Folks -

Question came up the other night on the sequence / player involvement with resolving Autofire-generated multiple hits.

Let's say that the PC faces two rivals that are in engaged range of each other. He fires a weapon with autofire (adding a purple, and all the rest) - and gets a hit, plus six (advantages). So, enough for FOUR total hits (2 ADV = an extra hit).

Do you:

(a) Ask the player to tell you which hits to apply to which rival BEFORE resolving the damage. "How many hits to Rival #1 and how many to Rival #2?"

-or-

(b) Walk thru each hit individually. "Your first hit hits Rival #1... he's still standing..." and let him apply each hit AFTER he knows if preceding hits took an enemy down.

I have a player who rolls ALOT of ADVs (a mod'd barrel plus aiming a lot)... who wants to apply each hit individually... so he can then throw a bunch of left over ADV out as Boost dice, etc.

Thx,

- GM Khyrith

RAW there is no right or wrong answer technically. You resolve all advantages at the same time. The autofire effect itself imo implies you decide how many hits to activate and on who when you pull the trigger. I think allowing your PC to engage in that amount of bookkeeping while firing a machine gun is a little to min/max for my tastes.

Since each hit can generate it's own critical, I suggest just working each spending of Advantage out entirely before moving on to the next spending.

Also make sure the player is declaring their intention to hit multiple targets before rolling the dice. It's most important for making sure he is rolling against the hardest character to hit, but it also makes them think more about their action before the dice hit the table.

Now as far as spending the advantage I would normally allow them go one by one through each Advantage deciding what to do with it and resolve them as you go. So basically what you have been doing.

There are a lot of threads on these forums dealing with Auto-Fire, if you feel it's getting a tad boring I would suggest seeking some of the previous threads out. They are full of ideas on designing encounters that nullify Auto-Fire, or at least reduce its effectiveness significantly.

What you should aim for is to challenge the character sometimes, but others give them the chance to slaughter and have fun. The challenging times will just make the lawn mower times much more fun.

My group must declare targets prior to firing, using the difficulty of hardest to hit, they will be hit in the order called out.

Yeah, I’d be inclined to make the PC decide which targets to hit with how many shots each, before resolving the various results of the hits.

You’re basically taking a machine gun and waiving it around at your targets, hoping that one or more blasts will hit them. It’s not like you’re a sniper who is taking their time between each and every shot to carefully re-aim and then pull the trigger again.

It's not hard to imagine concentrating automatic fire on one target until it drops and then sweeping over to another target. It doesn't have to be a wild spray across the target area, and the fact that friendlies are rarely in any danger from your auto-fire suggests that it is not wild spraying.

In this, I have actually been helped by other media.

I used to demand that players who wanted to use Autofire tell me beforehand how many shots were going to each target before hand, two to the first then the rest to the 2nd, etc. Okay roll.

However, after playing specifically Battlefront, I can tell you that it's pretty easy, at all but the longest ranges (can barely see them), to concentrate on one guy until he goes down and then move to another. Even with the fastest firing and highest recoil. When I turn the corner and there are two or three opponents, I just squeeze the trigger and don't let up until they're all down... or I am. Yes, it's only a video game and not "real life". However, this is Star Wars so...

So now, I allow them to go shot by shot. Though, I also don't tell them wound point status. Just "Okay, that guy goes down." Often they aren't out of the fight, they just dropped prone. It makes my players happy.