Editing Metal Slug System (section)

==Basic Mechanic==
All weapons come in two parts: delivery and payload. These are both measured in dice: one die, of whatever size is needed for the job: 1, 1d2, 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12, 1d20, 1d100, whatever. If you have other sizes, cool, those are good too.

When you fire a weapon, first roll your delivery dice. Then subtract your target's dodging ability from what you rolled. If you're over 0, awesome: roll your payload dice that many times. For example, my rocket-launching sniper rifle is 20/*/4 (worry about the * later). I roll a 12, he has dodge 7, I roll 7d4. He subtracts his armor value from the result, and takes that much damage.

But that's a boring weapon. My new weapon is a shotgun that fires that last weapon. The shotgun is an additional delivery mechanism. Now my weapon is 10/20/*/4. I roll a d10, then roll that many d20s, then the poor sap gets to subtract his dodge, then I roll the remainder in d4s.

Almost, but not quite. Needs more boom. The rockets don't only explode, but the explosions themselves explode. No, I don't know how or why. But now it's 10/20/*/4/4. I roll d10, then that many d20s, then subtract dodge, then roll that many d4s, then roll that many d4s, then the poor son of a bitch better hope he has lots of armor.

Great, but now this thing is really complicated, so you're going to have to start worrying about fuckups. See, when you roll a 1 you don't get to add that dice to the total. If it's the final dice in the weapon chain, you're safe. But if there's another dice after that, you have to roll the next dice and whatever comes after it against yourself. Don't roll a 1 on your initial roll.

Total the number of stages in your weapon to get its speed rating. More stages = slower. During a turn, everybody says what they'll do simultaneously, but if two people fire weapons with different speeds the guy with the lower number goes first. If it incapacitates the other guy, he doesn't get to fire.

Weapons have ammunition.  No matter how crazy the weapon, it uses up one shot of ammunition each round you fire it.  However, weapons have differing amounts of ammunition.  When you kill an enemy, it drops enough ammunition to fill up one of your weapons, chosen at randomly, but never the weapon you killed it with.  If you don't have any other weapons, they just explode satisfyingly instead.