Armour, Shields, & Stress, Oh My!
One thing that’s been bugging me for a while is how to handle armour and shields. That’s energy shields, not buckler-type shields :p
Anyway, I’m not too happy with the way most FATE games do, with having it be a flat reduction of damage. I mean, the whole system is based on “Add this, add that, and maybe add some more.” Also, addition is mentally easier than subtraction for most people.
Stress
Halo is supposed to be heroic and epic. How I originally wanted to do stress was fill in the box and all lower. However, after playing more Dresden, I realized how heroic the “mark one” system is. So I’m changing it.
Whenever you take stress, you mark off the box that corresponds to the number of shifts dealt—or damage of the weapon, whichever is higher. So if you’re hit with a 3-shift attack with a damage 2, you mark off the 3rd stress box. If it was a 2-shift attack with damage 3, you’d mark off the 3rd box also.
If the box you’re supposed to mark is already marked, it rolls up. So if you were hit with the above two attacks one after the other, your 3rd and 4th stress boxes should be filled in, but no others.
Armour
I had an epiphany last week when playing Dresden Files RPG with my group. I was looking at the stats for a really powerful creature we were interacting with (~-42 refresh, while we have 13), and I noticed his physical stress track.
Remember those monsters with a stress track that looks like O O O O (O O) because they have inhuman toughness? That’s when it hit me. Armour adds to your physical stress track.
How Armour Works
All armour adds 2 to your physical stress track. For light armour, that’s it. Medium armour also gives you an additional mild physical consequence (damaged armour or something similar). If you want heavy armour, it not only gives you 2 extra stress, the mild consequence, but it also allows you to recover from that extra consequence once per encounter!
Shields
How are shields different? Shields don’t add to your stress track, it’s a new stress track. All shields stress track are 4-boxes long, along with a mild physical consequence (shields blown, or something similar). They are differentiated by how quickly they recharge.
Shield Recharge Rate
All shields may be recharged with a supplemental or regular action, as long as they didn’t take any stress this exchange. As a supplemental action, light shields may remove a mark from the 2nd box, medium shields can remove a mark from the 3rd box, and heavy shields may remove a mark from the 4th box. If that box is unmarked, you may remove a mark from one box below that.
For example, if your medium shields stress track looks like O X X O, you may remove the 3rd mark. So after the supplemental action, it now looks like O X O O. If you don’t take any more stress the next round, you may use another supplemental action to remove the last mark.
As a regular action, you may roll systems. You may remove one stress box as per the supplemental action, but for every 2 points over the difficulty of 0, you may remove one more box, starting with the lowest.
Shield Consequences
If your shields have taken their mild consequence, you must deal with that first. Roll systems (as a regular action), against a difficulty of 0. For each additional time you try to remove the consequence, add an additional +1 to the difficulty. If the consequence hasn’t been tagged, it may be tagged to increase the difficulty of the roll by +2.
If you succeed at the roll, the consequence is removed. After each conflict, the difficulty is reduced back to 0.
Closing Remarks
There you have it. It’s all about stress and boxes. I like boxes that look like circles, don’t you?
