Weapons Locker – Body Armour – Chapter zero

Introduction

This article deals in body armour, from the low-tech to the future tech.

Like most Weapons Locker articles, the primary goal is RPG stats. The other chapters are mostly in plain English, but this intro chapter is mostly technical.

As always with Weapons Locker articles, we are interested in fiction, with an emphasis on comic books, action movies, RPGs and video games. It’s not a historical study of body armour.

This article is forever in beta. It is slowly and gradually expanded.

We do have material about shields, but it is in another castle.

Chapters

To keep the articles manageable and avoid having to split them up later on, let’s have them as separate pages from the get-go.

Them’s the rules

An important aspect of body armour in MEGS is the limited number space. Not for power armourStrength-enhancing body armour, like Iron Man’s. à la Iron Man, but for ordinary protection such as chainmail or ballistic vests.

What these can do is improve one’s RV by one, maybe two APs.

So we’re going to also use a number of community-developed tools. Namely :

The Enhance Power

This’ll get used a lot to avoid the “substitutive vs. additive” quandary (explained in our Character Design document).

Enhance is explained in the New Powers document.

The Damage Capacity Power

It serves as a RAPs buffer, and is explained in the New Powers document.

Damage Capacity is much more granular than simple RV increases, yet remains simple. We can also play with the Power’s Recovery options to model how ablative a suit of body armour is.

Damage Descriptors

Damage Descriptors (such as Piercing, Lightning, Bludgeoning, Flame, Slashing…) are important to model the weak and strong points of various kinds of body armour. And of some superhumans, such as Wonder Woman.

The notion is present — to a degree — in the rulesbook. But it got fleshed out in our New rules – Miscellanea document.

Enhance + Damage Descriptors

As a side note it is possible for multiple Enhance Powers to stack linearly (within their cap, obviously) if their Descriptors do.

The most common example would be a piece of body armour with Enhance (Kinetic RV): 01 and Enhance (Unarmed RV): 01. Unarmed is a Descriptor for a type of Kinetic Damage. Since all Unarmed attacks are also Kinetic, the RV against Unarmed attacks would be enhanced by 01 + 01 = 02. Both Enhance Powers apply.

Of course, this cannot take your RV above the cap given for the Enhance (Unarmed RV) Power.

Other tools

The Blunting Power, the Conditional Soaking Advantage, and the discussion about the Skin Armour Power and Kinetic Damage are also useful to review if you missed them.

Partial Coverage will also get used a lot. That one’s in Blood of Heroes: Special Edition (BOH:SE) p171.

BODY scores assumptions

This is another important bit to consider when discussing body armour.

You can find our assumptions spelled out in our Human STR and BODY scores benchmark article.

Double-scale DCH

Increasing quantities by one in MEGS can have little impact given the Columns system. To fix this and in the spirit of increase granularity, you can check the Double-Scale DCH article.

The level of detail for the armour suits is done with the existence of the double-scale in mind. Frex, we might hesitate about modelling something that hinges on a single AP of difference, as it may not be worth the bother. But in double-scale DCH this difference is more meaningful, and thus it’s noted after all.

Your /BODY/, my /BODY/, everybody work your /BODY/

Mayfair-era body armour is often written up as italicised BODY, or /BODY/. Written that way because it’s easier to spot than BODY, especially on a small screen.

While it has the advantage of simplicity, we have long since veered away from it for two main reasons.

Excessive coverage

Wearing body armour that provides /BODY/ means that you’re also protected against attacks such as :

The “jettison all damage !” effect

Tough Guy Of Justice has BODY 05 and wears a /BODY/ 06 doorgunner vest.

He comes under heavy fire from the Dastardly Minions of Injustice. With LDD, Tough Guy of Justice is reduced to a Current BODY Condition of 01.

Oh, no ! One more telling blow and Tough Guy of Justice goes down !

Quickly unfastening the straps, Tough Guy of Justice ditches his vest. Ta da ! Now either :

The spread RAPs fix that wasn’t

Though it is also possible to spread the RAPs between operator and armor, that fails at describing most power armour operators in comics.

Frex, Early Tony Stark was in bad health and with major cardiac problems when he wore the first Iron Man suit. He had perhaps a BODY of 02. Which starkly (so to speak) limits options.

(There is a space where the damage is spread between the body armour’s BODY condition and the wearer’s Hero Points, as a sort of power-assisted Last Ditch Defence. But this hasn’t been explored yet).

But /BODY/ is fine in many cases

Power armour is in fact a good example of /BODY/ usage. Such suits will be environment-controlled to a high degree, and perhaps even medicalised. Having them resist a wide spectrum of assaults with their /BODY/ is fine.

And having the wearer emerge more or less intact from a wrecked suit of power armour is common enough in stories.

Them’s the new rules

Furthermore, we’re also going to introduce two optional, simple rules for body armour.

Stealth penalties

In DCH, stealth is an OV/RV opposed to people’s Perception Check. Stealth penalties lower this OV/RV.

So say, if you have Thief (Stealth): 06 and you wear an armour with a 1/0 stealth penalty, your OV/RV becomes 05/06.

The penalty assumes that the stealthy person carefully muffled the armour. Attempting to sneak around in unmodified armour is a -2CS penalty.

This is essentially a Power Loss Drawback, though we distinguish the OV and the RV for better granularity. See the Gadgetry document for implementation.

Stealth penalties are primarily useful in low-tech fantasy games, to explain why sneaky types do not generally run around in plate mail.

Wearing body armour

Correctly-made body armour at any technology level will not normally hinder general speed and mobility.

Exceptions include :

But there are downsides still

Again in general terms :

Super-convenient armour

The downsides above are considered a normal part of Equipment, Gadgets and Artefacts. This is why Gadgets and Artefacts have a cost divisor.

Having to wear a magical scale mail is less practical than having blades-resistant skin. Having to hop aboard your Ferrari Testarossa is less convenient than running at 170mph (275 km/h). Carrying a shotgun is less convenient than shooting eye beams.

However, some body armour is largely free from said downsides. A fine example is the beta cloth jumpsuits issued by S.H.I.E.L.D.. They offer excellent protection, but wearing them seems to be as much of a bother as wearing a tracksuit. *And* they’re way more flattering.

For these, we suggest using the Miniaturisation Gadget Advantage (BOH:SE p170) with a – 1FC Limitation (Encumbrance Only).

Donning and doffing armour

XXXXXXX SEE PREVIOUS CONVO W/BIL AND ADAM.

Under the skin

Historically, one key role of body armour — even very light one — is to reduce the odds of an open wound. Of being cut or impaled open.

This is triply important, as :

In DCH terms, the Blunting Power is a nod in this direction. But these aren’t elements that are within scope for DCH as a game system.

These considerations usually are a thing in gritty historical/quasi-historical stories, and in bleak low fantasy. And some less common genres, such as gritty western (the kind that emphasises what being shot in the gut meant back then) or realistic post-apocalypse.

DCH *can* handle these, but it’s just not an optimal system pick.

Oversimplified body armour

The next chapters are going to describe a gazillion specific types of armour, because this is a Weapons Locker-type article. However, it is *possible* that you run a game that needs much less detail than that.

So here are a tiny selection of *simplified* stats if that’s all you need :

LIGHT LOW TECH BODY ARMOUR [BODY 02, Blunting: 01, Enhance (Physical RV): 01 (RV cap is 05), Bonus: Enhance is doubled vs. Unarmed descriptor]. Say, a full suit of exceedingly generic armour-grade leather.

HEAVY LOW-TECH BODY ARMOUR [BODY 04, Blunting: 02, Enhance (Physical RV): 02 (RV cap is 07), Rec. STR 02, Bonus: Enhance is doubled vs. Unarmed descriptor, Drawback: Stealth penalty 2/1]. Say, a full suit of exceedingly generic plate armour.

LIGHT BALLISTIC BODY ARMOUR [BODY 02, Blunting: 03, Enhance (Physical RV): 01 (RV cap is 07), Miniaturisation: 01, Limitation: Enhance is inapplicable against Bludgeoning and Unarmed, Drawback: Partial Coverage (Vest)]. A concealable, undershirt vest.

HEAVY BALLISTIC BODY ARMOUR [BODY 04, Blunting: 03, Enhance (Physical RV): 02 (RV cap is 08), Drawback: Partial Coverage (Long Coat), Drawback: Stealth penalty 1/0]. Obvious, SWAT or infantry type body armour.

FUTURE TECH HARDSUIT [BODY 06, /BODY/ 08, Blunting: 02, Cold immunity: 02, Flame immunity: 02, Radio communication: 06, Sealed systems: 09, Drawback: Stealth penalty 1/1]. Exceedingly generic “space marine” body armour without advanced functionalities, but capable of withstanding some alien environments.

By Sébastien Andrivet.