We played our seventh session tonight of our WWII game, run by Stephen. We tried to layer in some of the changes from 2.5 (though obviously we still have the 2.1 playbooks for WWII). Here's some stuff that happened and some observations.
A. Assaults, Attacks, Covering Fire
The combined covering fire and assault move seems problematic, though in a couple of ways that surprised me.
1. The first came up twice - I was laying down covering fire with my BAR to aid various assaults, and a player (and then the GM) felt it was appropriate to use the Aid mechanic.
This floored me, and seemed like a sort of mechanics usability problem (as covering fire is somewhat buried). In hindsight, I can see how they got there - covering fire, mechanically, is basically a specialized Aid move (the +1 forward), but which (unlike generic Aid) lets you inflict harm and use weapon tags.
2. The other thing happened twice - once when my soldier was laying down MG fire at ambushing riflemen in windows, and later when our sniper player was shooting into another MG nest. The oddness is hard to explain, but it feels a bit like choosing Assault (instead of Attack) puts the cart before the horse:
"Tactical advantage" is rather open, in particular because it seems to include the possibility of the enemy losing ground - moving back under a hail of fire. So it seems that I choose Assault if I want my shooting to have the possibility of making the enemy retreat a bit, or to somehow give my friends an advantage. But it's not obvious to me how I narrate the difference in my actions - either way, I'm just shooting. Then, if we settle on assault, the successful shooter is in the position of being able to decide how the enemies react. (The shooter isn't moving up, so the pick of "seizure of contested territory" implies enemy retreat.)
To put it in BW terms, it feels like I carry out a task, and then, once I've done it, I choose what my intent was.
(I like it when there are clear physical actions that differentiate moves, rather than merely hopes for how it turns out: e.g. move while firing to claim ground, lay out fire wastefully to rattle 'em, careful controlled shots to kill them. At the moment, a clear differentiator seems to be the amount of time you shoot for, which gives rise to the gear spend.)
3. Given how liberal the GM should be with incoming VOF, assaulting a position to claim it without inflicting any actual damage an Attack feels really weird to me.
4. The area fire vs. group thing came up when I used the LMG on the soldiers in the windows. With enemies behind cover, it's a huge advantage if we don't use the "vs. Group" rule, because I can use my area tag to hit them all (potentially taking out the whole bunch if I roll 1W).
B. Rolling VOF against enemies
Tim hates rolling VOF against enemies, he says he doesn't care what happens to them. After play, the group rumbled close to the idea of the GM just adjudicating the effects of weapons during assaults; I'd be sad to see it go that way, I enjoy the gun porn.
In particular, the group seems to have settled on the idea that any VOF against NPCs above Scattered is irrelevant. NPCs have two generic damage pips, and Direct or better fire always does one pip.
But - nevermind! I see now that we missed the line that it takes two Stress to do a pip of damage to an NPC!
Suppression
The rules for the effects and removal of suppressed and pinned seem to have been dropped from 2.5.
Stress
The gang really likes the new stress track. As some of us started injured, we didn't migrate to the new wounding system.