Vehicle Armour Houserules, Tl;dr at bottom. What do you think? Options

[McAllister]

Dumpshock, most houserules are introduced to solve a specific problem. In this case, there's no game-breaking problem I'm trying to solve, but something's been bothering me; a human wearing heavy milspec armour (body 4 and mobility upgrade 2 would obviate any penalties) and carrying a ballistic shield would have better armour against a Panther assault cannon round than a Black Mariah armoured van ever could (24 vs. 20). However, without called shots or exceptional successes, you could fire the Panther at the human 100 times and eventually kill him with 2S or 3S damage at a time, but never put so much as (game-mechanics relevant) dent in the truck. I'd like to see a vehicle armour system that let vehicles stack more armour than people (not too much to ask, right?) but also non-penetrating attacks some ability to accumulate.

Note that I realize the RAW are perfectly adequate in this regard; I'm just introducing the following because I'm hypothetically ok with a system that involves a few more rolls per attack.

Under the rules I'm proposing, vehicles can be equipped with any type of armour equal to their Body without penalty. Drones with a Body of 4 or less can be equipped with any type of armour equal to twice their Body without penalty. In any case, no variety of armour is arbitrarily capped at 10 or 20.

The maximum amount of armour any vehicle can be equipped with it equal to twice its Body, and the maximum amount of armour any drone with a Body of 4 or less can be equipped with is equal to three times its Body. However, when equipping a vehicles with armour beyond its Body or a drone with a Body of 4 or less with armour beyond twice its Body, the following cumulative penalties apply. Note that all references to Body in the following list refer to the Body of vehicles, or twice the Body of drones with a Body of 4 or less. All penalties are doubled for aircraft.
-The capacity used by the armour doubles. Note that this applies as soon as armour exceeds Body, but only applies once no matter how much
armour is equipped.
-When armour exceeds 100% of Body, reduce Acceleration by 10%
-When armour exceeds 125% of Body, reduce Handling by 1 and the operation time of aircraft by 10%
-When armour exceeds 150% of Body, reduce Acceleration by an additional 10%, for a total reduction of 20%
-When armour exceeds 175% of Body, reduce Speed by 10% and the operation time of aircraft by additional 10%, for a total reduction of 20%.

Note that with the new armour rules, heavily protected large vehicles (such as Lone Star’s Black Mariah prisoner transportation vehicle) could reach armour values as high as 30 without much difficulty, and some vehicles could even equip as much as 72 armour. Since no weapon in Shadowrun could ever hope to damage the armour of such a vehicle, I have constructed new rules for damaging a vehicle’s armour, such that its effectiveness is limited against further assault.

When a weapon hits a vehicle but fails to do any damage because the attack’s DV + net hits is still lower than the vehicle’s modified armour, roll dice equal to the vehicle’s armour (modified by the attack’s AP) and subtract the hits from the attacker’s DV + net hits; the resulting number is the attack’s Armour Destruction Value, or ADV. Roll dice equal to the ADV’s total; any hits are subtracted from the armour’s rating until the vehicle is repaired. At the gamemaster’s discretion, only attacks targeting the same general area of the vehicle benefit from this reduction in armour. Here is an illustrative example:

Suppose a gun-crazy go-gang has strapped a GM Heavy Cannon to a Tata Hotspur, and is firing on one of Lone Star’s Black Mariah’s in an attempt to free some captured comrades. The cannon, with a DV of 17 and AP of -8, is one of the best imaginable weapons for the job; however, the Black Mariah’s armour rating of 30 and Body of 15 are built to withstand nearly any assault. Suppose the ganger’s get lucky and land a direct hit on the Mariah’s left side with a remarkable three net hits (after all, the target isn’t able to manoeuvre out of the way too well). Their DV of 20 is nothing to scoff at, but scoff the Black Mariah does, for even with a -8 AP the criminals have failed to pierce 22 armour. However, they may still soften it up; the Mariah rolls 22 dice and get 7 hits, subtracting those from 20 to arrive at an ADV of 13 for the gangers. The gangers roll their 13 dice, getting 3 hits and reducing the armour on the Mariah’s left side to 27. They haven’t even begun to damage the vehicle, but the next shot has a better chance, as will the one after that, and so on, as long as the damaged left side is targeted.


TL;DR - Would it make sense to let vehicles potentially get more than 20 armour if non-penetrating attacks were able to incrementally damage armour's effectiveness?

[Draco18s]

To point out you said that it's possible to get a vehicle with 72 armor, giving it 108 dice to resist damage.

Using the same weapon mentioned in your post that gives us ~20 DV vs. 100 modified armor + body.

Trading 4:1 that gives us 25 reduced DV, to -5 ADV, minimum...0?

The 36 body, 72 armor super tank is immune to damage. Forever. Even with the Ares Gause Cannon, which reduces armor by half first, that still nets 70 armor+body against 20 DV, which makes ~24 (rolled average) or 18 (4:1), netting at best 2 ADV.

[McAllister]

Hmmm. Well, first of all, thank you for reading and replying; you raise a good point. That's probably why I left Body out of the roll to reduce ADV, but let me see what would happen if we fired an Aztechnology Itzcoatl Gauss Cannon at a LZ-2065 zeppelin (yeah, weirdly the highest body I could find on a vehicle was listed for a zeppelin. I'd rule that fully armouring that mofo cut into its carrying capacity like whoa, but theoretically it could work).

Pretending two net hits gives us 20 DV vs. 26 armour (72 / 2 = 36, 36 - 10 = 26), which isn't enough to penetrate. However, assuming those 26 dice only roll about 8ish hits, the ADV of 12ish will reduce the armour by 4ish.

It's true that putting 60+ armour on anything gets absurd; I'm just frustrated that milspec-armoured cybertrolls are harder to peel open than armored vans. Let's assume the most armour you can stack on a cybertroll is 20 (heavy milspec + helmet) + 2 (natural, plus SURGE dermal plating) + 10 (two points each on five cyberlimbs) + 3 (orthoskin) for a total of 35. I know you can get much, much higher than that, but I'm trying to be reasonable. Thoughts on getting over that hurdle for a vehicle without causing a total game meltdown?

[Dragnar]

It's true that putting 60+ armour on anything gets absurd; I'm just frustrated that milspec-armoured cybertrolls are harder to peel open than armored vans.

I agree, but the problem isn't that vehicles have too few armor, it's that people can stack on too much. You're basically trying to solve the problem from the wrong end, which is why it'll end up kinda messy and complicated anyhow.
If the difference bothers you enough to think about houseruling it, I'd advise you to devise a way to limit armor on people, not one to make armor on vehicles even more plentiful.
Think of a way to limit damage resistance on people, possibly linked to Body, such as to strenghen a rather weak attribute at the same time.

[Heath Robinson]

Kill FFBA? Change Armour Encumberance Limit to Strength + Body?

[Summerstorm]

Sure you can damage something with 100 Armor. Even more... it is just gonna cost you.

For example you could rigg a Ares Dragon helicopter.. accelerate it over 201 speed, and crash it into this tank. The Helicopter does 66 DP on impact. (But this one attack just cost nearly half a million nuyen *g*) They should really expand the ramming table for "RIDICULOUS" speeds at well... a Thunderbird has only 20 Body.. but at a speed of 1000 it should make more than triple body, hehe. Other good things to crash into "invulnerable" objects is the Cessna (speed over 200 and 18 body) or maybe a speed-modded Chrysler-Nissan Patrol car (10 body)

Well, seriously though... i think that some stationary weapons could easily outperform the vehicle-mounted and still damage something like this. Also. what is the damagecode for the "Rods of God?" or other orbital weapons?

Oh, and back on topic: As i GM i would diminish the stats of any heavily armored vehicle. No question. I would judge with common sense, i don't need a table for it. It all depends on the vehicle. It is not really that dependent of body, more of the engine, quality of the frame and such. I can imagine something built for much armor (which can easily carry a bit more with only losing some acceleration and mileage, but others will lose handling like hell, or may get damaged if droven over bad terrain. Depends on how much and how it got modified.

EDIT: Oh and you could always use explosives... i mean with RAW... which in this case is a bit weird you can just get some Foam or Plastic explosives, let's say Rating 15 (hahaha) and just blow it up. To do 100 (106) damage you just need 50 Kilogramm... 75000 Nuyen and BOOOM. Hm... i hope you have a blackmarket pipeline for Plastic explosves.

[Draco18s]

EDIT: Oh and you could always use explosives... i mean with RAW... which in this case is a bit weird you can just get some Foam or Plastic explosives, let's say Rating 15 (hahaha) and just blow it up. To do 100 (106) damage you just need 50 Kilogramm... 75000 Nuyen and BOOOM. Hm... i hope you have a blackmarket pipeline for Plastic explosves.

50 kg isn't really "man-portable"* anymore. That much explosive compound is likely to fill a large suitcase and be rather obvious.

*By "man portable" I mean that an average person wouldn't just be able to walk around with it. If he is, that's all he's doing for the most part. Not because of weight, but because of size.

[McAllister]

Thanks again for all your suggestions.

Dragnar: I think part of the problem is that the books keep adding ways to get another couple points of armour, and they all add up. There's also the fact that things like dermal plating, orthoskin, cyberlimb armour and (partially) custom-fitted milspec armour or FFBA circumvent the BODx2 limit. Maybe I just need to houserule that BODx2 is a HARD limit, and ANY two points of armour above that will add penalties.

Heath: Killing FFBA is an excellent idea. Several other armour options, like the chameleon suit, are tight-fitting, but for some reason this one is less encumbering? It doesn't make sense to me. However, I think using STR+BOD would just make BOD an even less appealing choice, and wouldn't solve the real problem (which is things letting you get armour that either triples or ignores BOD as a limiting factor)

Summerstorm: I find your ideas creative. Also, you might be right that this is the sort of situation where the best way to handle damageability on vehicles is with just a bit of well-applied handwavium armour. Or a few kilos of explosives!

Draco: True, but you could always deploy it as a bomb. I've been a bit surprised that the best airplane-dropped bombs they thought to stat was 22 DV. I guess WMDs and bunker-busters are little inappropriate for the setting, right?

[Summerstorm]

@Draco Why should it be man-portable? To expect something small as a carried gun or such beeing able to obliterate a "Super-Tank" tm is a bit much, or not? Best thing would be to scale it like another tank of that class has a reasonable chance to get it with one shot, but may have to try a few times.

And yeah, i found some weapons a bit lacking. The whole armor-thingy too. But i think that just comes with the rules, when you do not scale or have different categories. Sometimes i wished that vehicle armor would be counted a bit different than personel-armor. As it is now, in some extreme regions funny things happen. (For example the drone- no damage/drone completely destroyed in one shot difference of loading a Pistol with APDS, or the whole invulnerable tank thing.)

Ah well... HOUSERULES FTW *g*

[Heath Robinson]

Heath: Killing FFBA is an excellent idea. Several other armour options, like the chameleon suit, are tight-fitting, but for some reason this one is less encumbering? It doesn't make sense to me. However, I think using STR+BOD would just make BOD an even less appealing choice, and wouldn't solve the real problem (which is things letting you get armour that either triples or ignores BOD as a limiting factor)

Make Customisation an Armour mod that costs 25% of the original cost per Rating point and reduces encumberance by Rating. Set the Max Rating to a third of the highest Armour rating. This doesn't remove customisation, but it does make the bigger armours significantly more expensive when customised. Make Military armours at least twice as expensive and increase their availabilities. They should be totally pie-in-the-sky.

The reason I advocate STR+BOD is that it doubles the BP and Karma cost of being eligible for the more ridiculous armours. If you don't believe that Body is useful for dying later rather than sooner then I'm not sure we talk of the same part of the game.

Would you mind pointing me to the options that ignore BOD as a limiting factor? I also happen to think that you should have even sitting down in armour above your encumberance limit count as fatiguing the wearer. It can get pretty hot in that stuff.

[McAllister]

I dunno, Heath. I've always assumed things like a troll's natural armour or orthoskin didn't count against encumbrance. Is that incorrect?

EDIT: But that's not even the biggest part of the problem. Think about it; the Ares Citymaster has a body of 16. A troll ghoul with exceptional attribute (body) and a suprathyroid gland could get that high without cyberware/geneware/SURGE/metavariance, as could a bear (shapeshifter) adept with 3 levels of Improved Attribute (body). So what does body mean, if a metahuman or Awakened animal can get more of it than an APC?

EDIT2: Your ideas for increasing the cost of customization and pie-in-the-skying milspec are quite helpful, and would probably work. Thank you! And the reason I implied that Body isn't the most useful attribute, other than Dragnar's assertion (I think) that's it's a weak attribute, is the philosophy that it's better to improve Reaction or Intuition, and get another die to go first, or improve Strength or Agility, to have a better chance of disabling your opponent fast, than improve Body, and have a better chance of survive a counterstrike. Perhaps this is motivated by the fact that if you take a shot, survive, and then kill the shooter, you'll still be eating the wound penalties for a while.

[Heath Robinson]

No, I believe that's correct. I'm just pretty tired and not remembering everything. Perhaps it should be houseruled that they don't stack (like most of the armoured skin SURGE options), or that they encumber (at half armour value?) and stack.

[McAllister]

I like the idea of encumbering and stacking. It makes sense that carrying around another 20 pounds or so of bone is just part of the burden *snrk* of trolldom, and if your "energy-diffusing weave" or what have you that's installed under the skin is just as effective as armour coating, then it'll probably hamper motion and weigh you down just as much also.

[Heath Robinson]

The problem with making them stack encumberance at full Armour value is that they're no longer any different to worn armour, at which point what's the point in spending more money, and Essence, on them?

[McAllister]

Easier to sleep in? Don't get stabbed while you're in the sack? Never take anything worse than stun damage from flechette rounds (ok, exaggerating... but only a little)

It's pretty much the same reasons you'd get a cybergun in your arm instead of just carrying one.

Though, with that rule tweak, I'd probably halve all costs associated with them (same to the SURGE armour) to reflect the nerf.

[Orcus Blackweath...]

In the history of warfare, there has always been a race between builders of armor, and builders of weapons.

In the end Weapons always win eventually.

Cav beats footslogger, phalanx beats cav, heavy cav beats phalanx, longbow beats heavy cav, ad nauseum...

No matter what kind of armor you come up with there is a silver bullet that will take it out. You really don't need a mechanic for using super heavy weapons. Shadowrun is not Hammer's Slammers. It is supposed to be more covert than that. GMs should feel free to add whatever bizarre homegrown rule they want so that their players can play the M2070a4 main battle tank, but in the end, it comes down to if the enemy sees it it dies. I am assuming that there are military grade weapons that are not covered in the books that have no problem penetrating 1000 points of hardened battle armor (or at least to cause spalling and kill anyone inside).

I would suggest, that if the players need to kill the OGRE, they need to find one of these weapons, and the GM can decide how difficult it is to find. If the players have abused the rules to create a giant lumbering monster, then the GM simply announces that the weapon exists, and after giving them sufficient time to bail of of the kill zone, he launches it. Either way, unless you enjoy rolling huge buckets of dice, it can be declared by caveat.

[Falconer]

Yes and that weapon is....
An orbital cow drop.


Really, anything too big and obvious is just asking for a crowbar from orbit.

It's a prime reason to make sure your 'base' isn't out in the middle of nowhere and is snuggled into a nice urban area as HTR/military grade assets are much harder to have deployed against you there.

[Draco18s]

as could a bear (shapeshifter) adept with 3 levels of Improved Attribute (body). So what does body mean, if a metahuman or Awakened animal can get more of it than an APC?

Obviously you've never been in a fight with a bear. 500+ pounds of sheer ferocious muscle.

There's only one known weapon that you can take with you on a hike and use to kill one before it mauls you. The Wasp Injector, because it basically gives whatever you stab the bends, tears through flesh, freezes the flesh, and explodes vital organs as the compressed CO2 expands rapidly from an initial 800 PSI. The Wasp also kills sharks good.