[belaran]

Hi all,

I'm fairly unhappy with the current encumbrance rules attached to the armor. They only aimed at giving penality to stacking armor or having extra part while giving no penalty whatsoever if your only piece of armor is a heavy one. So I've tried to come up with a house rule to work around that:

A character can carry, without penalty, as much as (Strength + Body + 3) point of armor. For each 2 points of armor above this limit, a -1d to both Agility and Reaction applies. Stacking armor adds to the total points of armor in this regards.
Ex: A character with  a Str 3 and Body 3 character can carry up to 9 points of armor without any penalty, so he can use a chameleon suit or armor vest. If he carries both, the total armor is 18, so he will get -4d to both his Agility and Reaction. If he adds a helmet (+2), the total armor points arrives to 11, so he will get -1d penalty to both Agility and Reaction.

This is my house rule, so I (of course) like it. Especially I like the fact that a regular "joe" can carry an armor vest without penalty, but not more. It seems to me more "realistic" (as far as a world with elf, magic and technomancer can claim ground with reality ).

So I like this rule  and my question here is not "do you like it ?" but can you see this going wrong somehow ? Some impact I may have overlooked in the game ?

[Kuirem]

I think the current system is fine, it allows weak character to have a decent enough armor to go into a fight and big guys can still raise their soak pool quite high. Big armor are rare anyway because they raise a lot of suspicion, walk around in the city with a Full Body Armor and you will have the cops called on you in a split second. Unless you play full Pink Mohawk combat is a small part of runs anyway so most of the time you walk with a inconspicious, and weaker, armor and if you are caught by surprise you won't have time to put on your FBA.

From a Balance point of view, your weakling Decker/Mage with his measly 2 STR/BOD will only have 7 Armor max, if he ever gets into a gun fight he will be down ridiculously quickly. And you can't bet in Shadowrun that you will never be in a gun fight.

I think your formula would need to be STR + BOD + 6 at least else that's too much of a nerf. Right now you are saying that your average joe can't even put an armor jacket or an Armor Vest + Helmet without having trouble moving around. I'm also not convinced about bringing BOD in the equation, it means it now cound double for soaking damage and become an ridiculously important Attribute.

From a fluff point of view, RAW completely make sense. Full Body Armor is NOT a plate armor from D&D made of big clumps of metal hammered together. The armor is build to allow easy movement and is made of light but resilient materials. Note that big armor from Run&Gun come with their own "Restrictive" feature to reflect the encumbrance.

With your rules the biggest armor from Run & Gun can't even be equipped on a human. The heavy Security Armor will require 7 BOD/10 STR which is almost impossible to reach for a human. That's non-sense considering that these armor are worn by human security and not only Ork or Trolls. Even the light one will require 6 BOD 6 STR without counting the Helmet.

[Bushw4cker]

I agree with Kuirem

With your house rule, a character with average stats (All Rating 3) wearing an Armor Jacket with Gel packs, would be unable to move at all.

The two issues I have with Armor, First off, there is no distinction anymore between Ballistic and Impact anymore.

Second, I don't like the converting Physical Damage into Stun rule, if the modified Armor rating is Higher than the DV.

I think it would make more sense to do something like halve the modified DV (rounding up),  of any attack, where the  Modified Armor Rating is greater than the Modified DV.

Let's say that Average Joe Runner (Body 3) gets shot at with a Heavy Pistol while wearing his Armor Jacket. The guy shooting at him gets 1 Net Sucesses. (Heavy Pistol DV is 8P,  -1AP.), Average Joe Runner would roll 14 dice to try and resist 5P damage.

Just for fun, I rolled 14 dice six times to see how much Damage character would take.  Rolled: 6, 5, 4, 2, 3, and 7 hits.

[Quatar]

Bushw4cker, that idea would make a Troll with cyberware armor nearly impossible to kill. Not only do they roll 40 dice to soak damage, that sniper shot that did 20 DV only does 10 DV now.

[Bushw4cker]

Bushw4cker, that idea would make a Troll with cyberware armor nearly impossible to kill. Not only do they roll 40 dice to soak damage, that sniper shot that did 20 DV only does 10 DV now.

My original idea about Armor, was that if modified DV is less than modified Armor Rating, don't  convert to stun, but count 4, 5, and 6 as Hits.

Or use rule of Six, if Armor > DV

[Kiirnodel]

Bushw4cker, that idea would make a Troll with cyberware armor nearly impossible to kill. Not only do they roll 40 dice to soak damage, that sniper shot that did 20 DV only does 10 DV now.

My original idea about Armor, was that if modified DV is less than modified Armor Rating, don't  convert to stun, but count 4, 5, and 6 as Hits.

Or use rule of Six, if Armor > DV

The convert to Stun actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Think of any crime drama tv show, where a cop gets shot but their vest stops the bullet. If the show is being somewhat reallistic, the cop is probably still going down. They're probably going to be stunned at the very least and have a giant bruise to boot. The vest mitigates the damage, making the impact non-lethal, it doesn't halve the effect of the impact.

[Kiirnodel]

So I like this rule  and my question here is not "do you like it ?" but can you see this going wrong somehow ? Some impact I may have overlooked in the game ?

And also a response for the OP.

I get the idea of doing this, in fact that was the rule in the last edition (armor was limited by Bod x2). It was an optional rule to let one piece of armor be worn with no penalty. The problem I see with this sort of rule is that it doesn't really penalize people with high body, so all it ends up doing is punish low body characters even more.

Edited to Add:

You also run into the issue that anything a human can wear with difficulty (requiring high attributes) a Troll can basically wear without any concern whatsoever. They only need 1 more Body/Strength to match peak physical fitness of a human.

I took a look at the gear, and you may have overlooked something. With that rule, unmodified, a human can't wear full body armor (with the matching helmet) without taking a penalty. Even a 6 Body, 6 Strength is only a total of 15 and that armor totals to 18. And that doesn't factor in the heavier security armors in Run & Gun.

[Zweiblumen]

Personally I think armor and encumbrance work just fine as-is in 5e.  It leans more towards abstraction than simulation, but the concept of strong armor converting P to S makes perfect sense to me and having a single piece/suit of armor be wearable by anyone seems more or less reasonable.  When you start stacking armor (note, chameleon armor and an armored vest don't stack, you'd use one or the other and look pretty silly with both) with shields/helmets/PPP/over-coats/etc, that makes sense that you'd need to be strong enough to cope with that extra encumbrance.
That said, to give STR a value for folks other than melee gurus you could do something like (STR * 2) + 6 for your base armor.  This would let a STR 2 wear some decent armor (long coat, armored vest, mortimer/zoé, chameleon) but would give a value to boosting str.

As for armor variation; I think they do a decent, but not great, job of that with various bonuses and situational effects of the various armors.


¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ymmv

[belaran]

Ok, some context might help where I come from here. With my main group, we misread this rule and basically applied it with the "free armor first". Meaning that most of my character have synthleather as armor (Armor 4) because anything else give them dreadful Agility bonuses. And honestly, we are happy like that. It make the game a bit more dangerous, which we like.

Now, the silly thing with this mistake we did, is that most armor are indeed out of reach. What I don't like about the regular rule is the lack of malus if you are wearing heavy armor.

As I agree with the comment of my rule making Body too important, I've changed my rule to (Strengh * 2 + 3).  Now, let's try to make you guys understand where I come from with this, by using a very, very concrete example. In real life, I'm not a strong guy, in Shadowrun I would probably have 1 or 2 in Strenght. If I were to be wearing an armor vest, I'm pretty sure I'll be encumbered enough to have a malus in both my Agility and Reaction.

A regular Jo, more biffed by me, (Str 3) would probably be wearing the same one without any maluses. If the same regular jo was wearing a combat armor (let's say 14 armor for simplicity sake), I would expect him to have some maluses to both Agility and Reaction. Thus my previous idea of having 9 as a threshold to start having penalty. In this context, regular Jo would get -2d maluses, which seems fair.

Now, moving above regular Jo, let's talk about Bob, security specialist, Strength of 5, can wear up to 13 point of armor without any maluses. (in previous version, the same Jo would probably have 5 in both Body and Strength so it would work).

Oh and btw:

Bushw4cker, that idea would make a Troll with cyberware armor nearly impossible to kill. Not only do they roll 40 dice to soak damage, that sniper shot that did 20 DV only does 10 DV now.

This is one of my issue. If you start rolling 20d to soak, you can soak a lot - way too much to my taste. I like my Shadowrun game a bit more closer to the vest (not an armored one). Basically, you can probably get shoot a couple of times, before it start to hurt too much or just be down, but not more...

@ZweiBlumen: FYI, our game will be unaffected, we'll apply the rule as describ in 5ed

[Zweiblumen]

The downside is that it's almost impossible to *not* be one-shotted if you have a str < 6.

If you've an armor of 6 (armored clothes) and a body of 3, you're rolling 9 dice to soak and you've 10 monitors spots for physical.  An Ares Predator is doing minimum of 9P -1v on a 1 net hit shot.  You've 8 dice to soak 9 damage.  Lets say the person is a decent shot, and they get 3 net hits instead of one, and that they are using the ubiquitous APDS rounds.  Now you're looking at soaking 11P with 4 dice.  On average you're gonna get 1 hit, and you're 1shotted.  And that's just from a pistol.  SR is supposed to be scary and dangerous, but instsa-killing everyone seems extreme to me.  IMHO, the armor rules balance out with the weapons rules as they currently are.  That said, if you're players are enjoying the game, no reason to change things.  The point of the *game* is to enjoy it  

I appreciate that *our* game is using RAW