapons do so in my games in which guns make appearances they are probably more overpowered than they should be. I like the idea of Base+(Burst x Margin), it shows more that the higher your rate of success is, the more damage you do.

Just my humble opinions

GandalfM

 

[Hand of Evil]

I have not used it but a friend was going to treat burst as SWARM, you may want to create a template for burst or full auto.

 

[Thanee]

Since you add margin of success to damage and since burst or full-automatic fire should increase your chances to hit, I suppose, just add an appropriate bonus to the attack roll.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Verdande]

If the game has abstracted combat to a single d20 roll, is there really any need to provide combat actions like that? Part of attacking with a weapon is using it to its capacity and suiting the situation. It's incidental as to what "mode" the shooter is using, as long as they hit.

Does adding different firing modes add that much to the game that it's even worth worrying about?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

IMHO/IME, yes.

I've had players run PCs in games that didn't have Autofire rules that felt "right"- M&M being one of the most recent- and almost had rebellion on my hands.

 

[garrowolf]

What I finally decided to do is go with my first version.

Base damage + (Burst Rating x Margin of Success)

What I fix about it was that I have a Burst rating for Burst Fire and the Full Auto version is just +1 on the Burst fire Rating so something like this x3/x4. A burst is a simple action and full auto is a complex action. All Base damages are damage/AP so when you use Burst then add the Burst rating to the AP as well.

So for example a MP-5 uses 9mm which does 9/6 with x2/x3 burst. With a Margin of Success of 8 on burst fire, you do 8x2 = 16 + 9 = 25. The AP goes up by 2 from the burst rating so it ends up being 25/8 damage.

So I went back and redid the math and it seems to be working out after all. I guess I was worrying about nothing.