NWod Mass Effect/Weapons
Contents
Weapons
Ranged Weapons
Pistols
This class of weapons is generally less impressive than the Rifles class. There's a reason for that. Seriously, if you're in a war zone you want a goddamn larger gun. Pistols have the advantage of concealability or more acceptance as personal defence weaponry, also being good fallbacks after you're out of heat clips for your main armaments. Also less cumbersome if your role isn't front-line fighter and you don't want to be lugging round heavy armaments.
All pistols share the same type of heat clip.
Light Pistol - Damage 1, SS/BF, Ammo 10 - Civilian sidearm, really, or very compact concealable assassin's weapon.
Heavy Pistol - Damage 2, SS, 9-Again, Ammo 10 - Big heavy pistol. Make sure your shots count.
Machine Pistol - Damage 1, SS/BF/Auto, Ammo 20 - Machine pistol. Spray and pray.
Rifles
This is everything that is a) not a melee weapon b) not a pistol and c) not a heavy weapon. Shotguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, you'll find them all here. Again, all share the same type of heat clip.
Assault Rifle - Damage 2, SS/BF/Auto, Ammo 40 - Your bog standard infantry weapon - good range, full selection of fire modes, hits reasonably hard.
Battle Rifle - Damage 3, SS, 9-Again, Ammo 30 - Marksman's weapon. Hits harder but each trigger squeeze fires one bullet. For the efficient killer.
Light Machine Gun - Damage 3, Auto, Ammo 50 - Squad support weapon. The LMG can't shoot in conservative fire modes, it's made for hosing down the battlefield. Unwieldy so will throw a penalty on you if you try and run around firing it (not sure what penalty yet) - hunker down in one spot and set to work.
Assault Shotgun - Damage 4, SS/BF , 9-again, Ammo 6 - Shock trooper's weapon of choice. Hits like a brick, but pants range, and its Damage halves every range increment out you go (so Damage 2 then 1 as you get further away) and it loses 9-again at anything other than short range.
Light Sniper Rifle - Damage 3, SS/BF, Ammo 12 - Light long-range rifle, good for firing from long ranges. However, will probably throw some sort of this-gun-sucks-at-short-range penalty on it.
Heavy Sniper Rifle - Damage 4, SS, 9-again, Ammo 5 - The long-range murderstick. Once again, the choice of a precision killer. Once again, sucks at long range, and unwieldy too so you'd best not want to move around with this chap.
So that's a first draft of the basic ranged weapons. Heavy weapons and grenades will follow once we've gotten this unruly lot in order.
Properties
Autofire and aiming. Autofire works pretty fine as is - it adds 1-3 dice to the attack pool, because Mass Effect is a setting in which it's well established that chucking lots of bullets at a target is indeed a good way to make sure you actually hit them. However, the three modes of autofire could do with a bit more cutting up in terms of which weapons can do what.
So we get Single Shot, Burst Fire and Automatic fire classifications on weapons. Single Shot is firing single rounds. Burst Fire allows the 'short burst' autofire for +1 dice. Automatic allows the 'medium' and 'long' burst fires for +2 and +3 dice. They chew through the same amount of ammo (or heat sink capacity) as in regular nWoD, so by autofiring you'll hit a lot but probably have to reload a lot. Note that you also can't aim when burst/autofiring, as per normal nWoD - this doesn't literally mean the character doesn't aim at all, just that they can't get the aiming bonus.
Aiming bonus itself remains the same - sacrifice a turn for +1 to hit, up to a max of +3. Autofiring is basically strictly superior in terms of hitting things - as it should be in the setting - but isn't available with all weapons and, again has that 'ammo' problem.
Modifications
Ammo Powers. Hmm, these buggers don't really play well with this system, because you can't copy the +X% model of the computer games, and besides which the damage isn't in incremental enough steps to allow for the fine adjustment of ammo types. A '+1 to damage' power is a far bigger step up for a Damage 1 machine pistol than a Damage 4 shotgun, for instance. Additionally, I'm really loathe to start slapping Armour Piercing on weapons because we quickly end up in a situation where Armour doesn't really count for much; I can't think of a good way to implement the 'sets you on fire' or 'freezes you' stuff in a way that doesn't feel excessive for a storm of bullets that will be constantly hitting and applying the effects; and overall it feels like we'd see a situation where special ammos would either be used all the time (because they're better than normal firepower) or suffer balancing penalties that'll just leave you not wanting to bother with them.
Mods. Would like to consider some sort of mod system as with armour. Thinking just 1 mod a weapon. If one of the possble mods is an under-slung grenade launcher or er, concussive shot enabler, it also solves the problem I've been having of how to get some sort of concussive shot type power into the game in a way that actually makes sense.
