tinman

Re: Alternative terms for archtypes?

Re: Alternative terms for archtypes? In my campaign UNTIL has three general categories for threat ratings: Offensive Ability, Defenses and Difficulty to Restrain. Each is rated from 0-3 (where 0 is a normal unarmed human). A light brick would be 2/2/1 (able to kill easily at close or medium range, ummune to standard small-arms fire, must be held in a reinforced structure). A teleporting martial-artist would be 1/1/3 (able to kill at close range, difficult to target, cannot be restrained while conscious). Superman would be a 3/3/3 (able to kill hardened targets at long range, immune to all conventional weapons, cannot be restrained by any known method). More detailed explanations of the individual's abilities would be available in their dossier of course, but the three ratings are easy for agents to remember and refer to if they should find themselves facing someone without having been briefed first. This also provides each superhuman a "power-level" rating which is simply the three threat levels added together ("In other news, a class 7 metahuman was killed in a prolonged battle with UNTIL agents in Hannover today. The incident left six agents dead and seventeen wounded.").

Re: Armour Piercing as an Adder

Re: Armour Piercing as an Adder That's a good point about STUN. When I came up with -2 DEF per 5 points I was thinking of it along the lines of standard effect from 1 DC "only to penetrate armour" (-1), but I wasn't really thinking in terms of STUN.

Re: Armour Piercing as an Adder I tend to be leery about genre/special effect rulings (armour with the special effect of being a ballistic vest doesn't work well against a RKA with the special effect of being a high-velocity rifle round). It just seems to reduce the generic abstract utility of the system to have to do that. An alternative to making Armour Piercing an adder could be to provide varying levels of it instead (+1/4 reduces armour by 25%, +1/2 by 50% and +3/4 by 75%). Of course, this is all highly YMMV territory. Armour Piercing as it stands is probably a perfect fit for most of the games out there.

Greetings all, One of the things that I have been struggling with in my campaign is a more realistic representation of guns vs. body armour. Basically I wanted to come up with a way to model how a rifle bullet that penetrates a ballistic vest doesn't seem to be any less deadly than one that just hits unarmoured flesh. I tried using Armour Piercing, but it just wasn't granular enough for me. Either the weapon halved non-hardened armour or it didn't. So I came up with a prototype system for a granular version of Armour Piercing as an adder. For every 5 extra points spent the attack may ignore 2 points of whatever the appropriate defense is. So if you buy a 2d6 physical RKA at 30 points plus 15 points worth of Armour Piercing your attack can ignore 6 of the target's rPD when applying damage. If you buy a 6d6 Energy Blast plus 20 points worth of Armour Piercing your attack can ignore 8 of the target's PD. Essentially for 5 points you get double standard effect in exchange for only being used to breach defenses. So to model a standard rifle round you might buy it as a 2d6 physical RKA with an additional 10 points of Armour Piercing so that it can ignore 4 rPD. To model a true armour-piercing bullet you might buy it as a 1d6+1 physical RKA (to reflect how the bullet doesn't deform) with an additional 25 points of Armour Piercing so that it can ignore 10 rPD. Hardening would reduce the effectiveness of the Armour Piercing Adder. The first level of Hardening halves the benefit of Armour Piercing, while the second level of Hardening renders Armour Piercing completely inneffective. Thoughts?