Adjudicating Blind Fire

[admiralducksauce]

Hi all!

A sticky situation came up in my game last night, and I thought it was tricky enough to rule on that I'd post it here for better ideas.

Two guys with drum-fed assault rifles are outside a run-down slaughterhouse shooting through the walls into the interior.  There's another guy with the same weapon (for this example anyway) firing through the walls back outside to the first two shooters.  We've already decided that the building walls are really only serving to conceal each person's location ("Rundown construction" placed earlier) rather than provide any sort of armor or hard cover.

How would you run this?

What ended up happening for us is that the two guys outside used their first actions to Maneuver aspects of "Flying Lead" and "Hail of Bullets" on the interior of the building.  Then they made attacks the next round, and I felt weird not applying any sort of modifier.  I didn't, however, and as it turned out the shooters' rolls were good enough to hit without tagging their Maneuver aspects.  It just felt weird that blind firing didn't do anything mechanically in game.  I ended up compelling everyone to be "out of ammo" so I wouldn't have to deal with the weirdness, but I wish I could think of a better way to handle that.

Maybe someone could Declare an Aspect of "Blind Firing" or "Total Concealment" and compel that to have the attacks miss?  But what if the shooter wanted to tag the "Flying Lead" Aspect at the same time saying that there are so many bullets it doesn't matter that they can't see?  

Can you buy off a compel with a tag like that?  Given no Fate expenditure, would firing through walls like that really not be any different from seeing your target?  I know I flubbed on something obvious here but I'm not seeing it.

[LokiTM]

You might try treating it as a +3 shift border against bullets. If you hit, you still do real damage because of the weapon value, but the odds of hitting go way down.

With an automatic weapon the ability to put up a "hail of bullets", and thus increase the odds of hitting, seems fair.

[luminos]

I'd adjudicate it as a zone border or an armor value.  Armor doesn't have to literally be armor, just something that provides a static bonus against incoming attacks.

[sinker]

I've also dealt with blind fire as a block before. More keeping everyone pinned down instead of actively trying to hurt any one person.

[admiralducksauce]

You might try treating it as a +3 shift border against bullets. If you hit, you still do real damage because of the weapon value, but the odds of hitting go way down.

With an automatic weapon the ability to put up a "hail of bullets", and thus increase the odds of hitting, seems fair.

This is the obvious thing I was missing.  Zone borders.  Thank you!  Now it would make sense for those shooters' Maneuvers they placed earlier to matter if the zone border is high enough that they'd likely miss without them.

I'd done suppressive fire as a block earlier in that same combat, but this time their intentions were definitely to shoot the other parties despite the intervening walls.

[devonapple]

We were on the other side of a stack of pallets from some Shotgun-Wielding Mercenaries. The GM treated it as a Zone Border 3, but we still got some blowthrough damage.

[noclue]

Maybe someone could Declare an Aspect of "Blind Firing" or "Total Concealment" and compel that to have the attacks miss?  But what if the shooter wanted to tag the "Flying Lead" Aspect at the same time saying that there are so many bullets it doesn't matter that they can't see?  

And this is a bad thing why?

However, I wouldn't compel a scene aspect. Tag the scene aspect for a +2 on your athletics, sure, but compel things on the character sheet.