SMG, MG and belt ammo

On the Forge someone noted the SMG says "area" in the Gunlugger playbook, but "auto fire" in the gear. Vincent replied it should be "autofire", which is cool.

MG has the same problem, but I love the idea of a belt-fed MG just continuing to fire on and on.

I was thinking that changing "auto fire" to "area" seems an appropriate Gunlugger "serious" gun option for an MG, about the equivalent of adding "ap".

Normally I'd just do this, but as I'm hoping to play the a Gunlugger at some point I want a second opinion. Thoughts?

Ummm, if you're looking for a compromise solution of sorts, you could just make belts of ammo some gear acquired by barter/fiction/whatever that temporarily switch the tag to area.

For what it's worth, from a "real life simulating, rahr" standpoint, belt fed machine guns still burn through those belts pretty fast if you just hold down the trigger and go nuts spraying an area (not to mention overheating the barrel). I only bring that up as a further option for "activate their stuff's downsides", not because I'm against Rambo style machine gun mayhem.

So a mg is autofire messy. What this means is that (a) you can give it reload to make it area, but (b) if you don't give it reload, it's still messy, which means that it might hit anybody or everybody in its area.

This makes me happy! I'm glad I did it that way.

I don't have strong opinions about giving a gunlugger the ability to make a machine gun area without reload. It doesn't seem like a whole move's worth of ability to me, though. I prefer Jeff's compromise solution.

messy is so gorram fun. best tag? could be.

Cool, thanks. This works for me.

Oh, wow, I just realized something about this whole conversation: tapping autofire to get area+reload doesn't have to mean "a short burst". Maybe y'all were already thinking this way, but I sometimes forget that in AW a move doesn't necessarily equal one small, discrete "attack". So if you're going to "seize by force" by hosing down a bunker for 3 solid minutes, taking your time to try to hit everything there, and burning up your ammo in the process, you're good just using the autofire tag as-is. I think the ammo-belt gear option would only really come up if you were doing something like a giant battle with huge rains of fire on multiple separate target (areas). Since you already worked out what you want to do, this is probably useless by now, but I thought it was cool to remember.

Damn.  Vx, that is sweet indeed.  Man, I don't know how this happens but these games are like poetry -- they sneakily enforce truly awesome design decisions and perfect simulation (stuff like your and Jeff's points) without any conscious effort.

Aside:  that was me talking about the SMG.  *bows*

Jeff Russell - that's funny: your first post put me onto this.

Jim D - sorry about the lack of attribution!
 

Ah, dude, seriously, no sweat.  I'm not at all worried about it -- honestly I was making a joke.  :)  I'm not about to come around here all high and mighty going "I'm the bestest evar!"

...that hurt to type, frankly.