Hi fellow Gamemasters,

I have been a GM/DM (depending on which game you started with) for 15 years now, with only a single year being inactive, and a player for half that time. Needless to say, I have seen a LOT of standard fights in a plethora of game systems. So, with age comes a refined, or some would say, blatantly insane taste for shaking things up a bit. My players are also veterans, so I have started to thoroughly foil their plans and expectations every so often by making fights and enemies MUCH different than they appear to be, or are used to.

However, my grasp of the finer points of Dark Heresy rules isnt all that bullet-proof, so if any of the following ideas violate the Rules-As-Written, please tell me so. A min/maxer on occasion, I prefer not having to bend the rules, its much more satisfying. The idea is, btw. not to just kill my players, thats lame. The idea is creating flavorful encounters with usually boring enemies, that will be talked about for months and years to come, or teach a valuable lesson about underestimating your enemy.

So, here we go with the first scenario: Stacking the Pin!

The idea: How do I make a bunch of PDF rookies, sadly mistaken in their worship for the dark gods, into a dangerous encounter for my party, without being unreasonable (plasma guns!) and by using severely average gear (no Manstoppers or Dum-Dums) which no acolyte would get caught dead with?

Solution: I stack pins! Suppression Fire and Overwatch are about the most happily disregarded tools in the toolbox for any of my groups in the past months. Nobody uses it, nobody needs it, nobody fears it. Ah, but nowadays, most players have come to accept the power and luxury of having a Full Action. They use full-auto or semi-auto with abandon, they charge, they all-out-attack, and they foolishly use weapons with reload times like 2Full.

So, our measly squad of 10 PDF troopers sports 2 heavy stubbers, with a shooter and a loader each (to help out with clearing any jams that inevitably will occur). The other 6 are armed with autoguns (2 of them) and Lasguns (3 of them), with one officer using a sword+autopistol. He also carries the few grenades that the squad has.

Tactics: The officer is, very officer-like, at the very front, will stay in any cover. Ideally, this happens in an narrow street, a tunnel, or any other way to create a fire corridor for the stubbers. The stubbers are set up with overlapping fields of fire down said street, in heavy cover, but not next to each other (we dont want a grenade to cook them both, do we?), with the rest of the squad in front, and the officer at the very point. Both stubbers are in Overwatch until the players come into view. From then on, both stubbers primarily use Suppressive Fire.

Now, a -20 WP test is something that can be reasonably often passed. Two of them is a bit different, and the rules dont state anywhere that you cannot stack pinning tests, nor do they state that even if the bullets cant really hurt you (armor etc.) you get out of it... basically, the players will get pinned. A lot! Heavy Stubbers got a RoF of 10, with 200 rounds of ammo per belt, so this lasts a while. Whenever one jams, one of the soldiers with an autogun takes over. I have the PDF guys use free actions to coordinate this. The Lasgun guys are just there to do regular fighting, which they can do without much in the way of jams, and the officers job is to lob grenades at anyone crawling close enough (remember, pinned means only half-actions and -20 BS, so the players will likely have to get really close to do much damage to anything in proper cover. In theory, one could stretch belief and add more stubbers, stack more Pinning, but the problem is that stubbers on suppressive fire dont really do much damage. The more pinning you add, the less damage output your squad has left.

Since Half-Actions only disallows a LOT of the usual player tactics, this can (and has, for me) turn into a deathtrap, with players being pinned in cover, while the stubbers have no targets, go back to overwatch, and the entire thing becomes a stalemate... until the officer starts lobbying grenades over cover... at which point the players either move (and get possibly pinned by Overwatch, meaning they ll likely not even clear blast radius and get stuck in the open) or eat the grenade.

Since then, my guys are really careful about going against even a Crank Cannon

More to come.

Now, a -20 WP test is something that can be reasonably often passed. Two of them is a bit different, and the rules dont state anywhere that you cannot stack pinning tests, nor do they state that even if the bullets cant really hurt you (armor etc.) you get out of it... basically, the players will get pinned. A lot! Heavy Stubbers got a RoF of 10, with 200 rounds of ammo per belt, so this lasts a while. Whenever one jams, one of the soldiers with an autogun takes over. I have the PDF guys use free actions to coordinate this. The Lasgun guys are just there to do regular fighting, which they can do without much in the way of jams, and the officers job is to lob grenades at anyone crawling close enough (remember, pinned means only half-actions and -20 BS, so the players will likely have to get really close to do much damage to anything in proper cover. In theory, one could stretch belief and add more stubbers, stack more Pinning, but the problem is that stubbers on suppressive fire dont really do much damage. The more pinning you add, the less damage output your squad has left.

The rules don't state that you can stack them either. I'd generally assume using two stubbers, firing heavier ordnance or wearing armour would work out to circumstance bonuses and penalties - a guardsman in power armour being pinned by an autopistol is a little... silly.

The rules aren't clear on multiple instances of pinning. I'd rule that you only need to test once to overcome pinning. That said, if you have at least one heavy stubber laying down Supressive Fire every round and stagger when they open up a little so they're not caught reloading at the same time then the acolytes will need to test for pinning at WP -20 every turn. Hell, you can even have one pinning the unfortunate players and another working on actually shooting them with Full Auto fire. It's a very deadly combination, and I almost got to use such a setup against some of my own players recently (curse those Awareness checks). It has a few flaws to exploit, though.

1. Only an absolute show-stopper if there's a lack of cover for the acolytes to use.
2. Ammunition is heavy and bulky. You've got 20 turns or so's worth of shooting, though I've yet to see a fight that lasts even close to that amount of time.
3. A skilled sniper, and possibly one who can sneak off to a flank and conceal himself, can quickly put your heavy stubber troopers down. The acolytes fanning out in general can also work as a counter as you might no longer catch them all in one arc of suppressing fire.

Suppressive fire happens in every fight in my campaign that involves automatic weapons. Making the other guy keep his head down and limiting him to half actions is massively useful in controlling the battlefield.

Unless you have huge WP, a -20 WP test is going to be failed more often than not. (which only makes sense, very few people just stand calmly in the open with bullets flying at them, not to mention lasers)

My players really bitched about pinning/suppressive fire until they went: wait we can do that too!. If you can pass even one pinning test and have the appropriate armament you can counter fire w/ your own suppression. If the enemy then fails his pinning test he can't continue doing suppressing fire b/c can't take full actions and must stay in or move toward cover. This gives your allies a chance to make a recovery test w/ the bonus for no longer being shot at to try to come out of being pinned.

Now as to making suppressive fire from multiple opponents effective:

1) Multiple people supressing a single target - RAW doesn't really address it one way or another. If the suppressors were all in the same general area/direction I wouldn't call for multiple tests/greater penalties unless we were talking about a truly massive amount of incoming fire. I mean one full auto MG shooting at you or two full auto MG's shooting at you isn't going to make much difference in how much you duck. One guy w/ an autorife vs. 20 guys w/ autorilfes however.... So (this is not RAW merely my idea) I would apply an extra -10 WP for every order of magnitude for incoming supression from one direction, (i.e. 1 guy shooting at you = -20, 10 guys = -30, 100 guys = -40) and/or bump the penalty one step harsher (extra -10) if supression is from particularly heavy weapons (i.e. assault- or auto- cannon).

I would only call for separate pinning tests if supression was coming from multiple quarters (at least 90 degress or so apart) to represent the confusion and terror of being caught in a crossfire.

2) If you just want to go with RAW try this:

With your unit of full auto armed troops (doesn't matter what kind, could even be done w/ autopistols) have just enough individuals do supressing fire to cover the entire area the opponents are in in the fire zone. No more than this b/c while you get more hit rolls your targets are or will be getting into cover and w/ -20 BS you're shooting to pin while supressing, not to hit.

For the rest of the unit have half fire for effect (regular full auto at the enemy, spread out based on the shooter's assessment of target priority) this block gets the +20 BS for full auto, likely lots of hits, but depending on quality of cover may or may not penetrate.

The other half of those not supressing have go on overwatch covering the area the enemy may try to move through as thickly layered as possible. That way if enemy jumps out of cover to try anything (or the guy who passed his pinning test stands up to counter-fire) the overwatchers can hose him (again the -20 BS, but likely less/no cover problem and w/ multiple shooters volume of fire is sure to produce some effect).

Toss in one or two guys w/ hunting rifles (or other acurate single shot weapons) to do called shots at bits of characters sticking out of cover; and/or have a couple lob frag grenades over the cover, leaving the characters w/ the option of stay in cover and eat the frags, or run out of cover and get hosed by overwatch.

Makes for nasty situation even if you are facing less accomplished troops.

This scheme does not require a particularly huge number of troops either. A 10 man squad (9 armed w/ autoguns, 3 supressing, 3 full auto, 3 overwatch - rotate/stagger beginning of firing/who's doing which task so that when out of ammo no more than 1 out of 3 guys is reloading at any given time for steady fire [full auto generally eats a clip every 3-6 rnds depending on the weapon]. 10th guy has hunting rifle for aimed shots. Give each 1 frag grenade for lobbing over barriers and you're ready for your mooks to roar)

3) As to the question of power armor and supression, there was an earlier thread discussing giving situational modifiers (including such things as how you were armored) to pinning tests. Just come up with the modifier you feel appropriate. Also remeber even PA troops need tot ake cover against the big guns (auto- and assault- cannon, heavy bolters, etc.)