Good Overhauls for d20 modern Firearms?

[frogglesmash]

As the title says, I'm trying to find out if there are any good homebrew overhauls of the d29 modern fire arm rules.

[weckar]

It's probably easier to point you to relevant ones if you give us what you personally think is wrong with them?

[frogglesmash]

1. Firearms don't seem deadly enough, specially at higher levels.
2. Autofire and burst fire don't seem like they're very well thought out. The former because it doesn't take into account the users BAB, and the later because it doesn't take into account different rates of fire.
3. Different categories of firearms aren't all that different from each other, ie. shotguns are basically just rifles that get worse at range, anti material rifles don't seem to be all that effective against armor save for their highish damage, light, and heavy machine guns only seem to be moderately more damaging than most Assault rifles etc.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Quick question: you play a lot of d20 modern?

The first thing that comes to mind is that d20 modern is just a lower power curve than D&D overall. "High levels" are much lower than in D&D for one thing (you don't really expect to keep going after about 12), and con rarely gets a boost. Nobody gets d12's outside of one or two advanced classes to boot. The damage honestly looks fine to me.

On the lack of notable difference between different categories of firearms; firearms of different categories aren't that different. A .762 coming out of a long-rifle really isn't different from the same caliber coming out of a combat rifle except -maybe- having a couple more grain of propellant. Anti-material rifles are generally just long-rifles that throw bigger slugs (generally .50 or bigger) and the difference between an LMG and a combat rilfe on full auto can be as little as the size of the magazine.

For the auto-fire/ burst thing: there's a reason full-auto is called spray-n-pray and is generally only used for suppressive fire in modern combat. For burst, I'd swear I recall some rules about effectiveness differences between a 3 round and 5 round burst weapon in the system but the fact that it defaults to 5 rounds instead of having different counts for different guns is just a lack of granularity in the abstraction. Yeah, you're more than likely going to release the trigger after only about 3 cycles on a relatively slow automatic but do you really want to have to keep track of cycle rates on all the different guns released in d20 modern and its expansions? Besides, it's a net gain on faster cycling weapons; minigun* anybody?

*honestly don't remember if you can burst-fire a mini in within the rule-set but I'm making a point.

That out of the way, you could amalgamate the rules from d20 modern and PF. Might be something useful to be had there.

[Ashtagon]

If you think d20 modena guns lack high level deadliness you are clearly ignoring the massive damage rules. In d20 modern they typically get rolled when damage exceeds your constitution score not when it exceeds 50.

If anything the problem is the save or die proliferation.

[Tohsaka Rin]

I often suggest people use the rules and equipment from Star Wars SAGA edition for d20 guns. In particular, automatic fire and burst fire attacks work very well. Most (if not all) blasters convert to slug throwers (bullet firing guns) by just dropping the number of damage dice rolled by one.

Shotguns, too. They're pretty terrible in D20 Modern (one of the devs once said that he hated shotguns, and didn't care about putting in much effort to make them better), but outstanding in SAGA.