Something that sticks out a bit in d20 Modern's combat rules for firearms is how various forms of automatic weapons are handled. The rules are a little odd, which is something of an issue because it's an action game set in the modern day.
Shooting in d20 Modern
d20 Modern is action-oriented, and isn't really supposed to be a tactical shooting simulation. Certainly, as far as table top games I'm familiar with go, GURPS does it far better for a broad variety of reasons. That said, not everything really needs to be super realistic and not everyone favors simulationism. With that said, here's what's been on my mind again recently.
Regular Shooting
By default, a basic attack with a firearm in d20 Modern is a single pull of the trigger that produces one potential shot on target - be it from a musket, a semi-automatic pistol, a select-fire rifle, or a machine gun.
For most weapons - especially the ones used in a fast, fluid combat like you would expect from a d20 game - that's not a bad approach. Combat rounds in d20-at-large are six seconds, which is a reasonable window of time to make a short distance move, get a simple gauge of your general situation, take a quick aim at something, and send a shot down range at your opponent (or a combination thereof).
This is a traditional ranged attack - you roll your d20 + your bonuses or penalties vs their Armor Class and work it out from there.
If you are attacking with a weapon that has some kind of automatic mode - be it a burst or full auto option - the extra bullets are, as the rules say on p.148 of the Core rule book, simply wasted. Generally speaking that's 10 rounds for a full-automatic weapon, or whatever the burst setting gives you for a bust-limited weapon (probably three). You pull the trigger and all the bullets go down range, but only one hit ever actually counts for a damage roll.
For a mostly cinematic, action-oriented game that's just fine. The game never claimed it was a tactical shooting simulator! Even in real life a lot of lead gets slung per casualty produced - some 50,000 rounds or more, easily, at realistic fire-fight ranges. Most d20 Modern fire-fights are going to be way closer range but even there that 10%-33% hit potential is pretty generous to the shooter at all but the closest ranges.
The issue, if any, is that the extra lead just never ever counts for anything, apparently - it just vanishes. It never has a chance of allowing you to strike a target more than once, and it never has the potential to miss and hit someone else - even if they're in close combat with your target (as when you shoot into a melee only one person is ever hit). It does nothing.
You also can't fire a semi-auto weapon more than once per Attack action (or round). One could theoretically loose a lot of rounds from a semi-auto in a fairly controlled fashion in 6 seconds (or even three), especially at very close range. This just isn't allowed, normally. Your only apparent option here is to utilize the "Double Tap" feat, which lets you take a penalty on hit chances to "let go two" and gain "+1 die of damage" - which I assume means something like a Glock 17 at 2d6 becomes a 3d6 (and so suchlike). This requires Dexterity 13+ and the Point-Blank Shot feat, however.
For automatic weapons, there are a few special attack modes that will help you maybe make a little more out of it though. The most basic is just called "Autofire", which is what anyone can try and do with a weapon that can fire on automatic.
Autofire
With Autofire, you are definitely spraying and not just hammering a bunch of rounds at one person - you actually target an area that is 10' by 10' - an area explicitly two squares wide by two squares tall. This still costs you 10 rounds (or whatever you are burst-limited to) and imposes a -4 penalty if you don't have the "Advanced Firearms Proficiency Feat", but changes combat mechanics a bit.
Instead of a traditional ranged attack at one target, you are dumping rounds into that zone - and potentially hitting everyone in it. This 10x10 square of squares has an AC10 - you roll your d20, manage modifiers, and if you win the roll everyone inside that 10'x10' must take a DC15 Reflex Save.
Whomever fails the Reflex save "takes the weapon's damage" - which I'm pretty sure means just roll normally.
This always costs 10 bullets - if you don't have 10 bullets, you just can't do it. For auto-only weapons, I suppose this means 9 = 0.
One could see merit in this fire mode - AC10 is not a high bar to clear, even for very low level characters. A DC15 Reflex save isn't exactly insurmountable but it's not an automatic pass, especially for lower level targets. And this is for everyone in the fire zone, meaning you could potentially wound or remove a fair number of targets in a single Attack action.
Problems here is that it's always a 10'x10' - you don't get to dictate how you use your gun. You can't take those same four squares and make it a 5'x20', even though that's not exactly a huge distance to cover in a sweep - unless you take the "Strafe" feat, that is (which requires Advanced Firearms Proficiency).
The weird thing here is that the targeted individuals can only protect themselves with a Reflex save - any armor, spells, or what-have-you simply don't seem to count. Cover helps - there's a table on p. 145 of the Core rulebook that provides some bonuses to your Reflex save based on how much cover you're in. Other personal protection, though? Not so much - and there's little indication as to why, unless maybe the implication is that everyone gets shot in the ankle, or something.
Burst Fire
Where Autofire lets you dump some lead in a fixed area and force a Reflex save, there is a way a character can engage individual targets with more than one shot at a time.
If you have Advanced Firearms Proficiency and Wisdom 13+, you can opt to take the "Burst Fire" feat, which lets you fire on a single target at -4 in order to gain "+2 dice of damage". Thus, something like an AK goes from 2d8 to 4d8. It's otherwise a normal attack, so you would roll against their AC - it also has the effect of reducing the 10 round expenditure of a regular bout of auto-fire to only 5 rounds, which helps offset the substantially increased miss chance a bit - unless the weapon has a burst limiter of its own, then it just uses whatever that lets you have.
As before, you need to have the entire amount of ammo to pull off the attack.
Recap of the Shooting Rules
To reiterate:
A normal firearm attack is typically just a single bullet at a time. If you have a semi-auto weapon that you want to fire more than once per round, you need to take the "Double Tap" feat. If you fire a weapon in full auto or a limited burst as a regular attack, you waste the extra bullets (firing 3 or 10, typically) - unless you take the "Burst Fire" feat, firing only 3-5 rounds. In all instances, this is against your opponent's DC, and you will gain extra dice of damage in exchange for a penalty to hit.
Instead of a normal attack, you can spray lead at an area - usually 10'x10' - at DC10 and bypass the target's AC completely by forcing them to take a Reflex save of DC15 and dealing normal damage. You will spend 10 rounds of ammunition to hit everyone in this 10'x10' square, and you will take a -4 penalty unless you have the Advanced Firearms Proficiency feat. If you choose the "Strafe" feat, you can change this from 10'x10' to a 5'x20' zone instead.
So what's wrong with it?
Basically, nothing. With automatic weapons it sort of captures the tendency of extra shots simply being wasted in terms of dealing damage to the target, though totally bypassing AC is kind of weird. Were I to run a game I'd probably just leave things as-is unless the players specifically wanted something different. The default expectations is something of a running firefight, so I'd expect it to be kind of messy like this I guess.
However, I'm not running a game right now, and I like to tinker with things a bit.
Alternatives
If I were to make changes, here are some speculations:
Regular Attacks
For semi-auto weapons, things are probably fine enough. I would be least likely to make a change here. If I did, I would maybe open up an attack option for them to spend extra bullets for a bonus to hit - say 5 rounds for a +1. This is just the character cranking on the trigger at a single target. It would probably become a Full Round Action, even. If there was a burst-limiter, they could possibly get two bursts in for this effect (costing them probably one extra bullet over semi-auto, however). This would not require a Feat.
For Regular Attacks with some kind of Automatic weapon, I'm wondering if offering an "arc of fire" not too unlike the model given on p. 156 might be in order - you can empty 10 rounds at targets in an arc in front of you, rolling up to some number of attacks at -2 to your attack roll (with range penalties and such as applicable beyond that). Targets have to be exposed - they can't be behind another potential target (though they could be behind cover). You fire off 10 bullets as before, but I'm liable to think you wouldn't get 10 attack rolls against 10 theoretical foes - perhaps just 1d6 targets in the overall arc, chosen at random. If you want to get extra complicated fancy, maybe something like 1d4 + (BAB/2), allowing better-skilled shooters to make more of it. Burst weapons, if desired, would get something like three bursts in this mode. Naturally if your BAB ever got high enough to go over the number of bullets fired you would drop the difference - you are just more likely to hit in general.
The Burst Fire and Double Tap Feats still fits into this, where as an attack action you can take a penalty to hit in order to get extra damage dice on a single target.
That might be a bit too much extra.
Alternatively, there is a simpler proposition where one could try to work a little more potential gain into firing in Automatic as a regular attack, without mucking much with the base mechanics.
For instance, one could say that whenever an Automatic or Burst-limited weapon fires multiple shots as a regular attack, they still expend their ammo as before, at no penalty, but improve their threat range by one - that is, you improve the frequency of landing what the game considers to be a "Critical hit".
In this case, a (20) weapon becomes (19-20) - this would be the overwhelming vast majority of firearms, and all of them from the base game rules. Here, most of the bullets still go nowhere important, but there's the increased chance that an extra one will strike your single target. If you want to be nastier, perhaps a (20) becomes a (18-20), or a (19-20) x3 - the latter simulating not only the increased chance for a double strike but maybe even working in a potential for as much as three good hits on your target. You could give normal auto weapons a bigger threat range than burst-limited weapons, perhaps to represent the trade off to releasing more lead.
Of course, just increasing the threat range doesn't remove the need to actually confirm the critical hit.
With this in mind, I'd be generally less inclined to improve the critical damage bonus and simply increase the threat range. Overall, I think this is probably the best course, because it's pretty simple - it's just an "Improved Critical" you get from just having automatic weapons. Note that "Improved Critical" isn't a regular feat in d20 Modern for...reasons...you have to be a "Soldier" Advanced Class to get that - and I'd say that would still apply even in this model.
"Double Tap" sits unaffected - in this latter scenario, it would be the only way that a semi-automatic weapon could fire more than once per turn.
Autofires
I would keep the rules as-is, though I'm tempted to let Armor and Class Defense bonuses apply here. It's strange to me that you can just bypass their armor this way (though again the concentrated area of ground implies you're shooting their feet I guess?).
Simply, you could drop the Reflex save part all together, and instead spray into the 10'x10' and make targets just take regular save, as if they were getting attacked in any other fashion.
Alternatively, you could still use the Reflex save, but also let them add their Armor Bonus (less any Dex penalties of course) and/or the Class Defense bonus to the total they roll. Cover still applies its bonus as well.
"Strafe" still applies here, letting you change the shape of the zone you spray into.
If you take the alternate "Improved Critical" representation of automatic fire above, you can still offer improved critical options on account of this still being automatic fire. Passing the Save gets easier for targets, but the attacker gets a somewhat larger chance to Crit more often.
Now that I think about it, maybe the "Cone of Fire" model proposed above could replace or supplement the game's basic "Autofire" model, giving you the ability to spray either down at a fixed area of ground or out at "man height". Food for thought.
Someone else's take
I also have a note I made based off some discussion on the old WOTC forum, when they still had a d20 Modern section:
Many people on the WotC forum say that this ability isn't very useful, because you can spray 10 rounds at a few guys and only hit them once each.
One possible solution is to declare how large an area you are spraying; the larger the area the easier it is to dodge the bullets.
To quote user "backstabbist",
I'd go with reducung the AoE to increase the RefDC, and add Armor (and shield) Equip Bonus to the roll.
10x10=DC15
5x10=DC17
5x5=DC19
Most times folks would probably chose to saturate 1 square with 10 bullets to hit one guy.
That's a DC19. However, to avoid getting hit by folks hosing your square with slugs, maybe if you wore some armor...
Others have suggested that the save DC be connected with the attack roll.
That was probably from about 2008 or 2009...(August 28th, to narrow it down a bit). How time flies! I was trying to do some kind of urban low-life campaign back then, something sort of "Streetfighteresque". This one guy's comment is another bit of support in favor of adding the Armor bonus to the Reflex roll (though apparently not the basic Class bonus), so at least I'm not too far off the mark.
Closing
The base rules are probably just fine, even if they are a little odd when you think about them a bit. To me, anyways. I would probably not use any house rules for them unless the players themselves specifically wanted to. If I did, however, I'm partial to the "Improved Critical" for automatic weapon attacks and lean toward the "Just take a regular save" against an auto-fire. At least, that's my stance at the moment, anyways - it would have to play out well for players in an actual game before I make up a mind about it. It's simple, and makes responses to attacks consistent because there's not suddenly a case where an assault rifle makes you take a Reflex save suddenly.
As an aside, this is post #150! That's kind of neat.
Thanks for reading!
Cheers!
0 Comments