weapon handling detail (Weapon Handling)

Weapon Handling

Some weapons demand raw physical Strength to control safely -- this
is completely separate from your Rifles/Handguns Skill and has
nothing to do with how well you aim.

    - Your combat Skill (Handguns, Rifles) plus Dexterity, Will, and
      Perception answer "how well do you operate and aim this
      weapon."
    - Weapon handling answers a different question entirely: "can
      your body physically control what happens when it fires."

A character with excellent Rifles and poor Strength aims brilliantly
and still gets thrown around by a weapon too heavy for them. Strength
is never part of your Skill check itself -- it only matters here, on
this separate physical axis.

Handling difficulty isn't always about recoil. Most demanding weapons
are heavy-kicking firearms, but a weapon can just as easily be
difficult to control because of its own bulk, weight, or awkward
balance rather than any violent kick -- the underlying physical
problem differs by weapon, even though the mechanics work the same
way.

It is not a hard gate

You are always allowed to try firing a weapon you're too weak to
control -- nobody stops you. If you're short of what it demands, two
things can happen when you actually pull the trigger:

    - Your shot itself suffers a control penalty (worse odds of
      hitting), scaling with how far short you fall.
    - Physical control can genuinely get away from you -- anything
      from a moment of struggling for control up to the weapon being
      torn from your grip entirely and landing wherever you're
      standing. The worse the mismatch, the more likely and more
      severe this gets.

Meeting or exceeding the requirement means none of this applies --
completely clean, no penalty, no risk.

Only firing has consequences

A dry click, a jam, or any other refusal to fire never triggers a
handling consequence -- there was no discharge, so there's nothing to
control. Whatever your weapon's selected fire mode does to
ammunition (a burst or automatic burst still fires as a single
combat attack, exactly as it always has), handling is resolved once
per attack, never once per bullet.

Who this applies to

Only a small, deliberately-configured set of weapons carry a
Strength requirement at all -- most firearms have none and behave
exactly as they always have. Today the HDG M82A3 anti-material rifle
requires Strength 8 to fire its standard shot without a mismatch,
standing and unsupported, and the DSI Longarm requires Strength 5 for
sustained semi-automatic fire but 7 to control its full-automatic
burst -- the same weapon can demand more of you depending entirely on
how you're firing it. The DSI Warhammer launcher requires Strength 4
and the DSI Sledgehammer launcher requires Strength 6, each a single
weapon-specific value rather than anything derived from caliber or
weapon category. The flamethrower requires Strength 4 to control on
its normal firing mode -- not recoil in its case, but the sheer bulk
of its backplate-mounted fuel tanks and the awkward leverage of
holding its nozzle steady. As proper bracing, prone firing, bipods,
and mounted-weapon support get built out, using them will lower what
a weapon effectively demands of your own body.

Checking a weapon's requirement

    weaponstatus <weapon>

reports a HANDLING line naming the requirement for the weapon's
currently selected fire mode and comparing it to your own Strength --
only shown for a weapon that actually has one configured; nothing is
shown for the rest of the arsenal.

For builders

Weapon-handling requirements are stable, data-driven, and per fire
mode -- never a display-name guess and never inferred from
`weapon_type` (several weapons intentionally share a `weapon_type`
purely for message-bank purposes, so it cannot double as mechanical
identity). Each configured weapon is keyed on Evennia's own
prototype-key tag and lists Strength requirements individually per
fire mode it actually supports (a weapon offering semi/burst/auto
does not have to define all three, and a mode that's left undefined
is simply unrestricted, not "impossible"). There is no universal
formula relating one fire mode's requirement to another's -- each
value is set individually per weapon.

See also:

    help firearms
    help smartlink

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