Quote:
Originally Posted by Rupert
The real reason suppressive fire works relatively poorly in GURPS is that the turns are so short, and thus the area you can reasonably fill with bullets is small - to cover a mounted machinegun's traditional 'beaten zone' takes many turns, and characters generally get to act on better information than people do in Real Life. Being brutal with Per checks to locate fire before you can dodge it, or to even know exactly where suppressive fire is even going, helps a lot when characters have human-normal Perception levels. It's not so good when they have Per 17+, but then characters with those sorts of attribute levels probably should be able to detect zone attacks with firearms, etc.
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Dodging seems particularly egregious in the case of suppressive fire at longer ranges. You can't be moving evasively to throw off the shooter's aim because they're not aiming at you at all, and seeing where they're aiming and dodging the cone of fire is problematic both because you probably can't see that well and because you would need to dodge the entire cone of fire, not just the one bullet in it that would have happened to hit you if you didn't dodge.
And since dodging one bullet is fairly easy and you're pretty unlikely to need to dodge more than one, that makes a big impact.
(Unless of course you've got the ability to see and react to the bullets themselves, in that case have fun.)