Making Powered Armor

[AgentSmith]

How would you simulate your powered armor having it's own Body and Stun scores that do not heal normally, seperate from the wearer's scores? If you take increased Stun as an OIF power, it adds to your own Stun, but only the stun from your own body should heal, the rest would require repair.

Create my own modifiers?

Make your armor as a vehicle?

[Beast]

as a focus it will have it's own body
should sombody target your suit seperatly you would need to repair it after the battle unless it had some healing/regen built in
you could buy the extra stun with a burnout roll to simulate various life support and cushioning systems failing after repeated abuse
this could be fixed after the battle could be a reason to add real weapon/armor to show that the armor needs upkeep and tuning



How would you simulate your powered armor having it's own Body and Stun scores that do not heal normally, seperate from the wearer's scores? If you take increased Stun as an OIF power, it adds to your own Stun, but only the stun from your own body should heal, the rest would require repair.

Create my own modifiers?

Make your armor as a vehicle?

[Nolgroth]

Four basic ways;
1) Buy a bunch of characteristics and powers with the Only in HERO ID Power Limitation.

2) Buy a bunch of characteristics and powers with Obvious Inaccessible Focus

3) Build it as a vehicle.

4) Build it as a Multiform (or if you want really bizarre try Duplication)

My own commentary on each method.
Method 1 is okay for the Super Hero genre. I suppose it gives a nice enough cost break to be worth building such a character when you have a whole lot of points to spend. It is not functionally different than having an early Thor or Hulk character so in many ways, it balances out.

Method 2 is less desirable because of one statement about people being able to take the item away from you easily out of combat (your character is unconscious). I see the balance reasons here. So, you could get the extra bonus if your powered armor has some sort of quick escape method that can be engaged externally.

Method 3 is not at all welcome in 99% of Super HERO games. It leads to a pretty powerful character for the points and the other players scream bloody murder. :D

For a Heroic level game, specifically one that deals with mecha and/or powered armor heroes, this is not really a bad method.

Method 4 may or may not be allowed. If you build the armor as a multiform, the GM may require Extra Time to be applied to be able to change into the armor.

Now for Duplication, which is a subset of Method 4. If you have the armor essentially be an A.I. controlled robot until such time as you need to personally take control, buy it as Duplication. That way, the character can be doing stuff in his Secret ID while the Armor is acting of its own accord. The GM may still require Extra Time to Separate from or rejoin the Duplicate.

Some final thoughts.

Anything beyond Method 1 is going to increase the complexity of the character build and take longer to implement. Also, depending upon the campaign and the GM involved, some methods may be forbidden.

Have fun.

[AgentSmith]

Thanks for all your ideas and suggestions. I appreciate it.

[Comic]

Ablative on Stun.

Body is already a property of a focus.

[Sean Waters]

Having a suit with extra Body is easy:

+10 Body OIF, does not heal normally (requires repair), no figured characteristics (I'd allow the Body to soak Body damage targetted on the armour OR on the character)

8 points

You probably ought to then buy a limited form of regeneration that only applies to the suit Body and requires a repair roll, extra time and the like. Easy.

Much more difficult is extra stun BECAUSE if the suit is taking stun damage then you shouldn't which means that it should, for instance, protect you from STUN, which just buying extra STUN will not, and buying extra CON too gets messy.

Can I suggest that you do this with damage reduction? 1/4 physical and energy damage reduction (resistant) will set you back 30 points and is like having 5/4 x your normal Stun and Body totals. if you want this to wear away as you take damage (actually that is probably not necessary, but you can if you like) then take a LIMITED POWER limitation: damage reduction ineffective after X damage taken, until repaired. the value of the limitation will depend on how high you want to set X.

[SteveZilla]

How would you simulate your powered armor having it's own Body and Stun scores that do not heal normally, seperate from the wearer's scores?

Why would an object have it's own STUN stat?

[ghost-angel]

Why would an object have it's own STUN stat?

Living Armor.

[SteveZilla]

That implies it could be knocked out before the character is, or more confusingly, that it could still be "awake" while the character is KO-ed.

Could such an Armor be Stunned? It'd need it's own CON stat then, right?

[ghost-angel]

That implies it could be knocked out before the character is, or more confusingly, that it could still be "awake" while the character is KO-ed.

Could such an Armor be Stunned? It'd need it's own CON stat then, right?

Probably yes it would. But maybe not. It can be Knocked Out, but not Stunned (hence a Stun score, but not CON score).

You could have Armor that is alive, independent (though requires a wearer for mobility) and such.. but not able to really act on it's own.

If you're KO'd your living armor could still get sensor input/output from a utility side of things.

Or - you know, it's just cool.

Maybe, Knock Out the armor and it's unable to protect you fully, or possibly provide some abilities - like say a Bio-Feedback Blast.

Just tossing out ideas mind, have no idea what the OP wants out of such a construct.

[TheInexplicable]

I'd have liked to know a bit more about the concept that led to you wanting your power armor to have Body and Stun. Not to criticize it, but to have a better idea of what you were aiming for. I've found that a lot of my players will come up with idea X and build it in far too literal of a fashion when there may be an easier or better way to accomplish their goal.

When I read this question I thought about it in terms of what would have caused me to think I needed my power armor to have this effect. I try to build my power armor characters a bit more "realistic".

So, I have an impressive but 'normal' individual in a high tech suit of combat armor. The defensive properties, weapons systems, and propulsion are always pretty easy to justify and explain via quasi-scientific principles.

However, how does one even somewhat realistically explain how when Grond punches Mr. Unobtanium in the face and accelerates our 'normal on the inside' hero from 0 to 60mph in less than a second (15"KB) that his brain doesn't compact directly behind his eyes into a half inch thick pancake of confused neurons?

Simple solution: ballistic/inertial gel layer inside the armor compresses and spreads the force over a long enough period of time that our squishy and delicate organs are not traumatized by the extreme acceleration or deceleration...yay airbag principle. Conveniently, this explains how he can make those high G turns while flying at supersonic speeds and not pass out too!

It would make sense that any attack that makes it past the hard crunchy exterior of the power suit would be somewhat further absorbed by this gel layer. I could see thinking that such a thing would be additional Stun and Body as part of the armor.

You could buy it as +X Stun and +X Body, with OIF (-1/2) and a custom limitation on how you need a workshop and some time and skill roll. Which is clunky and the character's REC would determine how fast you could repair Body damage rather than time or skill...

I'd rather ask the GM if they would allow "on top" ablative armor to simulate the effect. It would have to be kept to a reasonably small amount and ablate by stun getting through but would accomplish the goal of soaking some body/stun damage in a fashion that is only repairable with effort. Depending on how your other defenses are as a GM I'd allow a small amount of "on top" ablative like this for -1/4 to -1/2.

I don't like to get that granular any more, but back in my early days I would have loved detailing things down to this level. I might explain a power armor character as having this sort of thing built in as flavor, I wouldn't actually build it out like this anymore though. I've firmly grown into the 'simple is better' phase of character design.

The Inexplicable

[Hyper-Man]

Killershrike has an armored character by the name of War-Man (http://killershrike.com/MillennialMen/MillennialMen_WarMan.aspx) on his site (Killershrike.com) showing several different build methods (OIHID, Multiform, etc..).

I strongly suggest taking a look at them ALL for ideas.

[Sean Waters]

................

Make your armor as a vehicle?

Did this once with a character called Cyberus who was a human brain (in this kind of freaky spider suit(although, come to think of it I'm not sure I ever shared that with the chap playing him(his brain never actually had occasion to pop out of the skull and walk around(but it could have :))))) in a robot wolf body, with the robot wolf built as a vehicle.

Hill Air Ears.

Actually worked really well, but that was probably more luck than judgement. Story of my life.