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Sunday, December 8, 2019

Automatic Weapons & the shooting of them

Someone on discord the other night suggested a really cool premise for an Esoteric Enterprises game. The MIB or BPRD or whoever your paranormal hunting government agency might be has splintered off into warring cells named after the major tarot. The Tower are a group of agents who found their way into the underworld and never really came back out, The Chariot are a hyper-religious, hyper-conservative sect with itchy trigger fingers. You can see how this is some cool shit. 

So now my brain has been abuzz with how to hack some modern Esoteric Enterprises type elements onto my Into the Odd/GLOG hack. It's been slow going so far, but I think I've landed on a rule for automatic weapon fire that really shines. 

"Firing an Electrical Gatling" The telegraphic journal and electrical review, November 28, 1890


Firing an Automatic Weapon (Or, the ol' Spray n' Pray)


Roll up to 3 damage dice and keep the best result, then roll your ammo usage die once for each damage die you rolled, one die step at a time.

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Now that I'm writing this out, maybe this should just be the core rule for shooting a gun. Like, you don't take a special action to do this with certain kinds of guns, this is just how shooting guns functions, and maybe special guns deviate from this. 

I'm not sure how I would want to handle the ammo die. In the black hack your ammo would be represented wholesale by the usage die, and you would roll it at the end of a gunfight. That's a solid rule, and it would function fine on it's own. But I feel like the rule I wrote implies that you roll the ammo die every time you attack, so if the usage die represented all of your ammo you'd be running out pretty quick. I think I would rather it represent the ammo left in the gun. 

I use item slots, but I'm unsure what an item slot's worth of ammo should be. Should it fill your gun entirely? That's what I'm leaning towards. 

I break weapons down into 3 categories, Light-Medium-Heavy. This determines their damage die, the number of item slots they take up, so why not their maximum ammo usage die size? Maybe it could just be equal to the size of the weapon's damage die. I keep thinking to myself "but then shotguns will have a weirdly high amount of ammo" and the cognitive dissonance prevents me from making any headway on the idea. 

But, now that I'm looking more at this black hack blogpost about guns and ammo, I think defining the kind of gun you're using by slapping a special tag onto the standard light-medium-heavy weapon statblock would be a cool way to handle it. 

So you would take one of these tags (These are just a few examples)

Shotgun: Increase weapon's damage by one step, decrease max ammo usage die by one step. 

Sniper/Scoped: If you do not move this round, increase weapon damage one step

Arrow: Max ammo usage die is d12, but you cannot use the Spray n' Pray maneuver 

And apply it to one of these 



Weapon Type
Damage/Max Ammo Usage Die
Encumbrance Slots
Heavy (2 hands)
D10 
3
Medium
D8 
2
Light
D6
1




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