SR5: Suppressive Fire vs Cover and PANs

This past Monday was the most recent session of Shadowrun Missions using the Fifth Edition rules at my local FLCGS. As anyone who's ever played Shadowrun 5th ed (SR5) know, the complexity of the rule-set is not for GMs for the faint of heart. As usual, I was a player so I didn't have to contend with the two tricky rule concepts among a group that likes to wade into complex and complicated rulings. Those rule concepts were Suppressive Fire into Total Cover and PANs (Personal-Area-Network).


Suppressive Fire


The suppressive fire was basically a PC firing a suppressive fire arc into the wall of a building. Everything was A-Okay until we realized a key NPC would not only be caught in the crossfire but probably wouldn't be taken action to avoid being hit. So we did review of the rules for suppressive fire and then proceeded to figure out the effects of firing into and penetrating a barrier. As anyone who has tried to quickly consult a rule in Shadowrun could attest it was not a simple process. After much yammering, a ruling was made and dice rolled.


Simple, right?


You'd be wrong.


After the game, I decided to brush up on the suppressive fire rules. Looked at the chart. It read: Duck or Take Cover. Hmm, that's weird. Why would take cover work due to the barrier rules? Read the first page. Everything checks out. Those adjacent and within arc suffer penalties to actions. Ok. Read the next page. Characters behind full cover don't have to make the test to avoid damage. Uh, oh. Meaning the barrier rules don't apply to suppressive fire against full cover.


So we got a rule wrong. Oops. As we're lucky if we play Shadowrun 5th edition once a month, we're still mastering the basics let alone the more advanced rules.




PANs


I must admit we generally take PANs for granted. Is there a decker or rigger present? The rest of runners link key gear to the RCC or deck and don't sweat the small stuff. Well, we ran into the thorny question of what happens when a PC has too much wireless gear; and the appearances of the PAN within PAN trees.


Personally, I view PANs as a rule mechanic for firewalls. Everyone's commlink could benefit from the firewall provided by the RCC/deck's PAN, while any wireless gear would be within commlink's micro-PAN and benefit from the commlink's firewall.


Turns out, my viewpoint was minority viewpoint. Everyone was too focused on the network aspect of a PAN and thus my viewpoint was deemed to powerful. The point of contention was that one of the PCs had wireless grenades. Many felt that it would create quasi-chain of networked items far larger than what the rules allowed. Fair enough.


After the game I got to thinking, all weapons are visible in the Matrix. A PC would have their PAN and every wireless weapon's icon would exist outside the PANs icon within the Matrix. Who the drek would walk around the sprawl with grenades visible on the Matrix. That's asking for trouble.


Solution: Just because an item is wireless doesn't mean it's on the PAN. You're not going to walk around with every wireless item on. As such as, it won't be visible on the Matrix and thus the item doesn't require the protection of the Matrix.


Quite sure that interpretation will foster quite the argument... er discussion. Which I will probably lose as we've had the Bluetooth analogy before.




Happy Gaming!


Next time.