Burst Fire criticism / house rule

[iainjcoleman]

Much as I like the overall approach of the combat system, burts fire for automatic weapons leaves something to be desired. The additional damage from burst fire is just too low. Take the humble assault rifle. 3d6 damage from a single bullet - average 10.5 - but only an extra 4 points from a burst of four bullets. That's roughly the same, on average, as an extra 1d6 damage.

I guess tis simplified system is supposed to capture the average effects of burst fire without any tedious extra dicerolling. This is fine in principle, but is it really credible that if a target is hit by one round in a burst, there is only a one third chance of them being hit by a second round? That would surprise me.

Furthermore, this approach cuts out the really catastrophic damage that might be expected to result from burst fire from time to time. There ought to be the possibility that a burst will inflict devastating multiple wounds.

One simple way of improving the situation might be to add to the damage a number of d6s equal to the Auto rating. This wouldn't appreciably increase complexity, but would give a more credible result while sticking with the ethos of taking an averaged result rather than rolling for multiple hits. It's a bit of a half-way house, and ignores the issue of how armour should protect against burst fire, but I'm strongly considering using it.

 

[Faelan Niall]

Most current weapon systems either use or recommend a 3-5 round burst for burst fire options. Assuming 3-5 rounds are fired, the most important factor is range to target. The further away the less likely a secondary hit will occur. Generally using bursts is for CQB operations, or for attempting to increase suppressive fire on a target. Actually hitting with multiple rounds is for close ranges roughly up to 7m with real reliability, and perhaps 15m being what the mechanics of the game reflect, beyond this range the mechanics of the game may even be too generous. Note I am not saying it can't or won't happen, just that the likelihood drops drastically after those ranges with a SMG, an aimed burst from an assault rifle perhaps 50m, though most of these things are highly dependent on firing stance also. Personally I think the current system models the option fairly well.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

As a variation on your suggestion, rather than just adding the Auto Fire number of dice to the damage, treat it as a second damage roll (of however many dice) but no to hit roll.

Thus the autofire is treated as 2 damage attacks, but only 1 attack roll. Then armor can reduce both of the damage attacks.

 

[d(sqrt(-1))]

As a variation on your suggestion, rather than just adding the Auto Fire number of dice to the damage, treat it as a second damage roll (of however many dice) but no to hit roll.

Thus the autofire is treated as 2 damage attacks, but only 1 attack roll. Then armor can reduce both of the damage attacks.

But that then makes Full Auto fire not as good as Burst fire, since you are getting an automatic extra hit, whereas with the Full Auto rules, you roll and group dice in pairs, whch may or may not give extra hits.

Mark

 

[JimG]

I haven't done any of the math to figure out how well this would work under MGT, but I remember liking the old Striker (Traveller miniatures game) rules for autofire weapons.

If I remember it correctly - autofire weapons get a bonus to hit based on ROF (which decreases with range) and for every 2 points by which you beat the target roll, you get one additional hit.

 

[PFVA63]

Hi,

In the games I have played over the years, personal combat usually wasn't a main focus, so that I never paid too much attention to those rules, as long as they provided for results that seemed to make sense in the context of the game and as long as they weren't too complex for use. However, over the years I have collected some info that may be of use to you for addressing some of the issues that you all bring up.

With respect to firing bursts from weapons, some questions that probably needs to be addressed is

• how big is your target?
  how far away is it?
  are there multiple targets in the same area?
  are there other things that you might also hit?
  do you know where the target is (that is are you aiming at a specific target), or are you more aiming in a general location and trying to get as many rounds in the area as possible (for example are you returning fire in the direction of a muzzle flash you saw or the sounds made by a potential threat, or maybe just trying to clear out a room) etc?

Over the years I have found a number of documents either at a local used book store, or on the internet, addressing weapons and their capabilities. Specifically, there is a US government site called the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)'s Scientific and Technical Information Network (STINET) , which has many publicly available documents scanned and available for download. (Unfortunately being a .mil site, it may not be available to overseas users)

On this site is a document from 1964 produced by the US Army on tests with the M-16 rifle. Some of the results of the tests conducting as reported in this document includes:

• In firing 3-round-burst automatic accuracy at 25 meters from the standing position, the average extreme spread for all shots was 117.2 inches. The average extreme spread for the first shot in each group (aimed shots) was 2.4 inches.
  In firing 5-round-burst automatic accuracy at 25 meters from the standing position, 9% of all shots missed the 20-foot-high by 12-foot-wide target.
  In firing 3- and 5-round burst automatic accuracy at 50 meters from the prone position, without the use of artificial support, the average extreme spread was 89.6- and 101.9 inches, respectively.
  In firing 3- and 5-round-burst automatic accuracy from the hip at 25 meters at an E target, 90 rounds were fired, in 3-round bursts, resulting in 19 hits. A total of 150 rounds was fired in 5-round bursts and 32 hits
  were obtained.
  In the combat accuracy test, the average extreme spread was 4.0 inches.
  In the rate-of-aimed-fire test, automatic fire, compared to semiautomatic fire, resulted in a reduction of the average number of hits obtained by 39.6 per minute, although there was a 14.6 increase in the average number of shots fired per minute.

In another document from that site discussing the revised M16A2 rifle (dated 1986), there is some discussin regarding the elimination of of a full automatic fire capability from the weapon. The report notes that full automatice fire "enhances the ability of Army units to clear and defend buildings, to conduct final assaults on enemy positions, to defend against an enemy final assault, to conduct an ambush, to react to an enemy ambush, to engage an enemy helicopter or fast moving vehicle, etc."

Additionally, it notes that in the initial testing of this new weapon conducted by the USMC for the weapon "room-to-room fighting was conducted with blanks, no close-in firing was conducted, no firing with short time limits was conducted, no firing at aircraft was conducted, etc. In other words, for all of the automatic/burst firing conducted during the test, a semi-automatic mode of fire would have probably resulted in a greater number of target hits."

As such, based on my very limited understanding of combat, it would seem that full-automatic and burst fire would have some benefits in certain specific operations, but may not provide the same benefits across the board in all situations, and as such, any attempt to address the benefits and drawbacks of either burst fire or automatic fire in a game, like Traveller, maybe should consider stuff like;

• the size of the target
  the range to the target
  whehter the attack is a snap shot or aimed fire
  whether you are attacking or defending against a large group of potential targets
  and/or whether you are you are firing perhaps almost partially blindly to clear a compartment etc.

It would also seem that, really in any form of combat in Traveller, but particularly in situations where you are firing alot of rounds with the potential for alot of misses, that there may be a need to address the effect of these misses on other things in the area. This could be especially of interest in situationd say like in the movie "Aliens" where there were massed swarms of creatures attacking and that if you miss one you might hit another, but could also be of real concern within a starship or other location, where misses could damage other stuff in the direction that you are firing at.

Anyway, I just wanted to share some of the info that I had in case its of any use to you.

Regards

PF

 

[FallingPhoenix]

In my (albeit somewhat limited) experience with burst and automatic weapons, a bipod or tripod is almost essential to give any reasonable probability of multiple rounds hitting the same target.

As for extra damage making burst fire better than auto, it always seemed to me that the auto-fire advantage was that you could hit multiple targets with one attack.

Auto-fire is also really nice when shooting from or at a moving object, especially if you have tracers of some kind.

 

[PFVA63]

Hi,

One other thing that should probably be mentioned, that I saw in one of the documents that I read is (if I am recalling correctly) that the accuracy of a weapon in automatic and/or burst fire can be very dependent on how fast the weapon fires off its rounds. I believe the article stated that the shorter the interval between the shots, the less they are impacted by recoil, or something along those lines.

As such, in Traveller terms I'd guess that some type of weapons may be more accurate when conducting automatic or burst fire, than others. And in reality, I'd suspect that even some similar type weapons may have differences (that is I'd suspect that not every Assualt Weapons built in the Imperium would necessarily act exactly the same).

Anyway, just some additional thoughts.

Regards

PF

 

[Klaus Kipling]

Actually, once T/E was dropped the original autofire mechanism would've only needed a bit of modification to work well.

Roll the auto number of dice, take the highest, then add that to each of the others. Auto-6 would have 5 opportunities to hit, auto-4 would have 3. And apply no bonus from skill or dex (but do apply penalties), as the highest die adds to all attack rolls.
This has the advantage of making those devastating attacks possible, and of using odd numbers for the auto number, meaning auto-3 or auto-5 is available, giving more weapon differentiation.

Or, use a lower auto-number. +1, +2, or +3, which becomes either a to hit bonus for burst-fire, or the number of extra attacks for full-auto, ammo used x2 or x5 respectively.

 

[apoc527]

I had some additional thoughts on possible autofire/burst fire house rules.

Burst Fire House Rules
1. Wide vs. Narrow Burst -- Stolen shamelessly from Spycraft, give two options for burst fire: wide bursts add half the Auto value as a DM to the attack roll and Effect is added to damage normally. Narrow bursts have no DM, but in addition to adding Effect to damage, you also score bonus damage based off Effect and the Auto number. I would use Effect/2 * Auto number, so Effect 0-2 = +Auto, Effect 3-4 = +2xAuto, and Effect 5-6+ = +3xAuto. This would still use up Auto number of rounds.

It would also potentially hurt--a burst from an ACR with Effect 6 would do 3d6+6 (Effect)+18 (Auto x3). To help balance this out, a narrow burst could actually be a -1 DM. OTOH, catching a full burst from an ACR would totally suck!

Autofire House Rules
1. As per RAW, but Skill 2+ means that you expend only Auto x2 rounds instead of Auto x3 rounds to get the same effect. This represents an experienced autogunner being able to more effectively use the weapon on autofire without making it godlike in damage potential.

2. As per RAW, but Effect 6+ results in a bonus hit and is calculated independently per pair of dice. I.e. If I am using the ACR and roll my 6 dice and get a 5, 6, 5, 4, 6, 3 (a darn good roll) and I have Skill 1 and +1 DM from Dex, then I could conceivably pair the 2 sixes to get 14, the 5+4+2=11, and 5+3+2=10 to score 4 hits (2 normal successes and 1 extraordinary success).

Thoughts?[/i]