I've probably been overthinking about this a bit, but this is where I've currently landed to best abstract an attack with a multi-barreled weapon system:
The current 4e skills and dice rolls, including ammo rolls to an extent, all represent a "to-hit" chance. While higher ROF weapons put more lead downrange, their ability to actually hit their target still depends upon the initial skill dice roll (the base dice); the ammo dice rolls conferred from high ROF just adds suppression, or additional hits in the event of a hit from the skill dice. In short, ROF doesn't actually matter if you don't "hit" the target you're shooting at outside of suppression likelihood, and I'm not sure that would actually change a whole lot at the high ROFs you'd normally find on a multi-barreled weapon system. Thus, ROF and their resultant ammo dice are a system with diminishing returns. Let's use some examples to illustrate what I mean:
M82A1
ROF 1
Maximum number of targets that can be hit in one hex (max targets): 2
Maximum damage possible on a single target (max dmg): 5
M4
ROF 3
Max targets: 4
Max dmg: 2+3
M249
ROF 6
Max targets: 7
Max dmg: 8
Using the same comparison chart, the M134 minigun mentioned above would yield:
M134
ROF 10
Max targets: 11
Max dmg: whatever the base damage is plus 10.
What I mean is this - it doesn't matter what your rate of fire is if you aren't hitting the target with your base die roll, at best it will only increase the likelihood of the target being suppressed.
What I'm further driving at is that even with a four barreled system like quad-.50s or the ZSU-23-4, if all you're doing is increasing the ROF, then you're really just increasing the number of targets that can be hit in the same hex or the amount of damage being conferred by a hit based on ammo dice successes. Given that the number of available targets in a given hex usually won't even be enough to warrant raising the "max targets" parameter, and the "max dmg" being done by multiple successes only scales so much, I'd propose a different approach for multi-barrel systems:
Use the base dice to determine whether or not the hit on a target(s) succeeds, but calculate the targets hit, damage done, and armor modifier of each barrel separately when determining damage.
For examples, say you fire a quad .50 at a group of six soldiers in a given hex. The firer rolls their base dice and max ammo dice, and hits with the base dice and 2 of the ammo dice. The base dice hit would result in 16 damage (with 0 armor modifier) to the core target, or a hit on four separate targets in the hex, or 8 to one target and 4 each to 2 other targets. The firer would then divy up the 2 additional points of ammo dice damage as they see fit in accordance with the normal rules.
As a separate example, say the target is a BTR but everything else is the same. All four barrels would hit the BTR, but none of them would penetrate except for the 2 hits from the ammo dice (each barrel does 4 base damage with no armor modifier and the BTR has an armor level of 4). In other words, instead of doing 18 damage, the most penetrating damage that could be done would be 6.
As a final example, say the target is a single, poor infantryman, and everything else is the same. The hit would do 4 x4 barrels worth of damage, +2 from the ammo dice damage, or 18 damage in total. If the infantryman was wearing a flak jacket, it would only do 14 damage in total (3 x4 barrels worth of damage, +2 from the ammo dice damage).
|