Automatic Weapons

[Katarn]

And idea that I starting thinking of when I began playing at SWAT team member.

What's the rule for automatic weapons that could fire more than one shot a turn?  One possibility adapted from DnD Homebrew:
*Select a number of shots
*Roll 1 gun roll (the initial aim)
*each shot gets a cumulative -1 to each (due to kickback)?
*1 Athletics Roll against.

Example:  I fire off 4 shots on automatic.  I roll a +6 Guns, so the 4 shots are +6, +5, +4, +3.  Enemy's Athletics Roll is +4, so he take 2+1=3 stress.

Or do the rules cover another angle on this?

[devonapple]

The rules already would consider this a "Spray Attack" (don't know the page offhand). It is also good for Evocations, though a little harder because of the dual nature of Discipline checks.

There may already be a Guns Stunt for this, but if not, you could make one up that makes it easier for you to control each individual shot.

[Ren]

Near as far as I can tell there are no rules for auto-fire or burst fire. I think the idea is that you have to declare a Maneuver of "Automatic Fire" then tag it for a +2 for extra damage or if you are doing suppressing fire then you can tag it to affect all enemies in a zone as an additional maneuver to put an aspect of "Pinned Down".
Otherwise you can always perform a Spray attack and split the hits amongst as many targets as you like. Other maneuvers can be declared to increase the over all hit success.

[Tedronai]

The benefit of an automatic weapon when fired at a single individual, is included in the weapon rating.  When fired at multiple individuals, as others pointed out, that's a 'spray attack'.

[Sanctaphrax]

I do not think that your suggested approach is a good one.

As far as I can tell, there is no reason not to fire the max number of shots every round (assuming that ammo is not carefully tracked). Also, that would do a ridiculous amount of damage if the gun had a weapon rating.

Perhaps you could just allow spray attacks to target the same person multiple times.

[Becq]

Example:  I fire off 4 shots on automatic.  I roll a +6 Guns, so the 4 shots are +6, +5, +4, +3.  Enemy's Athletics Roll is +4, so he take 2+1=3 stress.

In your proposed mechanics, you misplaced the Weapons rating of the gun, which would probably be at least 3, and that attacker still hits on a tie.  So in your example, the damage would actually be 5+4+3 = 12 stress.  I don't think you want guns doing that much damage, do you?

[UmbraLux]

Don't have the book available for reference, but I believe it suggests using automatic fire as a block against movement.  Most people won't go running through an area being hoses with lead.    Think it also points out the block is only effective if the blockees are vulnerable to damage by firearms.  Uses the loup as an example if I remember correctly.

[LokiTM]

It is not as though one re-aims between shots of a fully automatic weapon.

I too lean towards treating it as part of the weapon's rating. At the granularity of the simulation, the entire burst is a single attack, which could be concentrated or sprayed, and where most of the bullets miss in either case.

In a single attack, even a single shot weapon might have been discharged multiple times (all part of the same attack within the game mechanics). Perhaps this is part of why there is no attempts to do tracking of ammunition in the rules.

[devonapple]

Perhaps this is part of why there is no attempts to do tracking of ammunition in the rules.

It's true. Those situations are best handled as a nonspecific Compels of the phantom Aspect "Gun."

[Bruce Coulson]

I would handle it as a tag, for +2.

And keep the 'Out of Ammo' tag and Fate Point in reserve...

[Katarn]

Word of Fred

That's doesn't simulate the story effect of an automatic weapon,
really. All that stuff is just subsumed in e damage rating of the
weapon.

So I guess you'd make the weapon rating higher.  Any suggestions how high of a weapon rating?  Keep in mind that this kind of gun could cause moderate/severe/extreme consequences in 1 turn for a pure mortal (ie full set of rounds to the chest).

[luminos]

Word of Fred

So I guess you'd make the weapon rating higher.  Any suggestions how high of a weapon rating?  Keep in mind that this kind of gun could cause moderate/severe/extreme consequences in 1 turn for a pure mortal (ie full set of rounds to the chest).

Reread Fred's quote.  You want to simulate the story effect of the gun, not the physical effect of it.  

Some facts to keep in mind:
1.)  One action in an exchange is abstract.  It could be a single punch, or a flurry of punches, or carefully testing an opponents defense before delivering a well calculated blow.  But the story effect may be the same for each of these, and if that were the case, they would all be represented by rolling a single fists attack.

2.)  The weapon rating is not strictly about what level of consequence the gun would inflict.  In fact, consequences are never inflicted by the opposing force.  They are always taken at the option of the defender, with the defender deciding the description of them.  In this way, consequences are more along the lines of "gruesome, but lucky, break" than they are the direct result of being hit.

3.)  Weapon rating is directly about how quickly the weapon will remove someone from a fight.  A weapon that will definitely remove a normal human from a fight is weapon 4.  A weapon that will remove most people from a fight, but will allow exceptions when faced by tough people who get lucky is a weapon 3.  A weapon which reliably removes people from fights, but it is not exceptionally rare to find counterexamples of people being hit by it and keep going is a weapon 2.  A weapon that will always take out a supernaturallly tough opponent is weapon 6 or higher.

Conclusions:

You can kill a normal man with single shot from a pistol, and that is only a weapon: 2.  Weapon: 4 represents grenades and powerful explosives.  Weapon: 3 is a good middle ground for most automatic weapons, but if its heavy enough, weapon 4 isn't out of the question.  If you try to justify, say, weapon 6, then you have not fully that numbers don't scale linearly in this game.

[Kommisar]

I'll state for the record here that I am both someone that has a great deal of experience with firearms including automatic military grade weapons AND someone that finds it to be a great waste of time and effort to try and model such a weapon's effects at the micro-scale.

Simply put, there are a vast amount of variables that can potentially come into play if one decides they are going to chase down the rabbit hole of micro-simulation of combat.  This is true of hand-to-hand and melee combat.  Especially true of combat involving firearms with a high rate of fire.  Many, many RPG systems over the last 30+ years have attempted to do just this.  All of them, in my humble opinion, have both failed to do so very well and added a daunting level of accounting, dice rolls, and overhead time to the game.

From a real world analysis of the effects of automatic weaponry in combat the real advantage of weapons with a high rate of fire (I am including everything from light machine-guns to semi-auto rifles and pistols here) is NOT damage potential to the target.  Hitting an enemy soldier one time in the chest with a 7.62mm round generally leads to the same outcome of hitting that soldier with 3 or more rounds to the chest (and legs, arms, head) with a statistical reliability such that the outliers make little difference.  The reason automatic (or multi-round burst) weaponry is so effective is because of their ability to pin down an enemy with sustained fire so as to both hurt their moral and allow for one to hold them in place to bring additional firepower to bear against them.  In a close quarter environment, the high rate of fire allows one to engage and take down multiple targets rapidly (room cleaning).

These are both wonderfully modeled (or able to be modeled) by the FATE system.  Having an automatic weapon gives you the easy justification to use that weapon in both blocks and maneuvers with a bonus.  At least that is how I have ran it in my game.  I treat "Automatic Fire" as a free taggable aspect of the weapon for those purposes if the character using it has a Good Guns Skill rating.  Now, this is completely my call here and my players have agreed that it makes sense and works for us.  I use a Good Guns rating as a threshold here because I know that using most automatic weapons effectively is not something that one can do easily.  But, for someone that is skilled enough, this means that having an automatic weapon gives them a bonus for when they attempt to use those weapons to pin people down or other similar effects. 

They already get the ability to make spray attacks.  That can be a big deal even if it can be hard to pull off.  But, as I have said above, hosing multiple targets with automatic fire effectively is not something anyone picking up a firearm can do.

Between those two bonuses, I do not see a need to give automatic weapons a boost or any reason to try and model increased damage based on number of bullets fired.  The place that it might would be against some of the bigger, tougher supernatural bruisers.  Against those really nasty things that just wade through fire, at best you are using the weight of fire to try and slow it down.  That is modeled as a Block with an automatic weapon gaining a +2 to the effort.  Against something that bullets can hurt but are tougher than human, I would say that anyone capable of holding their sustained automatic fire on target (a moving target!) like that would have an appropriate stunt that would give them a bonus with an automatic weapons.  An alternative would be to allow a very strong character to use his Might skill to supplement his Guns skill in that case.  Strength does matter in the case of controlling an automatic weapon.