I had bee thinking about the problem mentioned in other posts about suppressing fire and all that, so I looked at the SR4 rules and some rules from other systems.

Suppressing fire in SR4 needs a full auto weapon and uses up 20 rounds, with no staging to the damage. That's a lot of ammo, is loud but is good at keeping the enemy down.

By delaying actions, on the other hand, one could wait for the enemy to pop up and shoot at them directly. Any weapons could be used for this, not just automatics.

Opportunity fire would be a combination of the two. Do use this, the shooter would declare a target area, just like in suppressing fire. It can be up to 10 meters wide in 2 meter intervals. The first 2 meter wide area is "free," but each after the first adds a -1 penalty (-1 for a 4 meter wide path, -2 for 6 up to -4 for the full 10 meters). That penalty isn't for the given range band, but applies to the whole band and represents the division of the shooter's attention.

Any target that presents itself in the covered area is subject to attack immediately. The shooter makes their attack with all appropriate modifiers. The shooter treats this as a complex action for determining how many shots may be fired.

The intention here is to provide an alternative to suppressing fire and add a little more realism to delayed action cover fire.

True but think of this, your waiting for the enemy to pop his head up in order to shoot. Now this is the standard cop thing in movies with them dodging behind cover while exchanging fire. Which could be just NORMAL SR combat. You can easily describe reaction rolls as dodging behind walls or other cover but only for a moment as your shooting back.

You also have the problem if your not filling the sky with lead. Your foe can pop up from anywhere behind cover giving HIM the surprise. After all HE KNOWS exactly where he's going to appear. You don't

remember, even if the rules make it appear as if each person have a lot of time to do stuff, everything is happening withing about a 3 second time period.

so opportunity fire will be, as jack kain points out, normal sr combat.

SR1 and 2 was better at illustrating this as there you didnt have everyone get a full pass at first. in those versions, the wired samurai was king.

then it was like this:

roll initative. do something at initiative, -10 to intiative, if initative is still positive, get a new action at new initiative. so if the samurai rolled good (getting extra d6 pr level of wired helped here) and the others didnt, he could get multiple shots of before anyone knew what was happening.

kinda like:

roll initative, bang bang bang bang bang, all enemies dead, the rest of the team is standing there wondering what just happened.

the samurai then was similar to a ww vampire on a celerity high...

It's not much different now

Sammy goes, everyone goes, Sammy goes the other 3 times in his init
Sammy goes, everyone goes, Sammy goes the other 3 times in his init

So, the sammy still get's all kinds of other inits, it's jus that others get to go once, before the sammy really get's rolling.

bingo, but that small difference helps:

rather then:

sammy,sammy sammy, everyone dead

its sammy, everyone, sammy, sammy

so atleast in theory they have a chance to fight back...

That was for game balance

It is very easy to house rule it back to the old way, if that is what you prefer

House rule

You play the highest number action first, the rest follow suit in decreasing order.

So, someone with 4 initiative passes, goes on 4, 3, 2, and 1
Someone with 3 initiative passes waits on 4, goes on 3, 2, and 1
etc...

Highest initiative goes first, on those that have 4 initiative passes, then highest initiatives for those that have 3 initiative passes, etc...

Somehow, this doesn't sound so easy anymore.

actually, it is quite easy
pretty much the same as initiative is done now

Instead of starting with initiative pass one, then going to two, to three, to four,
you start at four, then go to three, then to two, then one

everyone keeps the same initiative, number of passes, etc..., it's just the order that changes.