Armor abstractions in Fallout's SPECIAL game system

[Slowtrain]

Especially since he wasn't wearing a helmet.

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I could see why that might be a problem.

 

Does anyone smell burning...hair? lolol

[Judge Hades]

That's pretty much what the F3 system did, but with DT instead of DR and with only two coverage areas: body and head.  Also, AC was a weird name for what it represented, so it was just changed to Evasion (I think).

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That is cool. Man, I really wish you guys were doing Fallout 3.

[Slowtrain]

That is cool.  Man, I really wish you guys were doing Fallout 3.

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I kinda do, too, but what's done is done.

[Spider]

A system like D&D isn't so good for that because who want to make 50 rolls on each attack.  But in a system built for the computer the CPU has no problem making multiple checks.  FO is one of the few games I've played that takes advantage of that.

 

Actually, it's still only two rolls, one to hit and one to damage. The rest is just math. Your point is still valid though because doing percentages when playing a normal RPG would slow it down a lot. Though I have played PnP RPGS that use more complex models than Fallout does.

 

Back to the AC thing. I have absolutely nothing against having a system with one AC component and one bullet stopping component. I really don't see the need for both DT and DR though. They basically do the same thing so one of them should be able to cover both. But that's an idea I'm not married to, so I don't care all that much. Although I do prefer one number to keep track of, it makes it easier to compare different armor types.

Edited January 14, 2006 by Spider

[Slowtrain]

A system like D&D isn't so good for that because who want to make 50 rolls on each attack.  But in a system built for the computer the CPU has no problem making multiple checks.  FO is one of the few games I've played that takes advantage of that.

 

I really don't see the need for both DT and DR though. They basically do the same thing so one of them should be able to cover both.

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I gues really its a matter of preference for complexity and control? The more variables you can affect and change the more interaction there is with a game world? I don't know really. But generally speaking, the more games thoroughly model something the more I enjoy being a part of it.

 

I mean theoretically you could simply get away with saying this weapon does ten damage, this armor absorbs 2, so pc takes 8. And in some games that would be completely sufficient. But I grew up on turnbase combat games, and I think that broke my brain.

[J.E. Sawyer]

But isn't that more just an issue where the values attributed to the various armors are unbalanced but the system  itself is not broken?

 

Also what was your thinking behind removing DR from the armor system?

Somewhat, but the system had the premise that tougher armor = higher AC. And heavier armors had almost no drawbacks (other than weight) when compared to lighter armors. No armor had stealth or AG penalties. Those seem more like systemic problems than data problems.

 

DR is also something that I considered to be a systemic problem. To begin with, the idea behind the math doesn't seem sensible to me. Let's say a piece of armor has 30% DR and 0 DT vs. explosions. A grenade goes off next to someone wearing that armor. The attack does 3 points of damage. 30% of 3 is less than 1, so the target takes full damage. Another grenade goes off, doing 100 damage. The armor protects the target for 30 points of damage. The more damage done to the target, the better the armor protects. Huh?

 

My expectation would be that armor would ablate damage damage up to a certain point with the rest being taken by the person in the armor. E.g. I fire increasingly large bullets into a barrier. The first few are low calibre and they bounce off. The next few are higher calibre and they penetrate deeper as the calibre rises. When the bullet finally penetrates the barrier, the bullet retains whatever energy that remained after breaching the barrier. Ballistics is certainly more complex than this, but that's the general idea. There's a threshold of protection that body armor affords. Once an applied force has overcome that barrier, the body takes the rest. That's effectively what DT is.

 

In Fallout, the better suits of armor have both high DT and DR, and they combine to make even horrible wounds virtually insignificant. The PCs' hit points rise, their DRs rise, and their DTs rise. By the end of the game, they're harder to kill than a lot of D&D characters. A lot of that has to do with the armor.

 

Removing DR and revamping the stats for weapons and armor made a big difference in F3. High-calibre weapons like military-grade sniper and anti-materiel rifles were awesome against heavily armored targets. They weren't so great against groups. Low-calibre, rapid-fire weapons were great against lightly armored groups. The results seemed pretty sensible, but armored characters still gained great benefits.

[Darque]

Because the things that were good about it weren't the fact that there were two medical skills and a broken armor system.

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You were going to make grenades as melee weapons if I remember correctly. I agreed with most of the changes, but grenades are not melee weapons!

 

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Oh, come on.

 

You can smack people in the head with them

 

Just make sure the pin doesn't fall out

[J.E. Sawyer]

Oh, come on.

 

You can smack people in the head with them

 

Just make sure the pin doesn't fall out

In the pen-and-paper game I ran when I was at Midway, thrown weapons used the athletics skill. Athletics broadly covered things like swimming, climbing, jumping, and throwing. It seemed to work pretty well. Throwing always seemed like such an overly specialized skill when compared with something like "science".

[Darque]

Oh, I was just teasing Hades (which never gets old )

 

I never had a problem with thrown weapons being a part of melee... I did think the "broader skill" needed a different name though since melee tends to evoke images of two people beating the crap out of each other with sticks though.. (note: memories of VB are cloudy... I don't remember if it had another name or not at this point)

[Gabrielle]

I don't see how grenades can be a melee weapon. It's a ranged weapon. It's in your hand, you throw it at the target and it goes boom. It would be a melee weapon if you were stupid enough to hold on to it and use it to beat someone with.

[Jorian Drake]

AC is something what is not the best described, but is used since the 1st D&D and it would be hard to change it (they try that in 3.5, but its not worked out)

 

I have used Smoothtalk (dont remember skill names correctly) ,matrial arts,

Plasma weapon and have used a plasma gun-sniper variant

(just think of hitting the enemy from one side of the screen in

the other AND precisely in eye )

 

Throwing has to have its own skill, maybe not just throwing weapons (think of a HUGE mutant throwing automobiles, or a knight a two-hand claymore :D )

 

More variable armor would be nice, but i like power armors

(but there r not just strenght modefier, some could change speed,agility,dodge,reflexes.Like exoskeletals in KOTOR)

 

...

 

besides, Bethesda guys are working on Fallout3, but i don't think it comes

out before 2010

[J.E. Sawyer]

I don't see how grenades can be a melee weapon. It's a ranged weapon. It's in your hand, you throw it at the target and it goes boom. It would be a melee weapon if you were stupid enough to hold on to it and use it to beat someone with.

Contrary to what Hades wrote, no one ever said that grenades were melee weapons. Throwing grenades was going to be checked against the melee skill in F3 because the throwing skill in Fallout 1 & 2 was so rarely used that it was practically worthless. The other alternative would have been to put potent throwing weapons everywhere, which made even less sense.

 

AC is something what is not the best described, but is used since the 1st D&D and it would be hard to change it (they try that in 3.5, but its not worked out) 

If someone went through the effort to do it, I don't think it would be that hard at all. D&D already uses damage reduction.

 

Throwing has to have its own skill, maybe not just throwing weapons (think of a HUGE mutant throwing automobiles, or a knight a two-hand claymore  :D )

If a game supported more "free form" throwing of objects, or throwing items to other characters, I suppose throwing as a stand-alone skill could be worthwhile.

 

More variable armor would be nice, but i like power armors 

(but there r not just strenght modefier, some could change speed,agility,dodge,reflexes.Like exoskeletals in KOTOR)

The Hei Gui armor intended for F3 was a light armor (about equivalent to combat armor) that boosted AG, PE, and sneak.

[Gabrielle]

Ah, ok I see now. Thanks.

[Kasoroth]

I think that there should definitely be tradeoffs for power armor, vs. heavy armor vs light armor.

 

In general, lighter armor would be less restrictive to your mobility, make less noise, and be easier to wear for extended periods of time without getting tired. It would not protect you as much from damage as heavy armor would.

 

Heavy armor would restrict movement to some degree, may or may not make more noise than light armor, and would cause more fatigue over long periods of time. It would generally be more protective than light armor, but less protective than power armor

 

Power armor would restrict motion significantly, make a lot of noise, and require a power source to operate, but it would not cause as much fatigue as heavy armor and would even grant a bonus to strength, and it would be more protective than heavy armor.

 

Not all armors would necessarily fit neatly into these categories, but they seem to me to provide a decent guideline.

 

To implement these, an armor system needs a few basic traits:

1) Separate values for chance to hit vs. protection from damage.

[Note 1a] Fallout's further division of protection from damage into a separate DR and DT seems to be an attempt to facilitate different ammo types such as AP bullets, but it doesn't really work very well in my opinion and isn't necessary to handle different ammo types. Instead I would suggest a system where armor had a single Damage Reduction stat that simply subtracted a flat amount from the damage dealt (like D&D's DR system). AP bullets would cut the target's effective Damage reduction by some percentage (for example, effective DR=50% regular DR), but subtract a flat amount from the damage dealt, so against an unarmored or lightly armored target, the reduction of DR wouldn't be enough to offset the damage penalty, but against a heavily armored opponent it would. Hollow point bullets would do the opposite and give a percentage increase to the opponent's effective DR (for example, effective DR = 150% normal DR), but give a flat increase to damage dealt, so against an unarmored or lightly armored opponent the damage increase would more than offset the target's DR increase, but against a heavily armored opponent, the increase in DR would exceed the damage benefit and make them less effective than regular bullets.

 

2) Armor needs to be able to apply penalties to a variety of activities to implement the drawbacks of heavier armors. The mobility restrictions of heavier armors might provide penalties to acrobatic activities, and to the "hit avoidance" stat. Noisy armors should provide big penalties to stealth, and some armors should alter social interactions (if power armor is very rare, it might make diplomacy harder, but intimidation easier, but on a military base where everyone's wearing it, it would not have much effect on social interactions at all)

 

3) Some kind of fatigue system would be good for representing the additional difficulty of wearing heavy armor.

 

4) For powered armor, a limited power source (instead of Fallout's infinite power source. Hey, why didn't the power armor come with an outlet to plug your energy weapons into for unlimited ammo?) would make an interesting limitation. This brings up several questions: Do you wear the power armor the whole time you're travelling, and drain power like the car's fuel supply in FO2, or do you take it off to travel to conserve power (and how long does it take to put it on when you get ambushed)? If it runs out of power does it completely immobilize you, or can you still move if you're strong enough (and what penalties do you get for "dead" power armor)?

 

 

Regarding skill division, I don't really have an objection to combining thrown weapons and melee weapons into a single skill, particularly in a CRPG. In a PnP game you can get away with having a wide variety of rather specific skills (for example, GURPS has tons of very specific skills, and even separates thrown weapons from throwing things in general, and has a fairly complex system of skill defaults to represent the overlap between some of these narrowly focused skills), but in a CRPG it makes sense to consolidate activites into a smaller number of fairly general skills. I don't think that "Melee" is really a good name for a skill that includes both melee and thrown weapons (perhaps "hand powered weapons", or simply "hand weapons" would be a better name), and I don't think "Armor Class" is a good name for a stat that represents the ability to avoid being hit, but these are issues of terminology, not actual rules mechanics.

 

-Kasoroth

[Ginthaeriel]

Combat was not why the Fallout games rocked. It was the freedom, and the sheer options available to you to complete tasks. Combat was one of those options, and also the most boring one. Fallout rocked because of everything else.

 

Also, Grenades should have been put into an "Explosives" skill category, that would aslo affect usage of rocket launchers, mines, explosive traps, maybe flamethrowers, etc. Traps would be how well you could conceal traps period, including explosive traps, as well as how well you could spot and disarm traps. This leaves traditional throwing weapons free to be merged with melee weapons.

 

It doesn't make that much sense, since the skills governing the usage of a rocket launcher and a grenade are rather different; but at least it *sounds* like it does and it certainly seems balanced at initial glance. After all, you still need to have a general course on how explosives work to really utilize both weapons. Plus, throwing grenades is not really the same thing as being able to put a dagger between the eyes of a guy standing thirty feet away. Gameplay over realism.

 

I would have loved to play a specialized pyromaniac character that makes things go boom.

 

Another possibility would have been to check grenades into a direct strength/perception/agility check, to see how far you can throw it and it's relative accuracy. I can't imagine the exact spot of a GRENADE really matters to the guy who throws it. I mean if I had a pinless grenade in my hand, I wouldn't even bother looking before throwing it somewhere. Anywhere. As long as it's not around to make ME go boom.

[Judge Hades]

Athletics would be a good skill choice but in case that wasn't ion the mix I would have placed grenades (and other things that are thrown and go boom) in Firearms or Small Arms skill. Thrown items that don't go boom like spears, throwing knives, and rocks I would have placed in melee.

 

Reasoning being this is the the way one throws a grenade is quit different than a knife. A grenade is lobbed for distance but doesn't need a forcceful throw to do damage. It needs to be accurate and that is all. A knife thown weapon needs to be accurate but also needs strength behind the throw to do damage.

 

Oh, who has the rights to the SPECIAL Rules System right now anyway? Does Interplay still have them or did they get sold off with everything else?

Edited January 15, 2006 by Judge Hades

[Atreides]

The grenade's in melee to better shove it down people's throat, foo.

[Musopticon?]

I understand why the chance from thrwo to melee was made.

 

So that they'd be more usable to combaty types without having to take points in Thrown Weapons, right?

[Judge Hades]

For the most part thrown skill was pretty much unused or no points were put into it. At least in my myriad of gameplays through the Fallouts that was the case.