Unknown Armies:Firearms damage

Firearms damage is identical to the successful attack roll—a roll of 45 does 45 wound points of damage. The higher your skill, the more damage you can do because you're shooting more accurately and you're hitting parts of the body that are more vulnerable. But your skill also serves as a limit on how much damage you can do. If you have a firearms skill of 40, you usually cannot do 70 points of damage in a single gunshot.

There is another limitation on your damage result: different calivers of firearms have different maximum amounts of damage they can dish out. If your successful attack roll is higher than the maximum damage for the firearm you're using, the damage you do drops to the maximum for that firearm.

Crits do maximum damage for that firearm—even if the maximum damage is higher than your Firearms skill rating.

Fumbles cause your weapon to jam or misfire. Semi-automatic and full-auto firearms jam and all others misfire. If it's a jam, you have to spend a round and make a successful firearms skill check to clear the weapon before it works again. If you fail the check then you can keep trying, but each attempt takes one round. If it's a misfire, nothing happens this round but next round you can fire again normally; mark off that bullet as a dud.

Matches have no effect on firearms damage.

Called Shots

To fire at a specific body part or other target of similar size, you need a successful attack with the following restrictions:

• Leg. A minimum roll of 30.
• Arm. A minimum roll of 40.
• Hand or Foot. A minimum roll of 40. Inflicts hand-to-hand damage. If against the hand, target drops any item held in that hand.
• Head. A minimum roll of 50, bat take a +10% shift to your skill. (Same chance as hitting the arm or hand, but can do more damage.)

Multiple Shots

To fire more than one shot in a round, divvy up your skill rating—which includes any shifts applied—among the number of attacks you want to make. You cannot take more than three attacks per round without using the suppressive fire rules in the next section.

You choose how to divide your skill rating. If you have Firearms 30% and you want to shoot at two targets this round, or fire two shots at the same target, then you could take two 15% shots, or a 20% shot and a 10% shot, or a 29% and a 1% shot. To make three shots, you might take three Firearms 10% shots or two shots at 9% and one at 2%.

You cannot use a focus shif if you are shooting multple targets, but you may use one with multiple attacks against a single target. If you do this, you add the shift before you divide your skill up. You don't add the bonus to every subdivided shot.

Suppressive Fire

You're not aiming, you're just shooting to make your enemy stop shooting while your buddy does something. This requires that you fire at least four shots per round of suppressive fire. More than one person can lay down suppressive fire in the same round; the effects are cumulative.

As with dodging, your first round of successive fire kicks in when it's your turn, making it useless against faster opponents. You can continue it by declaring so at the start of each subsequent round, in which case it then affects everyone regardless of initiative ranking.

Make a single roll for all the shots you're firing this round. On a 01 or a match, you hit someone by luck. Roll one die to see how much damage you did, while the GM determines randomly who you hit.

The effects of suppressive fire depend on how many shots are in the air that round:

• 4-10 shots cause a -10% shift to everyone in the same field of fire.
• 11-20 shots cause a -20% shift to everyone in the same field of fire.
• 21+ shots cause a -30% shift to everyone in the same field of fire.

Full-Auto Weapons

Firearms are already stupendously dangerous; full auto makes them worse. Here's how they work:

• You can either fire a three-shot burst or just hold the trigger down. A burst counts as a single shot for rules purposes. Blazing away counts as ten shots for rules purposes—it automatically qualifies as suppressive fire.
• A three-shot burst gives you a Firearms shift of +10%.
• Blazing away gives you a Firearms shift of +40%, but you need a minimum roll of 20.
• Either way, ignore the maximum damage for your ammo type. Your total damage is whatever you roll, period.

Fully automatic firearms are more or less illegal in the United States and many foreign countries. Usage of full-auto weapons in combat is going to attract substantial law-enforcement attention—and of course, they just encourage your enemies to up the ante.

Special Ammo

There are many types of ammunition available for firearms, such as hollow-point, safety slugs, and so on. All have the same effect: the maximum damage of your weapon is increased by 10. One exception is armor-piercing bullets—the so-called cop-killer rounds that penetrate bulletproof vests.