I was wondering if your teams all stack their armor with form fitting body armor.
Most of my human team members who are body five so could wear 10 total points of armor wear armor jackets 8/6 and then stack FFBA 2 under that 4/2 that you can stack with regular armor and it only counts half it's rating for encumbrance.
So your body 5 human is wearing 12/8 armor. It makes your buff human very resistant to physical damage from firearms which would have to do 12 boxes of damage to do physical damage.
I am not saying you should not do so I am just asking if most of your groups do the same.

I'm not so worried about the Bod5+ anything... they'll find ways of getting tons of armor no matter what you do and the increase is more marginal the more armor they already have.


It's the Bod2 decker or mage you need to worry about... and in those cases especially I don't see a problem w/ FFBA as it allows them to sneak in an extra point or 2 over 4 a much bigger and needed increase.


Also, while damage may stage down to stun... as some of the trolls have learned... stun can't be healed magically limiting them to only first aid... and unless pain editors are common... unconscious is far worse than dead if it gets you captured and interogated.

And a lot of body 5 metahumans do not have a stun damage track to keep up. Yes, they mostly take stun damage, but they drop unconcious rather soon if hit too often.

Well, no. Unconscious is, by definition, never worse than dead. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) At worst, it's *as good as* dead.

Well, dead only kills you. Getting knocked out, dragged into a holding cell and interrogated may kill you in the process and your entire team after that, depending on what intel the interrogators got out of you...

How's that worse? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Sign me up for the stun damage, please!

You don't think the death of not only yourself, but a lot of people who might be your friends is not worse than just your death...?

Industrious Line Winterized Coverall 6/5
FFBA (Full Body) 6/2 (counted as 3/1, when counting pemalties)
Helmet 1/2
PPP Shin Guards (discreet version) 0/1
PPP Forearm Guards (discreet version) 0/1

That is 13/11 armor (counted as 10/10 as penalties are concerned)

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I personally adore FFBA and encourage everyone who *doesn't* have a body higher than 4 to get some immediately. It's at the very low end of the body stat that people start to feel they should just wait in the car and I believe that discourages them from participating. I'd much rather they get enough armor to soak a few stray rounds and tell them to keep under cover most of the time. However, if you run in a less gunbunny heavy setting, FFBA might lead to powergaming or imbalances.

Liked it when it first appeared in Street Samurai Catalog. Still like it. Evens things up a bit for those with a low body and over all it only works out to 3 more dice (FFBA level 3 adds 3 dice beyond body limit) which works out to about 1 extra hit on average. Sure, more often it's stun damage rather than physical but from a GM perspective this means more story opportunity as team mates must rescue those captured rather than just leave them. Plus bad guys wear it too. It's fine and I've never had any real problems with it.

Stun actually CAN be magically healed. There is nothing in 4a that prevents it.

I am not saying you should not do so I am just asking if most of your groups do the same.
most of my professional or smart or non-suicidal chars do it
I'm (among other ) in one Group where we play H&K Special Ops/SWATS and its mandatory to wear Formfitting Armor

Hough !
Medicineman

Nothing except p.253 "Magical Healing":

Oh and the description text of the Heal spell also clearly states it only heals boxes of physical damage.

I removed it from my next campaign.
The problem I had was that players who didn't have Arsenal or didn't bother to skim the books for such things had, at best, body*2 armor (when they didn't choose a lesser armor to fit their character style better) while those who did had something like 6+(body*2-3)+2 armor.
This also meant that civilians and low-end opposition had far less armor than the PC.

So I had two options:
1. Forcing players to skim the books to get optimal gear (or help them do it)
2. Removing FFBA and PPP from the game

Since I'm aiming at a 'back to the roots' feeling, I chose the latter.

That second function is wrong and overly comlicated, someone with FFBA has at max:
Ballistic Body*2+3
Impact Body*2+1
Thats not much, considering they probaply paid atleast douple what those without arsenal did for a meager +3/+1 armor.

I think it's a no-brainer. FFBA and PPP were specifically put in there to stack with other armor. Asking if a player uses them is like asking "Does your street samurai use a smartlink? Does your mage use direct combat spells?"

The only thing I dislike about them, from a crunch perspective, is that they are an exception to the general rules about armor stacking. I would rather have had armor stacking being handled in a less simple-minded way to begin with, so that people would have a variety of options for armor stacking.

Yeah just having all armor stack would make for a much better game and much more variated armor choises for characters.
FFBA could still be counted as half as well Zoe's second skin.
There are allready ways to get max armor for most almost all body values, allowing everythink to stack would only increase varity allowing people to shooce armor pieces based on how they want their character to dress and not on what gives me the max armor.

Unlike previous editions, there is nothing saying magic can not do it, there may not be a spell to do it NOW, but it can be done.

For ballistic:
A full FFBA has 6 armor for 3 encumbrance.
This leaves them with (body*2)-3 encumbrance left, which means a (body*2)-3 armor.
They can then add PPP to get a few more "free" armor points (that's where the +2 comes from, but that's a mistake, you can't get more than +1).
That's how I get 6+(body*2)-3+1 = body*2+4

For just 1800 nuyen which is far from expensive for a +4 bonus.

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PPP also counts against the body*2 limit, so i dont now what the hell are you talking about.

I honestly see no reason whatsoever why Arsenal should introduce both FFBA that stacks and only adds half encumbrance, and PPP stuff that adds armor without counting encumbrance. I just discarded the special rules for them, they count like everything else. I don't add armor ratings for encumbrance though, I only look at the used armor rating. I am perfectly ok with someone wearing FFBA or armor clothing to protect them if they have to take off their armor jacket.

Please guys for all that is good in this world, read the damm rules first before whining about them.
Every point of armor from PPP counts against encubrance.

It says very clearly that These armor pieces do not count as separate armor for purposes of encumbrance.

Yes not as seperate armor, but as addition to your other armor.'
Still doesn't allow you to get more then Body*2 armor.

Ok, so it's just there to make sure you get that +1 armor point you need to get your body*2+3 armor rating.

But I still think that FFBA is kind of a "+3 bonus to armor for having read Arsenal".