In Sprawl Goons and the Carbon Edition, armour is abstracted and folded into the Dangerous Action Roll as a bonus. Here, I'd like to present an alternative way to handle PC and NPC personal protection.
If a character is wearing body armour, they no longer add a +1 bonus to their combat Action Roll. Instead, if a category of armour is worn on the body location hit by an attack, the Armour Rating is deducted from the damage received by the character.
Example:
Katya Kaiser is running for the cover of a parked R-Cab after taking down a Genexus agent. As she does so, another agent takes aim and fires. She dives, but fails her Action Roll, taking damage from the shot which hits her in the torso for 6 points. Katya is still wearing her spiderweave vest, which is classed as medium armour and reduces the damage by 2. So, Katya slides across the rain-slick asphalt, losing just 4 points of Resilience, rather than 6.
There are now three categories of armour:
• Light (-1 damage)
• Medium (-2 damage)
• Heavy (-3 damage)
[Tanksuits are still classed as vehicles and use the Vehicle Combat rules]
PERSONAL PROTECTION / BODY ARMOUR
Roll 2d6
02. Motorcycle Leathers - Light Armour
03. Arachnoweave Sleeve (figure-hugging second skin) - Light Armour
04. Carbon Fibre Flak Vest - Medium Armour
05. Laser-ablative Fabric (only effective vs lasers) - Heavy Armour vs lasers only
06. Impact Gel Inserts - Medium Armour
07. Ceramic Plate (hard armour shell, in sections) - Heavy Armour
08. Heavy Kevlar Jacket - Heavy Armour
09. Exo-frame (doubles Loadout score until you take it off; +1 Morphology) - Light Armour
10. Coil Suit (light-absorbing, black, myomar body suite; artificial muscle fibres confer +1 to Reaction)
- Medium Armour
11. Flame Retardant Sleeve (thin body sleeve; only one round of fire damage applies) - Light Armour
12. Heavy Leather Overcoat - Medium Armour
Armour CANNOT be layered on one location, the minuses do not stack. Layering also reduces character movement at the GM's discretion.
GMs now have the tools to create more armour variation for their characters. The wearing of differing helmets is now also viable.
Examples:
Steel - Medium Armour (-1 Reaction due to weight)
Added Ballistic Visor - Light Armour to protect the face (2-in-6 chance the visor is struck, rather than the helmet proper)
Kevlar - Medium Armour
Motorcycle Helmet - Light Armour
Ceramic - Heavy Armour
Arachnoweave Bandana - Light Armour
ARMOUR DEGRADATION
Armour can still be Slagged, as per the SG:U rules. Whether that rule is in play or not, no armour is beyond destruction. Any armour will degrade by 1 point when hit, if any damage penetrates and gets through to the wearer. When that armour is rated 0, it becomes useless and must be repaired or replaced.
Any thoughts on this are welcome in the comments below.
I know you're the game designer who created Sprawl Goons, but I find these new rules a little weird.
ReplyDeleteFirst, let me say that I like the 3 absorption tiers, it makes a lot of sense.
But, from that on, it feels like you moved from a level of high abstraction to a very concrete one that maybe, just maybe, doesn't match the rest of the rules and the fiction they imply.
The body part d6 is the second d6 you roll when a character gets a Critical Injury. But, all in all, it's only rolled when a Critical Injury happens and it's basically flavour (it doesn't matter that much which body part was hit rules-wise, which is fine).
When you add a body part roll for each Resilience hit, the fiction, at least for me, feels like it's falling apart.
Resilience points, by its own name, feel like a pool of heroic energy, the character's stamina, those are flesh wounds and bruises that can be easily ignored. After all, a character recovers all Resilience after only 8h of rest.
Let's now take these new rules for a walk:
Tanner is wearing a biker's jacket and a motorcycle helmet and fails a Dangerous Action Roll by 4 points, getting 4 damage to his Resilience. The player rolls for body part and gets a 6 (head). Now they have to roll again to see if the helmet was hit in its visor and gets a 2 (it was).
Besides demanding 2 more rolls after the DAR (one for body part and another one for whether it was the visor), what the narrative is saying it that Tanner took a bullet straight to the face and all he lost was 4 points of Resilience that can be easily recovered after a good night of sleep.
That said, maybe I think a little abstraction should be preserved so the Resilience concept remains the same. My suggestions:
• The body part specific armour (helmet for the head and jacket for torso and arms) are there to be sacrificed if there's a Critical Injury for that specific body part when hit location is rolled (that could justify the price gap between Motorcycle Leathers and Arachnoweave Sleeve, the latter covering torso and all limbs).
• A helmet or a shield adds +1 to the DAR and the only armour that absorbs damage is the torso one, just to keep it simple.
• A shield, when wielded, prevents the use of a two handed weapon and limits some actions (e.g., climbing), but allows the player to sacrifice it to protect any body part when a Critical Injury happens.
Anyways, this game is AMAZING and the Carbon Edition combined with Augmented Realities is is my go-to game for cyberpunk from now on. It is really great to see how this game has evolved and how much attention was put into it to make it evocative.
Maybe the numbers I suggested are a bit off.
ReplyDeleteA DAR bonus is far more significant than damage reduction.
In this case, a light helmet might not offer any bonus at all while a heavy helmet could offer that bônus (and be really expensive).
I was just rhinking about how we could have a more impactful ruleset for armour without adding more dice rolls to action resolution.
My point being that even Cyberpunk Red got rid of random hit locations for every shot because it was slowing the game.