Dude, armor sucks. Options

[emo samurai]

Even if it does work, it'll only give you stun damage, which is just as bad, if not worse, than actual physical damage. Would a houserule saying that it does 1/2 stun damage if it stops the bullet work well?

[Thanee]

If some hits are converted to stun you keep going longer. That isn't really a bad thing.

Bye
Thanee

[hobgoblin]

get yourself some hardend armor (alltho you probably have to wait for the book with military class armor in it).

atleast you live to fight another day, as long as your team gets you out of there. oh, and first aid can be used to fix stun damage now...

[Signal]

[emo samurai]

YES!!!!!! That's a good idea.

[Butterblume]

I don't think its that good. For example, it makes common pistols with normal ammo pretty useless again.

[Azathfeld]

Err, armor doesn't just convert physical damage to stun. It also adds to the resistance test, making you much more likely to take less damage. The stun conversion is really secondary to the extra dice for resistance.

[emo samurai]

Does it add dice for resistance if the DV is higher than the armor?

[Pallantides]

[emo samurai]

Maybe armor DOES rock...

[Grinder]

In my games every runner was more than happy to wear armor. ;)

[Pallantides]

I honestly kinda like the SR4 rules for armor- simple. I like the Cy2020 ones too, but SR is infinitely more elegant and there's less number crunching involved.

But I do like the Security Armors of earlier editions now that I have some SR3 books. Here's my lame attempt at conversion:

Light Security: 8/6 Armor Vest with Full Body Armor Helmet
Medium Security: 10/8 Armor Jacket with Full Body Armor Helmet
Heavy Security: 12/10 Full Body Armor with Helmet

[Red]

The key problem with armor is that while every point of armor counts for the physical to stun conversion, only 1/3 of it counts toward actual damage reduction regardless of what type of armor it is. Thus the higher the armor becomes the greater the gulf. This is what leads to many of the complaints regarding the perceived uselessness of armor. On average, armor is very ineffective. It requires luck, and more often Edge to make armor have a serious effect in reducing damage from an individual blow.

It is perfectly understandable if each point of armor has only a 33% chance of counting if the armor is very limited in body coverage like an armored vest. However something like full body armor should have a greater chance of counting. The problem is that since variable TNs have been abolished, there is no way to represent this change in effectiveness without pumping the total armor rating of a given piece of armor. But since the physical to stun conversion ratio is 100%, this leads to whacky results in other scenarios.

As the current armor system is written, it is impossible to reconcile the physical to stun conversion rating, and the damage reduction rating of non-hardened armor once you get past a certain rating, say 8+ or 10+. But without variable TNs, or a hit based location damage system it is impossible to solve this problem without a heavily abstracted armor rating system like the one that has presently been chosen through playtesting.

But, I suppose if you wanted a comprimise between a universal TN 5 system, and a full success system you could use the following House rules of thumb;

Torso coverage - TN 5
Torso and arms - TN 4
Torso and legs - TN 4
Torso, and head - TN 4
Torso, (select two, arms, legs, or head) - TN 3
Torso, arms, legs, and head - TN 2

Basically each area of coverage beyond the torso might drop the test by 1. However this house rule of thumb is flawed too. It assumes that the armor rating between all the various bodily regions are roughly the same. And it might be necessary to reduce the armor ratings of some SR4 standard armors because we just eliminated the reason for some of their inflated ratings.

To become more accurate, you'd need to take even more steps toward a hit location based system. And you'd have to restat all the non-hardened body armor sources. This would take you even farther away from the fast and loose execution for which SR4 seems to have been made. Beware what you wish for.

This post has been edited by Red: Mar 26 2006, 08:42 PM

[emo samurai]

You could just ramp up the armor values, too...

[hobgoblin]

im guessing the 1/3 effective stuff is based on the logic that you roll the armor as extra resistance dice rather then getting a direct reduction?

funny thing is that i think the new armor rules are more "realistic" in that you can get knocked out by a heavy weapon without taking any physical damage.

[Butterblume]

[emo samurai]

Only if you're a troll or something... but if you're a troll, you;ll probably have ton of armor on...

[hyzmarca]

[hobgoblin]

err, i was talking in general terms. as in i never defined what a heavy weapon was (alltho i see now that its a loaded expression).

point is this that multiple rounds into a vest will leave you bruised and beaten, just as if someone was hitting you with fists or other blunt objects.

in that sense you can go down from stun damage even tho the bullets was never able to get in and mess up the tissues of your body...

[Red]

Yes. The 1/3 is derived from the general probability of successes given a TN of 5, with edge excluded.

My experience with statistical analysis leaves a little wanting, so I shall leave more elaborate exercises to others that have commented long before me.

[Azathfeld]

The effects of coverage are factored into the armor's rating already. There's little statistical difference between rolling few dice against a lower TN vs. more dice at a higher TN. The latter has the benefit of being just like the other die-rolling that goes on in SR4, though, so it doesn't need a special rule. There's a reason that an armor vest gives fewer dice than an armor jacket, despite being the same type of armor.

On average, armor is effective, when you consider that it both reduces incoming damage and diverts some attacks onto the stun track. It's unlikely that armor will totally eliminate damage from an attack in SR4, but that's not a bad thing. You should feel some effect from impacts that don't penetrate your armor, but it should lessen those, which is what this system models. It's possible for light attacks simply to bounce off a highly armored invidual, but it's unlikely, and it should be.

There is a legitimate complaint in that stun damage is pretended to be less important than physical damage, when in an individual combat the opposite tends to be true. That's a problem with the damage system, though, and not the armor system. I think I'll resolve it by adding both Body/2 and Willpower/2 to the stun track, but changing the armor system is, IMO, not the answer.

[Geekkake]

[hobgoblin]

ugh, unintended...

[emo samurai]

I was going to point that out and then decided against it.

[Red]