Re: FB Armour (was: Re: Thoughts on FB .....)

Ground Zero Games <jon@gzero.dungeon.com> wrote:

>>A small change which would make armour a bit better, and also a lot
>>more interesting (IMO) is if the armour value applied to each facing
>>of the ship individually. So 10 points of armour gives you 10 points
>>on the fore, 10 points on port etc.
>>
>>Then you can have all the fun of ships rotating to bring their still
>>armoured sides to face the enemy.
>
>This was an idea that I considered when doing the new armour rules, but
>dropped it as being a little too complex; it could still pop up as an
>option in FT3. It could certainly be used for players that like it, if
they
>don't mind the extra detail and having to note which arc any fire is
coming
>in from. Logically it would use the same 6 arcs as the fire arcs, with
>armour split between the arcs either equally or not depending on design
>choices. BTW, the same theory can be applied to screens for some
specific
>genres, eg: Star Trek, where having screens/shields covering individual
>arcs fits the background - on a threshold, roll for each arc of the
screen
>- they can be lost individually.

I dislike the idea for two reasons:

1) As I've said in previous posts, I think that it complicates the
system
too much.

2) I would require a fairly serious modification to the ship's SSDs

If you MUST have directional armor:

A simple solution that might work for those who want directional armor
with
minimal disruption of the current game rules would be to assign each box
(or group of boxes) a letter code which corresponds to an arc (or group
of
arcs). Say F for all the forward arcs, and A for all the aft arcs.

Unfortunately this would also make each point of armor slightly less
usefull, as it would no longer cover shots from any direction. There are
several possible solutions to this problem, but they involve messing
with
the design rules, and I'd rather not get into that.

Schoon