Bullets Piercing Armor

I know that John (II) said not to bring this to a new thread, but it probably does need to be discussed in a new thread, so I'm bringing it here. I'm starting with a recap of what is posted in Behind the Screens 2008 (and gee, if that link actually works, I've learned something today about the forum coding).

John (II) "A1nut" Cross started it:

MJ, I don't see any kind of bonuses for shooting armor piercing bullets. A 7.62X39 (What I'm shooting) is designed to be a light armor piercing round.

This led to a response from Eric "Tadeusz" Ashley:

There is a list of bullets effects I created on this board. It probably covers
AP.

I think MJ has something against (although not extreme) different types of bullets. Jhiaxus had a discussion on this issue with him.

I suspect it principally falls into the category of having to create details.
Its one of the things that is very hard for a 'generic' game because there are literally a thousand and one different sets of details you need. Multiverser is not the only 'generic' game that has this problem, although many others more directly confront their problem (Mage and Champions forex). Indeed, I think this problem is inherent to the design.

Besides no one particularly wants to write 300,000 words. However, it needs to be done.

Also, certain residents of the People's Socialist Republics of the Northeast might have a tiny bit less experience with guns since they are not as free as Real Americans :). And just as I'm a bit reluctant to write on the law from my lack of experience (although I'll do it with some reluctance)so might someone be from what Tom Kratman called the People's Republic of Massachusetts, or its sisters.

Not finished with the matter, John continued:

And another thing. How does their armor affect my ability to hit them? I should have the same chance to hit that I had with anyone else. The damage value is what would be lowered. I mean I'm still shooting at a man sized target at the same distance. I have the same chance to hit said target. I could see the damage value being reduced an intensity, but the bullets wouldn't change direction because they were about to strike armor as opposed to flesh.

EDIT: I mean if you have a 6 foot by 3 foot piece of paper, and a 6 foot by 3 foot piece of titanium alloy, and you're shooting from the same distance, you have an equal chance to hit both of them. Your chances of hitting the titanium alloy are not reduced, your chance of PENETRATING it is reduced. See what I mean?

Scott "William T. Wodium" Horton, quoting part of that, gave a solid answer:

And another thing. How does their armor affect my ability to hit them?

That's a good question. My usual answer is that it doesn't. The penalty for cover value applies directly to your chance of skill success - that is, it reduces your chance of dealing damage with your firearm. Because of the relative success rules for calculating damage, this means that your maximum damage on a single blow drops along with your chances of dealing any damage at all.

Don't think of the penalty as turning otherwise good hits into misses. Think of it as turning good hits into mediocre hits, turning mediocre hits into cruddy hits, and preventing the hits that would have been cruddy even without the armor from doing any significant damage at all. That's not what the math looks like when you see it first, but that's effectively what the sit-mod is doing.

John posted again:

Well, I would have made it so that you had the same chance to hit, but a shot that would have done dangerous damage would now only do annoying damage. Something like that. That way, it wouldn't confuse players.

and then posted yet once more:

If the truth be told, I think the sit mod in this case is completely bogus anyway. I'm shooting light armor piercing bullets at armor that is designed to stop blunt force trauma. Chain mail would stop a slash from a sword, but a stab would go right in between the links. I used to have a friend that made chain mail vests to sell at conventions. They were great for reducing blunt force trauma (club, mace, ax, sword slash) but a thin sword like a rapier would go between the links and they would have little to no effect at stopping or even slowing it down. Bullets are, for all practical intents and purposes, a stab. (Think of it like the tip of a sword moving at about Mach 2.5) I don't care what the rules say, chain mail would be quite ineffective at stopping bullets. Of course, if we took the time to include every single modification that could be made in Da Rulez!! it would go from being the size of a telephone book, to being a multi-volume of telephone books. Oh well, maybe when I'm in Heaven, I'll get to become a verser, and try this out for real.

EDIT: MJ, I realize that probably sounds not too kind. There's no need to explain how the chain mail stops bullets, or start a new thread on the topic, or anything like that. Consider it pretty much dropped. The purpose of the forum is so that we can learn how to referee, and so that you, as the author, can get feedback from players about the game. Consider that feedback from a player about the game, and consider it dropped.

That is the discussion to this point; I'm going to post this much to make sure I've got it formatted right, and then I'm going to respond.

--M. J. Young

Let me start with this:

I think MJ has something against (although not extreme) different types of bullets.

I am not opposed to bullets having different effects; I am opposed to overly complicating the situation.

Given that these are armor piercing bullets, the assumption is being made that they are specifically good at piercing armor. I think, though, that this is already covered in the fact that they've been given a base lethal damage value. That is, armor piercing bullets do more damage against armor-clad opponents because they do more damage against everything--they will do more damage to an unarmored opponent than an otherwise comparable bullet that is not designed to be armor piercing.

I could have said that armor piercing bullets do ordinary dangerous damage against all targets, but get a +20 sit-mod against any armor. This has some really peculiar effects, though. Suppose I am wearing a bullet-proof vest--vest only. Previous calculations make the cover value of such a vest -12 (because you can be shot in the legs, the vest not covering all of your body). The armor-piercing bullets give a +20 bonus only if the target is wearing armor--which means that the person wearing a bullet proof vest is 8% less likely to be hit by the bullet if he removes the vest.

So say that it eliminates the effects of armor entirely. Now you have an entirely different problem--defining what constitutes "armor" for purposes of this elimination. Armor, under the rules, is cover, but that it moves with the wearer. That is, putting on a suit of armor is the equivalent of having a wall interposed between you and the attacker, but that you can move the wall. Suddenly we have a gun that can shoot through any such cover--including punching holes in neutronium alloy space ship hulls. We make mecha armor from depleted uranium, but it doesn't stop armor piercing bullets.

Any solution to this becomes much more complicated in play. Do you want to make it so that armor piercing bullets penetrate any cover up to the density of the bullet, but has no effect above that? That's a sort of bright-line test that really does not make sense, since the relative density of the two substances should mean increasing resistance of the armor against the bullet. Do you want armor piercing bullets to reduce cover value by a percentage? John wants it to mean that leather and chain and steel plate won't stop his bullets at all, but I'm sure he would agree that three inch thick depleted uranium would. Besides, this would mean that the more resistance a piece of cover has to penetration, the more effective the bullet is at reducing that resistance--that it would reduce the 12% cover of a vest by 1%, the 25% cover of chain mail by 3%, and the 80% cover of a solid uranium wall by 8%.

The question, then, is what really happens when any projectile hits any cover?

The answer is, the cover slows and deflects the projectile to some degree. That means fewer shots actually hit the person behind the cover, and those which do are less effective.

That is best defined by sit-mods.

I could define it by damage (die) mods, but other than the reduced botch effect this really doesn't make that much difference in this scenario. That is, if we're looking at a 60% chance to hit for dangerous damage, our shooter can roll up to 60 and do up to 6 intensities of damage. If we put a -20 sit-mod on that, we have any roll up to 40 is successful, and we can do up to four intensities of damage. Let us instead take a -20 damage mod. That means that any roll up to 60 will still hit, but we will subtract 20 from the roll before calculating damage. all rolls through 20 now do 0 damage, and rolls from 21 through 60 do from 1 to 4 intensities. We have the same effective range of damage as we would with a sit-mod, but a more complicated calculation to derive it. The only real difference in effect is that there is a 6% chance to botch with the sit-mod and only a 4% chance to botch with the damage mod--and I'm not certain that's an advantage, particularly since we have admitted we are using a highly complex technological device in a low tech world with very dangerous ammo.

I suspect it principally falls into the category of having to create details.

Its one of the things that is very hard for a 'generic' game because there are literally a thousand and one different sets of details you need....

Besides no one particularly wants to write 300,000 words. However, it needs to be done....

Also, certain residents of the People's Socialist Republics of the Northeast might have a tiny bit less experience with guns since they are not as free as Real Americans....

Although I've never felt any legal constraint preventing me from owning or using guns, and I have had experience with a variety of firearms (mostly in the Berkshires at my Uncle's place) ranging from flintlocks through rifles and shotguns, I admit readily that I've insufficient experience with or knowledge of guns to adequately address the matter. That is a fair point. The rest, though, I think a bit unfair.

In the Spring before Multiverser went to print, there were several projects envisioned to expand the game. Among them was a detailed combat supplement giving information on hundreds of real and imagined, historic and futuristic, weapons and attack forms in every bias area. We were going to do this with the aid of the employees we would hire with all the money that was going to come pouring into our coffers when our new game took the role playing world by storm.

Not only did that money not come, my partner, who was considerably better informed in and experienced with firearms (military marksmanship ribbons) and weapons (SCA and Marklanders) than I, dropped out of the effort. He had good reasons at the time, and I do not hold any ill-will for that. However, it left the guy who knew very little about real weapons to do whatever was to be done, and a priority at the time on completing a second book of worlds (which took too long as it was) and getting the game promoted on a shoestring.

I'm given to understand that BTRC has published an excellent resource on real weapons entitled Guns, Guns, Guns, and I have long wished I could obtain a copy and find a way to do direct conversions of their numbers to ours without infringing on their intellectual property. I have too many other financial needs to have been able to make that acquisition, so I can neither personally recommend the book nor do the conversion.

The problem of the sit-mod versus a damage modifier is adequately addressed by Scott:

Don't think of the penalty as turning otherwise good hits into misses. Think of it as turning good hits into mediocre hits, turning mediocre hits into cruddy hits, and preventing the hits that would have been cruddy even without the armor from doing any significant damage at all. That's not what the math looks like when you see it first, but that's effectively what the sit-mod is doing.

Because of the single-roll hit-and-damage system, that is what happens--your best shots are reduced in the amount of damage they can do, and the shots that would have been minimal hits are deflected or slowed such that they do no damage.

Part of the problem arises in describing the scene, and part of it comes from Multiverser's (and most games') system of combining all penalties into one. That makes sense, given that when you attempt to turn it around you get all kinds of confusion. In this case, we have the target value, which is already a combination of how well the individual dodges and how tough it is to penetrate his body with an attack, and separately we have the cover value, which is also a combination of to what degree the metal deflects the bullets and to what degree it slows them. I'm trying to give a credible color description to a mathematical result, and in assessing "credible" I'm giving place to the player's sensibilities. He thinks that a bullet of this sort would never be deflected by armor of this sort, even if it caught the edge of the shoulder or something. Thus in my descriptions I did not say that the chain ever deflected a bullet (although if he were shooting at Adam's Spectra Armor I probably would have included deflection in the descriptions). I am not so persuaded, but I'm not going to let that difference of opinion get in the way of our game. The dice say that this bullet missed. It doesn't matter, to anything mechanical within the game, whether it missed because he panicked in his aim, or the target dodged, or the metal chain stopped the bullet; it only matters to the color.

His objection is that the metal chain should never slow or stop a bullet of this sort. Forgive me for saying so, but that is an absurd objection even if your Uncle Bob doesn't realize it. A bullet that hits an unarmored man will hit him harder and faster than one that has to pass through a sheet of metal to get there; it therefore will do more damage. The flip side of that is that an armored man is going to take less damage from bullets which pass through his armor. That is achieved by reducing the probability on the success roll. In other words, this:

I mean if you have a 6 foot by 3 foot piece of paper, and a 6 foot by 3 foot piece of titanium alloy, and you're shooting from the same distance, you have an equal chance to hit both of them. Your chances of hitting the titanium alloy are not reduced, your chance of PENETRATING it is reduced.

...both hits and misses the point. The point is not whether you can hit the six-by-three rectangle; the point is whether you can hit the man standing behind that six-by-three rectangle. If he is standing behind a sheet of paper, that's going to have a negligible effect on your ability to hit him; if he's standing behind a wall of titanium, that's going to have a tremendous effect on it. A steel chain curtain falls somewhere between the two, reducing your chance to hit the man behind it.

Well, I would have made it so that you had the same chance to hit, but a shot that would have done dangerous damage would now only do annoying damage.

This is a much more severe penalty than the one imposed, apart from being considerably harder to adjudicate fairly. There are, after all, only seven damage categories, and there is quite a range of potential cover. Let's say that each density level of the cover creates one damage category penalty. That would mean that armor made of leather, wood, glass, or bone would create one damage category penalty, some plastics, soft metals, soft stone, and most polymers two, hard metal two to four, hard stone three to four, gems three to five, and sci-fi and fantasy materials like mithril and duralloy three to six. This gives no factor for how complete the cover is; either you have to work out separately whether or not the cover was hit, or you have to give the benefit to anyone wearing as little as a single armband. We now have a system whereby a man carrying a mithril shield can reduce the force of an atomic blast to an annoying attack, which might or might not do one intensity of damage to him.

More to the point, a damage category penalty typically reduces the damage done by half or more. A situation modifier reduces damage by a fraction based on a reduced chance that you would land a "good" hit. If that chance is already very low, it's a significant penalty--but if you're a good shot, the penalty for the armor is a considerably smaller part of the total.

Chain mail would stop a slash from a sword, but a stab would go right in between the links. I used to have a friend that made chain mail vests to sell at conventions. They were great for reducing blunt force trauma (club, mace, ax, sword slash) but a thin sword like a rapier would go between the links and they would have little to no effect at stopping or even slowing it down.

If you want to aim for one of the holes between the links, you're welcome to do so. Chain mail, in my experience, is made of rings between one half and one inch in diameter; since the wire is at least a sixteenth of an inch thick, you're looking at maybe as small as an eighth of an inch hole, through which other links are passing. That's smaller than the diameter of your bullet--which means you can't possibly shoot through the center of the ring without hitting the edges.

So chain mail impedes bullets. It does not stop them--nothing stops anything competely, it just works to make it much more difficult to hit the person behind it.

I hope this answers the problems.

--M. J. Young

Yeah, MJ, it answers it. Just to nitpick though, in this instance, the armor might actually increase the effectiveness of the weapon. Imagine a bullet striking the chain mail. Not only is the bullet going to enter, it's going to turn pieces of the chain mail into shrapnel. It's cool.

Something though that I have seen. An armor piercing 30-06 (Steel core bullet) went through a 3/4 inch piece of plate steel, like it had been drilled. The guy that showed it to me said it went through that, and an 18 inch oak tree that was behind it. The hole looked like it had been drilled. So, I do know some of what I'm saying about armor piercing bullets. The ones I am using are not steel core bullets, but they would shred kevlar. In fact, I've been told that it would take a bomb disposal kevlar vest to stop a 7.62X39. Those are about 6 inches thick reinforced kevlar. A normal kevlar vest, minus trauma plates, you might as well be wearing a tee shirt.

Ya know what MJ? I think I owe you an apology. I was thinking about this, and I remembered a story I read a long time ago. Police got into a gunfight with a motorcycle gang. The police were shooting 45 automatics. The motorcycle gang were all wearing heavy leather biker jackets. They found out that the biker jackets actually stopped the police 45 bullets in many of the hits. So I guess if leather can stop a bullet, then a steel chain mail could as well.

Its relatively rare that I find myself disagreeing so broadly with MJ.

I contend that reality and the common desire of many player's is on the side of making optional rules for bullets. MJ contends that this is too complex, causes problems, and that chainmail greatly impedes bullets. I would reply that these are game design problems, and that a game that claims to be 'every story is true somewhere' should be open to having those problems solved.

I would also reccomend taking off your chain mail armor before you get into a gunfight.

I guess I should be more clear in what I was saying here MJ. I wasn't trying to say that the chain mail wouldn't slow the bullets down at all, what I was saying is that the guy that got shot would be just as dead. The Grim Reaper wouldn't know the difference. Yes, the chain mail would slow the bullet down, but not enough that it would make any difference to whether or not the guy survived the hit. My oft-repeated example of shooting through the military ammo can. Yes, I have no doubt in my mind that the ammo can slowed the bullet down. What I am saying is that if someone was on the receiving end of the shot, the fact that there was an ammo can in the way would just mean that the guy lived for an additional 2 mircoseconds.

My oft-repeated example of shooting through the military ammo can.

Fill the can with sand and try it again. Compare to shooting the same volume of sand contained in a paper packet. This is MJ's counterpoint.

Also, bear in mind that lethal bullets + 2@ SAL deals "fatal" damage no matter what the sit-mod is; if it brings your chance of success from 54% to 30%, you're still quite capable of dealing 15 intensities of damage with that roll of 30, an instant kill. Bear in mind too that many of your shots aren't instant kills even without the armor - flesh wounds and the like.

Tad - armor exists that can stop bullets. It's the referee's call which armors can and cannot do so, and the default assumption is (and must be) that cover value is effective against attack. If the referee wishes to make an exception for certain attacks, there are means available to him.

(Personally, if I wanted to make armor-piercing weapons whose armor-piercing qualities were useless in the absence of armor - a concept that I have some reservations about - I would say "ignores up to the first 20 points of sit-mods for cover value." This requires that I check cover value separately every time my player attacks a new foe, but if I made that ruling, I'd have brought the extra work onto myself of my own accord.)

If the referee would rather not make exception for certain attacks against certain armors, then he can quite simply simulate the "armor-piercing" quality of the weapon by allowing the cover value to apply but increasing the damage of the weapon across the board. This is what MJ has done in this case. This has the effect that, when there is armor, the bullet penetrates more easily - AND, when there is not armor, the bullet still penetrates more easily.

The wisdom of this approach becomes more apparent when one considers that Density is a factor in Target Value.

Side point: "All stories are true" =/= "all game mechanics are viable and/or desirable."

To this from John:

I wasn't trying to say that the chain mail wouldn't slow the bullets down at all, what I was saying is that the guy that got shot would be just as dead.

This from Scott:

Bear in mind too that many of your shots aren't instant kills even without the armor - flesh wounds and the like.

It is already clear that your fatal gun will not always kill every person it hits--you can hit a man in the arm or leg, and he might be not only alive but still fighting; you can graze a man and wound him but not hamper his abilities in the least.

The armor reduces the number of clearly fatal shots. A higher proportion of those shots which hit wound instead of kill.

To this from Eric:

I contend that reality and the common desire of many player's is on the side of making optional rules for bullets. MJ contends that this is too complex, causes problems, and that chainmail greatly impedes bullets. I would reply that these are game design problems, and that a game that claims to be 'every story is true somewhere' should be open to having those problems solved.

This from Scott:

"All stories are true" =/= "all game mechanics are viable and/or desirable."

One aspect of Multiverser that does not see much exposure on the forum is its ability to interface with other game systems. This is quite simply because we do not wish publicly to infringe on the rights of other game designers--although the specific reason we do not use our licensed Legends of Alyria interfacing rules is that with that particular game it is rather important to involve the other players in the roles of non-player characters, and the forum game is hampered by the disruptions of schedules of its many players.

The point is, it is entirely possible to bring a player character into a world in which any particular game mechanic system is true, and have it be true while in that game world. Right now John is in a world in which there is a magic cloak which will work if he dons it--that is all he has to do. If he takes it with him, though, that cloak reverts to Multiverser magic device rules, and thus a roll will be necessary to determine whether it works when he dons it or not. In the same way, you can have a world in which armor piercing bullets go through depleted uranium unimpeded, if that's the way the mechanic is devised; but once you take those bullets out of that world, it is important that they work according to the rules established for technological devices, and that includes that cover impedes physical attacks. I don't care if the cover is a sheet of water pouring down from a fountaing like a waterfall--it is going to deter the ability of a shooter to hit and kill his target, even if only by one percent.

There is another factor in John's world that I did not realize until I was talking to another player late last night over the phone. John is using a high tech weapon in a low tech world. That means that the gun does not work as well, and the bullets do not work as well--for all that, even swords do not work as well in that world as they do in ours, because the tech bias is lower. One of the expressions of this lower tech bias is that it is harder to penetrate armor with piercing attacks. It just is. If John were firing at that same guard in that same armor in this world, he would have something like a 14% better chance to hit, and comparable increases in damage, because technological devices including weapons work better in this world than they do in that one.

This also becomes a problem for the "pierces all armor" type bullet: how do you adjust it for bias? A high tech device has to lose some of its advantage in a low tech world, but not usually all of it.

As Scott says, I am not against any referee making his own job harder; I am against any outside observer telling me that I have to do so in the games I am running. I prefer to keep special effects of attacks into the known categories of combat skill checks, which are:

• Positive and negative sit-mods, increasing or decreasing the chance to hit the target and inherently increasing or decreasing the potential damage done.
• Positive and negative die mods, altering chance to hit and average damage inversely to each other and changing the chance to botch.
• Damage points, altering the roll for damage calculation purposes only.
• Damage category bonuses and penalties, increasing or decreasing the level of damage done by an attack or conferring damage points when the maximum damage category changes are reached.
• Base damage category, that is, deciding that this bullet is lethal but that one only dangerous because this is a more damaging bullet.
• Damage riders, a second damage category attached to the same attack, as divided into
  • Intrinsic damage riders which tag more of the same kind of damage on an attack, using the same attack roll, as a way of fine-tuning the amount of damage inflicted;
  • Secondary damage riders, using the same roll for two distinct types of damage, such as blast damage and fire damage in an explosion, controlled by the same roll but possibly countered by different defenses;
  • Dependent damage riders, the use of a second skill which is rolled if the first is successful, such as the magic damage (only) bonus on a sword which must make a successful attack before determining whether the magic also worked.

The variety of adjustments possible within the rules is already significant, and few people really use them effectively. I certainly don't object to advice concerning how a particular weapon or bullet ought to be handled, but I don't think it is good game design to create new mechanics when existing mechanics suffice.

--M. J. Young

Just to throw a wrench in the works:

Don't armor-piercing bullets more or less require that the person you're shooting at actually be armored in order to do the most damage possible? I remember seeing a show like that, on the Military channel or something, where they were talking about armor-piercing rounds, and basically they said that if you shot such a round at a target who was not armored, there was a significant chance that it would simply blow right through, doing noticably less damage than a non-armor-piercing round, which would tend to flatten out more and thus destroy more tissue (whereas an armor-piercing round, with no layer of armor to flatten it, will shoot a very small hole through an unarmored target).

...

I'm gonna go hide now from the pile of books someone is surely planning to drop on me.

If you can devise a rule accounting for this that also accounts for when I'm shooting AP rounds at gargoyles, I'm interested.

I suppose I ought to dissect this point by point, but I am not confident that anyone would be truly listening.

Thank you John7 for validating one of my points.

Osevens, that is actually a valid point. It would increase the penetration power of the round significantly. In my particular case, I'm shooting standard 7.62X39 rounds. The standard round is not armor piercing per se, but it is designed to penetrate light armor. A true armor piercing round usually has a hardened core (steel, depleted uranium, etc.) mine have a standard lead core, but by their design, will penetrate light armor. Hard to explain. It would depend on what you were shooting at. Those armor piercing 30-06 rounds I was referring to are designed for attacking armored vehicles. Mine are designed for attacking armored soldiers. Obviously, an armored soldier would have less armor than a vehicle. But yeah Osevens, what you observed kind of goes to what MJ said about having less of a chance to hit if the person took off their bullet proof vest.

Gargoyles have stone skin don't they?

Bullet proof vests are a funny thing. They will stop a bullet, but not a knife or an arrow. Believe it or not, they will stop a bullet from a modern gun, but not from an 18th century flintlock. Why is that? Because Kevlar is designed to stop a spinning bullet. An 18th century flintlock has a smooth barrel, so the bullet isn't spinning. That's why they started putting trauma plates in the vests. It's a steel plate which goes in the main section. That will stop the knife, where the Kevlar wouldn't.

The one that I always thought was kind of cool. A 12 gauge shotgun slug is spinning, so a Kevlar vest will stop it. However, it hits so hard that it's still going to break all of their ribs, trauma plates or no trauma plates.

I ought to write an article on different types of armor, and what they stop, and what they don't stop.

Some of the kinetic impact weapons in Mary Piper would probably ignore most of the kevlar since as A1 points out a shotgun slug can still bang you up from pure impact.

Mirrors are best for laser defense, but white cloth is also good, as is cloth the color of the laser blast (thus if you have a green shirt on and a green laser blast hits you, it does less damage.) Aerosol fogs are also good, as is plain old smoke.

Magnetic forcefields would be great for proton and electron beam aka charged particle weapons, but useless against lasers. And a mirror isn't going to do much to an electron beam, I think. And a .45 is going to cut right through both with its lead bullet.

Chain mail came along, and swordsmakers of the middle ages responded by making weapons that focused on piercing which then lead the armorers to make plate armor.

The Mongol horse archers wore silk shirts under their light armor because an arrow would not penetrate the silk, but would push the silk ahead of it into a wound. This made removing the arrow (which was often as bad as getting shot in the first place) a lot easier.

A Hollowpoint bullet will do little damage to an armored opponent, but a great deal to an unarmored opponent.

Add in what A1 and 07 said about AP, and we've got a fair start.

Often sonic weapons can, in stories, be defeated by earplugs.

I think radiation weapons would cut through pretty much everything but forcefields, and too heavy to be practical armor.

The Jackson Laser Blaster, a more realistic weapon than most laser blasters, did in its enemies by dumping heat into the target, and flash-boiling them. I can't see kevlar helping much there.

Cutting Blades, courtesy of Starsong, are monofilament blades. Kevlar might protect you because I tried to be realistic. A hard substance causes the blade to deteriorate.

But there are plenty of mono blades in fiction that are not so realistic, and would cut through kevlar like a light saber would. As in, with no difficulty whatsoever.

A neat, or perhaps terrifying idea, is the self-forging anti-personell round. A bit of explosive, a bit of metal that the explosive forges into a dart....well, I can see them being made in twenty years. It would probably laugh at kevlar, and likely cut through bomb grade kevlar as well. Incidentally, I think this is basically a bullet form of an IED, and the IED is the roadside mine of the anti-tank shell or anti-tank missile that has been able to do this for over a decade.

Right now, we can't do a self-forging bullet, but its eminently reasonable to expect such in a couple decades. Can you imagine, a .22 pistol with a subsonic round for silence, that thanks to its round self-forging and accelerating to oh, 5 thousand fps at the last moment, can penetrate Bradley armor (Armored Personal Carrier), and it naturally has a minimal kick....pretty scary.

Of course, one of the defenses against this is what is called Reactive armor. The armor explodes in tiny fractions of a second as the weapon penetrates, and thus the weapon is thrown off, and deformed so that the pure killing spike becomes some less effective shape.

A Hollowpoint bullet will do little damage to an armored opponent, but a great deal to an unarmored opponent.

Actually Tad, it would greatly depend on what type of hollow point, and what type of armor. A Gold Dot hollow point is designed to penetrate Kevlar. It comes out spinning, as bullets do. On impact, when it mushrooms out, the tip folds back into 6 tiny blades. Imagine a blender that was 9mm in diameter. It cuts the Kevlar. Ya know what? Now I think I figured out why the rules on this are so generic. There's far too many variables to consider.

Can I load a .45 with FMJ, and another .45 with Hollowpoint, and a .50 with FMJ, and by the rules see a different effect for each shot? If not, this needs to be fixed. If yes, then we have no problem.

And I've wasted enough time on this discussion already.

Eric

Tad - sure you can. You can also see different results in turning radius and acceleration based on the precise make, model, and weight of your four-door sedan. Most referees in most situations, however, will not find the payoff to be worth the trouble. If the player gets heavily involved in street racing such that those details become the meat of the playing experience, then certainly, I'd cobble together some custom rules and I'd expect most other referees would make the same choice. Until then, however, it doesn't really matter.

Also, I highly doubt I would allow myself to get into that situation in the first place, because I, the referee, know almost nothing about cars. I don't have the time or interest to research them properly, and it's awkward to be in the position of officially adjudicating the minutia of a field in which your player is much better informed. If my player became highly interested in the details of learning a new foreign language or deciphering an archaic inscription, or even in the details of taking a medieval castle by siege, I would gladly go into greater depth and finer focus with the rules if necessary; thanks to my undergraduate linguistics courses and a minor research project back in high school, I would feel reasonably qualified to do so.

I do agree with you that it could be useful in some cases to have some fair and balanced statistics already worked out that dealt with a wide variety of weapon and ammunition types. I do not think that this is something that needs to be done with any urgency.

Apologies, Tad, I neglected to address your many excellent ideas regarding attacks and their various defenses. I can't address each in turn just at the moment, but I will say that many of those defenses are much better represented by something other than cover value. There are a variety of forms of Resistance to damage, they're generated by a variety of skills to be found in all bias areas, and they even come in three different rules-mechanical constructions. Combining this in various ways with the existing (and unaltered) mechanics for cover value ought to replicate everything you list.

For example, if it's important to you, your player and the game that hollow points deal reduced damage but are more effective at penetrating armor, you could model it this way: reduce the damage of the shot in all cases (perhaps a -10 damage mod), but require a skill check for the armor to be effective against the bullet. Either the defender must roll for his armor, with relative success equaling the percentage of his cover value which remains effective against attacks from this character with this weapon for this combat under this bias, or else allow the attacker to make a check for his weapon, with relative success equaling the percentage of cover value he may ignore (against this type armor for this combat under this bias).

Others on your list are more straightforward - the laser defenses, for example, are technological resistances which operate by a simple skill check, sit-modded for the effectiveness of the defense.

Scott and I have both talked quite a bit about what you can do with adjustments to weapons, but he brings up a significant point, and that is that there are many things you can do with defenses.

One point Scott missed is that it is stated as possible for "cover" to be effective against specific types of attacks, and to be more effective against some and less effective against others. Highly polished reflective metal plate armor might have one "cover value" relative to kinetic attacks, a different but still effective one against lasers, a significantly lower value against sonics, and none at all against electricals. The referee is tasked with determining how much protection, if any, cover value offers against attacks which are not of the same category as that against which it is designed. Again, this is because there are too many kinds of protections and too many kinds of attacks.

Also, although it is most common in bod skills and sometimes found in mag skills, there is no reason why certain kinds of "armor" wouldn't be skill-based. For example, using a sonic dampening field against sonic weapons would require an activation roll; the activation roll could then be the equivalent of cover value, subtracted from the sonic attack rolls, in the same way that an evasive tumbling roll is subtracted from an attacker's chance to hit.

There are a lot of ways to handle combat-related attacks and defenses because there are a lot of different attacks and defenses to handle.

Scott also makes an excellent point about cars. I would not be the person to dictate the bonuses and penalties of different cars--or of different guns, or different bullets, or different martial arts styles, or different computers. I'm a generalist, learning less and less about more and more and working toward the time when I will know nothing about everything. I don't pretend to know more than my players about anything except how the game mechanics work; when players bring things into the game about which they are knowledgeable, I work with them to attempt to define what matters about their skills or equipment in terms that work in the game--but I also strive to keep things simple. It's bad enough that I have a dozen different kinds of guns in the game and have to look each one up each time it is used, I also have different kinds of defenses against those guns, and have to remember to check these as well.

Which reminds me--I've a lot of work to do running games tonight, and I've hit several delays in trying to get there, so I'd better wrap up here.

--M. J. Young