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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6750830" data-attributes="member: 996">In addition to the Dune 'shields' you mention, there have been other rationalizations.  Jedi can deflect ranged attacks and have supernatural skill in melee.  In Traveler, powerful guns were avoided on board ship to reduce the risk of decompression.  Tradition and laws can figure into it.  An advanced culture might ban many sorts of weapons, but still openly carry and duel with some traditional weapon, with practitioners becoming so preternaturally skilled that they erase the advantage simple ranged weapons give to less well-trained combatants (Klingons using batleths in Star Trek for instance).  Like the shields, the offense vs defense arms race can favor defense for a time, when it does, melee weapons may be the only technically viable offense.  It doesn't have to be personal shields, it could be power armor, minovsky particles, teleportation technology making the range advantage obsolete, or environments - cramps ship interiors, twisting alien hives - in which you simply can't open up range.Conversely, a star-spanning culture could be in technological decline from some peaceful pinnacle.  They still have self-maintaining starships to tool around the galaxy, but can't make new ones or repair a ship that's too badly damaged, and ships were all designed in a time of peace, with defensive systems to stop meteorites and other dangers but no offensive weapons.  So blowing up the other guy's ship is out of the question, instead, you board.  Similarly, all weapons are improvised or made in the current, decadent period, so they're much lower-tech than the other trapping so the setting, maybe all the way down to hand-held blades, maybe high-tech tools misused and abused into weapons, maybe even-more-ancient-artifacts from the culture's violent periods.  It's a convenient conceit because you can be fairly arbitrary about what sorts of artifacts were made self-sustaining, like the ships, or still have self-sustaining production facilities, and which are rare, lost, or never developed at that pinnacle.If they're like Dune shields and require not just a melee attack, but a specific, unintuitive type of attack, the non-proficient user's Field could provide the same protection against all his attacks (ranged & melee) as it provides him vs ranged attacks, because he isn't trained to make the right /kind/ of melee attack to get out of his own shield, as well as through an enemy's.The less reliable they are, the more likely people are to keep using ranged weapons and try to overcome the fields with a massed firepower, instead of relying on melee.  As long as ranged damage rolls are fairly swingy (exploding d10's for instance, as opposed to multiple d6s), a fixed DR wouldn't be all that dependable, anyway.D&D tradition suggest a d6, with a 1:6 chance of the field failing.  Alternately, you could roll 'soak dice' and total them, with that amount being your resistance against that attack.  If you're rolling a lot of dice, d6s are convenient, because they're so readily available.I think DR is fine.  They could also 'deflect' ranged attacks giving a <s>deflection</s> bonus to AC or a miss chance or just disadvantage, making them more all-or-nothing.  Lots of potential mechanics, really.</blockquote>

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