Building a Better Suit of Powered Armor

You know
the cover of Zebulon’s Guide, featuring a character in a bad ass suit of
powered armor.

It had an
effect similar to the posters of some movies – promising delights that just
weren’t in the finished product. Buried among the plethora of skills (note, the
original meaning of plethora is “a great quantity, especially more than
desirable”) was the powered armor skill.

But, as
was typical with the Zebs rulebook, no examples of powered armor could be found
except what was on the cover. One had to wait for the January 1988 issue of
Dragon Magazine for the article “Armed and Dangerous: The power of powered
armor in the STAR Frontiers® game” before that deficiency was rectified.

The
writer David Dennis does a fine job of laying out the reasons for including
these kind of super soldier suits in the
game.

“Powered armor is a
device commonly used in science-fiction role-playing games and occasionally used in
fantasy RPGs,” Dennis wrote. “TSR.s own GAMMA WORLD® game has powered armor. A
suit of powered armor also appears in AD&D® module S3 Expedition to the
Barrier Peaks.

“Unfortunately, the game
that would most likely have powered armor lacks it. Spacesuit armor is found in
the STAR FRONTIERS® Knight Hawks rulebook, but it is not powered. Here, then is
real powered armor,” he continued.

The armor’s wearer – we’ll
call him or her a pilot – receives a number of benefits – immunity to damage
from certain attacks, super-hero like movement, such as 200 meter jumps,
tripling the pilot’s effective stamina, the ability to lift one-metric ton and
such. One of the major drawbacks to Dennis’ presentation are the complicated combat
rules.

For example, the
following comes from the “Armed and Dangerous” article:

1. Check if the
weapon penetrated the armor. If so, additional suit damage may have occurred.
(The nature of this damagewill be checked later on Table 7.) Character damage
also results. If not, no character damage results.

2. Check if damage to
the armor occurs. Subtract the number rolled from the number needed to hit for
the difference. If the difference is equal to or greater than 35,then
additional damage to the suit.s functions has occurred.

3. Add the number of
dice of damage caused by the weapon to a 2d10 die roll.

4. Divide the
percentage of protection by 5, then multiply the quotient by 2. Subtract the
product from the sum in step 3.

5. Consult Table 7.
Apply the results next turn.

6. Roll for normal
damage to the character, reducing the damage by half; reduce it by one-quarter
if using a powerscreen effective against that weapon type.

Wait
players while we break out our scientific calculators to find out if you take
damage and what kind of damage it is. Maybe this is a good time to order pizza.

Sarcasm
aside, the writer did not come up with the idea of complicated defensive
armor. Simply look at the spacesuit armor in the Knight Hawks game. It's also a system where you need to worry about patching holes in the spacesuit after a
character’s been hit in an attack.

Simpler
forms of powered armor have appeared in Star Frontiersman magazine including Chris
Harper’s “Powered Battle Suits” and a
powered inertia suit by William Signs, both in Issue 9, or Brian Cliff’s
powered armor from issue 14.

But,
another advantage of David Dennis’ article was presenting a system of how to
build a powered armor suit. I’d like to explore how that could be done in
future posting using some of the ideas laid out in the exoskeleton discussion.

Pinned

Off

Locked

Off

Forum category

Open Discussion