Suppressive fire, you are hosed if you are fast Options

[ogbendog]

Suppressive fire is pn page 144. I quote the annoying part of the rule:

The area remains “suppressed” until the shooting character’s next Action Phase.

so if a smuck shoots, it's suppressed for a full turn. If a guy with wired 3 shoots, it's suppressed for 1/3 of a turn. Or if the person with wired 3 wants to suppress an area, he has to spend 3x as much ammo to do so.

Has anyone house ruled this?

[Teulisch]

see, this is why wired reflexes have an edge. you can turn them OFF.

personaly, i would permit someone to supress, then hold for the rest of the combat turn. they only need more bullets if they want to change the area effected, or do something else, then supress again.

[ogbendog]

so the supression would last until and if they took another action?

I'd be tempted to allow them to aim for the next burst. Or even give them an extra 2d for each additional action they have that round, sort of retroactive aiming. That models the fact that a faster person can supress better.

[Backgammon]

Look at it this way: the wired 3 sammy can suppress people who only go once for the lenght of their Combat Turn, and he can still take 2 more actions (like actually aim at them).

Someone who only goes once and supresses eats up his entire Combat Turn (he can't do anything else).

So I don't see how being faster is a disadvantage.

[Hasaku]

Because if all you want to do is suppress for the entire turn, you're burning 3x the ammo. I'd allow the shooter to just skip his action and continue suppressing, as if he had fewer passes.

[FrankTrollman]

Your opponents only have to roll once to avoid getting shot during the period of suppression. Using three actions for Spray and Pray uses up 60 bullets, but it also makes everyone in the area roll 3 times to avoid getting shot.

-Frank

[hobgoblin]

why would a fast character use supression anyways?
only reason i can see is if he knows there is someone behind cover and wants to keep them there while the rest of his team moves forward.

do it for the first phase, team mates move forward and the enemy stays down. next phase he moves after them, and if the enemy have a fast people to they will now either try to shoot the fast char or maybe put up their own supression fire. alltho the latter option will only have effect for the fast char as he is the only one moving (the rest are allready behind their next cover).

that is unless the movement have to be spread out over whatever number of phases there is in the round.

thing is that unless the enemys are only wired chars, there is no reason to use suppression fire for multiple phases. you use it for the first phase and then pick of the ones that stick their heads out in the next phases. then you go back to supressing in the first phase of the next turn.

in many ways i wish that SR would use a phase system similar to SLA industries. there you have 5 phases, slowest get to go phase 3, next fastest gets to go phase 2&4, next 1,3 and 5. and so on...

[Akimbo]

Anyone who plays paintball or airsoft might know where I'm coming from here. A combat round is a few seconds. Think of it like this. Your wired sammy suppresses. They're pinned down. They think to themselves "Are they done firing?". Combat round is over. That single phase is just a few seconds. It takes time to realize the firing, jump down, and to assume the firing is over.

When I am personally being fired upon in paintball and airsoft, I make sure that I am down. Being out of the game is something I really don't want. To lose my life? I had better make sure they're not unloading on me still.

[Azralon]

[TheOneRonin]

Yeah, the way SR4 (and SR3 too) handles surppressive fire is pretty retarded. Expecially when you throw in characters with increased reflexes. Here's how I do it.

First off, I assign fixed rates of fire for automatic weapons. Things like ARs, SMGs, machine pistols, and most LMGs/MMGs/HMGs use a base ROF of 600 rounds per minute. That's a little slow for conventional weapons of today, but still completely reasonable. Plus it works out to nice even numbers when dealing with the SR 3-second combat round.

Secondly, realize that as long as the trigger is depressed, the weapon will fire at the same rate, no matter if it is being held by a wired reflexes 3 street sammy or joe-average man on the street.

Thrid, I require suppressive fire to be maintained for a full combat round (3 seconds) for it to be effective. More precisely, the shooter that begins suppressing during combat round 1 must continue to suppress until his turn comes up in combat round 2. During those 3 seconds, the shooter will fire 30 rounds. For every three rounds less than 30 that the shooter has in his magazine, he loses 1 die from the firearms test. Suppressive fire is completely ineffective if attempted with fewer than 15 rounds left in the mag.

Real suppression requires bulletts to be flying and tearing up stuff around the target for at least a measurable amount of time. To allow a wired character to spend only 1 action to suppress, then have 2 or 3 more actions to do other things is just WAY beyond my suspension of disbelief.

[Azralon]

Rate of fire has indeed always been an unrealistic gotcha for Shadowrun (and for similiar reasons, movement rates).

Unfortunately the only way to manage it properly is through the use of division, which typically isn't fun for tabletop rules. Then again, SR explosives use square roots. :)

[Antimuppet]

Maybe it's just me, but shouldn't the chipped up sammies be shooting to kill rather than laying down suppressive fire? With vision magnification, smartguns and insane speed to call on, shouldn't they be one-shot-killing with mad abandon? On top of that, the sammy who's dealing death left and right with burst firing machine pistols is way cooler and scarier.

Leave the suppressive fire to the orks and trolls who don't mind carrying an LMG around on a run.

[Azralon]

Depends on your mission objective, I'd say.

[FrankTrollman]

The suppressing fire option also represents spraying down an area trying to kill lots of people. The character gets to make an attack roll, and everyone in the area might get hit. They get to add their edge to their defense rolls, but for most enemies that's not a big deal.

If you are facing 4+ enemies, a "suppressing fire" action can be big fun all around. While in the hands of a drone with a weak autosoft the suppressive fire option is essentially 20 bullets to subtract 1 from all enemies' defense rolls for the rest of the turn, in the hands of a competent samurai or gun adept, a suppressing fire action is a legit attack on a potentially large number of enemies.

The name is misleading.

-Frank

[mfb]

depends on the situation, as well. ideally, yes, you should have someone laying down suppressive fire and someone making headshots--it's a good combination. but if there are too many bad guys to suppress properly, it might be wiser to have everyone suppress while the team makes a getaway or regroups for a different approach.