You fire at someone, they get scared, run for cover and hide. If you fire on full auto it's much higher penalty to resist. All is well there.

Lascarbine, S/2/-. Fired on semi auto, can force a full 45 degree killzone to panic and take cover. 2 shots fired. If it's a multilaser or some other badass weapon shooting more at the same time, it seems ok, but even a m36 lasgun only fires 3 rounds.

If it's 3 rounds from an autocannon then I can also argue that the armour tearing rounds would be enough to make you go into cover despite no real swarm of bullets, but all in all it seems suppressive fire should either be on every shot taken (simply because you're being fired at, it's scary) or only when the amount of bullets are overwhelming.

And yeah, technically you might have a comrade helping you out doubling it to 4 or 6 bullets, but the rules are no different for a stormtrooper with no comrade, or a guardsman with a dead one, than for the one who has a comrade.

I think it would've been better with some kind of cohesion system or similar like in deathwatch, in that you could make a (perhaps sweeping orders?) covering fire maneuver when a lot of the people in the group fires in the same area to actually produce that effect. As it is, it just seems like, I'd personally be more afraid of a guy firing 3 rounds AT me, than a guy firing 3 rounds in my general direction (and just MIGHT hit me or someone else randomly). But maybe thats just me

Say what you will, my dice assure me that the guy with the laspistol 90m away aiming two shots about ten meters to my right is far scarier than your pathetic little "heavy-bolter" thing.

Kiton said:

Well some-one should inform your dice that a full auto attack inflicts a -20 to the pinning test and semi auto inflicts only a -10.

Hardly a great deal of difference but it's there.

In previous games I pretty sure it used to only be effective out to half the weapons range but isn't mentioned in OW. That might be applicable house rule.

This doesn't exactly do it justice though, at least if you have a heavy machine gun. In DH I was trying to com up with a better way of dealing with it. What I was going to do was treat it as an area of effect with a radius of the rate of fire that deviates normally if a challenging (+0) Ballistic skill test is failed. A success suppresses the desired area but does not cause any hits. For every two additional degrees of success a single shot hits a target in the area.

There you go, a house rule if you want it.

Double post, ignore please.

I was joking around. I was ALSO complaining that the dice can make it a little odd sometimes, given the values aren't SO different.

Perhaps take away the fear penalties if the weapon seems a bit out of place for the roll? Perhaps the 2 shot lasgun burst doesn't inflict the -10 on the pinning. Balance without overly breaking the game.

Or just say that the 2 shots were aimed just over heads rather than sprayed as a more rapid fire gun might have been.

Haven't encountered this issue yet but it is interesting. Perhaps limit the number of affected targets to the number of shots fired? I could see a person being able to pin a couple of folk with a semi auto rifle but not a whole heavily populated 45 degree range.

Well, if you see someone shooting in your direction, you'd probably keep your head down.

Suppressive Fire is different from other forms of attacks in that you WANT your enemies to see it coming. Regular shots and bursts are aimed and timed to hit, and you want to give them no advance warning. Suppressive fire isn't meant to hit, just to pin them down.

This is just another one of those cases of rules not accuretly reflecting reality. Either leave it alone or houserule it to your liking.