Fria Ligans forum

The thing to remember is that you always get a Skill and Attribute roll in addition to the Ammo die. So a character with As or Bs in both have a good chance of hitting before rolling Ammo dice. I have done one play test with a friend who created a high skill operator and they hit a lot and usually only used a single ammo dice as a result.

The other bit is that the custom dice have the target emblem on them that increases bullet damage. We weren't using that as I am unsure of what numbers have the symbols, but a high Attribute, high Skill character is going to dish out a lot of damage, suppression and crits while using far less ammo than a low Attribute low Skill character.

How things will pan out long-term is hard to judge as the Virus makes getting together to game hard.

10+ is a double success. So possible only rarely on D10s, and a little less so on D12s.

High skill certainly matters a lot, but once you start working in modifiers, most shots are still more like D8/D6 than much higher than that, unless you're shooting point blank in the middle of the day. -4 modifiers were the norm of the engagement we did most recently. Sometimes -5 to -6.

My players always go for stealth and ambush wherever possible.

This is what I mean by the need to playtest across many groups with many different combinations of Skill, Attribute, weapons and ammo usage to see if the balance feels right.

RE: snipers and suppression. A single shot from nowhere can definitely cause suppression in the rest of the unit. How many resources are routinely devoted to eliminating one sniper? The Goose used to be considered an appropriate response. A single shot ringing out and Bob going down is going to be a significant emotional event for all of Bob's buddies.

A single shot from nowhere can definitely cause suppression in the rest of the unit.

Been a while since I went through the rules, so I'm not sure if anything addresses this, but this is important indeed.
For NPCs I'm thinking some sort of SOP drill would be appropriate. Roll something to decide how many NPCs return fire and how many just hunker down. (The standard operating procedure being return fire, seek cover) Some dummies will no doubt have no idea where the shot came from and just get down as they were taught, some of the sharper crayons in the shed may return fire (in this case I'm thinking just "aim" at the shooter PC but with only ammo dice to cause suppression for the PC and others nearby).
For PCs considering the CUF or maybe even rolling for it may be good, those that pass CUF can return fire, others just take cover.
And this I think should be the situation for any kind of unexpected attack for either side, unless there has been visual contact beforehand, that may change the situation somewhat.

SUPPRESSION AND NPCS
The Referee can apply the effects of a CUF roll for an NPC to all NPCs with similar stats in the same hex, placing a SUPPRESSED marker on top of the stack to indicate this. The Referee can also
rule that a civilian or less experienced fighter automatically fails all CUF rolls, applying the effect to all similar NPCS in the same hex.

All like NPCs in a hex (can) take the same suppression. Snipers are like that.

I've been thinking about another factor of ammo dice. I think the disconnect between "I'm only going to pull the trigger once" and the game assumption of "shoot 'til you hit or give up" can be solved with a couple of points.

• When shooting at ROF 1, the shooter can shoot one shot or 1 ammo die. Choose before rolling to hit.
• Define a single shot quality. These weapons cannot roll ammo dice. (Standard list; sniper rifles, missiles, etc.)
• Define an autofire quality. The must always roll ammo dice. This would be machine guns, mainly. Probably best to change Mk19 and AGS17 types to HMG (as was done with the Swedish Mk19 copy). Submachine guns would also fall into this category except that the ones already described are second and third generation select-fire models.

Tomas wrote this on fb earlier today regarding ammo dice:

We are tweaking this for the Beta though. In the Beta, ammo dice successes can increase damage (thus increase crit chance) instead of just triggering additional hits (but there will be a penetration limit to prevent unrealistic armor penetration due to successes on ammo dice). Also, the malfunction risk will be scaled down.

This looks intriguing.

Every time I open this thread I feel like a veterinary pathologist, as it is now mostly just beating a dead horse ... but yes, that's intriguing. If the ammo dice can give you a critical then losing that opportunity balances things if people want single shots. Also, it gives you more criticals without more hits, which I think is what a good combat system needs: lots of ammo spent without hitting much, but getting hit is dire.

In my experience many GMs never have NPCs disengage unless they fail some kind of morale check, and many players and GMs make characters act recklessly in all kinds of ways. So suppression rules / morale rules / etc. seem always to devolve into a way of forcing the player to take care. But I don't think this is what suppression (or any morale check) ought to be about.

This is exactly why I railed about the Social Combat/Persuasion rules earlier on. Suppression could easily factor into them as well, but the problem is that RAW both the success and failure conditions of attempting to avoid/halt combat with Persuasion is more combat!

With Suppression and a more robust Persuasion ruleset you could easily create a system that would allow groups to avoid fighting to the death within the rules by convincing enemy/friendly troops to withdraw through the use of Suppression effects and Persuasion checks. Sadly, we don't have that yet in the Alpha playtest