| Lamp Flower |
I've been wondering about this for a while, and the final release doesn't seem to have changed auto-fire, so here we are. Either I've misunderstood the mechanics or I just don't get the flavor.
Auto-fire is very similar to cone area fire (It probably doesn't even deserve to be a separate mechanic, but that's beside the point.), but area fire is a lot easier to understand flavor-wise. You fire a shotgun blast, a volley, or whatever in an area. Because you aren't aiming precisely, it's a save instead of an attack roll. You expend an amount of ammunition that does not depend on the amount of targets because you aren't firing at individual targets, you are firing at the entire area. Everything makes sense from an in-world perspective.
If you use the same flavor of shooting indiscriminately for auto-fire, everything makes sense. Except for the expend cost. Why does the expend cost scale with the amount of targets? Maybe you simply turn on full-auto and shoot so fast you can hit multiple targets. But then, if you're aiming at each target separately, shouldn't you be able to exclude targets from the area? What if there's an invisible target you're completely unaware of? Currently, a PC can look at the magazine (assuming it's trivial to check how much ammo you have left) and realize that there must have been one more creature in the cone than he was able to see because the auto-fire expended two more ammo than he expected. I guess the targets are picked by the gun then. There must be a device that scans an area, locks onto targets, and starts firing. If such a device is a common part of weapons, you'd think most automatic weapons would have a small monitor that can show invisible creatures to the user. There's already a part that scans for them, so it seems easy to implement.
Point is, every in-character explanation I can think of for auto-fire seems flawed in some way. What am I missing?