Using VP/WP and Damage Reducing Armor in D20 Modern

[Ruin Explorer]

Morgenstern - Um, so little benefit? It can very easily save you from death, the only issue is that *because* the game is SW, the armour has to be weak so as to prevent Stormtroopers, et al, being invulnerable to the gunfire of the heroes. I mean, in the movies, the armour does *nothing* therefore in the game, it does *next to nothing*.

However, in a d20 Modern variant, why should this be the case?

There's no reason that I'm aware of. You can simply have more powerful armour, with higher DRs. Maybe a Class-III flak vest w/plate gives a DR of 12, enough to stop a 9mm round, whereas a tank has a DR of 60, or whatever, to make small-arms fire simply bounce off it.

If the idea that a flak vest should always been hit offends you, you can simply add an armour-check, with a DC of 15, and a modifier based on how much the armour covers (and possibly Feats or stats), to see if it's hit. As WP are rarely lost, this will bog down the system very little. Most will happy to assume the armour automatically is hit, unless a penalty is taken to aim around it, or whatever, though.

I have to agree with Ranger REG on this, it makes little sense to apply DR to VP, as VP is supposed to mean NOT getting hit, as SW makes abundantly clear. I don't find the "armour contributes" argument convincing, and there's a further problem - to make the armour balanced, you have to give it a low DR value, if it protects VP as well, because otherwise PCs become near-invulnerable.

This means that you have to make armour unrealistically weak. Suppose Bobby the undercover cop, wearing his flak vest, is held down by the Evil Drug Baron(TM)'s minions, and shot in the chest with a .45 a couple of times. IRL, he will probably live, and not even be horribly injured, if the vest was a tough one, because the .45 is a low-velocity round. In Spycraft, he will take what, coup-de-grace damage twice, so maximum, which is 10 for a .45 IIRC, minus his puny DR on his vest (what 3, or 4), and thus take 12-14 points of WP damage, and quite likely be dead.

Whereas with a proper DR, of say, 8, which would be ridiculously high for normal combat, he can, as he would (particularly in an action movie), survive the attack, and only take an amount of WP appropriate to the likely bruising. An assault rifle will happily chew through that DR, though, and kill him dead. Again, as it should.

Also, if you've seen Spycraft's DR system, why aren't you worried about the "human tank" effect? The best armour in Spycraft applies a DR of 14 to VP and WP damage. This means that you basically *cannot* be hurt (due to the large VP pool), or if you are, it's a tiny amount of VP damage, even walking into gunfire! That can get quite silly, especially as d20 Modern doesn't have the "Gadget Points" system to limit things. With a system that protects WP only, he'll be hard to take down, but his VP will vanish in no time, so he'll be living on the edge. One or two lucky rolls, and he's a dead-man. Worse if you have some AP rules.

I think a good setup for VP/WP in d20 Modern would be:

VP = Current HP.

WP = CON.

Armour provides DR, not Defence Bonus, but only to WP. DR should stop most damage from an appropriate weapon. Thus a Class-III vest w/plate would stop 10 or 12 points, whereas a plateless Class-I undercover vest might only stop 4 or 6.

If WP were to be inflicted, armour is checked to see if it applies. DC is 15. A vest has a +4 to the roll, a +2 is gained if a helmet is worn, with a further +2 for each limb covered. A roll of 1 always fails, of course, so any PC-worn armour can be penetrated.

Weapons have an AP value. Most pistols have 0. Pointy melee weapons have 5. Assault rifles have 8 or 10. Heavy calibre rifles have 15 or more. AP rounds for weapons add +5 to AP, -1 damage per die.

AP is how much DR or Hardness they ignore. Note that this requires you to increase the hardness of materials and vehicles to realistic levels. Currently, IIRC, a Main Battle Tank can be destroyed with some fairly light weaponry, and an APC can be shredded by assault-rifle fire. This should not be so.

Critical hits go directly to WP. Double-criticals go directly to WP and ignore armour (or do double-damage, perhaps, which allows small-calibre weapons single-shot lethality).

 

[Morgenstern]

Well, I think my chief objection to DR-type armor not being useful against vitality damage is rooted in the nebulous nature of vitality damage itself. If it's purely 'not get hit factor' then why does a bigger gun chew off more vitality points? Dodging a blaster bolt is dodging a blaster bolt, so why can a character dodge 7 weeny green ones (say 50 vitality vs 2d6 averaging 7 points), but only 4-5 nasty red ones (same vitality vs. 2d12 at around 11 points per hit. So if the vitality points are already that abstract, why not let the armor be useful?

With WP being in the 10-15 range (more or less) then armor that only protects WP is only going come into play maybe twice before you go down...

Further, in regards to the big DR armor in Spycraft there are a couple of tradeoffs. If your armor completely absorbs an attack, you take 2 points of subdual damage - representing the massive bruising associated with getting shot while wearing a vest and such (I realize there is no equivalent in d20M with the non-lethal damage rules, but I suppose you could convert all of the attack's damage to non lethal and see if it provoked a check...). Further, a lot of Spycraft's bigger weapons can do more than 14 points of damage, and/or have the armor peircing (reduce DR by 3) or armor defeating (ignore DR) qualities. If you shift to any DR-based system you're going to want to bring in some mechanical effects for armor piercing munitions.

In Modern, a I suppose that using the Burst Fire feat would get your damage range up where putting holes in a guy in serious military armor would be posible on a slighly better than average damage roll (4d6 averages 14), which seems fine to me. The bank robbers in the famous shootout down south where shrugging off light arms fire from the police untile the cops went and picked up some heavier weapons . If you're standing there in massive armor, do you thnk it cool that the cops erase your vitality points with their little pistols? You're barely feeling the hits (they had a LOT of armor on), so why, if you were to shuck the armor 10 minutes latter and be running for it is all your vitality gone? You weren't winded, you didn't do a lot of jumping around to avoid the bullets (which is seemingly how most vitality points are burned off in a fire fight).

 

[Dareoon Dalandrove]

Are the armors and the DR for armors mechanic OGC?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Morgenstern - Uh, it was my understanding that they used AP-rounds, specifically, not just "bigger guns". In fact, I specifically heard that they went to a gun-shop and *bought* AP rounds on the spot, then came back and shot the back robbers with them, and their armour which had resisted the police weapons, including the weapons issued to SWAT, up to that point, failed them.

I completely understand your objection to the VP system, but that's what it really is, an objection to the system itself, not to armour DR. I mean, even without DR, a big, easy-to-dodge bolt, which, if it hit you, would kill you, will do more VP damage than some super-accurate blaster, even if the latter was virtually impossible to dodge. It's an artifact of the system, and can't *really* be used as an objection to DR specifically, I'd say.

Either you accept it, and move on, or you're always going to have problems with the basic VP/WP system, I suspect. I mean, I had that problem for a while, as it annoyed me that you didn't have the option to NOT lose VP by dancing around, but if you don't think of VP as endurance, but more as luck, or drama points, or whatever, it makes more sense.

Actually, it could be largely be solved, simply make all weapons do either equal VP damage, or damage based on how hard they are to dodge, which would lead to people using the latter weapons, then switching to the "big guns" for the kill, I think, and be rather silly.

It is somewhat abstract, but I think it works well enough, and I don't see why, personally, *just* because it's abstract, armour should protect VP. I mean, surely you can turn the argument around and say "Because it's abstract, armour should not protect VP, it's a sort of mystical thing, and wearing a steel plate isn't going to help you out". I mean, unless you have something more specific in mind...

So I think that is a "deadlock", with regards to the arguments on either side.

Now, taking in mind that there is no convincing argument either way on those basis, I take it to the next logical step.

Armour *should* protect you as much as it does "IRL", at least in a realistic game. Now, weapons must do enough damage to be fairly lethal under VP/WP, so we're talking 2d6 for a 9mm, and so on (I prefer 1d12 for a 9mm, myself, but that's a different issue). They have to be able to kill a typical unarmoured person in one shot, and they can, at that damage. Don't often, but can.

However, RL armour *CAN* stop bullets DEAD, and I don't know about your players, but mine know this. If we have armour that protects against the correct caliber of bullet (I believe it's Class-II w/plate for 9mm), then it should stop *most* of the damage from that round to WP. So Class-II w/plate should be 10, meaning only 1-2 points from a 9mm will ever get through.

If you have 10 points of armour on VP, though, it makes you very hard to kill, very hard indeed. SMG fire will bounce off you like a light rain.

Now, you say that Spycraft does 2 points of subdual damage for every hit that is absorbed fully. Is this to WP? If not, it's pretty tiny. If it is to WP, then it's screwing up the WP/VP rules completely, which say when you are losing WP, you are NOT being hit! This could be a problem if someone fired an acid round, for example. The armour absorbs the impact damage, but, in doing so, suggests that you have been hit, and that the acid should take effect.

In SW, if you lost VP under those circumstances, it would have been a miss. I suspect this is a difference to Spycraft.

As for the burst fire rules, they're yucky. Ugh. I've never seen worse, and I've seen more RPGs than most people have seen hot breakfasts. The idea that you can penetrate armour by firing more bullets with same velocity and approximate trajectory is nuts, unless those bullets are so numerous as to destroy the armour (which they won't be, with non-solid armour). I mean, what, there's a steel plate in front of me, if I fire one 9mm round it twenty times, nothing will happen, but if I fire a burst, mystic faeries will appear, and despite the bullets doing the exact same thing, the plate will buckle? Bizarre! That's not what the police did. It's not volume of fire, it's where you hit, and what you hit with.

They need revision too, but that's another thread. The firearms combat rules are definately the weakest part of d20 Modern, I'd forgotten quite how back they are.

You say "You need rules for AP munitions". Hehe, not to be all "read my post", but I did actually mention that, in some detail! Too boring I guess!

In the end, what it comes down to here is how you see VP/WP.

I see it the SW Revised way, which is VP represent not being hit, and basically end up as some kind of quasi-mystical "luck-force", "script immunity" or "drama-points", and are part of the game's "suspension of disbelief". .

You seem to see it the Spycraft way, which is that VP represent being hit *slightly*, dodging, and not being struck full-on, but that you ARE being hit, and will take effects from things like acid, fire, and so on, even if you don't lose WP (IIRC Spycraft correctly. It is entirely possible I do not!).

It's a different outlook, and a different mechanic.

A counter-argument to the Spycraft way of seeing VP as "wind", "dodge-ability" or whatever, is that if you wake up in the middle of the night, are confused as heck, and tired out of your tiny skull, but not helpless, you will still have full VPs, unless you've been attacked recently! I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you get your VPs when you're stunned, confused, and so on, right? Even when you could not possibly intentionally dodge? You are only denied them when you are actually *helpless*, no?

Either way, you're making an abstraction, and either way, there are problems. I feel the SW way of "You're not hit AT ALL" is better for the game, and "cleaner", rules-wise, even if it makes it quite difficult to tranq-dart people.

 

[jonrog1]

Not getting into the whole "what's the meaning of VP" discussion, I think that using armor as DR with the D20Modern rules would be more realistic.

Whether VP is "not getting hit" (SW Revised) or "dodging, turning a major blow into a minor one, etc." of Spycraft, having playtested a couple variations(see the Story Hours) I find the WP/VP system to be the bigger, more cinematic system.

I also happen to like the "every time an attack is fully absorbed, you suffer 2 subdual points" rule. This is because in Spycraft, firearm damage is high enough that if you're getting dinged, then the actual damage + subdual damage adds up fast. Armor slows down how badly you get dinged, but doesn't completely stop it. Conceptually, it's all that bruising going on under the vest, etc.

Also, the Burst rules in Spycraft are better, although the Autofire concept is better done in D20Modern IMHO. "Burst Fire" in D20Modern should just be a differently named feat. SC also has nice options such as "Cover Fire" and "Keep Their Heads Down". The tactics are built for firearms. Really worth checking out.