Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I don't really care what the story becomes, as long as it makes logical sense and follows from setting events. I loved the season 3 storyline you reference.
Which fantasy TRPGs do you think truly reflect the characteristics of firearms as Game Changers?
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question:
Firearms are usually described as being able to ignore armor AC. so how can modern bulletproof armor plate be represented in rules?
The protective area of modern bulletproof armor (a plate carrier with lv4 plate,for a example) is usually very small, with less than half of the torso being protected——————It can provide very little armor AC,especially in melee combat.but it can stop small firearm's bullets.
Its protective area is small even than breast plate, but still pretty heavy.
magic enhanced armor and gun are possible,but how to demonstrate their ability to block bullets and penetrate armor in terms of rules?
Firearms are usually described as being able to ignore armor AC. so how can modern bulletproof armor plate be represented in rules?
The protective area of modern bulletproof armor (a plate carrier with lv4 plate,for a example) is usually very small, with less than half of the torso being protected——————It can provide very little armor AC,especially in melee combat.but it can stop small firearm's bullets.
Its protective area is small even than breast plate, but still pretty heavy.
magic enhanced armor and gun are possible,but how to demonstrate their ability to block bullets and penetrate armor in terms of rules?
John Dallman
Hero
There re two conceptual problems here:
First, modern plates are not intended to let you ignore being shot at. Armour that can do that against rifles is too heavy to move in. They're intended to prevent you getting instantly killed. The hope - and it is hope - is that hits outside the covered area will not be instantly fatal, although many of them will take you out of the fight. You're relying on medical evacuation, hospital care and skilled surgery to survive hits, and they may well be life-changing. A solid hit on an arm or leg with a military rifle round may well cripple it beyond surgical reconstruction.
Second, Armour Class, as a concept, relies on you (a) having reasonably consistent levels of armour over all of your body, and (b) not looking at the issue too closely. When you try to represent someone with a helmet and plate carriers, it stops making sense.
Moonmover
Adventurer
Perhaps, then, medieval armor should reduce chance to hit (but is ignored by firearms), while modern armor acts as damage reduction or extra AC.
John Dallman
Hero
An idea: if you want to retain AC, have hit points steadily increase, and not have hit locations, then modern armour might act as a damage cap. This kind of plate caps damage at 15, for example, while another caps damage at 20.
The rationale for this is that the dice roll for damage represents, in part, where you got hit, as well as how good a swing was made with a melee weapon. Since a modern firearm has nearly constant damage potential from shot to shot if the ammunition is OK, damage variation must be mostly from shot placement.
Then low-damage hits can't have hit you anywhere vital, but high-damage ones must have hit somewhere important, which you (hopefully) have a plate over. This won't negate all damage, because the plate can only spread the impact, but it could limit the amount you take. Claiming that the amount it limits damage to is also applicable to hits that don't strike the plate is rather a stretch, but no more then D&D hit points usually are,
Celebrim
Legend
By using a more reasonable representation of the interaction between armor and a firearm. Firearms don't ignore AC. They reduce the bonus to AC from armor. You give firearms as "penetration" score. Early firearms might only have a penetration of 1. They effectively get no bonus to hit against unarmored targets and a +1 versus armored ones. By the time you get to 18th century Flintlocks, you might have +3 penetration. Modern gunpowder high velocity rifles might have penetrations of +6 or higher.
You can model modern armor somewhat using percentiles, but at some point, if you start caring a lot about realism you have to start modelling hit location. I personally don't favor that because the more non-abstract your combat, the more likely it is to be utterly and randomly lethal, and that's not good for a story nor does most heroic fiction work that way. Heroes in heroic fiction get hit and injured, but always in non-random ways. John Wayne or Sean Connery or Keanu Reeves isn't going to randomly take a bullet between the eyes. That's not the way heroic fiction that most RPGs are emulating works.
If you really wanted to model modern armor you'd give it attributes like "AC of 5 and penetration scores are reduced by 5". That doesn't have to be realistic to work, just create the right kind of randomness. Additionally I'd think a big thing about modern armor is that you'd model it as Fortification with say "50% chance to avoid a critical hit". This isn't exactly realistic but does cover the way modern armor is supposed to reduce the seriousness of injury exactly in the places where trauma would be critical.
When using an abstract system, the goal isn't realism. The goal is a plausible range of results. You are modelling the results of things and not the process.
Celebrim
Legend
Armor as DR works only on one of two assumptions. Either the DR is fixed but range of damage is random and large like Pendragons typical damage rolls of 4d6 or 5d6. Or else if the range of damage is low like 1d8, then the armor needs to provide a random reduction - say 1d4 maybe. Note that Pendragon effectively also make the DR random by giving a shield a random chance of adding to the DR.
If you don't do this, then armor because more absolute protection than is intended and you run into GURPS like problems of eventually all combats are long and resolved by random critical hits.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Give them a bad base AC, but allow the wearer to ignore critical hits from firearms?
aramis erak
Legend
AC simply is a horrid mechanic as implemented in the D&D/d20 lines...
Real world: Armor works by spreading the impact area so the force doesn't result in crossing the tissue damage thresholds (bruising, muscle disruption, bone fracture, bone cleaving.)
It does not make it less likely you will get hit. It can make a hit do strange disruptions...
The reason firearms are more dangerous is the concentration of force. A Karateka can get between 150 and 400 joules on a 4×8 to 5×10 cm area, so 50 J/cm² to 4 J/cm²... while a .357 runs around 1000 J over an area about 0.646 cm², around 1549 J/cm²... Even a 0.50 cal musket ball is more energy per unit area than the best fists...
But melee weapons can get to the same energy densities as small to mid caliber small arms, especially the late medieval ones.
And Bows can do the same or higher energy densities...
What bows need, however, is lots of practice to be good. A longbow can deliver a lot of energy, but how much varies by the longbow and the longbowman... a bodkin can get initial contact down to areas under 0.05cm², and up to 300 J...
The Crossbow ended the reign of the longbow- easier to learn, easier to practice, and heavier draws which combine with bodkin points to basically ignore chain, and on square hits, punch through plate.
The firearm was lesser than the crossbow until the flintlock made rifles and pistols fairly reliable...
The other element about real armor is that, for smooth surface rigid and semi-rigid armors, there's a chance of deflection.
GURPS takes into account both spreading the contact (via DR) and deflection (PD), but doesn't differentiate for the contact patch variation...
Palladium gets armor about as well as GURPS, but in different ways; it's two factors are AR (a measure of coverage) and SDC (a measure of durability - hits stopped by the armor damage it)... but it ignores the deflection chance and the spread factor.
Realistically, armor should be a divisor of damage, and a deflection chance, but that's going to annoy the math averse...
Borrowing Palladium's mode, but having a limit stopped per hit would seem to be the best overall compromise...
Real world: Armor works by spreading the impact area so the force doesn't result in crossing the tissue damage thresholds (bruising, muscle disruption, bone fracture, bone cleaving.)
It does not make it less likely you will get hit. It can make a hit do strange disruptions...
The reason firearms are more dangerous is the concentration of force. A Karateka can get between 150 and 400 joules on a 4×8 to 5×10 cm area, so 50 J/cm² to 4 J/cm²... while a .357 runs around 1000 J over an area about 0.646 cm², around 1549 J/cm²... Even a 0.50 cal musket ball is more energy per unit area than the best fists...
But melee weapons can get to the same energy densities as small to mid caliber small arms, especially the late medieval ones.
And Bows can do the same or higher energy densities...
What bows need, however, is lots of practice to be good. A longbow can deliver a lot of energy, but how much varies by the longbow and the longbowman... a bodkin can get initial contact down to areas under 0.05cm², and up to 300 J...
The Crossbow ended the reign of the longbow- easier to learn, easier to practice, and heavier draws which combine with bodkin points to basically ignore chain, and on square hits, punch through plate.
The firearm was lesser than the crossbow until the flintlock made rifles and pistols fairly reliable...
The other element about real armor is that, for smooth surface rigid and semi-rigid armors, there's a chance of deflection.
GURPS takes into account both spreading the contact (via DR) and deflection (PD), but doesn't differentiate for the contact patch variation...
Palladium gets armor about as well as GURPS, but in different ways; it's two factors are AR (a measure of coverage) and SDC (a measure of durability - hits stopped by the armor damage it)... but it ignores the deflection chance and the spread factor.
Realistically, armor should be a divisor of damage, and a deflection chance, but that's going to annoy the math averse...
Borrowing Palladium's mode, but having a limit stopped per hit would seem to be the best overall compromise...
rmcoen
Adventurer
Yes, to really start trying to model it, you need a computer. Pillars of Eternity starts getting into that math, for example, with armor providing damage reduction and deflection and taking into attacker skill with "grazes", hits, and crits. And doing this across each body part (since you can mix and match armor types per location with most armors)! But a "the table"... no, not fun.
