Impact Damage through Armor

[DrBeau]

Hey all. I'm having trouble finding the rules (if there are any offical ones?) for damage through armor. What I mean is, what are the rules for an SDC being taking a hit to their SDC when their MD armor gets hit for a large amount of MD from some kind of (kinetic?) weapon. Even if there are official rules, I'd love to hear any house rules as well. Thanks.

[Dustin Fireblade]

Page 355 RUE.

[DrBeau]

Thanks. I knew I saw it somewhere.

I'm still interested in any house rules that people might use.

[mobuttu]

IIRC, Rifter 30.

As a house rule, we are trying the following rule:

- Armors get an AR depending on their "heaviness" (using CB1 guidelines +2).
- Should a hit scores above the armor AR, it does SDC damage to the wearer, meaning the "energy disipation" wasn't enough for the armor to absorve.

Hope this helps.

[Shorty Lickens]

For some reason I thought later printings of the MainBook and SourceBook 1 had this stuff, but I just checked and they dont.
The Revised Sourcebook didnt have it because they put those rules in the R:UE.

The rules are located in the Game Masters Guide on page 31. If they are slightly different from the RUE I would just go with the RUE.

Page 31 is damage and stun effects for falls/explosions while an SDC creature is wearing body armor.
Page 35 has another table for the chance of being knocked down and another table for big creatures and people in PA or bots.

Page 37 has tables for optional side effects if damage is taken.
Page 42-43 has optional damage effects for bots and PA's.

All that stuff is from the GMG.

The rules in the RUE start on the lower right corner of 355 and continue to the upper left of 356. They are much better.

The only problem is the type of damage.
In the books (and the way I play it) lasers, ion, plasma, particle and regular bullets do NOT knock down or push back.
Rail guns, heavy cannons and pretty much all explosives DO knock down.

Physical attacks from large robots and PA are supposed to, but I dont know if we ever got an official ruling on full conversion borgs. I guess if its a heavy borg from germany or russia I would use the PA rules.

The game designers do make note that a 20th century bazooka will do 1d4x100 damage, which works out to 1d4 MD in Rifts, but they never account for the blast power.
Even though its an old, low-tech weapon and not likely to shred modern armor, it does have the ability to toss around a 200 pound human.
I just convert the SDC to MD for purposes of knocking people down and damaging them inside their armor, but like the official rules, it wont apply against borgs or PA.
Same with some of the handheld rail guns. One of them can do 6D6 MD, so if it rolls over 20 points on a single hit, I apply the 1 point of SDC to anything soft inside of armor (as per RUE).

I always try to apply all of the effects in any of my games. It doesnt make sense that a scrawny human would stand toe to toe with big machines and not get tossed around the battlefield, even if their armor could survive the attack.

[Shorty Lickens]

Crap, yur right.
I dont know how I missed it, it comes right after the optional damage rules which is where that stuff is located in the other books.

And it was just as lethal as I remember.
You would take a LOT more damage with the original rules than what they published in the R:UE.