Playing my first game of Deathwatch right now, and we found a question about Overwatch. We were being attacked along a corridor (I know, seems a perfect spot for a nice firing line...) and I successfully set up Sustained Suppression. As far as we could tell, with Overwatch, you get to make an attack against *any* enemy that fulfills the criteria. This is how we played it:

All 6 marines enter overwatch, covering the corridor. We decide to full auto enemies that move closer to us. Once we were all set up, every time an enemy advanced, they got hosed by 5 bolters and a heavy bolter. This pretty quickly led to a win for us.

Now, my question is this: did we play this correctly? Overwatch seems WAY too powerful if it works out like this...

You try to imagine attempting to move through a corridor with 6 bolters and a heavy bolter aimed at you. Seems perfectly in order. And I bet your GM will reconsider having a similar scenario in the future when he's seen the outcome.

Provided each character only fired full auto once in a given round you're good to go.

Overwatch as a general ability is far less potent however, as it takes a turn to set up ahead of time and it only covers a specific avenue of approach. You can't just overwatch in a 360 degree circle. However when you're in a situation with a single avenue of approach, the power can seem close to excessive.

BrotharTearer has it right here though, your GM will probably not repeat that scenario again.

IronNerd said:

Overwatch is good but can easily be turned against you by the GM if you are not careful. Let's say you just set up in a corridor and you all state "I will cover this corridor and as soon as an enemy appears I will pepper it". Then the GM sends a single guy pops out of cover you turn him into swiss cheese. Guess what? All of you just lost your overwatch and the rest of the enemy forces can charge you, etc. Oh, and the GM can and should use Tactical Advance against this too.

So tactically you need to layer your overwatch appropriately.

Another point to consider is that after Overwatch has been triggered you need to spend an action to get into Overwatch again to benefit from Sustained Suppression at all. But yeah this is the situation that Overwatch/Sustained Suppression has been made for, it should be powerful.

Alex

Seems like you played Overwatch perfectly. Just watch for LoS blocking weapons (Grenades mostly) and the Smoke Quality.

Although normal smoke isn't a problem for SMs equipped with autosenses.

And remember that -as someone else said- Overwatch normally needs an action to set up and covers only a limited arc.

But yeah: Marines point guns down corridor and stuff advancing down there gets shot. That's pretty much how the situation should play out. The way to avoid it is to say 'no' to the whole squad covering down a corridor that they haven't all got a clear shot down (due to other PCs ahead of them), have multiple avenues of attack, use blind grenades, toss grenades at them around the corner, or have enough bad guys to literally overwhelm the players by weight of numbers.