Overhauling Armor

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

another part (still early) of my slow, slow rewrite.

Merges the SDC and MDC armor systems to work as a cohesive whole.

the basics:

If you are wearing armor, your armor ALWAYS takes damage before you do, regardless of how little or much it covers, UNLESS the attacker makes a called shot to hit an un-armored area. This applies to SDC armors and MDC armors (which makes, in SDC settings, low-end armor like leather or a chain shirt still useful, as opposed to nearly useless when it is beaten passively by a middling attack roll).

Several types of Armor-related ratings:

Armor Coverage Rating/Coverage Rating - this is the number you have to beat on the attack roll to make a called shot and strike an unarmored spot. The same mechanic is used for non-armor cover (walls, shields, fox hole, what have you). If you dont make a called shot to beat the ACR/CR, you hit the armor and/or cover. If you roll over this number, you hit the person. Simple. There is no upper limit to this number, other than once you get to fully sealed armor (or 100% hidden by cover), you can no longer try to strike the person directly and have to destroy the armor/cover. My thoughts are that fully covering armor without a helmet would be ACR 19 or 20. Something like Huntsman would be 17 or 18, and something like Juicer Assassin's plate (at least as originally pictured in RMB) might be 13-14. Force fields (in most cases, at least) are total coverage, unless otherwise noted (only facing one way or the other). If someone had just a tiny, tiny bit of themselves exposed (EBA that is buttoned up except for a face-mask or just the eyes or something being 22-24, just a shoulder-blade sticking out of cover being 25+, etc.

Armor Reduction Rating - heavy armors (on vehicles, heavy robots, SOME heavy PAs (like Glitter Boys) will have a rating that is the amount of damage that is reduced from each attack that hits them. If you have an ARR of 10, you reduce all damage you take from each attack by 10, to a minimum of 1. Haven't settled on anything resembling numbers tuning on this. CONSIDERING having laser-resistant armor have a laser-specific ARR, and having Varaible Lasers have a special laser-resistant armor-only Armor Penetration Rating (see below).

Armor Penetration Rating - some heavy man portable weapons, and some vehicle weapons (particularly larger vehicles) will have weapons with an Armor Penetration Rating. This counter-acts Armor Reduction Rating point-for-point. If the weapon has an APR of 5, and the armor has an ARR of 10, then the ARR only reduces damage from this weapon by 5. CONSIDERING having APR also apply pass-through SDC damage to body armor and light power armor.

Thats the basics, at least. I think there was more, but im not at home right now where my notes are (i was hand-jotting most of this stuff on notecards for a while, and havent typed them all in).

[slade the sniper]

I am liking what I am seeing, although it does seem like a lot of work when you have to go through and specify what armor coverage rating, armor reduction rating or armor penetration rating each thing has.

The mechanic seems fine, similar to the old Interlock staged penetration and the D20 fan made Warhammer 40k pdf Damage Reduction Piercing...

All of which worked very well, but did add a new step to combat. It would take some getting used to.

-STS

[Eagle]

You have to decide how much abstraction you are comfortable with in your game system. How much "realism" improves the feel of the game, and how much just bogs it down?

Unfortunately in Rifts, SDC is almost useless. MDC is so much better that I've had characters where I never even bothered to calculate how much SDC and hit points they had. Like I'd been playing the character for months, and then I looked down and saw that where "SDC" was written on the character sheet, I just had a blank space with "+4D6, +D8, +10" scribbled in there in very light pencil. It's about as useful as knowing how much PPE you have when you're not a magic user.

Cool artwork that has some guy running around in post-apocalyptic football armor with shoulder pad spikes and no helmet is part of Rifts. But then you think "that guy should get his head blown off after 10 seconds of combat". But guys with partial armor is a huge part of the stuff that inspired Rifts to begin with, so you can't just get rid of it without changing the feel of the game entirely. So do you go with "realistic" combat where that guy dies immediately? Or do you suspend your disbelief and let him be effective in combat anyway? You have to decide that before you move forward with a game redesign.

Unfortunately, Siembieda never seemed to make up his mind whether he was going for gritty realism or wild adventure. So sometimes it's -10 to dodge energy blasts, and sometimes area effect weapons all hit main body and somehow don't kill the juicer who is just wearing MDC football pads and mirrored shades.

[slade the sniper]

Yeah, realism vs playability really is a huge design question. Palladium is almost quaint in that it basically ignores the question and forces/allows the group to determine how much they want...with all the heartache and drama that comes with it. Palladium is like a 3/4 game toolkit with great settings.

-STS

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

I am liking what I am seeing, although it does seem like a lot of work when you have to go through and specify what armor coverage rating, armor reduction rating or armor penetration rating each thing has.

Not as big of a job as it seems, as Power Armor, Robots, Vehicles, etc, dont really have to worry about a coverage rating. Most body armor is EBA, as well; until NG introduced the non-EBA "Ride Armors" in NG1/2 there were only a few suits that were non-EBA that would require being given a CR.

Penetration rating for hand-held weapons is similarly slim. Pretty much only heavies like Plasma Cannons and maybe heavy particle beams.

Vehicles.. yeah, some more work. But i think it's worth it in the end.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

Yeah, realism vs playability really is a huge design question. Palladium is almost quaint in that it basically ignores the question and forces/allows the group to determine how much they want...with all the heartache and drama that comes with it. Palladium is like a 3/4 game toolkit with great settings.

-STS

Im not really even shooting for realism or anything; its all about playability and consistency in mechanics.

Realism is all well and good, but it takes a back seat to being able to actually play and enjoy the game.

[Ambrosius]

I like the idea of trying to make even SDC armor viable in an MDC setting. The mechanics tend to over shadow the cool flavor of SDC weapons and armor.

I really like this, but I feel like it just might add yet another layer of crunch to an already crunchtastic game. Getting to Thaco territory almost. Maybe it's more manageable in play.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

I like the idea of trying to make even SDC armor viable in an MDC setting. The mechanics tend to over shadow the cool flavor of SDC weapons and armor.

I really like this, but I feel like it just might add yet another layer of crunch to an already crunchtastic game. Getting to Thaco territory almost. Maybe it's more manageable in play.

.. how so? Unless you're trying to shoot around the armor, you roll exactly as you do now. Actually, all this is doing is codifying with hard numbers the existing rules.. but in the existing rules, the GM has to make up a called shot number any time you try to shoot so meone in an unarmored spot.

Its also not really about making SDC armor viable in an MDC setting. Its about making armor work the same, and making SDC armor useful... period. The rules overhaul im working on is for the palladium system as a whole (with a focus on Rifts, yes, but the entire thing needs a rework), and right now SDC armor is pretty much trash even in the SDC games because it is beaten passively, and most of it has absurdly low ARs (particularly since it is a LOT easier to get strike bonuses with SDC melee weapons and the like).

All this does is take AR from being a passively-beaten number (for SDC) armor and a "made up on the spot every time" number (for non-fully-enclosed MDC armor) to a static number for each set of armor that you have to actively attempt to bypass (and spend an extra attack on).

Edit: from a number of the responses, im getting the idea that a lot of people dont actually know how the current combat system deals with this.

[guardiandashi]

I like the idea of trying to make even SDC armor viable in an MDC setting. The mechanics tend to over shadow the cool flavor of SDC weapons and armor.

I really like this, but I feel like it just might add yet another layer of crunch to an already crunchtastic game. Getting to Thaco territory almost. Maybe it's more manageable in play.

.. how so? Unless you're trying to shoot around the armor, you roll exactly as you do now. Actually, all this is doing is codifying with hard numbers the existing rules.. but in the existing rules, the GM has to make up a called shot number any time you try to shoot so meone in an unarmored spot.

Its also not really about making SDC armor viable in an MDC setting. Its about making armor work the same, and making SDC armor useful... period. The rules overhaul im working on is for the palladium system as a whole (with a focus on Rifts, yes, but the entire thing needs a rework), and right now SDC armor is pretty much trash even in the SDC games because it is beaten passively, and most of it has absurdly low ARs (particularly since it is a LOT easier to get strike bonuses with SDC melee weapons and the like).

All this does is take AR from being a passively-beaten number (for SDC) armor and a "made up on the spot every time" number (for non-fully-enclosed MDC armor) to a static number for each set of armor that you have to actively attempt to bypass (and spend an extra attack on).

Edit: from a number of the responses, im getting the idea that a lot of people dont actually know how the current combat system deals with this.

One way to look at it is as a sort of clarifying and combining into a cohesive ruleset armor as a whole.
As it is palladium uses 2 or 3 completely different rules depending on what armor you have.

Making all armor follow 1 ruleset even if it's a little more complicated would be a good thing.

As an example I came up with a ruleset for what I called gdc which was to mdc what mdc is to SDC . The big issue was that I had it be installed in plates that were in a lot of ways like scale mail from medieval times.

But if you consider that armor is going to generally have openings or sections that while still protected... aren't as tough as other places it can make for a more dynamic and or cinematic game play as attacks are either effective or virtually useless depending on where they hit.

[Eagle]

I like the idea of trying to make even SDC armor viable in an MDC setting. The mechanics tend to over shadow the cool flavor of SDC weapons and armor.

I really like this, but I feel like it just might add yet another layer of crunch to an already crunchtastic game. Getting to Thaco territory almost. Maybe it's more manageable in play.

What was wrong with Thac0?

[slade the sniper]

What was wrong with Thac0?

Nothing!

-STS