Firing Fully Automatic: when should it be done?

Chris Turner, British paratrooper, is at the corner of a solid stone farmhouse. Three Polish scouts are approaching, unawares.  Chris opens fire, fully-automatic, at about 30m distance…

 I am quite interested in when it is optimal for characters in 'modern'-themed role-playing games to  use automatic fire from assault rifles and submachineguns. My impression was that in some games it is pretty much always pointless, and in others nearly always optimal.  My initial survey somewhat confirms this...

In Twilight 2000 2.2, Chris has a Small Arms Asset of 16 (Strength 8 + Small Arms (Rifle) 8).  He is carrying an M16A2, with the following stat-line.

Weapon	M16A2				Recoil		Rng
ROF	Damage	Pen	Blk	Mag	SS	Brst
3	3	1-Nil	5	20/30	3	5	55

Chris can fire up to 5 bursts per round, each of 3 bullets (the weapon’s ROF). He fires a fully automatic burst at each Polish scout.  The range is short (under the printed range).

Each round counts as an ‘Impossible’ shot, i.e. resolved at ¼ of the asset, 4.

No rounds are lost from each burst due to range.  Total recoil is 15-8 for a total of 7, however, which is more than the number of shots in the burst. Therefore the fire is wasted!

However, if Chris fires two bursts, the total recoil is 2; these 2 shots are taken from each burst, thus Chris only rolls for one hit with each.  He is better off staying with single-shot.

But if Chris fires only a single burst, then he will get to fire all three shots, even if he only hits on a 4 or less.  If he had fired three single shots, he would hit on a 15 or less with each.

However, supposing he is with Jason, a driver who has an asset of 12, but greater Strength (10).  If Jason fires two bursts, he would get to roll six dice.  He would need a 3 or less to hit on each of them.

Usually single-shot fire is much better than automatic fire in Twilight 2000; this is particularly true for ROF 3 weapons. But imagine Doug is a British soldier, who has Strength 12 and an overall asset of 16.  He could fire two bursts of 5 rounds, for 10 rolls needing a 4 (i.e. a 20% chance) or more to hit.  He could still fire 4 rounds single-shot, but each hitting on a 16 or less (i.e. 80% chance).  Doug is still more likely to hit with the single-shots. This equation only changes a little at longer ranges: John’s hit chances will go down, but the number of effective bullets from the bursts goes down too. 

The only really useful thing is that the bullets that don’t hit the target might hit anyone else who moves in the vicinity, so it at least has some kind of potential suppressive effect.

 

 In Twilight 2000 1e, things work in a very different way.  Essentially every 'shot' of ROF represents 3 rounds fired for most weapons - you can work out exactly how many by the number they have divided the number of bullets in a magazine by.  Our M16 has a magazine of 10 rather than 30, so each shot represents 3 rounds fired.  The chances of hitting at 30m are 48% for each of the four shots, so not too awful for Chris in these rules. Incidentally, if I recall the rules correctly, if Chris spends a turn aiming, his first shot is fired at a 96% chance of hitting.

If the same situation took place in Shadowrun1e, imagine Chris has a Firearms skill of 6.  He is armed with an FN-HAR assault rifle; this has a 20-round magazine and a Damage code of 5M3; and it also comes with integral laser sight and gas-vent recoil compensator (2).  30m counts as medium range in Shadowrun 1e for an assault rifle, so the base target number is 5.

On fully automatic fire in Shadowrun, the number of bullets fired can be up to firearms skill +1, so in this case 7.  However, the number of shots is applied as modifier to the required target number: in this case it would move it up to 12. 2 points of this can be offset by the stabilizers on the FN-HAR, leaving the final target number as 10.  Chris rolls 6 dice for each round (i.e. 7 times) requiring a 6, then a 4 or more on the additional die rolled for throwing a 6 (i.e. a 1-in-12 chance).  It would be much more effective for Chris to limit himself to two shots, where he has 6 dice and only needs to score a single 5 or 6 to achieve a hit. And he has a reasonable chance of getting the 3 hits he needs to shift the damage from ‘Medium’ to ‘Serious’.

If the FN-HAR is the ‘smart-gun’ version, then bursts are much more worth it: one could try 4 shots and there is a quite decent chance of taking down an unarmoured target.

The damage code of 5M3 indicates the ‘Power level’, the ‘Wound Category’ and the ‘Staging Number’.  The ‘Power level’ is the Target number for anyone hit by the fire to try and reduce the damage of the attack; the ‘Wound Category’ is the base level of damage the weapon does; and the ‘Staging Number’ is the number of additional successes either the attacker or the defender need to change the ‘Wound Category’ up or down.  Interestingly, Shadowrun rules that the ‘Power level’ increases if a weapon uses automatic fire – but since the bullets are supposed to be rolled for separately, it is difficult to see why this is the case.  To make sense of this, I would suggest that each burst is considered to consist of 3-, 4- or 5- individual bullets.

 

 RECON has a more idiosyncratic system although it does have its points. All weapons of the same type have the same rate of fire; this rate of fire that you roll for is explicitly NOT the same as the number of bullets fired. So all submachineguns can fire 5 ‘shots’ on full automatic; the only modifier is a further -10 to all hit probabilities (which are given in percentages). The RECON 2e rules (i.e. the ones published by Palladium) use a ‘situational’ rather than ‘simulationist’ system, whereby the main modifiers are the combat situation: attackers in  an ambush are likely to roll at nearly their base skill level, those being ambushed fire with big penalties.

So, to go back to our example, Chris has a base skill of 80% with assault rifles. He can fire 5 times on full-automatic.  He can split his fire between the three Polish scouts. Because he is ambushing them, he will roll twice at the first two and once at the third with a 70% chance of hitting.  Ammunition is dealt with in a somewhat ‘quantum’ fashion: everyone has ammunition until they haven’t, the relevant factor being the character’s Alertness rating – more Alert characters pay more attention to their ammo expenditure, less Alert characters blaze merrily away.  This doesn’t affect their likelihood of hitting, just how many stoppages, whether through magazine changes or jams, they have. There is actually quite a lot to be said for this approach, as long as ammunition shortage isn’t a significant tactical factor.  It might be taken into account by demanding a ‘weapons check’ (i.e. a stoppage check) after every occasion on which a character fires fully automatic, but not when they fire on semi-automatic.

Thus there is a fair amount of disagreement about how accurate or not automatic fire is and thus how and when it is most worth using. In very broad terms, the answer seems to be  - always in T2000 1e, very rarely in T2000 v2.2 except when doing a form of area denial or at certain ranges when spray'n'pray works a little better, nearly always in Recon, and a little bit in Shadowrun 1e i.e. to the extent that the weapon is rigged out to avoid recoil, although these rules overall don't seem to make that much sense in any case.