WOIN AP Rounds in NEW

[raspberryfh]

You hit the quote button too fast! I tried to edit in a second bit and you missed it

1a) The "if it's 10 or less part" doesn't really make sense because that means that you get no benefit at all from using AP rounds against more heavily armored targets, which is exactly where AP should be useful. I'd just eliminate this phrase entirely and make it a flat "ignore X SOAK."

If the change ignores SOAK only up to a certain level, then you eventually hit a magical SOAK number where you're immune to AP rounds too.

 

[Morrus]

The problem with your AP rounds doing -2d6 damage is that a lot of weapons only do 2d6 damage. There's isn't really space to remove two dice from the damage mechanic.

 

[Morrus]

One other design space might be to play around wth the crit mechanic.

Hollow point, for example, maybe does severe crits rather than regular crits. It's harder to stop the bleeding.

What is it GURPS does? Not that I want to copy another system -- but HP doubles armor and does extra damage, while AP halves both armor and damage, IIRC.

 

[raspberryfh]

While that is true, most players will still be rolling more than 2d6 dice when it comes time to roll damage. The ignore 7 SOAK, pay 1d6 damage dice is fairly comparable in terms of balance. I didn't use it because it becomes better at lower SOAK values, and I was intentionally trying to create a spot between HP and AP rounds where usual ammo could be useful.

I'd also argue that if you're shooting at a heavily armored target with a weapon that only does 2d6 damage, you probably made a poor tactical decision.

One final point is that my rule was designed in the microcosm of a game where there are significantly more options for higher damage weapons. I've posted the google spreadsheet for that a few times.

 

[raspberryfh]

One other design space might be to play around wth the crit mechanic.

Hollow point, for example, maybe does severe crits rather than regular crits. It's harder to stop the bleeding.

What is it GURPS does? Not that I want to copy another system -- but HP doubles armor and does extra damage, while AP halves both armor and damage, IIRC.

I've never played GURPS but one of my players had and it was the basis for the rules we came up with, adapted to more of a d6 system.

I do kind of like the idea of HP rounds causing more deadly crits. I think balancing it might be tricky, but something like "-1d6 attack, roll 2 crit effects on a critical hit" might be okay. That could even just be another ammo type, leaving HP rounds as a damage-boosting ammunition.

 

[daniiren]

I rolled high enough on my Programming [LOG] check and got my WOIN damage simulation to give me a few useful things here. For the interested party, I took an attacker with an assault rifle and 5d6 attack pool, and a defender with 18 ranged defense and either kevlar or a battlesuit. I look at both the AP/HP rules as written (ie, vanilla), and also raspberryfh's proposal (except the damage penalty for AP is only 1d6).

The end result with vanilla rules is that a battlesuit tends to take more damage from both AP and HP. With raspberryfh's rules, AP has very reliable low-damage output against a battlesuit, and HP is more effective against kevlar than a battlesuit.

 

[raspberryfh]

What was the SOAK penetration that you used when you reduced the damage penalty to 1d6? Did you ignore 7 SOAK or 10?

 

[Morrus]

Could you try running it with half damage and half soak?

And conversely, for hollow point, double soak and double damage?

I don’t expect those values to be useable, but it will give a good sense of direction.

 

[daniiren]

What was the SOAK penetration that you used when you reduced the damage penalty to 1d6? Did you ignore 7 SOAK or 10?

10.

Could you try running it with half damage and half soak?

And conversely, for hollow point, double soak and double damage?

I don’t expect those values to be useable, but it will give a good sense of direction.

I present the results from the GURPS idea, and also a hybrid where AP gives half SOAK and -1d6 damage (opposite for HP ammo). Not gonna lie, I like how this hybrid setup looks. Battlesuits are vulnerable to AP and almost immune to HP, and kevlar is about the same for both.

I think I'm going to spend some time making this code usable by someone else, and I'll post it to allow others to play around with it.

 

[raspberryfh]

My issue with all of these results is that they still do way too much damage against someone in heavy armor. AP rounds, as they stand in the current state are too powerful. They are cheap as dirt and come with no downside. As we've seen in the other thread, there's already a trend toward "heavily-armored" defenders taking more damage than their lightly-armored counterparts. We don't need to make that situation worse with AP rounds.

Your tweaked version of my suggestion actually buffs AP rounds in many circumstances: Instead of just ignoring 5 SOAK (equivalent to +5 damage for almost all targets), you are ignoring 10 SOAK at the cost of 1d6 damage dice (on average this will give you +6.5 damage vs heavily armored targets; it is a buff for anything higher than 8.5 SOAK).

Unless heavy armor gets a major buff, I would highly suggest capping the SOAK penetration at 7 with a damage penalty as 1d6.