How to deal with good position and good cover?

Burning Empires Firefight
1

Last night we had a firefight, we started very enthusiastic and then it dragged, it got repetitive and we stopped doing color then we stopped to care and it kind of killed our session. :frowning:

What happened: Our psychologist chief of propaganda decided to take prisoner one of her political opponent for interrogation, she passed over the chain of command and took a squad with her to abduct the politician at his residence. The politician had some civilian security guards and a firefight ensued (the psychologist player called for a firefight). The psychologist goal: to capture the politician. The security team goal: to take the psychologist hostage (was linked with one of the politician belief).

But the psychologist had no good firefight skills and the chief of security had only average firefight skills (exponents 3 and 4). We were hoping for a fun but sloppy operation. But the chief of security choose to hide and to protect the politician in a well positioned room and scripted take cover. Our psychologist was not able to dislodge him so eventually also scripted a take cover to gain some protection. So we had the security team in a position of 3 with a cover of 3 vs the psychologist squad in a position of 1 with a cover of 3. The security team dint want to loose the best position on the map and never moved. The psychologist team was also not tempted to move and finally only tried to advance to take the position of 3 out of desperation. A close combat eventually ensued in the open, but we were so tired of the fight that we dint care anymore and even the close combat had a lot of wiff and no one were making progress. So the GM faction surrendered to stop the firefight.

My character was in the psychologist squad, but there was never enough extra success to buy me interesting independent actions.

After the fight we felt that having one position better then all of the others clog the firefight around this position. And we felt that cover crank up the obstacles and drag the firefights into a series of fails and wiff and repetitive actions.

One of the reason why we stopped adding colors was because we were stuck in adjoining rooms and with the repetitive wiff and fails the firefight dint move into any interesting direction and became repetitive.

So once one side got a good position with a good cover how do you keep the firefight fun and interesting?

We are still looking forward for our next session, but we were not able to finish our session manoeuver and everyone was a little bit discouraged after the session.

2

Oh, that’s an easy one. Suppressive Fire/Flank/Flank. Even unskilled you’re going to whittle away at him.

FF is a game of maneuver. Static defense almost always loses (unless you can roll out your big guns real fast and wipe out the enemy before they flank you).

Imagine the security forces hunkered down, thinking they’re secure, as you slowly encircle them.

3

Yes, this, absolutely.

Flank is the Lock of Firefight.

4

You don’t add up the cover rating to the Ob for flank? (sorry I was not one of the player in charge of the firefight and I am still re-reading the rules)

5

Cover only affects individual shooting actions earned through Direct Fire, Suppressive Fire, etc. It doesn’t affect the unit level actions.

6

OK super méga cool! We added +3 Ob to all actions involving shooting! No wonder we failed everything and nothing was happening!
Sorry Luke for the thread. :stuck_out_tongue: (but I still take note about suppressive fire+flanking)

7

Always happy to talk about Firefight!