Armor & Quickness never made sense to me., No...my rule geeking doesn't stop. Options

[Stumps]

<<<Moved from a thread that it didn't belong in...>>>

Armor...never made sense.
I actually ALWAYS hated it being based on Quickness.
I thought it should be based on your (Body + Reaction) / 2, because your reaction incompasses every angle of your agility and speed in combat and your body explains how much you can endure in pure weight.
It would seem to me that the mixture of these two would produce a more accurate number than allowing Quickness to be the master of one more combat element out of it's slew of them.
It would mean that a whimpy fast character would see the penalties in combat for wearing tons of armor, and it would mean that Arnold would see penalties for not having any agility while wearing a tank's worth of armor.

My reasons in the rules for choosing this mixture of Reaction and Body are these:

Body: SR3, p274, Hauling The Load: "A character can carry up to his Strength x 5 in kilograms without appreciable effect. Twice that load (Strength x 10kg) will leave the character in a state equivalent to a Light Wound on the Stun Condition Monitor. The wound occurs when a character carries the load a number of Combat Turns equal to his or her Body Rating."
Ok, first...we almost don't need anything else to determine how much armor you can wear since armor has a weight rating to it. All you really need to do is add that to your total weight and run it against this formula.
On the other hand...we can't really all want to do that much math for all of our Armor and it also doesn't really do anything for your Reactions being slowed down much, so...We will at least take note that SR compares it's ability to carry weight against your Body rating and since we are wanting to know how much armor in weight you can wear on your body before you start seeing problems we'll use the Body rating as part A of the formula.

Reaction: SR3, p41, Reaction: "Reaction determins how quickly and how often a character can act under pressure. A character with good reflexes will have a high Reaction. The Reaction Rating is the average of Quickness and Intelligence, rounded down."
First, before we start saying that Reaction is bad due to it's involvement of Intelligence, remember that your ability to react mentaly quick is always a factor.
If you can't do that, then it doesn't matter how much the armor is slowing you down.
So, Reaction here is extremely important as to how fast you can react to something in SR combat. No secret there. Now throw on some armor and try being athleticly skilled...it's not that easy...many of my buddies in EOD in the Army will tell you that.

So we have two questions really.
1) How much armor can I wear before I fall over because my knees gave out?
Answer: Body

2) How much armor can I wear before I can't turn my torso side to side fast, run fast, or grab my weapon in a hurry?
Answer: Reaction

So we get: (Body + Reaction) / 2 = Armor Encumberance (AE)

Example:
Body: 4
Intelligence: 5
Quickness: 6

Reaction: 5
AE: [(4 + 5) / 2 = ] 4.5


It could be argued that Strength has a roll to play since it was in the listing above on page 274. That version would look like:
Example:
Strength: 5
Body: 4
Intelligence: 5
Quickness: 6

Reaction: 5
AE: [(5 + 4 + 5) / 2 = ] 7


It's really up to for debate in my head as to which of these makes more since and balance, but I'm more weighted to the (Body + Reaction) / 2 = AE than the other one.

[toturi]

Armour is both limited by its weight and the way it restricts your physical flexibility. Weight is already limited by Strength and Body. Quickness determines the agility and dexterity, therefore it could mean that Quickness determines the amount of restrictiveness you can cope with before armour cuts into your combat effectiveness (Combat Pool) and other miscellanea.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Tank troll (BOD 11, QUI 4, INT 3) + Suprathyroid + Artwink + Wired-2 = BOD 12, REA 10 = AE 11. And it gets worse if you include STR into the calculation but keep /2 (instead of going /3).

Now I'm definitely not saying linking armor to Quickness makes sense. I personally link it directly to Body, except that I don't compare the rating of the armor to BOD but the weight of the armor instead (and there's one multiplication and a bit of addition/subtraction involved). When the limiting factor is armor rating alone, using straight Body certainly isn't the optimal solution.

Reaction is problematic because it's the easiest attribute to get a ridiculously high rating at. Any serious ranged combat specialist will have a REA in the low-mid teens.

For a decent compromise, I might go for something like (BOD + QUI)/2. It's pretty rare for characters to have both of those very high -- it can happen, but certainly not as often as with BOD and REA. I'm not too sure Intelligence should factor into this in the first place, so QUI suits me better anyway.

Still, I use my own rules which are quite a bit different. You go with what fits your games the best.

[Stumps]

(Body + Quickness) / 2 = AE is MUCH better once I slap myself and remember that I'm talking about Wired Reflex Happy SR.