Alright, I've read the various "Is Autofire Broken" threads and considering the player in my game who has a character that uses a Jury Rigged Autofire Heavy Blaster Rifle has said "this is broken" we have come up with a few rules to make it, and a few other broken bits, better. This comes from last nights session where I had them battling wampas, when they were battling them the autofire guy would simply back up from Engaged range to Short, burn two Strain so he could use Aim and drop a huge handful of dice because his Agility is Five and his Skill is Three. He had, on average, three Yellow, two Green, one Blue and two Purple... Combined with his Jury Rigged Heavy Blaster Rifle he had between five and seven extra hits at between eleven and fifteen damage. He chewed up wampas making short work of the beasts. So we had plenty of time to discuss the problems since the adventure went by pretty quick.
First off, there isn't (as far as we can find) any penalty or problem with simply backing away from opponents at Engaged range to Short range so you don't have to suffer the extra difficulty of firing Heavy weapons in Engaged range. Also it seemed strange that there would be such a strong penalty for using ranged weapons in engaged range when a shooter could simply use a maneuver to back away and eliminate those extra difficulty dice. If you look at the math of it staying at Engaged range, aiming and shooting means three purple dice and one blue dice while backing away and shooting without aiming means only one purple die. We've decide that if a character wants to back away from an Engaged opponent they must use two maneuvers to do so. If they don't use two maneuvers the opponent gets a free attack on the retreating character. We figured this makes it harder for anyone who wants to shoot their way out of every problem to do so and it makes the one dimensional big shooter less attractive than the well balanced character.
Second we decided that to shift fire from one target to the next needs some kind of penalty. Several other gaming systems that have autofire do something similar so we decided that in order to move to the next opponent they must spend one Advantage. After all, bad guys don't stand shoulder to shoulder waiting for the good guys to hose them down, they spread out to make it more difficult to take them all out. Also those shots that go between the bad guys can be used for all kinds of mischief by an evil minded GM.
Third we decided that the autofire attack can only cover a 30 to 45 degree arc. Mind you that's hard to do if you aren't using a grid and character markers but one can use a rule of thumb to determine the maximum number of targets. At Engaged range at most there can be two bad guys in that arc. Then as you go out to Short Range make it three, then four at Medium range and perhaps six at Long range and lastly eight at Extreme range. One could use a Leadership check from the opponent group leader to reduce those numbers indicating a skilled leader would have his troops spread out. Cut the maximum targets down by one for every uncancelled Success on that check.
Fourth we decided that instead of adding one purple die to the autofire roll we would upgrade one purple die to a red die. This gives a chance of really bad things happening so a creative GM can have an excuse to damage something they may have needed or hitting an ally with a stray shot. It also makes an autofire user think twice about using it in certain places where that stray shot can screw them up. I would also use that rule for dual wielders since wild shots can cause all manner of problems.
Lastly I think the player needs to say which targets they will be spraying fire over before rolling. After all, they don't know how much damage it will take to finish each opponent off and they won't know how many hits they will have. So while they may know their average hits and what average damage may be for the attack they shouldn't be able to move to the next target after they've taken the first one out. That implies a level of control that simply can't exist. So while there may be three targets in their optimal arc do they want to spray over all three hoping for enough hits and damage to take three out or would it be a better idea to spray over only two? As a GM you hope they chose all three and dividing the damage and hits with needing to spend two Advantages to engage the three targets your bad guys will survive long enough to get a second turn of attacks.
I don't think these tweaks are a complete eff you to the autofire guys since two of the five apply to more than just the autofire players and the rest of them are simply applying some reality to the existing rules.
Comments?