Dealing with high DR
 

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.

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

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

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

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.

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

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.

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

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

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

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!

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

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 :)

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

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.

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

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.

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

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.

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

No need to make the DR lower or the horrible crap that is ablative. Laser weapons have at least an Armor Divisor of 3, and that brings effective DR down to 35. Should power armor be immune to dinky little guns that have barely been maintained for 200 years? Absolutely. Should lasers and blasters be a threat to the meat in a can? Also yes.

Get used to looking at the Armor Divisor on your weapons. The reason DR gets so high is that weapons develop higher AD instead of constantly going for more dice of damage. This also lets you shoot the guy without armor, and not create a fine, red mist or turn them into a pile of ash.

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

From the background you've described, them being functionally immune to small arms fire doesn't really seem too out-there - the OpFor will have to switch to heavier weapons to reliably get through.

That said, the power armor in the books is appropriate for a brand-new suit, not one that's been repaired and rebuilt from scavenged parts. The armor panels of the latter suit may give incomplete coverage (allowing foes to take a penalty to hit unarmored sections, or even allowing for random armor-ignoring hits) or be made of poorer materials (for reduced DR). You could also make them semi-ablative against burn damage, so that foes with lasers can eventually melt through the armor and hit the character.

One thing that may be causing a disconnect is that very few games use the GURPS DR model, simply because "No, your weapon can't hurt him, sucks to be you" is rarely all that fun in a computer game (in a tabletop game, you can figure out other ways to defeat/escape from the foe). At least for Fallout 3 and later (can't speak to the older games), armor gives something more akin to IT:DR - it serves to reduce damage by division rather than subtraction.

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

Fallout and Fallout2 used the GURPS DR model for Damage Threshold, which was subtracted from damage. Fallout's DR was the percentage reduction after the damage threshold (GURPS 4e IT:DR). The AC bonus was like GURPS 3e PD. In Fallout 1 or 2 power armor, you could engage in fisticuffs with an entire village armed with hunting rifles and pistols and not be harmed except on some lucky critical hits that multiplied damage (and then only harmed by a few HP).

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

As others have said: Armor divisors are the key.

Basically at higher TLs the toughness of materials raises to such a degree that you need to use proper penetrations. Armor divisors have the added benefit of causing less one shot kills that raising the base damage has.

Basically if you want to penetrate 105 DR 50% of the time will ball ammo you would need 30d damage, say 6d*5. The problem is that on a roll of 27 of the 6d (almost 10% of that or higher) you take 30 points damage after armor and on a roll of 30(almost 2% of time that or higher) you take 45...

But if you use a armor divisor the required damage is less. As example using a small shaped charge, a 3d(10) has the same 50% possibility of penetrating, but even on high damage rolls you single hits do not cause multiple death rolls though armor. The same to a lesser degree with lower divisors. Further when using firearms with AP ammo the injury modifier is lower, further limiting the maximum damage.

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

Power armor needs power.

How about attacking it with EMP-based weapons (or ion weapons or whatever it is called in your setting).

Re: Dealing with high DR
 

Outside of nuclear explosions, EMP's are pretty rare in Fallout, and aren't as effective as they are in our world (as Fallout uses vacuum tubes and the like, having deviated from a normal TL progression somewhere in the 50's). Seeing as they were presumably designed for nuclear warfare, I'd expect any power armors that would normally be susceptible would have proper EMP shielding.