My Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign has been experimenting with a couple of tweaks to specific weapon classes. Reception has been generally positive so far, so I’m posting them for public consumption.
The point of having a belt-fed machine gun is sustained automatic fire, whether for lethality or suppression. The problem I see with 4e’s rules as written is that the only thing making machine guns better at this than assault rifles or battle rifles is their larger magazine capacity. Given an equivalent shooter and rate of fire, all automatic weapons stand an equal chance of jamming or breaking down when pushed.
Shortly after the game released, there was some discussion on Kato’s forum about this topic. The usual suspects suggested a few different options. The solution my table is using is to ignore 1s on pushed ammo dice. When pushing a machine gun attack, only 1s on the base dice will reduce Reliability or cause jams.
We have one machine gunner in the party, and this doesn’t seem to be game-breaking so far. Balancing factors include increased ammo consumption (he’s encouraged to use his full ROF more) and rigid enforcement of the penalty for hip-shooting a MG (p. 65 for those following along in the Player’s Manual). The net effect is that he spends the first turn or two of combat getting into a good shooting location with partial cover before he opens up, which, to my mind, is functioning as designed.
Separately, the PCs recently scavenged a Steyr AUG from a downed opponent, which has forced me to codify something I’ve been chewing on for a while. I have a tiny bit of trigger time behind both AUGs and FS2000s and have handled several other bullpup assault rifles, and I was looking for a way to model their unique handling. Their balance and overall length makes them quite handy in tight quarters, but ergonomics can be awkward for certain actions.
My current solution is to treat a bullpup assault rifle as a carbine. This means that a bullpup takes a -1 rather than a -2 for attacks in the same hex, and a -2 rather than a -3 for one-handed fire. To offset this, reloading a bullpup is always a slow action – it’s impossible to make a Ranged Combat check to reload as a fast action.
(I’m not sure what I’ll do, if anything, if the PCs get their hands on a bullpup LMG or SMG. My interim solution is to just avoid letting them have a Steyr AUG Para or an L86.)