Quick Idea For Rapid Fire Weapons

I'm currently working on the graphic design of our unit reference cards. Which is coming along quite nicely. As I've been working on it though, I've had some thoughts about how we might handle 'Rapid Fire' weapons in our game.

Most military 'Assault Rifles' carry about 30 rounds. Which are normally fired in short bursts for accuracy. Something which is handled pretty well with our normal rules.

But these guns, (not to mention Machine Guns and Rotary Cannons) can also go 'full auto' and pop off all of their ammo in a hail of bullets that will shred anything close to the firer. They're not terribly accurate when fired this way, but there are times when the ability to spray out a wall of lead would be pretty useful.

The downside is, of course, that you're popping off a large part of your ammo to do this. Which might leave you flat-footed when you need a few extra shots, but don't have them available. So how to we represent this?

Here's my idea: We let weapons with the 'Rapid Fire' special rule increase their rate of fire as a special ability. But you pay for these extra shots with Suppression Markers. Which represent your unit shooting off a bunch of it's ammo and the associated hassle/confusion of reloading.

Along with this we could double the normal -1 range penalty during the actual firing. As this is really only something that you want to do at close range anyhow.

Now, the problem with this conception is the actual numbers. The table above assumes that a unit of 10 rifles is shooting 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 shots per round. You can see though, that if they go from RoF2 to RoF3, then the extra suppression marker they'd get from the Rapid Fire ability would eat up their gains and them some. They'd go from 10 average hits with 20 shots, to only 9.9 hits with 30 shots.

So this suggests 2 things. Either we let the Rapid Fire ability double the unit's shots (10 average hits to 13.2 average hits), or we don't apply the suppression marker's to-hit penalty until after the shots have been made (10 average hits to 15).

Right now we're also increasing the target's evasion by one point for every suppression marker the firer has. If we went to +1 Ev for any level of suppression, then Rapid Fire only hurts your ability to follow orders next turn.

AND/OR... The marker added to the unit could be an 'ammo marker' instead of a Suppression Marker. Same effect, but the ammo marker can't be removed for the rest of the game.

Thoughts? This idea is still in it's infancy. :)