About weapons skills: a very simple way to break down firearms skills is
by the last three entries in the stats for the weapon: signature, recoil,
and "difficulty as." This gives us:
Med/Med/Handgun: All types of revolvers, auto pistol, body pistol, SMG.
Med/Low/Handgun: Both kinds of snub pistols.
Low/Low/Handgun: Gauss pistols.
Hi/Hi/Rifle: All sorts of hunting rifles.
Hi/Med/Rifle: Shotgun and autoshotgun.
Hi/Lo/Rifle: Assault Rocket Launcher.
Med/Hi/Rifle: Light Assault Gun.
Med/Med/Rifle: Carbines, Rifles, Autorifles, Assault Rifles, ACR's.
Lo/Med/Rifle: Accelerator Rifle.
Lo/Lo/Rifle: Gauss Rifles.
Energy weapons can be lumped into two groups based on recoil.
The method I actually use is to keep the "official" weapon skills, treating
the weapon actually picked for the skill as the weapon the player is most
familiar with. If the player wishes to use another weapon in a firefight
(or has to out of necessity), I take his skill level in the other weapon,
apply any tech level modifiers to the new weapon, and then subtract one from
the skill for each factor by which the new weapon differs from the weapon
in which the player has the skill. If the new weapon is primarily a single-
shot weapon and the weapon in which the player has the skill is automatic,
I subtract an additional skill level, and vice versa. Switching from energy
weapons to slugthrowers (or vice versa) costs two, but in this case the
automatic vs. single-shot modifier doesn't apply. Frequently, the skill
level will be modified to below zero; I keep the result if it's no worse
than -3 and use it as a modifier rather than just throwing it out and
penalizing the player a difficulty level for having no skill at all. If the
player has several gun combat skills, the one yielding the best result
applies. I also let these modifiers apply to the character creation process;
if a player has Combat Rifleman-2 and gets a level of Shotgun skill, he can
take it as Shotgun-2 rather than Shotgun-1 since the Rifle part of Combat
Rifleman would give him a Shotgun skill of 1 already.
- - -- PTD --