Pinning and suppression:

Suppression is caused by the fear that you will be hit and that the hit will be effective.

Examples:

You are in a firefight and are taking cover behind a stump.

Case 1:

Your unit it taking fire, but none of it seems to be directed at you. But if you did something to draw attention to yourself, that might change.

Result: Mild suppression

Case 2:

Bullets are occasionally hitting you stump and whizzing by over and on the sides. If you stuck your head out there, it might get blown off.

Result: Moderate Suppression

Case 3:

Your stump is being targeted by a HMG. Huge chunks are being blown off and many of the rounds are going right through. It’s a miracle you haven’t been hit yet.

Result: nomnomnom tasty dirt (Severe suppression)

Case 4

You thought is was going to be something, but it turns out the ‘enemy’ seems to be just civilian protestors throwing rocks. What are you hiding behind this stump for?

Result: no suppression, at least until someone loses an eye.

So, on the face of it, the suppressive fire action in Only War is ridiculous. You are able to suppress a near infinite number of targets with a water gun, as long as you have a semi automatic water gun. If you were firing an automatic cannon instead, you wouldn’t produce any more suppression. If you were firing many more rounds that 2, you wouldn’t produce any more suppression. Your shots don’t have to be anywhere near the target to suppress them

Alternate rules for dodging, parrying, and pinning/suppression:

1 I woulda gotten out of the way, but I didn’t know how

Remove Suppressive fire action from the game.

Remove dodge skill from the game.

Remove parry skill from the game

2 ‘It’s close’

The players shouldn’t always know if they ‘have’ to dodge or parry before committing to a dodge or parry. So, they get a warning from the GM ‘it’s close’ after the dice are rolled, but before they are told if it’s a hit or not.

When an enemy attacks a character, roll the dice in secret and tell them “it's close” if the roll was a margin of failure of two (2) or better, so a success or 'small' failure' counts as 'close'

The semi-auto attack action increases the “it’s close” margin of failure to three (3) and the full auto action increases it to four (4).

(Need some additional rules about semi and full auto suppressing a small area too, but haven’t thought something up yet.)

3 Reactions (Dodge / Parry)

Dodging:

The character then has a choice to use his reaction as follows:

Ignore it and let the attack proceed

Or

Make dodge test with a bonus of their choice of up to +30.

If they chose to make a dodge test, they must then make a pinning check with an opposing penalty equal to the bonus they took on the dodge check.

Pinning check results:

Ranged Attack:

Success:

If the character under attack wishes, he may drop prone.

Failure:

Gain Pinned Status.

If the character under attack is not in cover relative to the attacker, he must drop prone.

If the character under attack wishes, he may drop prone.

Close combat:

Success:

If the character under attack wishes, he may drop prone.

Failure:

The character under attack drops prone.

Parrying:

The ability to parry is now something everyone can do, as reflected by their weapon skill. They can attempt to parry as long as they are armed with a close combat weapon.

So, you can dodge close combat attacks with, potentially, a large bonus. But then you have a chance of falling down, which would give your opponent a chance to really lay into you next round. Or you can parry, without the risk of falling down.

4 Example:

Piotr, a guardsman (Toughness 30, Agility 30, Willpower 30, Guard flak armor), is in a firefight with some traitors and one of them fires on him with a lascannon. The GM rolls the dice, and smiles evilly at him, ‘it’s close,’ he says.

Piotr, not wanting to find out what kind of mess being hit by a lascannon would leave, says he’ll dodge and take a +30 bonus on the check. He rolls a 52, dodging the attack. He doesn’t know if the attack would have actually hit him or not. If he were feeling more brave, foolhardy, or invincible, he could have just ignored the lascannon shot and hoped it was just a close miss.

Now, he has to make a pinning check at -30. Since his willpower is only 30, this pretty much means he’s going to be pinned. On the other hand, no lascannon created holes in Piotr.

5 Results:

Scarier guns are more likely to produce pinning, as people will want to take more dodge bonuses against them.

More accurate fire is more likely to produce suppression.

It removes the silliness of shooting someone to suppress them being different than just shooting at them, though shooting more bullets does tend to promote more suppression.

Forces like Orcs, that don’t tend to take dodges, don’t have their advances halted by shooting. On the other hand, they are much easier to gun down.

Edited February 8, 2015 by crusher bob

Thanks for redirecting me to this proposed rule, I had not seen it before.

I like the way you adress suppressing fire, but I'm not really sure I would entirely remove dodge and parry skills: they are options that players can choose to specialize when spending experience points, and having them or not can help differenciate characters.

Have you playtested this rules?

When I find time, I will!

Edited January 5, 2016 by whoseyes

These rules are far more complex than standard, and it some time and careful reading to understand.

First of all, I echo that removing Dodge skill is probably not so good idea, after all Eldar are supposed to be better dodgers than orks, not just having better agility.

Other issues: Dodging enemy attacks are now a very risky proposition, since you are very likely to get pinned. Even a normal +0 dodge means about around 70% chance of pinning a normal guardsman, and the PCs are not that much resilient unless Psykers. As a result, combat becomes more a matter of who shoots first, as the first shot is likely to pin an enemy. This means that maxing out willpower and geting Pinning-related talents becomes even more important, and Suppressive Fire action was already a bit too much.

I do like that particularly dangerous weapons will probably Pin more often, and getting pinned down by a lascannon seems fine by me. My players generally roleplay this anyway if they get targeted by something big.

As it is, area of affect suppression is not a thing except for grenades - unless you get multiple hits, but in that case there is no "close" as the enemy will know that you need x DoS to get extra hits. So the system needs a way to attack more targets in a close group and pin them down. Also, the system probably would have to be deadlier to make Lasguns and Autoguns be Pinnable, otherwise they would be fairly useless for this.

Another strange thing with the system is that WP only comes into effect if the player or GM decides that the attack is worth risking a Pin for. So players can practically choose to be fearless, at the cost of forgoing dodge, despite having low WP. In fact, very low WP characters will benefit from never dodging and hoping their armor etc. will work, as they are likely to be pinned at any attempt to dodge. Is this attended?

Assuming they guy shooting at you has about a 30% chance to hit, if they are firing at you on semiautomatic, then they have around a 60% chance to produce a 'close' attack and around 50% of close attacks would be hitting you. So you aren't pinned all the time. This does make pinning and maneuvering on the enemy much more important, since people are much more likely to be pinned by fire.

I didn't want to force action on the player due to 'low' willpower because almost all guardmen have low willpower. So I just made low willpower more likely to pin you instead. Assuming you have the talent that allows you to reroll pinning checks, you have around a 50% chance of passing a pinning check if your WP is 30. It may be a bit too difficult to drive your ability to be pinned to very low numbers (around 10 or 15%, since that requires you pass pinning checks around 60% of the time and reroll).

If the players/characters are not afraid of being shot by lasguns (or whatever) then lasguns won't really produce pinning checks, so this seemed to work out well. If you don't like the fact that characters aren't afraid of being shot by X weapon, then you should probably think about buffing the weapon. But in the stock rules, a weapon with 1d5 damage semi (2) can pin a 45 degree cone in front of you.

I mostly wanted to remove the dodge and parry skills because they are something that everyone will take. And if it's something everyone will take, then it needs to be given to everyone already. If the standard eldar has something like agility 40-50 then they are already considerably better at dodging than the aveage human, and they can take less bonuses on the dodge to avoid the pinning check penalty.

I also wanted to avoid the silly ability of really dodgy characters to just stand in a open field and dodge bullets. I wanted everyone to have the ability to mitigate damage, but not be Remo Williams.