Suppressive fire plays an important role in cinematic gun fights. It’s that moment when the hero shouts, “Cover me!” and someone unloads their rifle on full auto so the hero can out flank their enemy. From my research, this seems to be an important factor in real life gun fights, too.
However, I’ve never seen it used in TTRPGs, even when there are mechanics for it. So recently, I’ve been thinking about how to give suppressive fire a mechanical and narrative role, rather than relegating it to a rule no one actually uses. The answer may lie in the OODA loop.
The what-now?
OODA stands for “observe, orient, decide, act.” It’s a series of steps that people in rapidly evolving situations like gun fights execute to respond to the evolving situation. OODA is happening constantly, so you’ll often hear talk about the “OODA loop,” which just refers to repeating these steps to continually act and react as the situation evolves. Everyone is doing it, including your enemies, so it’s a competitive process, too.
The most important thing about the OODA loop is this: whoever cycles through the loop faster is going to win a contest.
That means there are two ways to win: make your own cycle faster, or make your enemy’s cycle slower. In this sense, the orient phase is the most important. This is the phase when your mental model of the situation updates. It takes the most time of any of the steps, and it is the most vulnerable to disruption.
Aerial Combat
The OODA loop was developed from the analysis of fighter plane dogfights during the Korean War. It was found that pilots who reacted faster than their adversaries were winning battles, even if their planes were technically inferior. Reaction speed mattered more than pure performance.
OODA is still used extensively in fighter doctrine, even though the technology has evolved and most aerial combat these days takes place at beyond-visual-range (BVR) distance rather than the knife range of a dogfight. BVR is when pilots can’t see their opponents with their own eyes and have to rely instead on radar and instruments. At these distances, observing and orienting are mainly about getting a radar lock on your enemy, so you can shoot them down with missiles.
This is where stealth grants a huge advantage. While the F-22 and F-35 lack the graceful curves of the B-2 and odd angularity of the F-117, they are nonetheless stealth fighters. Stealth in this case doesn’t mean invisibility; it means the plane is harder to detect. It’s harder for an enemy to get a lock on the plane. That means the F-35 pilot can get a lock first, fire missiles first, and emerge victorious.
The plane’s stealth properties don’t grant invisibility—they disrupt the enemy’s OODA loop.
Stealth and Tempo
When games (both electronic and tabletop) have modeled stealth, they model it as a sort of awareness meter. The Infinity TTRPG from Modiphius has three stages of awareness that describe various stealth states. Splinter Cell had a five-step progress bar. This model treats OODA as a state (“How aware are your enemies?”) and not as a relationship (“Who can act on information faster?”). This is fundamentally the wrong model.
Controlling OODA allows you to react faster. It’s about tempo, not awareness.
Modelling different tempos is challenging when everyone marches to the same beat. Wargames and RPGs use fixed turn lengths. Everyone gets six seconds or whatever to take their actions. No one can go faster than their opponents.
The solution is to use variable turn lengths. To accurately model the OODA loop, the game has to allow actions that can vary in length. One side has to be able to react faster than the other. You can’t do that if everyone is acting in six second chunks.
What I’m Testing Now
I’m currently playtesting three different techniques for surfacing the OODA loop in a tactical combat game.
The first technique is simply tracking actions’ lengths. For example, say it takes 2 seconds to aim and fire a handgun. What can your adversary do in those two seconds? Dive for cover? Tackle you? Whatever he decides, he has to get it done before those two seconds are up or he’s getting shot.
On top of this simple mechanic, I’ve added an explicit “observe/orient” action that is required when the information environment changes. For example, when you kick down the door for a raid, you have to pause for 1 second to orient yourself to the environment on the other side of that door. There’s another mechanic for tracking awareness state before a guard can react. If he’s on a break and relaxed, he may need to take five seconds to process the sound of someone kicking down the door. If he’s on active duty, it’s only 2 seconds.
You can already start to see how these timelines interact. An operative kicks down the door. She needs one second to orient to the new environment. A nearby guard hears the door getting kicked open and needs two seconds to orient himself. That leaves the operative with a one second window for her first action. Does she take cover? Does she sweep the room? That’s where the excitement and tension happens.
This system also promotes moving carefully and cautiously into new spaces, especially if there might be an adversary there with overwatch on the doorway you’re about to step through. This tracks with both cinema and real life, not the kind of brazen entry techniques that happen in TTRPGs.
Finally, I’m modelling incoming fire as a penalty to the OODA loop, not as a skill modifier. When you’re under fire, the trouble isn’t that your hands are shaking (which would be a skill modifier). It’s that your decision cycle blows up—you can’t think straight, you can’t observe clearly, can’t orient calmly, can’t decide deliberately. It’s a cognitive effect, not just a physical one. It changes the tempo, so it’s a change to the OODA loop, not a skill penalty. By having incoming fire affect the OODA loop, we make suppressive fire stronger mechanically and narratively.
Like I said, this is all currently stuff I’m playtesting. It shows promise, but there are some edge cases and weird incentives that I’m watching. For example, the mechanics may tend to encourage moving in 1 second dashes rather than moving from one tactically secure position to another. These are tractable problems rather than fundamental flaws. Further playtesting is required, of course, but I’m excited to bring the OODA loop to life in a combat simulator.