[For bigtino] Thread about heavy armor

[bigtino]

This is stuff that I've encountered, too. I have no idea why a person would choose to wear heavy armor. For 2,000 credits, you can get 8 soak at the cost of 4 defense in a suit that has a vulnerability to Electric damage. Which means a couple of things.

1. With a 48 credit electro-pistol, I can ignore your 2,000 credit purchase. But that pistol is weak compared to standard pistols, so fair enough. But that still means...

2. For half a credit per bullet, I can use AP rounds that ignore 60% of that 2,000 credit purchase at zero penalty. There's no trade-off for AP rounds, and at 10 credits for 20, there's no reason not to use them. Not to mention the defense penalty of heavy armor means it's easier to hurt them than it would be to hurt someone in lighter armor.

3. The biggest issue in my eyes, for RP if not for balance, is HP rounds. Bullets that are meant to shatter more easily so they do more damage against soft targets but do little against armor. But they do +1d6 damage at a cost of -1d6 to hit. That means that, the heavier the target's armor, the more effective hollowpoint rounds become, because that penalty to hit is mitigated by their own defense penalty.

4. And then there's Weak Point. A one grade dip in a career that's pretty easy to get into gives you an exploit that lets you totally ignore soak once per target. Now the tradeoff, at least in how I read it, is that if you miss that Weak Point shot, you can't try it again - you've used that exploit against that target. But the heavier the armor they're wearing, the easier they are to hit, making it easier to ignore their soak entirely.

So with those issues comes the question that I still haven't figured out the answer to. Kind of a multi-parter, I guess. If quality is available, even capped at exceptional, there becomes no reason to wear heavy armor, because you can get better light armor for less money using quality. If rarity is to be more strictly enforced on quality, how do we enforce it? What's the metric there? What do "uncommon" and "rare" mean? How do they factor into loot or purchases or what-have-you? And if players should not be able to purchase any item of quality (which seems silly to me, since a market, especially a futuristic one, is going to have higher quality options readily available for a higher price), then what do they do with their money? Vehicles are ungodly expensive, as are cybernetics, to the point where it makes me question when a player, by the standard loot rules, could ever make enough money to afford them. And there seems to be nothing to purchase between the "couple thousand" and "couple tens of thousands" price ranges.

And then there's the issue of dangling quality in front of a player. There's little more frustrating to a player, at least for me, as an arbitrary ruling, and saying "You have a space ship and a galactic market, but you can't find an uncommon item despite having the money to pay for it," seems pretty arbitrary - at least without some sort of metric or roll or something to determine what those rarity terms actually mean.

 

[Morrus]

4. And then there's Weak Point. A one grade dip in a career that's pretty easy to get into gives you an exploit that lets you totally ignore soak once per target. Now the tradeoff, at least in how I read it, is that if you miss that Weak Point shot, you can't try it again - you've used that exploit against that target. But the heavier the armor they're wearing, the easier they are to hit, making it easier to ignore their soak entirely.

Getting +5 or +8 damage (which is what ignoring its SOAK amounts to) *once* to an enemy isn't really that helpful. It's like an extra dice or two of damage once. For the price of an entire career grade. I actually think it's quite a weak ability.

 

[bigtino]

Getting +5 or +8 damage (which is what ignoring its SOAK amounts to) *once* to an enemy isn't really that helpful. It's like an extra dice or two of damage once. For the price of an entire career grade. I actually think it's quite a weak ability.

My point is that it just further shows how heavy armor is useless. There are tons of ways to get around soak, all of which are readily available and become better the more soak a character has, while there are very few things to help you just hit somebody with light armor and a high defense (Aim and Analytics are the only ones that come to mind, and both of them require an action. Tracers can help, but losing your cover is rough.) You lose over a full grade of defense by wearing heavy armor, it's extremely expensive when compared to other armors (Riot Armor has 7 soak and -2 defense for 1000 credits, while a Battlesuit is 8 soak and -4 defense for 2000 credits, not to mention the former has no ineffective damage types and the latter has a pretty easy one to get around if you carry a 48 credit backup pistol with you), and there's no reason to trade 4 defense points and 1900 credits for the 3 soak you would get by upgrading from a kevlar vest to a battlesuit. Even if we add in the gear from the Specialist Armor list, there's no heavy armor worth the price and defense penalty when compared to light (and some medium) armor.

With the Specialist Armor page, there's a light armor called Nemourlon Vest Mk I, which is 6 soak, has no ineffective damage types, is light armor, and costs 250 credits. The cheapest Heavy armor on there is 45,000 credits and has 15 soak, while there is a suit of light armor with 13 soak for 19,000 credits. So on the one hand, if we include this list, light armor is crazy favored over heavy armor. On the other hand, if we don't, there's no heavy armor that has enough soak to be even slightly worth the cost, ineffective damage type, and defense trade.

Weak point is only a weak ability because heavy armor isn't really a thing in this system as it stands. A suit of power armor that costs 10,000 credits only has a soak of 10, which means a 70 credit slugger pistol loaded with AP rounds that cost half a credit each can hurt a power armored person on an average damage roll without boosting their damage at all. And if they wanted to boost their damage roll, it would be easier for them to do, because that guy in power armor has a defense penalty for wearing it.

 

[Morrus]

It’s supposed to be easy to damage people though. Combat’s a dangerous thing - nobody should be walking into gunfire, whatever their armour.

I find nevertheless that my group soaks up a lot of the damage I throw at them.

One thing I do agree with is that I’m not happy with the way AP ammo works. I agree that needs a tweak.

 

[bigtino]

It’s supposed to be easy to damage people though. Combat’s a dangerous thing - nobody should be walking into gunfire, whatever their armour.

I find nevertheless that my group soaks up a lot of the damage I throw at them.

One thing I do agree with is that I’m not happy with the way AP ammo works. I agree that needs a tweak.

So consider a sniper. He's got a 500 credit sniper rifle and 3 points in rifles, so he's shooting at his dice cap (let's say 6d6). That's 3d6+4 base damage. Let's add in the High Damage upgrade for 1,000 credits because he's Grade 6 or 7 and can afford it. Now we're at 4d6+4 damage. He's got Deadly Strike because there's no reason for him not to, so now we're at 5d6+4 damage. He's using HP rounds because he plans on using Aim to offset the penalty, so we're up to 6d6+4 damage. So he's rolling a 6d6 to hit, given no other modifiers, with an average damage roll of 25. If he's firing at a target in light armor, he's probably not going to trade for damage. He's got Weak Point, because all snipers should have weak point, so all of that is going straight to health.

Now, for the lightly armored target, the sniper might have a 50/50 chance of hitting him, and let's call it a 50/50 chance of the target dying in one shot. But if we have a heavily-armored character with a full helmet, someone who's rocking 12 soak because he has Tough-as-Nails and some good heavy armor that he paid a whole lot of money for, our sniper is now much happier. He can now trade two of his to-hit dice for one die of damage and keep his 50/50 hit chance, and now he's got 7d6+4 damage and a much better chance of taking down his target in one hit.

And even for someone who isn't a sniper - anyone from a stealthy SMG commando to a raging 10 strength two-handed sword berserker - Weak Point is amazing if you can get it. It takes a potentially drawn-out fight to one that can be ended with one Weak Point/Deadly Strike first hit followed by one finisher hit, and then you're on to the next guy. You don't need to use it against a target more than once because they're probably going to be dead or close to it after you do use it - and the more heavily armored they are, the more likely that is to happen.

But everyone in my game so far has found soak really easy to get past. For light armor, and even medium, that makes sense. If the team's assault gunner (using a sniper rifle like the sniper, because there are no automatic rifles for a reasonable price and he has no reason to choose an automatic rifle anyway because the damage of a sniper rifle is better than the auto bonus if you're a damage-dealer) has deadly strike, he hits for 4d6+4 damage, 18 on average. Even before AP rounds, his average damage roll without trading for damage way bypasses any existing armor in the core rulebook, and that's an amount of damage that is super easy to attain for even a Grade 5 starting character. The difference between light and heavy armor here is simply that heavy armor makes it easier for that rifleman to hit you.

I understand that bullets should be scary and no armor should ever protect you from everything always, but I do feel like armor should follow two basic rules:

1. It should, on a general level, be at least moderately useful.
2. The heavier your armor, the harder you are to damage (not necessarily harder to *hit*, just harder to damage).

Right now, I feel like light armor is useful because sometimes enemies use lasers that don't have AP rounds and it doesn't make you any easier to hit. Heavy armor, however, is almost equally-easy to bypass as light armor, and because it makes you considerably easier to hit, it's actually a hindrance more than a boon.

 

[Morrus]

Armor skills?

So stop using monsters able to bypass armour? Not many are designed like that. Unless you actually want to nerf your players or are doing PvP for some reason, it’s under your control what abilities the bad guys have. Designing encounters to be challenging but fun needs taking your players into account.

 

[bigtino]

As a side note: I'm experimenting now with straight-up doubling all heavy armor SOAK values as provided in the manual. It does present situations where characters can have SOAK in the high teens or low 20s, but I think that's a reasonable tradeoff.

This seems like a pretty good solution to the heavy armor dilemma. No reason to cap gear quality (below a certain point, like exceptional) when the results are still cheaper than most heavy armor (the best one being an Exceptional Nemourlon Vest that has 10 soak, is light armor, and costs 1,500 credits), and doubling heavy armor soak means that you're paying for an equivalent scale of protection (like a basic battlesuit that costs 2,000 credits and gives a -4 defense penalty providing 16 soak instead of 8). That seems to balance decently with medium armor, since a regular suit of riot armor is 7 soak and costs 1,000 credits, although there's not really enough viable medium armor out there to make a good comparison.

So stop using monsters able to bypass armour? Not many are designed like that. Unless you actually want to nerf your players or are doing PvP for some reason, it’s under your control what abilities the bad guys have. Designing encounters to be challenging but fun needs taking your players into account.

I do realize that, but I think you've missed my point, which is that heavy armor is useless. Without a significant change, like the one proposed above, there is absolutely no reason to use it unless you have literally hundreds of thousands of credits lying around to get one of the few suits that's actually better than a suit of light armor. Probably the solution I'll use is the proposal above of doubling heavy armor SOAK, and then writing up a long list of weapons, armor, and other gear that fill the gaps of what's available (like assault rifles or medium armor that isn't a variation on a hazmat suit).

 

[Morrus]

High quality heavy armour is better than high quality light armour. Higher quality armour (of most any type) is better than lower quality armour (of most any type). The key is the quality, not the heaviness. There's no inbuilt assumption into the game that PCs should be seeking heavier armour, rather that they should be seeing higher quality armour. I think there's just a fundamental difference in expectation there.

 

[bigtino]

High quality heavy armour is better than high quality light armour. Higher quality armour (of most any type) is better than lower quality armour (of most any type). The key is the quality, not the heaviness. There's no inbuilt assumption into the game that PCs should be seeking heavier armour, rather that they should be seeing higher quality armour. I think there's just a fundamental difference in expectation there.

Yes, but while the quality bonus is a flat +2 soak per level, the cost is multiplicative based on base cost. A Mastercraft suit of Leather Armor has 10 soak and costs 850 credits, which is the same soak as a suit of power armor and costs less than 1/10 of the price. A Mastercraft suit of Power Armor has a soak of 16 and costs 100,500 credits. Yes, the mastercraft power armor is better than the mastercraft leather armor, but that's not exactly a good comparison to make when one costs 120 times as much as the other.

My expectation is not that all players are always seeking heavier armor - my expectation is that heavier armor should be a viable option, and because of the way everything scales, it simply isn't.

 

[Morrus]

Yes, but while the quality bonus is a flat +2 soak per level, the cost is multiplicative based on base cost. A Mastercraft suit of Leather Armor has 10 soak and costs 850 credits, which is the same soak as a suit of power armor and costs less than 1/10 of the price. A Mastercraft suit of Power Armor has a soak of 16 and costs 100,500 credits. Yes, the mastercraft power armor is better than the mastercraft leather armor, but that's not exactly a good comparison to make when one costs 120 times as much as the other.

My expectation is not that all players are always seeking heavier armor - my expectation is that heavier armor should be a viable option, and because of the way everything scales, it simply isn't.

So your issue is that you feel power armor is too expensive?

(We have rather gone off-topic here, which might be affecting discussion on the topic at hand, which was skill requirements for quality equipment; I might split this posts off to another thread).