Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

[Thia Halmades]

Hey y'all.

 

So I'm building this HALO to HERO conversion over on the Star HERO board, yeah? And while I'm doing it I'm doing all the basic math in my head. A 5 rPD armor vs, say, a Skorpion SMG that deals 1d6+1 damage (a weak weapon) isn't going to be threatened real often. That's fine. a 7 rPD armor is never going to take damage from this thing. Ever. It can't, unless someone has an ability that adds Killing Damage to their range-weapons. And, since most of the HALO weapons are coming in around 60 or more Active Points, that's going to be a difficult trick to pull off without a very expensive NPA.

 

So of course a few of my weapons have Autofire. The BR55 Battle Rifle has 3x. The SMG I gave a full blown 20x. I double checked the rules for something I believed to be true, and it was - autofire is in no way cumulative. Every bullet is counted against your total defense. There's no net effect for drowning someone in a hail of gunfire. In other words, Autofire is only scary if you're going to take damage from the weapon in the first place.

 

This strikes me as a rather wrong. It could just be me! I come up with crazy questions and people look at me all cross-eyed from time to time, but shouldn't there be some sort of cumulative effect for taking that many rounds? Even if it's +1 per round fired? Yes, it's extra paperwork to handle it that way, another option I thought of was to net the total number of rounds and add it to the "final round" to represent the additional damage, although now we're into the argument for 'penetrating' which is a separate advantage.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Have you, as a PC or a GM, been confounded when you're 2d6 RKA Autofire Burst weapon bounces harmlessly off a rather cheap 10 rPD armor?

 

And, per the Title, do y'all know something I don't know?

[tesuji]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

First key...

 

when simulating, don't fret over damage caps.

Take a semi-auto rifle, remove the stop and turn it autofire and it doesn't suddenly do less damage per bullet that hits. The world doesn't have Ap limits that make the gun do less damage if its autofire.

 

Second kep, even in your example, the guy would take stun damage from each bullet. So even thoug they just wear the heck out of his armor vest and do no body, the rounds will do plenty of stun and Ko his bad self.

 

but, your best bet is to refigure the armor and gun values to suit your setting. if the bullets do bodydamage then chose a damage value and armor value that makes this likely to occur, even if that means its different from the HERO rulebook generic use guns and armor.

 

change HERo to fit your setting, not the other way 'round.

 

but in general, you are right.

[Edsel]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Modern State-of-the-art body armor is very impressive in its stopping ability. In controlled lab conditions I don't know if any pistol with standard armor will penetrate Level IV armor. This is why weapons like the FN P90 were developed specifically to penetrate modern body armor.

 

In the field though things are not so clear cut. I have often heard stories of troops getting killed by a "lucky shot" that got through a gap (arm pit or whatever). I'd go into more detail but the workplace firewall is going up in one minute. Perhaps I can post more tonight.

[sbarron]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

tesuji is basically right. There is no cumulative damage applied as a result of being hit by several attacks, unless you look at the stun that is done. It's just not how the system works.

 

If you want to do more damage, then you need to either make larger attacks, or buy advantages like AP and Pen that are actually designed get damage through armor.

 

I'd suggest that you just lower the armor to 3/3 or so. The problem with larger attacks is the stun they do, so keeping those in check is a good idea.

[Chris Goodwin]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Also note that in a more realistic setting, that armor is going to itself be damaged by stopping multiple rounds. Four or five will probably make it useless.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

CG: I am talking about a heroic/realistic setting. Where would the rules be for the breaking down of armor in a fire fight?

[sbarron]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Ablative? If I remember the mechanics correctly, I think this would model realistic 5PD/5ED and 6PD/6ED armor pretty well. 3-4 hits exceeding 5 or 6 BOD and the armor is almost gone. I suppose you could tweak the ablative rules a bit and just say that the armor loses Def whether the BOD exceeds the defenses or not. Then it would only take 3-4 hits before the armor is all but gone.

[Chris Goodwin]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Idea, which requires some bookkeeping: treat it as Ablative, only keep track of the cumulative Body total stopped by the armor. For every multiple of its DEF, treat that as one instance of BODY getting through. (In other words, 7 DEF Armor is hit by 7 BODY. If it takes 1 more BODY, then it takes one Ablative hit. If it's hit by a total of 14 BODY, 1 more BODY pushes it to two. Etc.)

[ghost-angel]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

I agree with sbarron and Chris Goodwin - if you want autofire and more ammo to be a threat modify the Armor, not the bullets. Making it Ablative nicely simulates it breaking down over time with hits.

 

Chris: That's a pretty cool method for figuring ablative. Repped.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

I agree with sbarron and Chris Goodwin - if you want autofire and more ammo to be a threat modify the Armor, not the bullets. Making it Ablative nicely simulates it breaking down over time with hits.

 

Chris: That's a pretty cool method for figuring ablative. Repped.

Yeah.

What he said.

[prestidigitator]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Well, if you really want to, you can always put the Cumulative Advantage on the attacks. Actually I might suggest a slightly lesser version that is only cumulative with hits made in the same Phase. That could apply to Autofire, Rapid Fire, Move By, etc.

 

If you are using Hit Locations you can, of course, also roll individual locations for each Autofire shot that lands, which will definitely increase the possibility of some good damage (especially if armor is typically not full coverage).

 

The other thing you can do is apply custom Limitations that impose an OCV penalty on only parts of the Power (or use multiple attacks via Requires a Skill Roll). Then you wouldn't actually be using the Autofire Advantage at all, and things can be cumulative (different, "shots," are still part of the same Attack Power). If you want to simplify things as the GM, you can still treat things mechanically like Autofire attacks (i.e. the attack roll).

[David Johnston]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Of course another consideration is that nobody has ever made any real armour that can be worn by a human which has no activation roll or unarmoured areas. They all have places where they need to be allowed to bend and therefore the protection has to be less there than it is elsewhere.

[prestidigitator]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Of course another consideration is that nobody has ever made any real armour that can be worn by a human which has no activation roll or unarmoured areas. They all have places where they need to be allowed to bend and therefore the protection has to be less there than it is elsewhere.

Sure. Actually the system's official mechanic makes a lot of sense. If a projectile simply can't do damage to something, a whole bunch of them aren't going to do a lot more. Spray a bunch of bullets from a personal firearm at a tank and you still aren't being very effective.

 

Even if the average damage isn't enough to get past defenses, autofire increases the chances of doing some damage by allowing multiple rolls. Don't forget that; it is by no means insignificant! And the damage that actually does get past defenses is plenty cumulative.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

AH, but you're missing (in small part) the point of the discussion. I was considering Ablative, as it does nicely model the fact that no armor is perfect, even if it's nutty tough to get through. I also like CG's model.

 

This is all part of HALO HERO - a conversion you can find on the Star HERO boards which I decided one day would make a fun project. I'm through the entire human arsenal and building the alien weapons next. During the process, I built three weapons (the Assault Rifle, Battle Rifle, SMG) with Autofire in varying forms. The AR has it at 10, the BR has a burst setting (3) and the SMG is pimped at 20. I yield the argument that hosing someone with 20 rounds of 1d6+1 when they have 7 rPD armor is nearly impossible to harm.

 

What I'm looking for is Ablatative armor to be persistent in the world. Master Chief gets killed rather regularly, if you've played the game on anything other than 'normal.' It's hard, damn hard, to stay alive. He can get mowed down by a pair of... say... SMGs? Because of that I need to make sure the modeling in HERO reflects that he isn't nigh invulnerable. That would be ablative armor, that despite being great defensively, breaks down over time.

 

Good enough.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

AH' date=' but you're missing (in small part) the point of the discussion.[/quote']

Which point was missed, and who missed it?

 

Autofire doesn't cause bullets to do more damage, it causes armor to degrade faster ... if that was your point?

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Thia, may I suggest looking at this a little differently? You may be stuck on the term "Autofire" as the only or "proper" way to mechanically model an autofire weapon. With HERO you start with the effect that you want, and then find the mechanic that best suits it. The Autofire Advantage does certain specific mechanical things; if that's not what you want to have happen, perhaps you can try something else.

 

An autofire weapon allows you to fire multiple shots capable of either hitting one target multiple times, or hitting multiple targets in an area. It sounds as though you want the base Damage that a weapon does to the target to increase based on the number of shots you hit it with.

 

In that case, how about just increasing the base RKA that the weapon's built with, instead of adding an Autofire Advantage, and calling that an autofire weapon? The Special Effect of the increased damage would be the target being hit with more than one shot. If you want to hit several targets with the same "burst," just Spread the RKA - the damage done to each target will be lower that way, but that would match the SFX of each target taking fewer hits. Or, you can Spread the attack to increase your chances to hit, with the SFX of "hosing down the area" with bullets/pulse blasts/whatever.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

LL has a point... if "automatic" weapons are much more lethal may I suggest the following build:

 

Gun: 24 Charges, RKA 1D6 + RKA 1D6 (uses 2 Charges instead of 1) + RKA 2D6 (uses 4 Charges instead of 1).

 

At the full 4D6 of the weapon you're using 4 Charges (call each Charge a bullet) effectively using "automatic fire" to cause more damage than "non-automatic fire"

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Actually, that's an excellent idea, and I will make use of it at a later time. As it stands I've solved this problem for the moment. I did, in fact, finally build the armor that I wanted (or think I want) and its Force Field to go with it. And I took y'alls advice, and made sure I hadn't built said armor outside of the bounds of what would be 'harmable' under normal weapon rules.

 

Now I just have to build Covenant weaponry, and vehicles, and alien races...

 

Eeesh. Thanks for y'alls help!

[Sean Waters]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Weighing in a little late here but you could always buy the ammo as boostable charges. That would mean that if you used more bullets then you would do more damage. You'd also acquire a burnout roll. You might not enjoy that.

 

OK so what I'd allow is that you can ignore the burnout roll but have to use 2 or 3 or even more charges to get the boosted damage.

 

So (and I know nothing about guns, you understand):

 

The BR55 you can either treat as having 1 level of boostable charges (max) or a 3 shot sutofire. The Skorpion you can treat as a 20 round autofire 9if you want to hose down an area) or 4 levels of boostable charges (each 5 charges counting as 1 boosted charge) for a maximum damage of 2 1/2 d6. Just ignore the burnout roll if you don't like it.

 

Alternatively you can build it as suggested by Dust Angel. I think what you need to do first is sit down and decide how much damage you want the darned thing to do.

 

The other point to bear in mind with very large autofires (like the 20 shot SMG) is that, in-system, very few of those shots will actually hit: there's rarely any point, if you are aiming at a single target, of having more than autofire/3, or autofire 5 if you are hosing down areas.

 

For this reason, autofire may well not be the best method to simulate what it is you want to do. Consider AoE (line) for the 'spraying down multiple opponents' attack and simply extra damage for the concentrated attack - of course that then makes autofire skills pretty pointless.

 

Matter for you but you may want to limti the powers based on the number of charges expended:

 

1 charge: -0

2 charges: -1/4

3-4 charges: -1/2

5-8 charges: -3/4

9-16 charges: -1

16+ charges: -1 1/4

 

Now that limitation would only apply to the advantage/extra damage. In fact I'd do it as a single shot gun then a multipower of naked advantages. I know they are special powers - I got GM permission

 

45 MACHINE GUN OAF Pool limit: 4 recoverable clips of 60 shots (-0) for 90 point active pool

 

2u Mode 1: 2d6 RKA single 0 END 45 points

3u Mode 2: As above plus Concentrated burst (1" radius (hex with additional radius nonselective)) requires 8 shots (additional 13 points) 65 (active 67)

3u Mode 3: As above plus Hose Down (AoE line (up to 20" nonselective) requires 20 charges) additional 13 points 65 (active 75)

3u Mode 4: +1d6 RKA (requires 8 charges additional 15 points) 67 (67 active)

4u Mode 5: +2d6 RKA (requires 20 charges additional 23 points) 75 (90 active)

3u Mode 6: Accurate burst: As above + 3 levels with OCV, requires 3 shots 62 (67 active)

 

Total cost 63 points

 

OK bit of a dogs dinner: the charges on the pool are a notional limtiation to justify the extra charges limitations on the slots but the whoe thing is actually beuild with 0 END (as we are not actually using autofire we don't need to worry about the cost increase).

 

Basically you can single shot, three round burst (at +3 OCV), 8 round burst which allows you to make attack rolls against each target in a 7 hex area or a soiingle target at 3d6 RKA, or 20 round burst against a large area (allowing a lot of attck rolls) or a single target (doing 4d6 RKA).

 

The charges on the pool are recoverable because if youa re playing Halo you'll doubtless be finding more ammo strewn about the place

 

Anyway, that's what I think.

[David Johnston]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

This is all part of HALO HERO - a conversion you can find on the Star HERO boards which I decided one day would make a fun project. I'm through the entire human arsenal and building the alien weapons next. During the process, I built three weapons (the Assault Rifle, Battle Rifle, SMG) with Autofire in varying forms. The AR has it at 10, the BR has a burst setting (3) and the SMG is pimped at 20. I yield the argument that hosing someone with 20 rounds of 1d6+1 when they have 7 rPD armor is nearly impossible to harm.

 

Not really true. Even assuming the armour doesn't have a failure chance (and really it should), by the law of averages Mr. 7 PD should take quite a lot of stun. For the purposes of a videogame the distinction between being killed and being knocked below -31 stun and waking up a week later after the fighting is over in an enemy POW camp (assuming they didn't just kill you while you were out) is inconsequential. Either way you go back to a save and try again.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

 

So of course a few of my weapons have Autofire. The BR55 Battle Rifle has 3x. The SMG I gave a full blown 20x.

*snipped*

 

Another quick thing for consideration...

building your SMG as an AF20 attack means very little in reference to hosing down a single target unless you adopt a house rule like the one I mentioned in the "Older rules" thread.

The nature of the bell curve to hit rolls means that in effect the chances of you hitting by more than 10 or so is virtually nil, thus hitting with more than 5 shots will almost NEVER happen. As it stands right now, the only advantage to uincreasing the ROF of an autofire weapon is to increase the effects of attacking multiple targets or engaging in Supression fire

[prestidigitator]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

*snipped*

 

Another quick thing for consideration...

building your SMG as an AF20 attack means very little in reference to hosing down a single target unless you adopt a house rule like the one I mentioned in the "Older rules" thread.

The nature of the bell curve to hit rolls means that in effect the chances of you hitting by more than 10 or so is virtually nil, thus hitting with more than 5 shots will almost NEVER happen. As it stands right now, the only advantage to uincreasing the ROF of an autofire weapon is to increase the effects of attacking multiple targets or engaging in Supression fire

Well, except that 2-point CSLs aren't going to be that big of an investment on top of the rather large Autofire Advantage already paid for. Eh.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

Well' date=' except that 2-point CSLs aren't going to be that big of an investment on top of the rather large [i']Autofire[/i] Advantage already paid for. Eh.

Yeah, but you'd be hardpressed to find a GM that'd let you buy +20 OCV levels with your SMG, and you can't use anything less than 5 pointers with limits.

Granted, it'd be easy enough to tack on a bunch of said 5 pointers with OAF and some sort of "Only for autofire, only to increase number of shots that hit the target" custom lim and make it pretty cheap, but even that doesn't really work, because then you CAN'T hit with only 1 shot.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

It seems to me that the problem is that "armor" in most video games just means extra hit points, and in some cases Damage Reduction. In most cases, a video game character with a lot of "armor" will still take damage from even the smallest attack, to maintain game balance.

 

That's not the way Hero works and it's not the way the real world works. If I have a motor-driven .22 LR gatling gun, I'm still not going to be able to chew through a bank vault door or destroy a tank. Sure, I'll be able to erode all the bits on the tank that are outside the armor, but that's it.

 

 

On a slightly different note, does anyone else find it odd that Autofire, no matter how high, never increases you chance of hitting the target? Off the top of my head, something like +1 OCV for a five-round burst and +1 OCV for every full doubling of the ROF would probably be a welcome addition.

 

I suppose REALLY high rates of fire could be simulated with some kind of AOE.

 

Anyway, just some thoughts.

 

Zeropoint

[David Johnston]

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing?

 

 

On a slightly different note, does anyone else find it odd that Autofire, no matter how high, never increases you chance of hitting the target?

 

 

Not especially. "Spray and pray" is notorious for not being effective unless you happen to be firing into a crowd of massed targets.