Machine Gun Encumberance

[charlieluce]

When my character equips a machine gun, Hero Lab adds it to his Encumbrance. While I realize that it's Savage Worlds and all, I assure you that he's not firing it from the hip.

I originally tried just leaving the machine gun on the ground, but then I got an error when I tried to equip it.

[zarlor]

He may not be firing from the hip, but he's carrying it around, right? If it's on the character at all it should count against his encumbrance, according to SWD rules, so Hero Lab is tracking it correctly, IMHO. A common method for characters carrying encumbrance that effects them is to make sure you keep a enough stuff in a pack that you can "drop to the ground" as a free action, presumably while drawing your weapon with the other. If it's a 2-handed weapon your GM might declare that since one had was busy dropping the pack you'd have to incur a MAP to get it onto your two-handed weapon in the same round, though. Oh, and if you play a game where your group just doesn't bother tracking encumbrance at all there is a checkboxk on the character config screen for ignoring encumbrance, if that helps any.

[charlieluce]

The machine gun is mounted on a gun carriage, not being carried personally.

[zarlor]

Originally Posted by charlieluce

The machine gun is mounted on a gun carriage, not being carried personally.

In that case it would need to be added as a gizmo to the Vehicle that's carrying it. Which is a bit more convoluted. Probably the best thing would be to request from LoneWolf to make Vehicles as usable containers, then you could put the MG into the Vehicle straight from your character sheet where it belongs, but even then it would still have container behavior when it came to "equipping" it, meaning it will give you an error. I'm surprised that isn't already available, but I just tried it (haven't been playing a game where I had a vehicle myself, I guess) and while it acts like a container in that it has a little bag icon next to it to see what it contains, it doesn't show up on my list of containers I can put stuff into. Which seems like it would be a bug to me.

Then again, why do you need to equip it? All the stats should be on it even if you have it on the "ground" or some other container, right?

[charlieluce]

Because the 'equip' box is there?

Yeah, I guess it's just habit from using HL for Pathfinder, where I need to equip siege engines so all the adjustments get made automatically. I have to do all that manually in Savage Worlds anyhow.

[zarlor]

Lol!

Although if I may ask, what adjustments are you having to make manually? I mean unless it was magical or something for something like that it's usually just a straight shooting roll, so nothing that equipping it would affect. I do know there are other things I do often on some characters, though, that I like to set up Temporary Adjustments for, like I'll set up adjustments for Wild Attack to remind me I've used it and have that -1 parry, or for shooting maybe I've got a Marksman Edge and can get a bonus from that, although I should mention that I did suggest a while back a bunch of Edges that could benefit from check-boxes to activate so we might get some of those in the update we should be getting w/in the next few weeks. I have my fingers crossed for it, anyway.