These rules are a literal blast from my past being well over a decade old, from the days when I ran many many games of D6 Star Wars and my own D6 Star Wars / D6 Fantasy / Kitchen Sink inspired D6 Space Fantasy.   Cinema offering like Star Wars, and games like Dark Forces, X-Com (especially Apocalypse), and MechWarrior feature generous amounts of brightly colored rapid fire death and destruction, which I felt the D6 system needed a better approach to bringing to life.   I also wanted to give players even more play options at the table for ‘I shoot the guy’, without making automatic weapons fire into a complex minigame.   I also did not    

These rules have all been extensively playtested and to my mind work very swimmingly, with the caveat I like and encourage grand fireworks shows of automatic weaponry.   They also make automatic weapons in the hands of skilled marksmen a very awesome thing, and make blazing away a very good idea as the only drawback is the occasional burnt action reloading and needing extra ammo.  If you want a squad of stormtroopers dropped in a hail of blaster bolts in a single action by the mighty hero these are your rules!   If you want rules firmly grounded in reality . .  . these are probably not your rules.

D6 Autofire Rules

For all choices, the make by X over numbers can be decreased by whatever nifty widgets reduce recoil in the setting of choice.  Note, while the rules below mention hexes, hex maps are not required, simply use the abstract unit spacing representations of choice, yards, squares, hexes, inches etc.

Standard Autofire Attack – A normal attack to increase damage by attempting to land more than one round, it uses 1 action.

Declare how much ammo you will use before rolling.  

• If you make the attack by 0-4, nothing special occurs, normal damage.
• If make  the attack by 5 over, and fired at least 3 rounds, +1d damage.
• By 10 over, and at least 6, +2d damage,
• By 15 over, and at least 9, +3d and so on.  

This assumes an automatic weapon.

For semi-automatic and double-action and whatnot, see above but replace 5, 10, 15 and so on by 10, 20, 30 and so on.

Spray Attack

A normal attack with intent to better your chances of landing a hit through multiple rounds.

Declare how much ammo you will use before rolling, then get +1d to attack for every 3 rounds expended.

This uses 1 action and requires an automatic weapon.

Sweep Attack

An attack to sweep across a group of enemies in sequence to engage multiple targets.

Declare how many enemies attacking, all enemies must be in a row more

or less, though vacant hexes are acceptable. Declare the order the enemies are to be engaged, from left to right or right to left.  Ammo cost is 3 rounds per enemy and vacant hex between enemies.

Only one attack rolled is made, and compared against all targets.   The damage is base damage.

First target needs 5 over to hit, 2nd target needs 10 over, 3rd target needs 15 over and so on.  This uses 1 action and requires an automatic weapon.

Area Saturation Attack

This is an attack to engage multiple targets by filling the area they occupy with shear weight of rounds.rather than attacking them directly.

The hexes attacked must be contiguous and there is a minimum of 5 hexes.   Hexes may or may not be occupied, but the cost in rounds must be paid for each hex.

A single attack roll is made, and compared against all targets.

Three levels are possible.

• Light – requires 3 rounds per hex.  The attack must be made by 10, and damage is reduced by 1d as attacks into the general area are less likely to hit individual targets and the damages may not be square hits or may be flying debris.
• Moderate – requires 6 rounds per hex.   The attack must be made by 5, and damage is base damage.
• Heavy – requires 9 rounds per hex,  The attack must be made by 0,, and damage is base damage.  Also, if the attack roll is 10 over, damage is base +1d.

Creating Automatic Weapons (Optional)

In D6 Star Wars and other D6 products, often a weapons nature as an automatic weapon is subsumed into its stats.    For instance, a Star Wars Light Repeating Blaster may do 6d damage have ammo capacity of 25, since 25 ammo is rather low for a squad support weapon in a setting where normal rifles have 100 round capacity, it is very likely that 6D comes from multiple shots at once.  You could say reduce the weapons damage to 5D and increase ammo to 100 and allow the weapon to use these rules.   

Comments

I haven’t used these rules in years . . . but, I could still remember them even before I found my old writeup!   I had a lot of fun with these back then, as these rules were used for years with many a hail of fire from a blaster rifle.   Since I am now a pretty dedicated GURPS player, I notice my old D6 rules split ‘make it easier to hit’ and ‘give chances for more damage’ into two separate options,  while in GURPS firing away with automatic fire does both at the same time!   Some of the inspiration for this comes from D20 Arsenal by Perpetrated Press, an excellent book for magical gatling guns and other fun toys for your D20 needs, a book sadly out of print.