Passive cover bonus from shield and cloak?

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by tbone

no active defense means the big shield does nothing (in Basic Set, anyway) for the guy standing behind it

That is partially covered (ha ha) by the rules I mentioned above. Roll for random hit location of those dozen arrows; the ones that hit the shielded locations have to do enough overpenetration to hurt the guard (which probably means no damage). The guard with no shield gets no such benefit, and so gets riddled by all dozen arrows. You don't need to make active defense rolls to benefit from cover.

The catch, as we agreed, is there's no obvious rule telling us which locations are covered.

It's not terribly hard to make up such a rule. Surely the shield hand; the arm for anything bigger than a buckler; probably the torso. A really big shield would add groin; something like a Norman kite shield or Roman scutum is meant to cover a leg or legs as well (if not usually all the way down to a foot). The head and face aren't covered, or you couldn't see.

That leads to even more complexity, since you can move a shield. But then, if you raise the shield to block a successful hit on your face, you know the shield is in front of your face -- apply the overpenetration rules (if you're into that much detail). If you always use targeted hit locations, the active defenses not too much of a problem. For passive defense, you can assume the shield doesn't move from its standard guard position. (We are, after all, assuming the target is "passive", so why not?)

if you just roll randomly, then you could perhaps live with a static list of covered locations. Yes, shields can be moved, but we're already stepping away from a level of resolution that handles individual locations. If you're not aiming at specific points, then you don't need to know what specific point the shield is "actually" covering at any time.

If you don't want to use hit locations at all, then you could simplify that static list of locations into a flat percentage chance. Maybe a small shield has a 16% chance of randomly serving as cover even entirely passively, going up to 67% for a tower shield. (Adjust the numbers to taste or to fit existing tables; I'm just making up numbers here to resolve with a single extra d6 on the attack roll.)