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Well, if you're going to stack armors, I'd say any roll of 5-13 affects the frag cape (which, imo, is a bad name for a full suit of armor, as I always pictured it as a full suit of armor, not a cape), and any roll of 14-16 affects the hard armor. Your call if it damages both on a roll of 14-16.

Yendor wrote:Well, if you're going to stack armors, I'd say any roll of 5-13 affects the frag cape (which, imo, is a bad name for a full suit of armor, as I always pictured it as a full suit of armor, not a cape), and any roll of 14-16 affects the hard armor.

By the book that's how I would call it.

The hard plate/flak cape is how the Batdude does it, so why not PC's?

I agree with Yendor.

Be sure to factor in the weight, as appropriate. And there may be flexibility and/or custom tailoring issues to certain combinations. That's for the GM to decide.

It's an innovative strategy offering several advantages. In game terms, you protect the expensive armor by putting cheaper stuff in front of it. (I did the same thing with a bionic character from HU, it's not that 800 sdc wasn't enough, it was that the armor had a pretty hefty pricetag...). Also, you'll increase your total available sdc if the rolls stay low enough to use it.

IRL, layering is done to offer the advantages of different types of armor while compensating for their weaknesses. It's not a new idea. At least as early as 1200, european warriors were wearing deflective plates over a full suit of absorbtive maille. It took centuries for the plates to be good and complete enough on their own for the maille to mostly disappear. Soldiers are still doing the same sort of thing now in the desert: their plate and kevlar combination is better than either kevlar or plate by themselves.

Probably means flak, not fragmentation. A flak jacket is a cloth jacket that contains plates, not terribly different from an ancient brigandine style armor, supposedly good for warding off shrapnel etc.

I would imagine a "cape" made from such material is another sort of brigandine tailored that way, with SDC and AR identical to a vest. I could guess that it was probably added so that characters could get all batdude with their characters without the GM having to make up new rules.

I have no problem with simply adding the SDC from one to the other, provided the weight is added. It's easier provided that lower AR armor types are layered outside the higher AR types. Any unreasonable combinations can be disallowed ("A suit of hard armor with a flak jacket underneath and full bionic body armor and a shield generator on my right foot and another suit of hard armor up my nose and it's class four! AR 35 and 2470 SDC!") Once we get into actively customizing the armor, rather than simply layering, we enter the variable realm of GM fiat, which I am not comfortable discussing in much detail. Since it's up to each.