QUOTE (Yerameyahu @ Aug 4 2010, 03:50 PM)
Mr. Potato Drone!
Chainsaw Samurai, you're totally right. Except we're talking about the Manservant-3.
That's a specific exception for the Otomo. And a good one, because it makes perfect sense. It's designed to *be* a metahuman. As for your kevlar question, the answer has always been 'because those aren't the rules'.
Aren't they? It doesn't mention what vehicle armor is made of, and goes out of the way to mention it is conspicuous unless specifically installing the concealed version.
This goes back to why I am such a fan of having grades for more things than just 'ware. Especially for drones and vehicles. Not all of us want to be high class runners in our pretty looking concealed armor 2068 SUVs, you know. Some of us want to be patrolling around Z-Zones in torn up Jeeps with haphazard machinegun mounts and welded on rusted armor.
Lets warp this another way then. Your players are in a hot pursuit chase, another vehicle pulls alongside and blows out the passenger window with a shotgun. The character grabs a spare vest from the back seat and stuffs it where his window used to be. Do you give him the armor value for the next round coming his way or no?
As far as the Manservant goes, it has a body of 3. This limits it's "vehicle armor" to 9. I'll have to check around through Augmentation some more, but in the long run I don't see any reason why a Manservant should be treated any differently from a cyborg, if I recall they can wear armor as well.
An 'off the shelf" vest should be able to wrap around the torso of the Manservant well enough. Honestly I find more harm in fixing the "flaw" in the manservant's movement than throwing a flak vest on one. This could be perhaps because I am viewing the situation differently, let me try to rephrase the problem.
I believe the issue isn't with throwing a flak vest on a drone that seems anthropomorphic enough to wear one. I think the real issue is how these silly things' base armor works. Work it like Dermal Plating? Work it like Cyberlimb armor? Work it like armor in of it's own right?
Clearly I believe that the Otomo and Manservant should be able to wear armor (Otomo espescially obviously, they seem to be going for a GITS cyborg body feeling there). What I think the devs should have done is throw in a couple simple sentences fleshing out how much armor one of these anthro'borgs can have on them and to what extent it does stack. To illustrate my point, I can throw 3x the car's body worth of armor into it and the wheels still spin, the car still moves. Same for a helicopter, there 3x it's body is perfectly conceivable to have the rotors keep spinning. However, how much armor can you stuff under the skin of a skinny Japanese love-bot-girl before her arms, legs, and waist are incapable of moving like a person? Same for the manservant who's funky limb positioning seems like it would be hindered by a lot of armor (as it's already hindered by design especially).
I think this is clearly a case of Developer oversight in not making different vehicle/bot/borg body-armor ratios for anthroforms of any type.
Another thing that may have been missed: While the Otomo can wear people armor, and is developed as such for it, it can still augment the body like cyberlimbs. No problem so far, problem comes to the fact that you can technically do all of that AND it still has 6 modslots available for someone to continue to add drone/vehicle mods. This is obviously a bit of an issue when your 4'10" blank staring Korean luv-doll is loaded with more armor than most tanks and a pair of cyberguns to match the caliber of those Dcups.
Stuff like this makes me wonder how much actual play testing has been done. Obviously there are several cases in these corebooks where RAW and what one would reasonably assume is RAI are pretty distant. Lots of holes.