Firearms

A gun is a way to deal damage at a distance, on someone else's terms. Where a melee fighter has to be standing next to you and has to physically connect, a shooter can open up from across the room, reach you while you're hunched behind cover, and put several rounds into you in the time it takes to swing once. The cost of all that is control: the more lead you throw per pull of the trigger, the less of it actually lands where you meant it to.

This page covers the firing side of ranged combat — landing the shot, accuracy, rate of fire, ammunition, penetration, range, and condition. Once a round connects, what happens to it is the job of the Damage Reduction pipeline, which this page links into rather than repeats.

Quick takeaways:

• A shot is a skill check like any other. Your weapon skill blends with the physical stats that suit the weapon, your gun's accuracy and the volume of fire help you connect, and the target's defense is folded in as a penalty against you.
• Single, burst, and full-auto are a tradeoff. Spraying makes the first hit slightly easier and can stack several rounds onto one target, but recoil scatters the burst so fewer rounds bite, and armor gets to soak each one separately.
• Damage lives in the cartridge. A gun's damage and its armor penetration come from the ammunition loaded in it, not from your strength. (Bows are the exception — those scale with muscle.)
• Guns shoot over cover; melee can't. That's the whole reason to carry one when the other side has rifles.
• A worn-out weapon hits softer and cycles slower. Keep your gear repaired.

How a shot resolves

The boxes after "roll damage" are the Damage Reduction pipeline. Everything before them is what follows.

Landing the shot

Firing runs through the same engine as every other skill check. The relevant weapon skill is blended with the physical stats that fit the weapon, so the raw target number is a weighted mix — for example, automatic weapons lean on your senses, your physique, and your automatics skill; pistols lean on senses, motion, and pistols; bows lean on muscle, senses, and primitives. Which stats matter is a property of the weapon class, but it always adds up on the same $0$–$100$ scale as any other check.

Onto that flat score the engine folds a single bonus and the defender's penalty, clamped together to $[-30, +30]$ as usual. The firing bonus is built like this:

$$ b = 10 + \text{accuracy} + \min!\Big(8,\; \frac{\text{rof}}{r_a}\Big) + \text{momentum} $$

• The flat $+10$ is the standard "you're actually trying to hit something" bonus every attack gets.
• Accuracy is the weapon's own to-hit value, added straight in (positive is good). More on this below.
• Volume of fire ($\min(8, \text{rof}/r_a)$) is a small bonus that grows with how many rounds are in the cycle, capped at $+8$. A storm of bullets is simply more likely to put something on target than a single aimed shot. Here $\text{rof}$ is the rounds in the current burst and $r_a$ is a per-cartridge factor (around $2$), so a full-auto rip adds a few points to the initial connect where a single shot adds almost nothing.
• Momentum rewards pressing the attack: $+10$ once your momentum is high, $+15$ when it's very high.

The defender's dodge (or parry, or block) comes off the other side as a penalty against you, exactly as described in Damage Reduction. You don't roll a separate defense; theirs is baked into your roll.

The result is graded. The margin of that roll — how cleanly you beat their defense — becomes the attack's quality, and quality feeds directly into how much damage the round does (see below and the damage page).

Accuracy and aiming

Accuracy is a flat number the weapon contributes to every shot's to-hit, and it's one of the few weapon stats where bigger is simply better with no tradeoff. A tight, accurate weapon adds points to the roll; a crude or barrel-sawn one can sit at zero or drag it down. Because accuracy enters before the difficulty curve, it's worth the most in the $30$–$70$ band where the curve is steepest — the same place every other point of skill pays off best.

Rate of fire: burst and full-auto

A melee swing is one strike. A gun can fire several rounds on one action, and each fire mode is a pair of numbers: how many rounds it throws and a damage multiplier on the extra rounds. Representative modes:

Firing more than one round opens a contest between the cycle and your control of it. First the gun's recoil is computed from how many rounds are going downrange:

$$ \text{recoil} = \sqrt{\text{rof}} \cdot k $$

with $k$ a per-weapon recoil-scaling constant (around $6$ for most firearms). The square root matters: recoil climbs fast at first and then flattens, so the jump from one round to three hurts more than the jump from six to eight.

That recoil value becomes the difficulty of a recoil-control check (governed largely by muscle). The outcome decides how many of your rounds actually connect:

• Fail the check and exactly one round lands. You always connect with at least one — having already won the attack roll, you don't whiff entirely just because the gun bucked.
• Pass it and the share of the burst that lands scales with how well you passed:

$$ \text{hit ratio} = \mathrm{clamp}!\Big(\frac{\text{margin}}{30},\; 0,\; 1\Big) \qquad \text{strikes} = \max!\big(1,\; \lfloor \text{rof} \cdot \text{hit ratio} \rfloor\big) $$

A clean recoil-control result (margin of $30$ or more) lands the whole burst; a barely-passed one lands a round or two of it. Here's the shape for an eight-round automatic burst:

So the volume of fire is double-edged. It nudges your initial to-hit up (the $\min(8, \text{rof}/r_a)$ term), but it loads the recoil-control check against you, and only the rounds that survive that check do anything. A disciplined shooter with strong recoil control turns a full burst into real damage; a weak one is throwing most of it into the wall.

This is probably why automatic weapons feel like a strength-and-discipline tool rather than a finesse one — the skill check that lands the burst leans on muscle, so the same wiry character who's deadly with a pistol may only ever land one round of an auto rip.

Damage, per round and per burst

Each round draws its damage from the loaded cartridge — a min–max range per damage type, almost always bullets (a child of the kinetic/sharp branch of the damage-type tree). That base roll is then scaled by the attack's quality, the same multiplier the damage page describes:

$$ \text{multiplier} = 0.75 + 0.25 \cdot \frac{q}{30} $$

where $q$ is the margin from your attack roll. A decisive hit pushes past full damage; a barely-landed one sits near the $0.75$ floor. Badly damaged weapons (below roughly $30\%$ condition) hit softer on top of that.

When a burst lands multiple strikes, the first round does full damage and each additional round that connects adds its own roll scaled by the fire mode's damage factor $\mu$:

$$ D_{\text{burst}} \approx D_1 + (n - 1)\cdot \mu \cdot D_{\text{round}} $$

So a fully-landed three-round burst at $\mu \approx 0.55$ is worth roughly twice a single shot, and a full eight-round auto burst at $\mu \approx 0.40$ tops out around three-and-a-half times — if every round connects. The per-round factor is below $1.0$ on purpose: a burst is more total damage than one shot, but not a clean multiple of the round count, because spread and timing waste some of it.

Why bursts and armor interact

The strike count isn't only a damage figure. The total is divided across the strikes and soaked one strike at a time by the target's armor, exactly as in Damage Reduction. That's the lever that makes armor choice matter against guns:

• Threshold-heavy armor (hard carapace, plating against small-arms) shrugs a flat chunk off every strike, so it devours bursts and full-auto — each little round gets stopped near the threshold.
• A single heavy round that clears the threshold in one piece is what gets through that kind of armor.

Spraying a plated target is often worse than placing one solid round, because you're handing their threshold eight chances to bite instead of one.

Ammunition, calibers, and penetration

Because damage rides in the cartridge, what you load matters as much as what you carry. Different calibers and round types trade off damage, armor penetration, and weight:

• Damage is the round's base min–max, rolled per shot as above.
• Armor penetration is carried by the round and bites straight into the target's armor threshold before any soaking — see the penetration math. Armor-piercing loads exist to punch through plating that would otherwise eat a standard round whole; cheaper or softer rounds carry little or none.
• Capacity is how many rounds the weapon holds, and the rate of fire of any burst is capped by what's actually loaded — you can't rip an eight-round burst off the last two rounds in the magazine.

A weapon's effective penetration is simply its loaded round's penetration, so the same gun is a different tool with different ammunition: a paper-puncher with cheap rounds, an armor-cracker with the right load.

The split between gun and cartridge is a deliberate design choice — it lets a single firearm cover a range of roles through ammo selection, and it makes scavenging the right caliber a goal in itself rather than a footnote.

Reloading and condition

Firearms are built around an ammunition economy: a magazine or cylinder of a fixed capacity, a reload that takes time proportional to how much you're topping off (a near-empty weapon takes longer to refill than one that's down a round or two), and the constant background pressure of not running dry mid-fight. Faster-reloading designs like pistols pay for it with smaller magazines; belt-fed and heavy weapons hold more but are slow to bring back online.

Condition degrades performance the same way it does for armor. A weapon's effectiveness scales with its health, and once it drops below about $30\%$ it does noticeably less damage and cycles more slowly (a badly worn weapon adds time to every shot). Keep your guns repaired; a neglected one is dead weight in a firefight. See Crafting for repair and modification.

Range and cover

The defining advantage of a firearm is reach. Combatants can take cover in a room, and cover blocks melee outright — a knife fighter literally can't reach someone hunkered down and has to charge, breaking from their own cover and crossing the room (which takes a beat of travel time and drags the target out of cover when they arrive). A ranged weapon ignores all of that: it reaches a target in cover with no penalty.

So the positional logic of a fight is straightforward. If you have the gun and they have the knife, stay back and keep them in your sights. If you have the knife and they have the gun, you have to close the distance — and you'll eat fire doing it.

Heavy calibers are designed to carry knockdown into the stagger system on top of their damage, so the biggest rounds are meant to put targets off balance as well as wound them.

See also

• Skill Checks — the attack roll, the recoil-control check, and the resist-stagger check all run on the same engine.
• Damage Reduction — what happens to a round after it lands: per-strike armor soak, penetration, wounds, and stagger.
• Crafting — building, modifying, and repairing weapons and ammunition.
• Progression: Skills — the weapon skills (pistols, automatics, longarms, heavy, exotics, primitives) and the stats that feed your shooting.