So, I want to have my players meet an NPC inspired by one of the Trooper specs in Star Wars: The Old Republic, specifically the one that gets to use the Assault Cannon class of weapons. Like this one. So, what's the best weapon to model the kind of big, powerful, rapid-fire blaster seen here?

Is it too simple to give the NPC several ranks of burly and a heavy repeating blaster?

That's a light repeating blaster.

Sidewinder from Dangerous Covenants and some ranks in burly.

Either a Light or Heavy Repeating Blaster. Though be aware your PCs might have a case of the gimmes and want said blaster for themselves.

Doubtful. None of them really have skills to use them, and aren't going for character builds where that's effective (though one character is starting to have a distressing tendency to take enemy weapons. . . not to sell them or use them but literally to just hang them on the wall of his cabin aboard ship).

Beware adversaries carrying gear you don't want your PCs to have!

The sidewinder from DC, followed by the z-6 from FiB if you want something a little more manageable.

The thing about this system is that anybody with decent agility is going to be decent with any type of ranged weapon even without points in that skill. And pray they never discover Autofire.

4 hours ago, BadMotivator said:

Either a Light or Heavy Repeating Blaster. Though be aware your PCs might have a case of the gimmes and want said blaster for themselves.

Use an Arakyd 900 Gene-Lock, with the detonation mod. Put a "congratulations" note and some balloons

http://swrpg.viluppo.net/equipment/attachments/368/

37 minutes ago, Rithuan said:

Use an Arakyd 900 Gene-Lock, with the detonation mod. Put a "congratulations" note and some balloons

http://swrpg.viluppo.net/equipment/attachments/368/

Don't you mean a "Get Well Soon" card?

6 hours ago, ErikModi said:

So, I want to have my players meet an NPC inspired by one of the Trooper specs in Star Wars: The Old Republic, specifically the one that gets to use the Assault Cannon class of weapons. Like this one. So, what's the best weapon to model the kind of big, powerful, rapid-fire blaster seen here?

As Mark Caliber said that weapon is the Light Repeating Blaster and it's devastating in combat if your NPC is any good and uses Auto Fire. One trick is to use the Squad Rules and attach a group of Minions to the NPC using it so they last a few turns.

Well, he's intended to be a one-shot ally that I suspect the PCs will "adopt."

when you mentioned NPC, I immediately thought as an opponent. My bad!

If it is for a one-shot, why don't you make a custom gun, so you can skip the min/max of the attachments?

It'll be stock off-the-shelf for starters. Maybe an attachment or two. He's supposed to be part of an elite commando squad, after all. If the players do adopt him, I'll gear him up a bit more as they do.

Why stop at one? Why not give them dual LRBs with weapon harnesses, linked together to an armor suit with linked optics and a strength enhancement system?

Your PC's will "meet" him alright. Round One, PC's win initiative because of someone's great Presence score and the bad guy is defeated before he ever gets off a shot. PC's get the weapon. Best case seems to be that the bad guy gets one shot off before dying in Round Two as the PC's team up on him. This ain't World of Warcraft or KOTOR.

Even if he is an ally and the players don't go for the team kill, its possible that he dies during the course of a session and the PCs loot the corpse. Unless you make him a Nemesis level NPC so he has good chances of survival. But even then, he could die still.

But even if the PCs never get their hands on his particular weapon, they might end up wanting one if he uses it effectively. Autofire with a good ranged skill level is so good its kinda broken. Since you can literally keep killing stuff as long as you keep passing checks.

I had a character once with a HBR. One of the first big combats I ended everything in round 1 because of Autofire. We reread the rules like 5 times before and after the combat to see if that is really how it worked. That Cantina was full of bodies...

The rambo rule is a common house rule. You can only hit extra targets equal to brawn rating.

Apparently I need to read the auto fire rules again, because I thought it was an additional target hit for every two Advantages rolled (if the shooter wanted to spray 'n pray, instead of concentrating on one target).

9 hours ago, the mercenary said:

Apparently I need to read the auto fire rules again, because I thought it was an additional target hit for every two Advantages rolled (if the shooter wanted to spray 'n pray, instead of concentrating on one target).

It’s additional attacks, not extra hits. And you can chain additional attacks off the additional attacks. Letting you keep shooting till you either miss or the whole room is dead... If you have a character with a decent enough ranged heavy skill you can easily get 5-6 successful attacks in a row, and conceivably many more. Even with a stock heavy blaster rifle that many hits is enough to pretty much end many encounters.

While it is pretty realistic, it is a bit OP. And that is without adding talents and just higher skill in general.

1 hour ago, BadMotivator said:

It’s additional attacks, not extra hits. And you can chain additional attacks off the additional attacks. Letting you keep shooting till you either miss or the whole room is dead... If you have a character with a decent enough ranged heavy skill you can easily get 5-6 successful attacks in a row, and conceivably many more. Even with a stock heavy blaster rifle that many hits is enough to pretty much end many encounters.

While it is pretty realistic, it is a bit OP. And that is without adding talents and just higher skill in general.

I'll admit I haven't dove into the rules in a while and this may be semantics, but I'm positive that it's additional hits.
Attacks = roll of the dice
Hit = apply the a full dice result of damage to a target.
With automatic fire you increase the difficulty by one and use the most difficult target and it lets you get an additional hit in for every two advantage scored.

Even two (or more) weapons is still only one attack (roll of the dice).

The only way to get an additional attack that I know of is from the critical hit result that lets you repeat the attack.

If the attack hits, the attacker can trigger Auto-fire
by spending [2 advantage]. Auto-fire can be triggered multiple
times. Each time the attacker triggers auto-fire,
it deals an additional hit to the target Each of these
counts as an additional hit from that weapon, and
each hit deals base damage plus the number of uncanceled
[success] on the check.

This is straight out of the core book.

Hrrmmm. I was sure we read that and it was a whole new attack.

You mean something like this?