[HT] Full-Auto weapons and RoF #!

[apoc527]

It bothers me less for UT guns, but there is a definite "issue" of players rapid firing to the bonuses. You see semi auto, sure, but in terms of burst sizes, you tend to only see 5, 9, and 13 round bursts, all designed to be the minimum ammo usage to get the next highest RoF bonus.

However, this ultimately doesn't bother me very much. The RoF bonuses are already an abstraction with arbitrary limits. If I'm living in a world where the physics dictate that bursts of 5, 9, and 13 rounds give me the bonus I want, then I suppose I learn to FIRE 5, 9, or 13 round bursts and don't bother wasting ammo. Really, what would requiring players to waste ammo on 6-8, 10-12 or 14+ round bursts really accomplish? Is it going to drastically improve gameplay? For some, I'm sure they are sufficiently bothered to say "yes," but for ME, the answer has to be "no." ESPECIALLY if I need to add another die roll for more precision/realism. One reason I stopped playing GURPS 3rd Edition was the ridiculous number of rolls needed to adjudicate a burst of automatic fire. The new system isn't perfect, but it's playable, and for me, that's what counts.

So I'll keep on ignoring the slight amount of min-maxing inherent in conveniently only firing bursts of 5, 9, and 13 rounds. :-)

EDIT: One thing you could do by way of "remedying" this situation is to say that guns can ONLY fire at 100% RoF, 66% RoF, 50% RoF, 33% RoF, and 25% RoF. This is arbitrary, of course, but it would force some guns to waste ammo on suboptimal burst sizes. It's a double edged sword though, because now any gun that happens to hit those magic numbers above is "better" than guns that "waste" ammo.