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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9486107" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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