House ruling firearm skills?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by ed_209a

It seems to me that the real skill in using a firearm is in aligning the weapon with target, and then triggering the weapon without pulling the weapon off target. That is what you spend hundreds of hours honing. That shouldn't change whether you are firing a .38 revolver or a blaster.

Actually it will be pretty different with the blaster. Beam paths are much less distorted by things like gravity or wind than bullets. All of the stuff you would do to compensate for range is unnecessary. And in rapid fire you don't need to worry about recoil (conversely you can't use it to help change the aim point if you are trying for suppressive fire) or where the cases are going.

Most of these skills have good defaults to each other anyway, so this mostly amounts to adjusting how much practice you need buy off different "familiarity" penalties - buying up a default is exactly the same process, it just has a different name and calls for more hours.