Although many TMLer's do seem to have military experience for those that
don't there seems to be some misunderstanding of autofire. When a weapon is
fired on auto many people believe that only a percentage of the bullets will hit
the target. This is true but probably only a percentage of the FIRST few bullets will hit. I will give the basis for this below:
When a weapon is put on auto and fired at a target the weapon will tend
to "junp" (for lack of a better word). Once it has started to jump in one
direction it will tend to continue to go in this direction as long as it
continues to fire. This is why most rifles made for armed forces around the
world now have a "burst" selection instead of "auto". Case in point the M16A2
has a 3-round burst setting. This is because after the first 3 shots the weapon
is usually so far off its intended target as to make the following shots "useless". Although in the future gyrostabalization will probably compensate somewhat
for this, it will still continue to be a problem in projectile weapons. So I
will show you the rules I give for this particular situation.
First: Determine the number of rounds fired on auto-fire during the
combat round. For those that wish to truly represent realism, if a player
wishes to stop before all the ammo is used up add some randomness. For any
amount of shots over 10 if the player wishes to stop have them roll 2d6. One
to determine whether they stopped before or after they wanted to, and one to
determine the number of shots high or low.
Next: For very shot over the first the to-hit roll is at -1 cumulative.
for stabalized weapons, or -2 cumulative for non stabalized. This really
represents how hard it is to keep an auto-firing weapon on target (known from
3 years of experience). Continue to roll until there is NO chance for a hit.
Occasionally they won't hit until the first or second time but this can easily
be explained as poor aim at first. Example: Bob fires at Jim but shoots a bit
to the right, however the weapon travels left and hit him on the 2nd and 3rd
shot.
Now we get into those nasty missed shots. These can be discarded in an
open field but not a crowded area. Although some players might think of this as
simply gore and boredom added to the scenario, in campaigns, players who are too
messy with their "hit" jobs will get a lot more heat. Not only will the players
be in trouble for the murder (or maybe assault) or the target but also of the
people standing around them. Killing a known pirate will probably get the
players a little sympathy but not if they also accidently killed 7 by-standers
and wounded 12 others. Oops, sorry about that, back to the rules. Roll for the
missed shots against another target normally. If it hits go back to the auto
fire rules but after a miss don't roll again. After all it is unlikey the
player is trying to bring his aim back on them. As for missed shots, when an
area is pretty empty simply roll once any more than that and roll more times up
to 5 or 6 rolls for a really crowded area.
I added these rules simply because a lot of times players think it is
easier than it is to shoot at a crowd and only hit one person than it is.
Firing into a crowd, even to hit only one target, will 90% of the time will
bring multiple deaths. This works the same with grenades. Although these rules
may seem tiresome they tend to make the players much more careful about wielding
weapons with such zeal. And make enemies who do use them as such seem much more
villainous, making them much more important to hunt down. Thank you.
Matt Teets