Typically, a well-kept Weapon 🔪 with tight tolerances will not jam or malfunction. However, that is not always possible. Being mechanical devices, firearms tend to fail under hardship at least a few occasions. If that occasion coincides with grave danger, the life of its user might be put in danger. It is important for weapon users to be aware of potential sources of UNRELIABILITY, a measure of how much difficulty their weapon has in functioning without failure.
Weapons may accumulate UNRELIABILITY through different circumstances. Some of them include:
- +1 UNRELIABILITY -> Operating in mud, wetlands, jungle, desert, extreme cold or extreme heat.
- +1 UNRELIABILITY -> Weapon has not had maintenance in a while.
- +1 UNRELIABILITY -> Employing cheap ammunition (Aluminium-cased Cartridge).
Additionally, a weapon's OIC Quality Grading ✅ (a measure of their manufacturing quality) also impacts their reliability:
- +2 UNRELIABILITY -> Weapons classified as Grade I - Jury-Rigged Contraption
- +1 UNRELIABILITY -> Weapons classified as Grade II - Industrial Mass-Production
- Weapons classified as Grade III - Quality Craftsmanship suffer from no UNRELIABILITY modifiers.
- -1 UNRELIABILITY -> Weapons classified as Grade IV - Modern Manufacturing
- -2 UNRELIABILITY -> Weapons classified as Grade V - Masterwork Artisanship
- -3 UNRELIABILITY -> Weapons classified as Grade VI - Laboratory Prototype
At 1 UNRELIABILITY, when performing a hit roll:
- On a Critical Failure (2, 3), the weapon has a simple malfunction which must be cleared by spending 1 AP.
- A simple malfunction represents one that can be easily fixed by the user by racking the gun a few times or performing percussive maintenance.
- On a Cursed Failure (1), the weapon has a serious malfunction which must be cleared by spending 3 AP.
- A serious malfunction represents one that requires partial disassembly, and as such, takes much more time to figure out.
Every point of UNRELIABILITY moves this scale backwards. Therefore, 3 UNRELIABILITY would cause a weapon to suffer a serious malfunction on 3, 2 and 1, or a regular malfunction on 4 and 5. This means that accumulating UNRELIABILITY will result in constant serious malfunctions which, by requiring an entire Turn to fix, put the creature in grave danger.
Weapons with the Musket ⚡ tag cannot suffer from serious malfunctions, only simple ones.