Icebound

Why is this a good idea?

- The defining characteristic of firearms as a weapon is that they are incredibly easy to use, and there is no reactive defense against them. That's why they are known as the great equalizer. In order to simulate this reality of firearms correctly they need to be dangerous even in the hands of a little old lady who keeps a gun in her purse but has never shot it.

- It introduces the idea of suppression into combat. Anyone with a firearm who hasn't been attacked recently is infinitely more dangerous than someone who is taking fire or dodging blows. So that breaks up the typical strategy of focus firing a single target, and instead makes it beneficial to spread the love. Especially characters with low combat skills panic and become almost useless when they are attacked, but are a serious threat if you ignore them.

- It allows low combat skill characters to be useful in a fight without taking away the benefit of being highly skilled. In a duel the character with higher skills retains the upper hand, because both characters will be suppressed for the whole fight and not get the hit bonus. However, a low skilled character can take effective pot shots, as long as they don't get targeted themselves. A high skilled character isn't simply immune to bullets from anyone who is not equally high skilled, they need to engage the shooter in order to actually gain the upper hand.

- Fast firearms will have an advantage in applying suppression, because you can rotate between multiple targets to keep all of them on their toes. Slow firearms retain their favorable burst damage, but simply aren't as good at dealing with multiple enemies.

Along with that I would introduce a change to NPC behavior that makes it so that NPCs with a firearm will not move to establish line of sight while they are suppressed. That means, if a player runs into cover, or runs away from an NPC that has recently been shot at, the NPC will wait where they are until they get their hit bonus back, and only then begin to move to establish line of sight. (They will switch targets if they are attacked by someone they can see though)

That change will make getting into a gunfight with an NPC feel a lot more natural. If you have shot at the NPC getting into cover will actually give you time to reload or apply a bandage, instead of immediately prompting the NPC to start sprinting around the cover to resume firing. You will get less kiting the NPCs around the map, and more popping in and out of cover to keep them suppressed, which is just a lot nicer in terms of the game feel.