BCZ Retrospective XXI: Shooting Weapons

Shooting Weapons have a higher power ceiling than Melee Weapons and they can also attack from longer distances. BCG had, in my opinion, too many niche or utility Shooting Weapons and not enough generalist options. This led to the creation of a metagame where most of the optimized Shooting specialist builds were of the glass cannon variety, built around using one or two specific guns and sacrificing everything else. My goal with BCZ was to add some variety and make it easier for more generalist builds to compete with the specialists. So let's see how they turned out, on with the show!

Anti-Mecha Cannon
Crippling is a pretty good debuff and with Long Range you could potentially 1v1 harass someone the entire fight with impunity. I considered making this Slow instead of One Shot, but it was still too good. As a One Shot you can build around it (and other One Shots) to keep the most dangerous threat Crippled every turn while you shoot from safety. It's not something you can pull off at low PLs though, so this is a niche weapon with secondary use as an utility/finisher.

Hyper Launcher
Blast 3 is HUGE and Unreliable doesn't hurt artillery builds as much as other drawbacks like Slow and One Shot. You can use this any turn, every turn, to wipe low Threshold Grunts with all but the worst of rolls. It lacks Long Range, but it's a great pick if you want to spam Blasts without having to perform shenaniganry with Slows and One Shots.

Lockdown Missile
Would you believe me if I told you that this used to be a Support Upgrade? The original idea simply surrounded one zone with barriers and let you lock out someone out of the battle forever, unless they had the appropriate Upgrades or enough friends to beat you up and stop trolling them. This was waaaay too good as a 5 MP Support and still uncomfortably griefy as a 10 MP Support, so it became a One Shot Weapon with a decent Blast radius instead. With a way to resupply One Shots you can still murder someone while keeping them out of the fight the entire time, but you have to be close to them and have to be careful about not trapping yourself in there too... And they could still fly over or teleport through your barriers, so it's not as easy to abuse. Still good though. Just make sure you're not making the GM/CoPCs miserable while you're laughing your way to victory.

Macrowave Cannon
A commissioned Weapon. It was inspired by an old design from when this game was called GGG, which only survived to BCG in the form of a Boss Weapon. It may read as a Beam Weapon, but it's just plain Shooting. Which is good for it, because otherwise it'd be even more difficult to use properly. Because it is so strong and has such a huge aoe, the recharging time isn't as much of a  drawback as you may think, since it is likely to end or make unloseable the battle when you use it with some buffs.

Mounted Blaster
A long, long while ago, Shooting Weapons granted an Advantage for standing still while using them, rather than granting two for Aiming with them. While I think the current version of the Shooting Keyword plays a lot better, the simplicity of having a guaranteed Advantage that you could gain just by losing some mobility was nice to have. This is a callback to those days, allowing most types  of gunners to trade in the Movement that they may or may not even be using for attack parity with Meleeists.

Radiation Bomb
This is Bombardment's evil twin. Or, well, eviler twin. While Bombardment is a ruthless, efficient killer. Radiation Bomb will either tickle you or hurt you way more than Bombardment could, making it the cruel sadist of the relationship. While Bombardment is a great Weapon, it does feel like a flavor miss sometimes when you try to use it to represent particularly nasty weaponry like napalm, nerve agents or, well, radiation bombs. So I made Radiation Bomb because there clearly just weren't enough ways to create huge explosions and destroy everything everywhere forever in this game already.

Rapidfire Machinecannon
Another simple gun. Shooting Weapons in BCG had more roles to cover (short range, long range, area, debuff, etc....) than Melee ones, so as a consequence they were generally more complicated and had more drawbacks to use. This is why there's so many more Shooting Weapons that just grant one Advantage (or inflict a Disadvantage) in a specific sitaution in BCZ.

Sentry Turret
It's the only non-Beam Remote! The flavor is that you're planting down an aimbot that has a wide reach and hits hard but is fragile and immobile. In a previous version, it got an automatic roll of 10 to the Might Test. In another, it was Crippling. The autorolling 10 was weird because it arguably did reduced Damage compared to weaker guns when they rolled highly, which led to some moments where it felt bad to use. Crippling from Long Range is, as I have already said, way too good. The final version is nothing amazing, but if you shield it with your body and Engage baddies that would snipe it then it will provide a reliable source of damage every Turn.

Torpedoes
This Weapon is so niche that it's way more likely to be used by specialized NPCs than by most PCs. But it also serves another function in that it is an example of how homebrewers might want to balance their own custom Weapons. This might not seem like a big reason, but given that I wasn't sure whether I was going to end up making a Custom Weapons system or not (and I didn't) I wanted to put it in BCZ to at least provide a little guidance by example.

Tracer Rifle
It's a focus fire Weapon that, while weak, grants a +2 to every other friendly that coordinates with you. This makes it very powerful, particularly if you've got a low Might build and don't really care all that much about doing Damage yourself. It is a very nice side gun for support oriented builds.

Other than the griefing potential of the Lockdown Missile (Which has been described ''legitimately the funniest thing i've seen in a game" by one of its live witnesses and as "the full spicy meme experience" by another, so I think of it as more of a feature than a bug) I don't have any significant issues with most of these. Even the ones that look difficult to use properly, like the Anti-Mecha and Macrowave Cannons have a unique role that works for them, without being overpowered. All in all, a very nice set.

Next is... Oh, it's Beam Weapons. :sweating_emoji: Oooh boy.

Gimmick Out.