Has anyone played around with static defense values? I'm wondering because the game seems kinda clunky with 3 rolls involved in every combat action (To hit, Defense, and Damage Resistance) Coming from playing Exalted, this seems very slow paced. I was therefore considering playing with a way to derive a defense value that all players have which the attacker just needs to make the threshold of to hit. Thereby reducing it to two rolls, attack and damage resistance. My thought was that your standard ranged dv would be half your reaction plus environment modifiers (Making environment stronger while reaction becomes weaker) and add half your dodge if you take the defend action. Melee would be reaction plus relevant skill/2 + situational modifier. Has anyone else tried something like this?

Buy Hits.

Hell, the game even suggests doing so for less important stuff/mook fights, or situations like Tank Armor soaking a light pistol round.

There have been a couple threads about this. It really depends on whether you want to reduce the randomness of the game. For me, that's generally a bad idea. If you do want to, the simplest method is the Exalted 2e way: divide defense pools by 3 (not 4). It's important to remember, though, that this *isn't* Exalted. There are major setting and mechanic reasons for the difference.

I've taken out the defender's initial Dodge roll and simply apply their Dodge as a negative modifier. Sort of like the current incarnation of WoD with its Defense Trait. I leave in the option that if they wish to make the roll they can spend the Action, though I might keep the WoD concept, and let them double Dodge with the Action.

I like the idea of losing the Damage Resistance (just subtracting Armor rating from the damage as suggested in the Corebooke), but haven't quite gotten to the point of trying it. Yet.

Like you said, trying to speed up the combat.

Surely both of those massively unbalance the mechanic, though? Making an RPG less deadly can be a good thing, but that's a big change that affects a lot more than just speed of play.

True. Like I said, still up in the air on the resistance. Maybe tone down the armors or something. It's a work in progress, to be sure.

We generally forget the Dodge skill, period, but the players and myself, for some reason, and by the time it gets remembered we are several rounds in, and people just want to get it done and get patched up, heh. Its inclusion in anyway is something.

In my buddies campaign I play a troll physad that normally rolls with 14 points of ballistic armor when I'm not in fear for my life. So subtracting armor automatically would make me a bit overpowered. In our last game I was wearing a camo suit with helmet, FFBA 1/2 suit, and I have 3 points of Mystic Armor and natural dermal armor and a ballistic shield. Sounds pretty redonkulous, but we were assaulting an Oyaban's mansion, and hey, I'm a troll! Anyway, with a whopping 23 points of armor, and a body of 9, I still managed to get only 4 hits to resist a goon's SMG shot and ended up taking like 7 boxes of stun or so (YES, I was out of EDGE : ). If we played with armor reduction, it would have to be modified a bit or I would only be hurt by the BIG guns firing rock and roll. I've seen quite a few rolls like that in my time playing and running the game, and I like the randomness of it, even if it is clunky.

That's a wierd one, the book does succest you buy hits in this situation, but i can't for the life of me figure out how that situation could ever arise.
There isn't a soak roll for light pistol shooting a tank as the tanks "hardened" armour absorbs all of that damage before a soak test.
Or if that shot was made by uber gunslinger using edge and scoring enough hits to beat the "hardened" armor, then i don't really see tank having to soak somethink like 21 points of damage as "buying hits" kind of moment.

That'd be one heck of a shot. What'd he do, hit the thermal exhaust port right below the main port?

I'm technically not allowed to discuss this one, so let's just say that it's mathematically probable with enough Edge.

I've houseruled the opposite in an old-school Vampire campaign I run. No more rolling for damage and damage resistance, only for to-hit and defending.

I kinda like it that way; you roll for the thing you "do" (dodging), while you just calculate what just "happens" (armor).

It takes some figuring out to determine the balance, but it seems pretty stable right now.

If you were to do the same thing in SR, I'd also suggest buying 3:1 hits on the damage resistance. It seems more sensible to roll (and have use of Edge) on something active, like dodging, than on something passive (damage resistance).

Thats the way Ubiquity handles it sorta. A single opposed roll except their roll is like nWOD where its a potential damage roll. I thought of trying using Ubiquity for Shadowrun but have not done so yet.

could just add the Defense and Damage Resistance together for one humungous roll.

Even with the multiple rolls per combat, that action seems to go pretty fast. As a GM, I only have to roll once, when attacking. The player tells me his total hits and I give him the net results and then I move on while he rolls his resistance and marks damage. I'd think that cleaning that up too much would make combat go "too fast".

My concern with making damage resistance static is that trolls will have an effective hardness of crazy proportions, making it impossible to injure them with small arms fire. It does make sense though that if you take two twins with the same armor on and shoot them both in the same spot with the same gun and ammo it's unrealistic to think that one will take less damage than the other due to a die roll. But then it seems like stunning damage would produce different effects, as we all react to pain differently. I'm not really sure how to balance this concept.

We experimented with this idea too, but we didn't like it. When a PC gets attacked, the player wants to do something to defend himself. Just naming a defense stat doesn't feel the same way as rolling dice to defend.

The other problem is that it can mean a large reduction in drama. If certain kinds of attacks are mechanically ignorable, they'll also be dramatically ignorable. It's not even a question of metagaming, just the way things work. Randomness is fundamental to RPGs.

Quick maths: if Defense and Damage Resistance is added together vs Attack roll as a success test.

Player A 15 dice with a heavy pistol, APDS rounds

Player B Troll with Reaction of 4, Body of 9, Armor 20

A shoots heavy pistol gets 5 successes, Damage is 11, -5 AP.

B rolls Reaction+Body+Armor-5 (27 dice) gets 9 successes, for 2 points of Stun.

This would make combat faster in that there would be less back and forth dice rolling, and characters would die much faster.

I don't know weather that would be good or bad.

You wouldn't happen to be refering to using edge for a long shot test, would you?
Called shot to ignore armor, then use edge to long shot it?