Dealing with high DR

[Highland_Piper]

I normally only play low TL games so I've been having some transition problems moving to High and Ultra tech settings. I'm playing the Fallout setting in GURPS and so far (other than some adjustment issues) myself and the players have really enjoyed the games.

The question I have is how should I deal with Power Armor. In Ultra Tech the Battle Armor is about the best description that fits the Fallout Powerarmor. The smallest is DR:105/75. That does fit the notion of the Power Armor being a walking tank.

However 105 DR!! Now unless I've been misunderstanding DR all this time it against each attack not the total damage of a weapon in a round. These type of issues don't really come up in Low Tec settings. So a guy with a M4A1 can only do 6-26 damage per shot making it useless to fire at anything with a DR over 26.

Every example I read only tells of one bullet or arrow or sword. Or if they talk about a burst then the target will dodge all but one shot. I can find nothing that gives an example of a full burst. So if the guy with the M4A1 does a burst of 10 rounds do you still count each individual bullet or the full damage 60-260 (if he managed to hit with the majority of them)?

I've looked at [B282] and it doesn't specify.

[Lucian]

Customize it, create new weapons and armor.
Or maybe add ablative to power armor so that it breaks down eventually.

Or lower the Dr of it.

105 Dr is pretty relative. I'm not familiar with fall out but if power armor is the tankiest stuff around then set it's DR to something like 30 40 then with armor piercing rounds it's more easily done

[Anaraxes]

See B373 for rapid-fire rules. You score extra hits based on the margin of success (MoS) of the attack roll. The target can Dodge those extra hits based on the MoS of the Dodge roll (B375).

Multiple hits are resolved individually (roll damage, subtract DR from each). B379 gives you an option to speed things up by rolling damage once and using that roll for each hit. "Follow-Up" attacks (B381) are the ones where the later follow-up attacks get to bypass DR because the initial "carrier" attack penetrated. Regular autofire doesn't place all the bullets precisely on the same hole in the armor.

Note that a lot of ultra-tech attacks have an Armor Divisor (B378) to go along with the higher DR, so the DR gets divided by 2, 5, 10, etc, before subtracting it from the damage roll. Low-tech muscle-powered weapons are expected to be useless against such stuff.

Armor Divisors are also useful in a gaming sense in that they let weapons penetrate armor without automatically killing unarmored humans. (105 DR is 30d6, so you'd be in deep trouble if hit without your armor. On the other hand, 3d6(10) has a 50-50 chance of injuring the armored guy, while still being survivable for the unarmored guy.)

It's also probably worth mentioning that Ultra-tech is a catalog of possibilities, not a setting book. That is, it's not necessarily expected that all the gear at every tech level is available. The GM is supposed to pick and choose as part of the world-building process.

Perhaps you want powered armor that is a walking tank, essentially immune to infantry weapons, and only other powered armor can carry the weapons to defeat each other. Perhaps you want a situation where soldiers can carry weapons that can defeat the walking tanks without themselves being tanks. Or perhaps you want a situation where military combat is very lethal, and there's not a lot of protection. Similarly, you have to ponder how risky it is to wander around as a civilian, in no armor, or perhaps concealed armor, and whether people are living in a world where they would routinely have some light armor as part of their "going out" outfits. All those effects are possible by choosing from the armor and weapons in Ultra-tech. But you do need to compare the weapon damages versus the armors to see what matches up with your expectations.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Highland_Piper

Every example I read only tells of one bullet or arrow or sword. Or if they talk about a burst then the target will dodge all but one shot. I can find nothing that gives an example of a full burst. So if the guy with the M4A1 does a burst of 10 rounds do you still count each individual bullet or the full damage 60-260 (if he managed to hit with the majority of them)?

I've looked at [B282] and it doesn't specify.

Each round is individual.


If you aren't the DM (and can thus just lower the DR of the Power Armor) you need to find some anti-tank weapons... since you're you know, fighting tanks.

[Highland_Piper]

Okay, so I did have it right with individually. Thank you.

Based on the last few posts I think I'm going to lower the DR, make it Ablative, and keep track of each piece separately. I don't have too many weapons that have armor divisors in the game and with the way Fallout 4 works the Ablative armor will fit right in.

Thanks everyone

[Bruno]

Chinks in armor (-8 to hit) is very appropriate when trying to attack a tank. But still not good for your M4A1.

But this is, as you put it, a walking tank. Stop using anti-personel weapons! It's only a small walking tank so you don't need machine-mounted weaponry. You want anti-materiel weapons (ie a Barrett M82A1 and load it with APHEX shells[1], as the good lord intended) That's 6dx2(2) pi - aim at the chinks and you get 6dx4(4) pi, and you still get that tasty 1d-2[1d-2] explosive follow-up inside the armor to ruin the day of the occupant.

Until you can get yourself on serious weaponry, you need to consider alternative tactics. IEDs are time-honored, and since this is a light armored vehicle are more likely to be useful. But get creative in your traps. Consider a tiger pit. How well does one of these things climb, anyways?

[1] Shells, not rounds, damnit. Those things are enormous!

[Coffee Zombie]

If you want to simulate the Fallout Power Armour, you would not want to use the Ultra Tech power armour. All Fallout armour is, in effect, just slightly reducing the incoming damage of attacks.

To GURPs it up, since you have a smaller HP pool, you do want lesser attacks to "ping" with no damage, so think:
1 - what level of damage do you want power armour to ignore
2 - what degree of damage do you want to hurt the wearer, but only on very excellent damage rolls
3 - what level of damage do you want to be dangerous to a power armour user.

Then start seeing what weapons and attacks produce these results. Be prepared to do a lot of fiddling. If you're not looking to reproduce Fallout, my apologies here :)

[mlangsdorf]

I'd probably model Fallout style power armor as DR 15 + DR 30*, possibly semi-ablative. Note that the non-flexible armor is the first layer and absorbs damage first. So the wearer is mostly immune to pistols and assault rifles, but will take some blunt impact from battle rifles and the like. A laser rifle that does 8d (2) bu would penetrate for an average 6 injury.

[The_Ryujin]

Now keep in mind that in the original two Fallouts getting the Power Armor was meant to be a "oh hell yeah!" moment and you were in effect a walking tank and were pretty much immune to conventional small arms fire. It took heavy weapons like rocket launchers or plasma casters to be a real threat. In the newer games power armor was nerfed heavily so they could give it out like candy at the beginning of the game.

If you are going for a Falloutish game then keep power armor heavy, but keep it rare but also let the players find old batches of LAW or AT-4's or a plasma rifle or two (even a cheap out of date anti-tank weapon like the LAW makes a battlesuit trooper craps his metal pants).

Also keep in mind that a M4 is a modern weapon designed to deal with last gen body armor at most while the power armor you're talking about is a mature TL9 system that takes advantage of plausible advancements based on current breakthroughs in material science. It's meant to be taken on by soldiers with more advanced TL 9 fire power that's meant to take on much heavier armor.

[Highland_Piper]

I'm trying to strike a balance between Fallout 1 and 2 and the newer Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas.

I've played them all but Fallout Tactics and FO Brother Hood of Steel.

In my setting the players are from a Vault that was meant to experiment on wounded war veterans turning them into mindless cybernetic slaves for the army. There was a minor revolt as a few hundred combat veterans overtook the much smaller Vaut Tec staff and started running the Vault their own way. The Vault is full of disused and damaged Power Armors and robots, many of which have been repaired. The General (who acts like an Overseer) is the original that started the coup and had his brain placed in a suit of T-51b Power armor making him pretty much a combat robot. Like all Brains in Jars he has lost some of his sanity.

So the player have access to one suit of old T-45a Power Armor that requires the use of Fusion Cores like in Fallout 4 where as anything T-51 or higher is fitted with a back-mounted TX-28 MicroFusion Pack giving it decades of Power. Their current mission is to scout the region and get reconnaissance on the local 'monsters' and civilians for the glorious return of the Commonwealth (they might just be the bad guys if this was a FO game).

They have great training, better equipment then the locals, and they are pretty much outnumbered 1,000 to 1. And by using GURPS rules they realize they can die pretty damn easily.

None of us has played a modern or sci-fi setting before so it's a learning process.