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Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: "A.R.Gay" <cs6004@****.WLV.AC.UK>
Subject: Shadowrun Autofire
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 15:26:31 +0000
Ok, Here is some stuff I pulled off of the news nets, I think
some of the points made in these articles are correct, I have
tried to edit them together in a resonable way, but as this is
my first attempt give me a break. The shadows are hard enough
without the other cyphers breathing down your neck.=)

Enjoy, JackFrost
--------------------------<<Begin Datanet Transcript>>------------------------
ANNON:
>How is it that someone with faster reflexes can somehow magically pump out
>more rounds of a full-auto weapon in 3 seconds than a really slow person? How
>is it you cannot aim at an _area_, which I believe is the entire point of
>automatic fire? And where do they get this 15-shot rule for miniguns? A
>minigun fires something on the average of 50-60 rounds per SECOND. Obviously,
>they wanted to make it survivable. Bud, if you take a full second's worth of
>rounds from a minigun, you are hamburger. Forget game balance.

MATT: Since you asked...

To rationalize an imperfect system, the faster character pulls the trigger
first, therefore getting off more rounds. A one to two second difference in
when the triggers are pulled makes all the difference on full-auto. If you've
ever fired a fully automatic weapon, you'd know what I'm talking about.
As for your second point, you're totally wrong. The yet-to-be-released
book Fields of Fire deals with cover fire.
As for your third, you have a point. But I'm not going to throw away an
entire section of the rules over some minor point that can be solved very
easily.
---------------------------<<End of Data net Transcript>>---------------------

They carry on like this for a bit, but It got me thinking.
There realy are some big holes in SR2 Autofire rules there was a
very good reply but I lost it. Anyway are there alternate rules
you use for autofire? I tried the Twilight 2000 rules for my
game but when my players could kill 10 people in 1 round, I
droped it as not quite right.

Enough for now,
-- JackFrost
Message no. 2
From: Timothy Dann <C598706@*******.BITNET>
Subject: Re: Shadowrun Autofire
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 16:44:39 CST
ERROR: This message seems to be empty. It is located at LOG9402C.RN::457749,262.
Message no. 3
From: Michael Garoni <Michael_Garoni@****.INTERSOLV.COM>
Subject: Re: Shadowrun Autofire
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 1994 09:13:00 LCL
What I used to do when I was GMing, on the rare occassion that anything other
than burst fire is used (and this is very rare in our game) is figure out how
many shots an auto weapon can spit in 3 seconds. ie an UZI at 600 rounds/minute
is a standard sort of SMG throws out 30 shots per turn. If a character has a
single action, they fire 30 shots on full auto, and this creates a fire zone
that lasts until that person's next action, next turn. If they have two
actions, full auto is 15, 3 action and it's 10, 4 actions and it's 7 one action
and 8 the next. I then went through and figured fire rates for each weapon
based on cost, manufacturer etc.

I think that I gave the Vindicator a lowly 2000 rounds/minute so you can do the
math to figure this one out.

Of course - what about recoil ? A weapon quickly gets out of control in this
manner. Well, I also gave each weapon a recoil grouping - how many shots it
took to increase the recoil by 1.

Any one who stuck their head up in a fire zone got attacked by the weapon.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) I no longer GM Shadowrun, since there are
two people in our group better at this role than me and we don't really use
autofire any more (more than bursts). As such I have misplaced all of this
data. It was probably fairly innaccurate anyway (I have never used a REAL
minigun so I have no idea how much recoil it inflicts).

I know that some people are thinking that this is getting around reaction etc,
but what is reaction? It is the speed at which you alter your activities, and
simply holding the trigger down for 3 seconds is one activity. Also, these
rules did not affect bursts or any other aspect of combat.

Any way, it probably isn't the best way of doing things, but for an abstract
system it had enough details to get the message through. If someone is laying
suppression fire over your head, don't stand up!

A side benefit was that it added a little more colour to the weapons and
individualised (is there such a word) them a little more. Made it almost worth
going for an SCK over an Ingram or vice versa.

-Obi Wan
Message no. 4
From: "Skrub." <mccllstr@*****.BUCKNELL.EDU>
Subject: Re: Shadowrun Autofire
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 1994 14:31:57 -0500
Question on autofire. I know in first edition you could only fire seven
shots / action in full auto. In second I can find no reference except for
the 15 shots on miniguns and 12 on some updated SSC heavy machine guns.
The examplr uses ten shots, that makes game balance sense to me, but what
is the actual rules entailed?


Skrub.

Further Reading

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These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.

Thwap!