X-Com: Gray Dawn Reloading in Combat
At some point in time, you are bound to run out of bullets in the middle of a fight. Reloading your weapon will require at least one combat action. If you only take one combat action, you can choose to reload your weapon, and it will succeed automatically. If it is taken as one of multiple combat actions, things get more tricky. Try it sometime (if you have the means to); try to quickly pull a mag from its pouch, drop the old one, drive the new one into the magazine well then chamber a round so you can continue firing. Go ahead. I'll wait. Doing this very quickly requires a lot of practice and good reflexes.
If you choose to reload a weapon that has removable magazines as an extra action, you must make a standard (15) difficulty reflexes check. You can add the appropriate weapon skill to this roll. A success means that you have managed to drop the empty mag, replace it with a fresh one and chamber a round. This readies the weapon to be fired on the next action (be it during the current round or a later one). Failing the roll means you are somehow fumbling the procedure. If you have more actions plotted, you can use them to continue trying to reload. The penalty for extra actions (-3 for every action beyond the first) applies to this roll. It is more difficult to fire off three bursts and then reload quickly, as you are trying to fit a precise combination of actions into an even smaller span of time. For example, if you elected to take 3 actions (fire, fire, reload), each shot would be at -6, and the roll to reload before next round would be at -6, also. A fumble during a reload check may result in dropping the magazine or jamming the weapon. Reloading is an action that may be taken from full cover.
Reloading a tube-fed weapon (like a pump shotgun) can be an art in and of itself. By reducing the weapon to a ROF of 1, you can freely drop a shell into the open chamber, rack the slide and fire. Doing so causes a -5 initiative penalty, like firing after moving without the aiming penalty. If you want to reload multiple shells, you can sacrifice all combat actions during the round to stuffing the mag with shells. Make an easy (10) reflexes check, adding your rifle skill to the roll. If you succeed, the weapon now has one round in the tube, and you can keep making reload rolls (with successive -3 penalties to each one) until you fail one. That is the number of shells you were able to reload that round. Those highly skilled with rifles and/or with high reflexes will able to reload more shells into a shotgun in a short period of time.
