Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
EN Publishing
[For bigtino] Thread about heavy armor
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="bigtino" data-source="post: 7249941" data-attributes="member: 6912595"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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...</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>more effective</em> hollowpoint rounds become, because that penalty to hit is mitigated by their own defense penalty.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>uncommon</em> 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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="bigtino, post: 7249941, member: 6912595"] 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 [I]more effective[/I] 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 [I]uncommon[/I] 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. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
EN Publishing
[For bigtino] Thread about heavy armor
Top