NAA D6: Solution To Armor/Penetration

I was having a fair amount of trouble coming up with a scheme for armor penetration that I actually liked. I did not like having weaponry with static armor penetration values that are used for every attack. Almost every attack and skill use in NAA D6 is bound to be at least minorly successful because it is a 3d6 roll under system. If your player has a 12 skill and a pistol he or she is likely to always be able to plink away at an enemy with that pistol as long as he or she can see and target the enemy. The thing that bugged me was that every single attack from that plinky pistol was adding armor penetration values. So even the tiny graze shots were ignoring armor and that seemed a bit lame.

So instead of that, I came up with something new. For V1.6, I invented a couple of new weapon properties. One of them, the property that got me thinking about armor in the first place, was Rending #. The property read: “if your attack roll is less than or equal to the Rending number, you have a +1 bonus to Armor Penetration.” I realized fairly early on that weapons didn’t need better armor penetration, because they already had enough of that, so I put Rending into my “document of bad ideas.” After thinking about it a bit, I was going to put pretty much the entire armor penetration scheme into my document of bad ideas, when I rediscovered rending. Seeing them side by side in the same document made me come up with the new, and more agreeable to me, system for armor penetration.

Now, instead of always adding its penetration value to an attack, a weapon has to Rend – that is, it has to score an attack roll lower than the Rending value. All weapons now have a Rending value for this system, between 4 and 10 (some ridiculous things like attack drills and chainsaw swords have higher Rending values because they are ridiculous).

So consistently scoring 9s or 10s like you’re used to won’t always give you armor penetration, unless the weapon has a very good Rending value. So now weapons are balanced out by that factor also. A whip is not going to penetrate armor practically ever, but it has other redeeming values as a melee weapon. A pistol is small, concealable, easy to use but has a very poor rending value. If you score a Miracle Success with it though, you are going to get some armor penetration into the mix to reduce the opponent’s Soak and therefore up your damage. I have to see it in action, but I’m happy with it so far.

Note to self – check back on that “document of bad ideas” more often.

The next version of NAA D6 will be coming soon. All of the hard crunchy stuff is basically done now, I’m just looking now at what I can do to clarify things a little more, like writing an “anatomy of a combat turn” and so on.