"Any character who is not behind cover or who does not immediately move behind cover on their action is at risk of getting hit by the suppressive fire." As written, this does state that if you are [i]either[/i] a) not behind cover, [i]or[/i] b) not behind cover and moving into cover on your action will get hit. Which is to say, if you're not behind cover, you get hit. As intent goes though, Smokeskin is probably right; it's meant to be an "and", such that you need to both be outside of cover [i]and[/i] fail to get behind cover to get hit, because otherwise the second clause is strictly superfluous.

Erulastant wrote:

It's actually sillier than that, and RAW the second clause is [I]not[/I] superfluous. In order to not get hit, you must both be behind cover and moving behind cover on your action. Now whether this means moving to get behind more cover (without leaving cover), additional cover (same caveat) or just moving around while behind cover (still without leaving) is up to gm interpretation.

I don't read it that way at all. I'm a native English speaker and I parse "does not immediately move behind cover" as "does not immediately move into cover". There is definitely some structural ambiguity, but the context is sufficient to disambiguate. It's logically chained with "not in cover" i.e. "if you are not in cover, then you must be immediately moving into cover to not get shot".

Not going to go into the RAW debate... however, I think Smokeskin is on the right track with RAI. Keep in mind how movement works in Eclipse Phase though. Regardless of when in the action turn your action is or how many action phases you have, movement happens continually across the action turn. This means that I would rule it as "in order not to get hit (if cought in the cone) you have to either be in cover OR already have declared a move that will bring you into cover within the same action turn". That is, you don't get to retroactively decide to go into cover when someone starts suppressive fire, you need to have started it already. I am a bit surprised though that noone commented on the interesting fact that someone with speed 4 needs 80 bullets to accomplish the same thing as someone with speed 1 does with 20.

Well, a speed 4 character has the reflexes to spray bullets for suppressing fire but also to turn the gun on an individual target when the rest are behind cover (spending three actions shooting particular targets and one on suppressing fire). But no, I don't see how someone with speed 4 holding down the trigger and firing wildly uses more ammo than a slower character doing the same. Drugs make your fun fire faster?

I know people hate it when I make this argument but... You might consider that "supressive fire" means something other than wagging a FA weapon while continually mashing a trigger. It could be that supressive fire means what it actually means in the real world; covering an area or sector and making snap shots at any target you percieve or guess might be there, in order to weaken the enemy's moral ability to return aimed fire. Or you can conclude that weapons in EP have realy low rates of fire and the rof can be modified by drugs.

Ya I'm sorry I said--wait... What? Oh, cool. :-)

Heh, depends on wether you're fighting germans or arabs. ;-) I'm just joking! I've run across some info like that comparing feluja (SP?...) To urban fighting in WW2. I'll look for it. Supression of an area with a high volume of fire, be that massed muskets or a machine gun, works because it *is* deadly. (disclimer; I have no personal experience) That said, supresive fire in EP is kinda silly because there is no reason at all to break cover to aim. (yes I know I just ruined my own argument but no one made that point last time.)

there is a thought. make the cone size a function of player speed

I've been in the army. I was never deployed, so I never had anyone fire anything but blanks and lasers (we had this laser tag system for exercises) at me. Suppressive fire is more like what OTP describes - you pepper the known or likely positions of the enemy. The chance of hitting anything by just spraying is practically nil - there's so much empty space around people and especially so if they're just peeking out behind cover. But even with suppressive fire that's directed at where the enemy is, you're very unlikely to hit anything. Suppressive fire serves two purposes. The first is that if someone is firing several automatic bursts in your direction, you're going to want to duck behind cover (if you have combat training - civilians tend to stand still and look around instead), and if you're in cover and it gets hit by some rounds, you'll want to stay down. If my squad manages to suppress the enemy, then my squad can all be up and looking so we have situational awareness, we have weapons shouldered and ready to fire and we can move freely. The enemy is ducked down, can't see what we're doing, they can't fire as we move. It's a massive tactical advantage. The second advantage to suppressive fire is that it hurts the enemy's accuracy. Shooting is a precision art. It requires calm and concentration. Even pulling the trigger wrong will make your aim deviate. If you're twitching because a bullet landed next to you, if your hands are shaking from fear and adrenaline, if you're worried about being hit instead of firing correctly - your accuracy drops way down. I'm a hunter, and I shoot worse in the field than on the range - just because I'm worried about missing and injuring the animal instead of a clean kill. For some people, it gets so bad that they miss easy shots just because of their nerves. I can only imagine that incoming fire is much more stressful than that! If the EP rules were to capture that, I'd go with something like a Coolness under Fire test when under suppressive fire to a) move out from cover and b) get the bonus from Aiming (fail and you just waste the action). Coolness under Fire would be made with WILx2 or an appropriate Profession skill.

Smokeskin wrote:

If the EP rules were to capture that, I'd go with something like a Coolness under Fire test when under suppressive fire to a) move out from cover and b) get the bonus from Aiming (fail and you just waste the action). Coolness under Fire would be made with WILx2 or an appropriate Profession skill.

It might be interesting, if we're doing this heavy-level modelling, to make all forms of fire affect morale in some way. After all, even if an area isn't being hosed down in bullets, shots that narrowly miss you are going to be intimidating. As a very simple, untested system, I could imagine that when fired upon, if the attacker's Margin of Failure is [i]higher[/i] than the defender's WIL, the defender has failed to keep their composure and are pinned.

Jaberwo wrote:

From Smokeskin's post I get the feeling that supressive fire in 10 AF might be as outdated as line infantry tactics are today, if you fight robots or fearless exsurgents or ultimate mercenaries.

Even if morphs are expendable, it's a bad strategy to throw your morph away because you're not afraid of dying. Suppressive fire will remain effective because it makes the enemy unwilling to risk moving into it, irrespective of whether this is because of a fear for their own lives, or because it's not cost-effective. This'll apply even to "fearless Exsurgents", who will see their long-term survival as instrumental to causing more havoc, while throwing their morphs away by running into fire will be a waste of time and resources.

Jaberwo wrote:

You just hold a sensor over your cover and launch seekers at the guy marking his position with muzzle flashes? Or you carefully aim and shoot, while he sprays and prays. Statistics is on your side.

Those seekers will not be very effective as denying an area to the enemy; Seekers have lower rates of fire and are a lot more expensive that bullets, which means that if you want to make an enemy unwilling to move into an area, Seekers will not be able to suppress them. As for carefully aiming and shooting, this is indeed a good way to deal with the problem, but that could be done today. Soldiers tend not to, because of that pesky high chance of death.

On the whole speed thing, I've always found it silly in a way that speed increases rate of fire on a gun. I can see it allowing you to aim, reload, and react faster, but if you're already holding the trigger down for a fully automatic weapon, I don't see how it would fire 3x as fastjust because you're on drugs. Maybe weapons should have a maximum rate of fire?

Urthdigger wrote:

On the whole speed thing, I've always found it silly in a way that speed increases rate of fire on a gun. I can see it allowing you to aim, reload, and react faster, but if you're already holding the trigger down for a fully automatic weapon, I don't see how it would fire 3x as fastjust because you're on drugs. Maybe weapons should have a maximum rate of fire?

Modern automatic firearms fire 10-20 rounds per second, so the case is more that the rules don't allow people to just hold down the trigger.

I know I'm about to derail ny own thread but... I highly recomend tracking ammo because a magazine lasts 2-1/3 turn for the average character. My characters are constantly running out and it has major tactical implications for the game. Take the example from above of using a pistol weapon for supressive fire. do that once and you're using your next CA to reload. tactically thats probably a waste because oponents are not supressed while you reload. Ammo count is the ballance point between kinetic and beam weapons.

OneTrikPony wrote:

I know I'm about to derail ny own thread but... I highly recomend tracking ammo because a magazine lasts 2-1/3 turn for the average character. My characters are constantly running out and it has major tactical implications for the game. Take the example from above of using a pistol weapon for supressive fire. do that once and you're using your next CA to reload. tactically thats probably a waste because oponents are not supressed while you reload. Ammo count is the ballance point between kinetic and beam weapons.

I'm definitely finding this to be the case in my own game.