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(For the record, there's no official previous threads to this, I just couldn't resist a title with a reference!)
As you may have guessed, this is another thread about AoE weapons. There's been a lot of those going around lately, because as playtesters are starting to find, AoE weapons have a lot of problems, some of which have been raised over a year ago. This isn't just an "AoE weapons bad" thread, though I'll go over some of my play experience and reasoning as to why I believe AoE weapons are not really workable in their current implementation: rather, this is a thread to present some alterations I've tried with AoE weapons that, from my playtests so far, have in my opinion successfully made those weapons both generally desirable and particularly good for the Soldier (not just good on the Soldier, good for the Soldier, and I'll explain why). Here are my findings:
If this is your first time encountering this kind of thread, the starting criticism here is: AoE weapons are not very good, and in my opinion they'll never be good in their current shape. In case you've seen all of this before or just don't feel like going through an entire opening crawl's worth of text, I've spoilered the list of reasons and left a TL;DR below.
Their Damage is Awful
Right off the bat, AoE weapons are not going to be dealing the damage you'd expect from their damage dice. If you're a martial class Striking an at-level enemy twice with regular proficiency, you'll generally deal 110% of your weapon's damage on a hit on average. A single Area or Auto-Fire at up-to-master proficiency when your class DC isn't behind your attack proficiency (which will be between 8 and 12 of your character's levels), by contrast, deals 80% of your weapon's damage on a hit on average, about a 27% reduction in damage overall. In other words, a d12 AoE gun would deal barely more damage to any one target than a d8 regular gun, and that d8 singing coil is going to be dealing less single-target damage than a d6 laser pistol. That's pretty bad.
But surely, it's worth it if you catch lots of low-level enemies together, right? Unfortunately, still no. Just as an example, let's say you're a 10th-level martial who just managed to catch some level 6 enemies in your fully-upgraded stellar cannon's AoE. Because they're PL-4, let's say they all critically fail their save. Your expected damage is going to be 4*5.5 + 4*3.5 + 4 = 40 damage... which against a level 6 creature's average of 95 HP, is nowhere near enough to kill them, even if you max out all of your damage dice. In fact, even if they all had the average of low HP at 71 and you dealt the maximum of 68 damage, it would still not quite kill them. Even in the best-case scenario, you're therefore going to be unlikely to kill even the weakest of non-trivial enemies unless they're already softened up, at which point a fireball from your caster would've been much more likely to do the job.
So poorly does this damage scale that even at 20th level and with a full complement of upgrades, your AoE weapon will deal an average of about 34 damage per Area Fire, barely above a cast of needle darts at that level at about 31... and that's if the enemy doesn't have high Reflex saves, which is about two-thirds of enemies in Starfinder so far, at which point your damage drops below that.
Nobody Really Wants These
An important question that needs to be asked here is: who is actually going to be using these AoE weapons? Obviously, there's the Soldier, because that's what their abilities rely on, but who else? Someone on Reddit wrote a thorough breakdown of classes and how they'd do with AoE weapons, and lemme tell you the conclusion right now: most wouldn't ever touch these. Casters are out, because their class DC doesn't scale and they need two actions a turn generally to cast spells (so even a Witchwarper with their scaling class DC wouldn't really find those weapons appealing), but most martial classes also have class DCs that scale way too slowly for these guns to even compete with normal weapons, to say nothing of the general lack of synergy with their abilities and the conflicts with the actions they'd want to do on their turn. This does not bode well for a subgroup of weapons that are meant to be at least somewhat attractive to more than just one class.
And All The Rest
A lot of the above tries to put Area Fires and Auto-Fires on equal footing with Strikes, but the reality is that making Strikes is much better than taking two actions to force a saving throw for a variety of reasons:
Honorable mention also goes to class DC just being a weird bucket to draw from for AoE weapon attacks: in general, the stat doesn't reflect proficiency with AoE, so Commanders from Pathfinder will suddenly find themselves among the better users of these weak weapons, despite AoE damage not at all featuring in their kit. Because there's no interaction with weapon proficiency, there's little reason for anyone interested to use anything but the strongest weapons on offer regardless of their class's proficiency track, rendering simple AoE weapons in particular completely redundant.
TL;DR: AoE weapons are doomed to deal awful damage compared to regular guns, are ineffective even in the absolute best-case scenario where you catch lots of enemies bunched up together, are undesirable to nearly every class, and interact poorly or not at all with all of the things that make single-action Strikes so good. Coupled with their reliance on a stat that has nothing to do with weapon usage or even AoE, these weapons are, in my opinion, unfit for purpose. They also just strike me as an attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole, offering the false promise of making classes good at a thing they're not meant to be good at, using mechanics that are not designed to accommodate AoE terribly well, and involving weird use of certain stats that are both unintuitive and already prone to abuse.
So, now what? If current AoE weapons are doomed to disappoint, should we just scrap them altogether? Personally, I wouldn't want that, because I do think there ought to be room for weapons that play a little differently from each other, especially in a game like Starfinder where rotolasers and stellar cannons would cater to many a player's character fantasy even when not playing a Soldier. I think it's still worth trying, especially because precedent exists in 2e for letting weapons deal a bit of AoE damage.
Now, you might be thinking: "I've got a bad feeling about this." And I'd normally agree with you, because I'm talking about the Scatter trait, a trait that lets you deal 1 damage per weapon damage die to enemies in a burst radius around your initial Strike target on a hit. This sounds terrible, and for a long time I also thought the trait was terrible, because scatter firearms are just not very good.
However, after modifying a few guns to incorporate this trait, along with a few custom traits I wrote that riff off of the same theme, I actually ended up having a really good time. For starters, here are the traits and modified weapons I used in my playtests, with an explanatory TL;DR:
Traits
For starters, I included the Scatter trait, which I modified slightly. The mechanical changes are listed in bold:
Effectively, instead of adding a point of damage to the main target on a hit and only working on a hit, scatter here provides a reliable, minimal amount of damage even if you miss (this is good for casters looking to "cast gun"), along with some fairly reliable AoE. I felt it was okay to differ a bit from the scatter listed in Guns & Gears because a) the book is getting remastered, and b) nobody uses scatter firearms, including Gunslingers due to their reliance on the fatal trait for decent damage. Here's a couple of other traits I used that mimic the above:
Pretty straightforward, right?
Weapon Balance
So, with these traits hashed out, I applied them to the playtest's 13 existing AoE weapons (plus the missile launcher), with a few more alterations:
And outside of that, I tried balancing the weapons to be close to Pathfinder's shortbow (for simple weapons), longbow (for martial weapons), and better-than-longbow for advanced weapons (not picking the daikyu, because it's a terrible weapon that's arguably worse than the longbow). Now, without further ado:
Simple Guns
Martial Guns
Advanced Guns
I may have over-egged it a little, but the general intent was to have these weapons have damage dice similar to what you'd find on other guns of the same group.
TL;DR: I took the Scatter Trait, made it more of a reliable source of splash damage rather than added single-target damage, copied it for lines and cones, and modified AoE weapons to use these traits. All AoE guns therefore became regular guns that dealt splash damage on anything but a critical miss with every Strike.
So, how did these weapons do? Surprisingly, quite well! I've listed some more details in the spoilers below, along with the TL;DR below that:
For the purpose of this playtest, I ran encounters from the playtest scenarios we've received, plus some custom encounters, and incorporated a few modifications to ranged combat that encouraged more enemies to group together, listed here. I tested these guns out on an Envoy, an Operative, a modified Soldier, and a Witchwarper. I'll talk about the Soldier further below, because there's a lot to discuss there, but here were my findings with the others:
TL;DR: Splash guns performed significantly better than their AoE counterparts. Although they wouldn't be must-haves on every class, particularly the Operative who'd prefer on-crit traits, they became actually usable on everyone, gave the caster a bit of reliable third-action damage, and at worst basically functioned like a capable damage stick with other traits. They also allowed for much more fluid turns, particularly for the Envoy and Operative I tried out who had options for their third action. Even if I'd downgraded these weapons' damage die by a step, they'd still have been far more usable than current AoE guns.
So, splash weapons are a success! All that's left is the biggest question: what about the Soldier? Their entire kit is made to work with Area Fire and Auto-Fire, so how does this benefit them?
So, as mentioned above, I ran these experiments with a Soldier, and before talking about the results it's worth mentioning that I heavily modified the class's core features to work with these new guns. The details are in the spoilered bit and the summary's in the TL;DR below:
To make the Soldier work with these traits, and try out a different mode of play, I basically reversed Primary Target: rather than deal additional single-target damage with an AoE attack, the Soldier now dealt additional AoE damage with their splash weapon Strikes. Here's the level 1 feature:
Area Fire (single action)
manipulate, soldier
You excel at saturating the battlefield with gunfire. If your next action is to Strike, or to use an action that has you make at least one Strike, and you use a weapon or unarmed attack that has the cone, line, scatter, or splash traits for that Strike, you don't deal splash damage. Instead, you make an additional Strike with the weapon or unarmed attack against each target that would have normally taken splash damage other than the primary target, without expending additional ammo. On a failure, a target takes half damage, including the primary target. Each attack counts toward your multiple attack penalty, but you do not increase your penalty until you have made all your attacks.
So if you see an opportunity to deal lots of extra damage with your gun, you can spend an additional action to do so, with even more reliable damage dealt. You might be wondering: where does this leave Suppressing Fire? Well, here's how I wrote it:
Suppressing Fire (single action)
flourish, soldier
You have a knack for using powerful weapons to hinder your foes and prevent
them from operating at their peak. Make a Strike. A creature damaged by this Strike, including by splash damage, is suppressed until the start of your next turn.
Pretty simple, right? You'll notice that this means you'll be suppressing enemies even on a miss, so I basically cannibalized the Bombard. It also means you can suppress enemies even as a single action, not just with a meatier Area Fire, and you can combine the two to deal lots of damage and apply suppression. You'll also notice that neither Area Fire nor Suppressing Fire specify that you need to make a ranged Strike, which made for an extremely easy rework of Whirling Swipe:
Whirling Swipe (Feat 1)
soldier
Your heavier weapons cleave in a deadly arc. Two-handed weapons you wield gain the cone 10 ft. trait. If your weapon has the reach trait, it gains the cone 15 ft. trait instead.
And with this, you can make Area Fires and Suppressing Fires with your melee weapons to your heart's content, while also working much better with other weapon-based feats. I didn't rework every feat for this, but did alter one more:
Shot On The Run (single action, Feat 2)
flourish, soldier
By readying your weapon while on the move, you can do some of your weapon’s setup
in advance of firing. Stride up to half your Speed and Strike.
Same as with Suppressing Fire, you get to choose whether or not to make this an Area Fire. In exchange for this flexibility, I gave the action the flourish trait, as with Suppressing Fire, and this does mean you can't also suppress at the same time, but that ended up working quite nicely for the class's gameplay, as detailed below.
TL;DR Instead of Primary Target, I gave the Soldier an Area Fire action that's basically a spellshape for your splash guns, letting you deal lots more AoE damage. Other effects like Suppressing Fire and Shot on the Run are instead single action flourishes that let you Strike with a bonus, whereas Whirling Swipe just adds splash damage to your two-handed weapons and lets you interact with your other feats. The overall intent here was to make the Soldier much more flexible and give them more interesting choices to make in an encounter.
So, how'd the Soldier do? As it turns out, very, very well. Compared to my previous playtesting experience, it was like night and day. Same deal as the above, details are in the spoilers and summary in the TL;DR below:
I'll try to organize my findings around a few key points: function, flexibility, and fun.
Function
The vanilla Soldier in my opinion is one of the major underperformers of the playtest: when they get to deal AoE damage, they can feel quite good, and Primary Target does help with single-target damage, but often they can feel quite flat when only dealing with single targets. Because AoE guns are weak, their damage can also feel quite wet.
In this particular case, though, the Soldier was flat-out stronger overall. Against single targets, the Soldier could Strike twice, and thanks to the action compression on the modded feats could suppress them, move around, and just do a whole bunch more stuff on the same turn. Against crowds, the Soldier was brutal: even when firing at a relative -1 compared to other martials, their damage was extremely reliable, and while their baseline damage was a bit better than with an AoE gun, they really got to shine when shooting off-guard enemies, and their damage shot up sharply.
The one caveat to all this is that the Soldier's single-target damage dropped somewhat: making an Area Fire and Primary Target is better than Striking Twice, and the lack of MAP on Primary Target allows a Soldier to make a second Strike with an automatic weapon on their third action. Thus, the vanilla Soldier could burst down single targets a bit better than the modded version, though even with this dip, I felt that was appropriate for a class that's meant to excel at AoE damage more than single-target damage.
Flexibility
This was by far the most marked improvement, and a major driving factor behind the Soldier's performance. Whereas normally the Soldier has extremely rigid turns, with Area/Auto-Fire taking up most of their actions, with these changes the Soldier felt like a proper martial class, able to make single-action Strikes when more appropriate and still get to use their class's features and feats. The class was more mobile, especially with Shot on the Run, which on one particular turn in the Fire Team Fiasco encounter from Field Test #5 allowed them to Stride+Stride+Shot On The Run from one side of the map to the next and shoot an aeon guard that was hiding behind cover. Being able to suppress targets one at a time as a single action, or just spend one action to suppress enemies while spending two actions on other stuff, gave the Soldier a lot more freedom of action, and let them apply their signature crowd control far more easily. Normally, the Soldier I found to be very feast-or-famine and repetitive, but here, the class could competently handle a far greater number of situations, and was running their turn differently a lot of the time.
Fun
This is without a doubt the most subjective part of the assessment, but I genuinely had a lot of fun playtesting this version of the Soldier, in a way I just didn't playing the vanilla class. Again, a lot of it came down to flexibility: with the above changes, I felt like I was making genuine choices, as some attractive options competed with others, and I could achieve different things on the same turn depending on what I did: for instance, on that turn where I did a double Stride and Shot on the Run, the alternative was to use a Suppressing Fire + Demoralize on the glass serpent, and make a second Strike against the aeon guard hiding behind cover. On a vanilla Soldier, I would've just done an Area Fire + Primary Target on the glass serpent, with the option to maybe do the same to the aeon guard through cover with Shot on the Run.
I think an important takeaway here was that these changes allowed me to patch up the situations where the Soldier would've normally felt bad to play, without taking away from the class's high moments when things did work out really well. When enemies grouped together, my Soldier was dealing tons of damage and felt like a proper AoE powerhouse, especially when exploiting buffs and debuffs: I went out of my way to have my Gap Influenced Witchwarper cast heroism on the Soldier, and thanks to the house rules making enemies off-guard more often, they were critting a surprising amount.
TL;DR: With the above changes, the Soldier felt significantly better to play, in large part due to their flexibility. Their AoE damage was better overall, and they were able to handle themselves a lot better when enemies weren't grouped up too. Importantly to me, it felt like I was making many more interesting choices with this Soldier, and could do a much greater range of things.
AoE guns, as written right now, aren't working very well, and in my opinion are unlikely to ever truly work. However, there is still a niche for AoE on guns, especially if enemies are to group together more often, and from my playtesting experience, the above altered guns worked much better. Classes who wouldn't normally touch those weapons would find greater use for them, and with a few adjustments, the Soldier I think would become a class with more flexibility and diversity to their gameplay without sacrificing their AoE effectiveness. Beyond just allowing more classes to pick guns that do a bit of AoE, the above altered weapons I think allowed the Soldier to have more choices, deeper gameplay, and just more opportunities to shine overall. This is why I think the above sorts of guns would be good for the Soldier, not just on the Soldier, and that alone I think is reason enough to at least give the above a try.
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It feels like this is a problem caused by building characters that try to have AoE weapons be the right tool for every job. Which might be a problem for Soldier, since that is kinda how they are advertised to be.
If Area weapons or Automatic Fire is only thought of as one tool in the toolbox, it looks a lot more appealing as an option good for uses where it is good.
Yes, the damage may be lower overall, or the action cost higher. That does come with the tradeoff benefit of doing half damage when the dice are not in your favor. Sometimes doing a little bit of save-based damage is tactically better than trying to do single-target damage that does no damage on a fail.
I also have concerns on the idea of using splash to handle the narrative of area weapons or area fire. One point of splash damage seems a bit weak and unattractive. Also, splash is notoriously badly defined, but that is something that the Paizo devs need to address.
Auto-Fire with a Rotolaser takes 2 actions and affects a cone area and does 1x damage with a Reflex save to all the creatures in the area.
The Cone splash area Rotolaser does 1x damage to one creature and 1 splash damage to any other creatures in the cone. And I am not sure exactly how to align the cone on the grid since it seems like it should be pointed centrally to the primary target and that may not line up with the grid alignment correctly.
Personally, I would rather deal 0.5x weapon damage to two creatures if the dice don't go my way (both succeed at their saves) than deal 1 point of damage to the two of them if the dice don't go my way (I miss the attack roll). That is including the two action cost of Auto-Fire vs the apparently one action cost of the Cone area with splash. I also think it supports the narrative description of a rotolaser better to have it take more time to hit everything in the cone and do full damage to all the targets.
If Area weapons or Automatic Fire is only thought of as one tool in the toolbox, it looks a lot more appealing as an option good for uses where it is good.
The broader problem is that AoE weapons work poorly as backup tools, not simply because of their poor damage and accuracy, but because of their action cost. Normally, if you want to switch to a backup weapon and attack, you can do that in two actions with a Swap + Strike. With these weapons, you have to Swap + Area/Auto-Fire, and thus use up your entire turn. If AoE weapons were splash guns that used Strikes instead, you could switch to that weapon and attack with it much more easily.
Sometimes doing a little bit of save-based damage is tactically better than trying to do single-target damage that does no damage on a fail.
The splash weapons I used dealt their splash damage to the primary target on a failure.
I also have concerns on the idea of using splash to handle the narrative of area weapons or area fire. One point of splash damage seems a bit weak and unattractive. Also, splash is notoriously badly defined, but that is something that the Paizo devs need to address.
This is something I go over in part 2: splash looks bad, because when you read "1 splash damage" it just reads like you're going to be doing minimal damage, but in practice it added up very quickly. Because the splash guns I used dealt competent single-target damage, it did not feel like you were sacrificing one for the other like with AoE guns.
And I am not sure exactly how to align the cone on the grid since it seems like it should be pointed centrally to the primary target and that may not line up with the grid alignment correctly.
Pathfinder Player Core gives guidelines and illustrated examples of how to align different areas on a square grid. In practice, when I applied cones and the angle was a little awkward, I just moved them slightly until they fit one of the predefined areas a bit better.
Personally, I would rather deal 0.5x weapon damage to two creatures if the dice don't go my way (both succeed at their saves) than deal 1 point of damage to the two of them if the dice don't go my way (I miss the attack roll). That is including the two action cost of Auto-Fire vs the apparently one action cost of the Cone area with splash.
I think there are a few framing errors in the above:
So effectively, not only would Striking twice be a lot more reliable and liable to get you far greater returns, you'd still get pretty decent returns even if you do miss. This is ignoring the difference in action economy and flexibility in favor of single-action guns, which in my opinion was an even bigger factor that allowed classes to actually use these guns in the first place.
I also think it supports the narrative description of a rotolaser better to have it take more time to hit everything in the cone and do full damage to all the targets.
I think that's more of a class-specific fantasy than a universal fantasy because, in simple terms, ain't nobody got time for that. The Soldier should certainly be able to spend more of their turn making meaty area fires, but most other classes are not going to want to spend most of their turn making one attack with their gun. In fact, having to spend two actions to fire a gun is a major reason why AoE guns are a dealbreaker for almost every class out there, to say nothing of how many classes lack the class DC to make use of those guns at all.
And that's what it ultimately comes down to for me: we can talk about "narrative description" and all that stuff about how we imagine AoE guns to be, but in practice, no class is going to want to pick an AoE weapon unless they're the Soldier or perhaps a Commander in Pathfinder, which is why nobody mentions AoE guns in their playtests unless they're talking about the Soldier. I noticed you were speaking in hypotheticals and abstracts, and I encourage you to playtest these AoE guns on various classes and see how that "narrative description" works out for them. In my experience, most classes wouldn't touch AoE guns, but would have at least some reason to pick splash guns, if only as a backup weapon, and the Soldier in particular benefited immensely from this change and adjustments to their mechanics.
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I am going to point out this small problem. With every new weapon comes new upgrading costs but a shifting rune like upgrade would help make them actually easier to use at some level. The short range and sometimes awkwardness of AoEs also doesn't help.
I am going to point out this small problem. With every new weapon comes new upgrading costs but a shifting rune like upgrade would help make them actually easier to use at some level. The short range and sometimes awkwardness of AoEs also doesn't help.
You're right that a Shifting rune that worked for ranged weapons, or some equivalent, would allow a Soldier to more easily switch to a more convenient gun, such as from an area weapon to an automatic weapon or a regular gun, without having to carry that extra gun around. Switching back in combat would be difficult, however, as it'd take up your entire turn, and as you mention the short range and awkwardness of AoEs limits this further.
I think a problem with AoEs that I should've probably mentioned a bit more in the above wall of text is that making them use two actions and giving them a fixed range is a subtle, yet massive nerf to the flexibility of ranged weapons. Strike being a single action is what makes it so easy to slot at least one of those into one's turn, even while doing lots of other stuff, and range increments allow a character to Strike at a disadvantage without needing to move just yet. You could spend a second action making another Strike, just as you could also just move to get within your weapon's first range increment, but the option to not do that makes a big difference in gameplay. AoE guns take that away, and I don't think they really give that much in return, so making them single-action splash guns restores that flexibility.
I think Automatic weapons need two have two different ranges one for Automatic and one for normal fire instead of trying to use Range Increment/2 or full Range Increment for Action Hero Soldier, which means Paizo has to limit the range of these weapons. Which hurts in a entirely ranged meta format.
I think Automatic weapons need two have two different ranges one for Automatic and one for normal fire instead of trying to use Range Increment/2 or full Range Increment for Action Hero Soldier, which means Paizo has to limit the range of these weapons. Which hurts in a entirely ranged meta format.
This is basically what I implemented for the cone trait listed in the OP, which I used for most automatic guns: you get your normal range increment, and then you get a set range for your cone AoE where the splash damage happens. Both these ranges are completely independent from one another, which would make for easy fine-tuning.
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Your math is sound, but imo the key problem with Splash isn't its deceptive numbers or game feel, it's that its fundamentally just a regular weapon that happens to deal some small amount of damage to additional targets as a rider.
It's not really a solution for area weapons because they aren't area weapons.
I'm also not sure things like "area weapons aren't good against single targets" or "you aren't going to one tap swarms of enemies" are necessarily even problems in the first place.
I feel like this thread touches upon a bunch of issues, like save/dc progression, the cost of backup weapons, action economy, the effectiveness of area weapons used outside their area mode, damage scaling of ranged weapons, etc. and actually improving game feel will come from tuning those knobs, rather than simply nuking area weapons.
Your math is sound, but imo the key problem with Splash isn't its deceptive numbers or game feel, it's that its fundamentally just a regular weapon that happens to deal some small amount of damage to additional targets as a rider.
It's not really a solution for area weapons because they aren't area weapons.
I'm also not sure things like "area weapons aren't good against single targets" or "you aren't going to one tap swarms of enemies" are necessarily even problems in the first place.
I feel like this thread touches upon a bunch of issues, like save/dc progression, the cost of backup weapons, action economy, the effectiveness of area weapons used outside their area mode, damage scaling of ranged weapons, etc. and actually improving game feel will come from tuning those knobs, rather than simply nuking area weapons.
This is fair, but I think it's worth questioning the assumption that "area weapons" specifically need to function differently from normal guns and take two actions to fire. I think the idea that these guns have to be cumbersome and work a certain way is overtaking the reality that that kind of implementation is doomed to leave these weapons unwanted by the near-totality of classes in 2e: not dealing good single-target damage and not being all that immediately effective even in the best-case scenarios really does make a difference, because most martial classes don't want to deal crap single-target damage or spend their entire turn switching to an area weapon just to take zero weak enemies off the board.
Beyond the math making it extremely difficult to actually improve these weapons (your d12 weapon can only deal about a d8 weapon's worth of damage to a target at best, your accuracy will generally suck even with an unprecedented +3 item bonus to your DC, and contending with weapon damage die progression means you're unlikely to apply particularly meaningful AoE), the biggest factor by far in my experience was flexibility: even if classes did have the ability to deal good damage with these weapons one way or another, they still would be unlikely to ever go for these weapons, because they are far more rigid and limiting than any other weapon in the game. By contrast, splash guns may not look like "real AoE guns" on paper, but in practice they felt genuinely so much better to play, and allowed classes to pick those weapons when they otherwise wouldn't touch AoE guns. The Soldier was of course the biggest winner from this, and felt like an actual martial class. This is why I feel we shouldn't get too attached to a model of AoE weapon that has so far failed miserably and is, in my opinion, doomed to dissatisfy, not just due to the underlying math but due to the fundamentals of their implementation. A gun that takes two actions to fire is simply not going to appeal to very many characters.