Passive cover bonus from shield and cloak?

[tbone]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

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.

Right, which is why I say there's no existing rule for that passive cover. A potential key component of such a rule – random hit location – is available, but without that tied to shield coverage, there's currently no playable RAW that a GM can invoke to have a shield passively block missiles and stuff.

House rules to the rescue! As you say, there's nothing hard about coming up with something basic. The house rules I reference suggest a main approach and two optional approaches. Without pasting details here, the three approaches boil down to:

1. Abstract cover

Treat DB as a bonus on AD (that's RAW), or as a penalty TH.

(That's the simplest idea, with no fuss over cover locations, etc. When passive defense should apply, a miss caused by that TH penalty means the shield was hit. Easy enough!)

2. Random cover

With reference to B408, treat a shield as cover appropriate to shield size. This means a TH penalty (to intentionally aim for the general unexposed portion) as above, or an appropriate (n in 6) chance of hitting the shield (appropriate for those long-distance arrows).

3. Specific cover

For a given shield size, this approach specifies the degree of cover (none, half, full) that each hit location enjoys. Play things naturally from there: say, target the partly-covered torso at a penalty, or shoot for the uncovered head at no penalty (beyond normal head TH penalty). For that long-distance arrow, roll a random location, and let that location's cover determine what happens.

(This is obviously best for the detail lovers: from that base, you could adjust per-location cover for high guard or low guard, or for different shield shapes, etc. I leave that to others...)

So. Good or bad, that's one way – er, three ways – to handle shields as portable cover offering passive as well as active defense. I'm all ears for better ideas!