Damage Control
By Steven “Bull” Ratkovich (bull@dumpshock.com)

I’ve been asked why I’m writing these articles. Basically, for two reasons:

  1. I sometimes have players who do their best to work “around” the rules. They don’t necessarily break them, they just bend them into a pretzel-knot. And while throwing a ruling out to the crowd in the middle of a game session to cover a whacked out event that happens, or to fix a “bald spot” in FASA’s rules is perfectly fine, I have a bad tendency to forget these by the end of the game session. Or, when I sit back and look at them, I go “Why did I do that? This would work so much better!”
  2. Because I like well balanced rules. I could care less how “realistic” something is, as long as it’s balanced and makes sense. So this column let’s me try and work with some of the stuff I don’t think is necessarily balanced.

Enjoy! And if you have any questions, comments, or any rules you think are broken or at least utterly bendable by anyone with a mildly abusive streak, let me know! I’ll see what I can do with them.

Controlled Autofire

Whether the gun fires 10 shots at a time, or 15, Automatic Gunfire can be a powerful, yet difficult to use feature on a gun. After all, spraying that much lead, it’s downright difficult to control the gun.

However, somewhere between a 3 round burst, and the full blown, balls to the wall 10 or 15 round Full Auto hail o’ lead, you have your selective burst. This allows a player to select how many shots he wants to fire, if he doesn’t want to waste bullets. Unfortunately, there’s a downside to this ability, and our friend the Munchkin often uses this to the fullest potential!

Only have 7 points of recoil modification available for your gun? Fire a 7 round burst! No modifiers, and you can do +7 power, and +2 Damage Code! Or why waste that 10th bullet? After all, if you’re firing full auto, you get one extra damage code for every 3 bullets! So after 9 shots, what’s one extra point of power? Is there really that big of a difference between a power of 16 and a power of 17?

And yes, while we all know that under combat situations, you don’t have time to think about how many shots you’re firing when you’re just hosing the lead out as fast as possible. And more importantly, as a character you’re not really able to make a distinction between “Damage Codes” and “Power Levels”. A hail of bullets is a hail of bullets. But, there are a lot of players who always try to minmax out their combat rounds as much as possible.

So how do you, as the world weary, much maligned, and often misunderstood Game Master handle players like this?

Well, in all honestly, not much if they have a smartlink. The Smartlink allows a lot of control over a gun, including selecting firing modes as well as the number of shots that the gun will fire in Full Auto mode. You can choose to make the mental selection of shots a Simple Action rather than a Free Action, as this gives you some control over the situation again, but it’s a minor quibble.

However, if they don’t have a smartlink, it’s a different story. You, as the GM, have a couple of options.

  1. Don’t allow “selective firing”. The PC basically simply fires the full load of bullets (or as many as he has left in the clip, whichever is fewer). Obviously, this is not all that realistic, even for Shadowrun, so I would suggest against it.
  2. Allow for “Random” bursts. First, roll 1D6. If the number is a 1-2, the gun fires low. On a 3-5, the gun fires high. On a roll of 6, the gun fires the number of shots called. In the case of a high or low count, roll a D3 (1d6 divided in half, rounding up) and add or subtract that number of bullets. Work out damage accordingly.

This doesn’t fully fix the Full Auto rules, not by a long shot. Unfortunately, short of changing the way Firearm Combat system works (along with possibly the whole combat and damage system), I’m not so sure it CAN be fixed. Just patched!

Either way, good luck! And try to persevere against the odds (and the Players! )