Suppressive Fire and HERO System- Solutions

Previously we reviewed how HERO System handled Suppressive Fire in the core rules and foundd it somewhat wanting.So we turn to house rules in order to achieve our goal.

Here I see two possible (and simple) options.

1. Define 'movement' into a hex declared for the Suppressive Fire maneuver to be the taking of any action not just actual movement (i.e. making an attack). This at least subjects the person to the choice of accepting an attack in exchange for doing much of anything. Along with this we'd have to overturn the restriction on requiring auto-fire for Suppressive Fire..
2. Rather than modifying the Suppressive Fire rule, modify the Presence attack rules by providing more bonus dice to the attack, likely linked to the number of rounds fired. This would have to count as an action instead of the normal zero phase Presence Attack perhaps also requiring the attacker to hit the target hex (DCV 3) or target's cover (typically DCV 0). Additionally the negative modifier for repeating an presence attack would have to reduced or removed for Suppressive Fire. Spreading or Firing into multiple hexes would allow the attacker to cover more than one target.

Both of these have their advantages and disadvantages.

The first eats up a ton of ammo (making it unlikely it would commonly be used), and to make it work we would have to scale the OCV modifier with the ammo expended (i.e. say a single shot takes -3, two takes -2, 3-5 takes -1, 7-10 takes -0, etc). On the plus side it allows freedom of player choice and allows Suppressive Fire to  be dangerous.

The second actually represents the genre use of Suppressive Fire better and is much lighter on ammo (as you only need to fire on your phase and not each segment between them). The roll for the Presence attack replaces any damage roll, or standard effect can be used to avoid any die roll at all. The downside is that Suppressive Fire is never really dangerous in itself.


I'll be presenting these two options to my players and we'll see what people think.