A question about armor and vehicles

[RangerWickett]

I have a game design preference question.

Personal Armor
Most every RPG has armor that either makes it harder to meaningfully hit you (e.g., increasing AC like Pathfinder) or absorbs damage (e.g., damage reduction like Rogue Trader/L5R) or occasionally a sort of hybrid (in World of Darkness, the more you hit by the more damage you deal).

But no tabletop RPG I know of has you track damage to your armor. Your armor can defend against dozens of attacks but always remains just as functional, unless someone actively uses some special attack to try to damage the armor.

Vehicles
By contrast, every game I've played with vehicles has treated them as objects that can be independently attacked and damaged, albeit sometimes with a mechanic for damaging the people inside the vehicle. The Millennium Falcon can take X damage before it's destroyed, and X is the same regardless whether it's empty, being piloted by experienced smuggler Han Solo, or being piloted by novice Rey. The different pilots might be better able at dodging attacks, but the person in the cockpit doesn't change how many HP the ship has.

This is the same for battlemechs in Battletech, for cars in World of Darkness, and for mile-long spaceships in Rogue Trader.

The Question
When do you switch between these two modes?

Iron Man wears armor. I figure it gives him AC or DR, but it's still Tony Stark's hit points that determine if he's able to keep fighting. You can knock him out without having to destroy the armor. And if Pepper Potts is in the armor, it still protects her, but she's probably got fewer HP.

If Tony gets into the Hulkbuster armor, that's much bigger. Is it still giving him AC or DR? Or does it now have its own HP total? Can you defeat Tony without destroying the armor?

Or to use a PF context, synthesist summoners can 'wear' their eidolons. Should armor work this way? Or would you prefer rules where the summoner just gets some defensive boost, and maybe some temp HP and new attacks?

 

[RangerWickett]

I ask because I'm tinkering with an airplane dogfighting game idea, and I feel like it plays better if the fighter jets use the pilot's hit points, and if running out of HP means you're defeated (battered from impacts, exhausted from high-G maneuvers, etc.) rather than that your plane explodes or something. Maybe once you're out of HP, you're not necessarily unconscious, but there is some narrative certainty that you cannot keep fighting, like your eyes are blurry and you'll automatically miss all attacks and fail all piloting checks. You'd be able to land your plane, or maybe run away if someone's covering for you, but you can't contribute anymore to the fight.

It would still be possible on, like, a critical hit to cause damage to the vehicle that could make piloting it harder, or damage a weapon system or something. (And if you're out of HP, any more hits on your vehicle are automatically crits.) So sometimes fights would end with your vehicle destroyed, but usually it'd just be damaged. This lets you get form a narrative attachment to your vehicle, and provides a bit of a game mechanic cushion to let the GM occasionally beat the party without killing the party.

 

[RangerWickett]

But then I run into a small hiccup that, like, say you've got a low-level hero with 30 HP (Timmy), and a high level one with 100 HP (Vader). They're both piloting identical jets, which grant the pilot 20 temp HP. And say a missile does 20 damage; and a laser blast does 10 damage.

In this situation, okay, Timmy in his jet has 50 HP and can take a few hits before he's defeated. Vader in his jet has 120 HP, though, and is a better shot, and so in three rounds he deals enough damage to defeat Timmy, and only takes 30 damage in return. Vader's in good shape. Timmy manages to narrowly land his plane and gets taken prisoner.

But then later, someone heals Timmy and helps him escape from the empire's jail. He's running away. And someone fires a missile at him.

This is a missile meant to blow up a fighter jet, and we scaled the tempt HP of the fighter so it is useful, but that player HP is more important. We scaled the damage of the missile so a high-level PC in a ship can survive having a few missiles lobbed their way.

But if Timmy's not in a jet, him surviving a missile is a bit more far-fetched.

 

[Tonguez]

So for clarity in the second example Timmy is running away on foot? And someone fires an anti-aircraft missile at him?

Youve got a missile designed for a huge objext trying to hit a medium sized one - so I’d say Timmy has a bonus to evasion so just might survive it because it hits the building and the man dodges the blast (he still gets knocked prone, but not damaged per se).

Extending that thought, I suppose you could implement for your game that HP is ‘Evasion’, thus as a Pilot manouveres their vehicle to avoid damage they use HP (there own and the vehicles), if the pilot has no HP then they can no longer evade and must drop out.
Armour is whats used to absorb damage to the vehicle, exactly how you would measure evasion across different vehicle types I havent worked out ...

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Use both. And what about parachutes/ejection seats? The more realistic you get, the more rules you need. But you already know that. I've seen rules that have armor take damage (Runequest?), where the armor is protective (DR) but the PC has HP as well.

 

[MarkB]

I feel like pilot skill should affect the vehicle's AC rather than its hit points - i.e. they're using their skills to dodge projectiles more adeptly, or to keep the most vulnerable components better protected.

 

[RangerWickett]

I feel like pilot skill should affect the vehicle's AC rather than its hit points - i.e. they're using their skills to dodge projectiles more adeptly, or to keep the most vulnerable components better protected.

Would you also want fighters in D&D to stay at, like, 10 hit points for their whole career but go up in AC so you have to be equivalently skilled to hit them? That might be more realistic, but it doesn't produce gameplay that's as satisfying, I think, because you'd have odd spikes in random outcomes where Darth Vader gets hit by a lucky shot and goes down without a fight.

One idea I've been working on is once-per-encounter "saves" that turn a hit into a miss (and give some other perk). They'd represent active defenses sort of the same way in the video game Dark Souls you can dodge roll a limited amount of times because it drains your stamina. I'm not sure if that works better with HP-scaling or AC-scaling, or something else.

 

[Tonguez]

I feel like pilot skill should affect the vehicle's AC rather than its hit points - i.e. they're using their skills to dodge projectiles more adeptly, or to keep the most vulnerable components better protected.

yeah on second thoughts for a Dogfighting game I’d be tempted to remove HP entirely. Instead using Evasive Manoeuvres (Dex+AC+skill).

So an Attack is rolled and then defended via Evasive Manoeuvres. If the Attack wins then the losing pilot is Shaken which imposes a penalty on their future subsequent manoeuvres. (Tony Stark loses the manoeuvre roll and narrates Jarvis losing its navigation systems).

Things like a missile kill shot would require the opponents Manouvres to be 0 or maybe a Critical Hit (fuel rupture!!)

just a thought, it keeps pilot and plane intact as long as they can manouvre out of the dogfight..

 

[MarkB]

Would you also want fighters in D&D to stay at, like, 10 hit points for their whole career but go up in AC so you have to be equivalently skilled to hit them? That might be more realistic, but it doesn't produce gameplay that's as satisfying, I think, because you'd have odd spikes in random outcomes where Darth Vader gets hit by a lucky shot and goes down without a fight.

Which is where vehicle combat is different than personal combat. When Darth Vader got hit by an unlucky collision at the end of A New Hope and was taken out of the fight immediately despite not even having been attacked before, was that unsatisfying?

If I'm playing a dogfighting game and I'm in a fighter jet, up against someone else in a fighter jet, I don't want either craft to feel like a tank.

 

[Wolfram stout]

Villains and Vigilantes does an interesting thing with armor. If you have Armor, when you get hit, you roll % if you roll lower than the armor rating, the armor takes the damage....and the damage comes off of the armor. So, you start out with for example, 50 points for armor, you get hit for 20 damage, roll a 32, the 20 comes off of the armor (so now you are at 30 points. If it is tech armor (like Iron Man) you have to spend money to fix it.

I don't think that would work in a Fantasy setting, but something like it might work in a dogfight.