Power Armor as a Character

[Alyster Wick]

I was thinking through some alternate rules for bionic limb replacement which would handle their stats independent of the characters stats. This would include independent BIV, strength, along with different effects for injury levels.

I started thinking about applying some of these principals to power armor, but one thing led to another and the image of a character sheet for power armor popped into my head. It's still pretty raw, but I wanted to rough out some ideas and make sure no one else had already gone down this rabbit hole (in which case I'd definitely also be interested in seeing what had already been written).

Fluff-wise, power armor deserves a little more attention than it currently gets. High armor value, a strength bonus, and maybe some auto-senses are nice, but this is a unique piece of Imperial history that's being fielded, with its own quirks and back story. Wouldn't it be more interesting to have an entire sheet devoted to it, with more options overall but also more detail when it takes damage?

My thinking is that it would make it a whole lot more fun to take power armor and would also make a player feel less cheated when their warband has one or two fewer models on the board since they essentially have an entire extra character on the outside of their leader. It would also make SMs a lot more interested, but that's a longer story.

Anyway, I'll be toying around with some drafts in the coming weeks but I wanted to put this out there to get the conversation going. My initial thought is give a certain number of injury levels for each location with injury effects ranging from the AV of the location dropping to losing strength bonuses or even having the component freeze up on you. For stronger armor the attacker may need to do a level or two of damage to the armor before the character is affected at all.

In the long run I think this could make power armor a lot more interesting for both players. The whole 10 points or armor thing can make ridiculous when you have a modestly armed group who is praying for two sixes to even put a scratch in the opposition. With this system though you could see progress being made and eventually start doing some real damage.

Anyway, just some initial thoughts. What does the community think?

[MarcoSkoll]

I was thinking through some alternate rules for bionic limb replacement which would handle their stats independent of the characters stats. This would include independent BIV, strength, along with different effects for injury levels.

I've started to do something similar.

For an example, the latest version of Silva's character sheet gives her bionics BIV 5 & AV 8, in place of her normal T 73 - designed to represent them being heavily armoured (and customised) military models, but nonetheless containing sensitive components.

As far as completely different injury effects, I've stopped short of going that far. I am considering the option that bionics might perhaps have immunity to bleeding, system shock or maybe a cap on injury total (dependent on various things, like whether the nerve interface has a cut-out. Particularly crude bionics might perhaps have badly calibrated damage feedback and have the inverse effect!), but the injury rules are already one of the time-sinks of the game - somewhat necessarily, as I think the detailed damage system is what makes a PvP RPG like Inquisitor viable, but the game tends to slow down a lot once you've got to start looking up injury effects.

(I've found it to be less of a burden since I reformatted the injury table for my updated quick reference, abbreviating everything down to get rid of all the "As Heavy" guff and laying it out more intuitively, but fixing it isn't really an argument to mess it up again)

Fluff-wise, power armor deserves a little more attention than it currently gets. High armor value, a strength bonus, and maybe some auto-senses are nice, but this is a unique piece of Imperial history that's being fielded, with its own quirks and back story. Wouldn't it be more interesting to have an entire sheet devoted to it, with more options overall but also more detail when it takes damage?

I think it could be very interesting and potentially a very characterful solution to the toughness of power armour.

I get the idea that it could feel almost more like fighting the character's armour. If their suit starts to shut down, then it's two hundred kilos of dead weight - even if they're completely unharmed, they're not going to be doing much with to compete with. A sense that power armour isn't just something you wear but something you pilot - I think that would be a rather nice take on the whole thing.

The trick though would be in not making it into too much of a rules burden, and I'm not necessarily sure the "pilot, not wear" thing would be right for every suit, but there's certainly something to work with there.

an entire extra character on the outside of their leader.

It's not necessarily the leader of course. The most likely such examples suitable for regular use would probably be Battle Sisters, who may well be under someone else's command.

Certainly, when Sister Phoenix finally has an Ecclesiarchy warband to join, she'll be technically serving as a bodyguard for... well, most of the rest of the characters involved.

In the long run I think this could make power armor a lot more interesting for both players. The whole 10 points or armor thing can make ridiculous when you have a modestly armed group who is praying for two sixes to even put a scratch in the opposition. With this system though you could see progress being made and eventually start doing some real damage.

Well, I was discussing a similar point via PM on Ammobunker recently, about the possibility of an INQ2.0 system trying to make things like power armour and weapons less cheesy - still powerful, but not something that a player had to feel guilty about bringing to the table occasionally.

I think power armour's balance has changed a certain amount with my Revised Armoury, which is used prevalently enough that its slight increase to things like rifle and shotgun damage (such as 3D6 rather than 2D6+2) makes a difference to exactly how much AV10 can shrug off, but the idea of addressing such things on a more fundamental game mechanics level did come up. Still thinking on that one though.

[KaptiDavy]

I think it's the usual trap: if something seems important, give it more rules!
But more rules make the game more clumsy...

If anyone cares, try GURPS - it's an old school, "rules-heavy" RPG system (it has rules for anything that can come up during a game session) streamlined for fast learning and easy playing in its 4th edition. In that, a power armour is just a handful of modifiers, although you can write a full page of its actual contents and attributes

[DapperAnarchist]

The idea of PA as a separate character makes me want to make a Sibberingarine in INQ, complete with the octomode bolts and the tripartite minds (one mind for the Astartes, in charge, supplemented by the armour's mind and the bolter's mind into the COVENet, or just Coven). That might be taking things too far, but I can see it potentially work as an occasional element in a Deathwatch game.

[MarcoSkoll]

I think it's the usual trap: if something seems important, give it more rules!
But more rules make the game more clumsy...

Well, yes and no. Cluttering up the rules is something to be wary of, but I'd say "interesting" and "important" are exactly the kind of thing that deserve their own rules.

I may be on an extreme end of the scale here, as it's far from unusual for my characters to have half a dozen custom special rules, and very often more (at the extreme end, Maya Avens has 33 abilities), but I find the quantity of rules is less of a clunky issue than the quality of those rules.

[TheNephew]

When I read the OP, specifically making the suits themselves more individual and giving them a bit of personality, my mind went immediately to the Necromundan Spyrer suits.
I might have built it up a bit in memory, but I'm sure I saw a Nec article (WD/CJ/something) about Spyrer gang experience - the suits doing the levelling up instead of the wearers. The longer they're on the hunt in the Underhive, the more systems come online, building up to full Predator-mode or Robocop mode etc.
In that, there might even have been a nice big random-roll table of suit gadgets, routines and enhancements that sound like the sort of thing  always imagined a Space Marine suit would have, or that the suits machine spirit could activate.

[DapperAnarchist]

I was thinking that the importance of rules for PA depends on whether or not the character ever takes it off. If they do, you could have the physical stats, even WS and BS, be the suits, along with a bunch of skills, and some of the character's skills get cancelled out, so these two entities overlap in various ways... Similar to that Spyrer idea.

[KaptiDavy]

DapperAnarchist's idea comes a bit closer, I think - but it could still mean a bunch of modifiers after all
The whole thing boils down to campaign/scenario considerations... I always wanted to ask how much of your usual game time is spent on action and other, more RPG like activities (if conversations, interrogations and puzzles are part of a scenario or played between tabletop actions)?

[MarcoSkoll]

I was thinking that the importance of rules for PA depends on whether or not the character ever takes it off.

I think that's probably one of the better ways to use power armour. Like any powerful equipment, being able to swap it in or out as appropriate to the scenario does quite a lot to address its balance.

I may do something like this with Silva Birgen, modelling several options between her standard gear and some of the heavy weapons she sometimes uses in background stories - they're not everyday gear (and in a lot of cases, she might well just grab a bolter) but she's known to use heavy machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, anti-materiel rifles and even gatling guns and light autocannons on occasion.

I think though, there'd be something potentially interesting about differentiating power armour more than just swapping which character sheet the character is using (the default damage rules don't necessarily represent that very well). I think rules clutter is something to bear in mind at all times with this, but I think it's worth looking into; it's possible to produce detailed rules without them being clunky.

[Alyster Wick]

DapperAnarchist's idea comes a bit closer, I think - but it could still mean a bunch of modifiers after all
The whole thing boils down to campaign/scenario considerations... I always wanted to ask how much of your usual game time is spent on action and other, more RPG like activities (if conversations, interrogations and puzzles are part of a scenario or played between tabletop actions)?

I've tried pushing some games with more RP elements with my group (of very occasional) players but I'm leaning back towards more action focused scenarios as folks get more comfortable with the universe. I've found that when you let new players get sucked in by the action and push gently with your own warband/NPCs then the RPing elements will come out natually rather than trying to force it.

Moving on from that bit, I've gotta say, more rules for power armor don't seem like a burden at all to me. If the rules for the armor are no more complicated than the rules for an additional character then there's no reason to think of it any differently. I wouldn't shy away from this concept any more than I'd shy away from the idea that a game could be player with a 5 person warband rather than a 4 person warband.

Taking into account that many of the statistics that pair with the armor are likely to be on the character's own sheet (weapons, stats, etc) it leaves plenty of room to have additional rules (alternate damage effects, etc) on the PA's sheet so you don't have to look them up.


To go off on a bit of a tangent, not all extra rules are equal. If you have a character that has a dozen special abilities from the original rulebook along with special ammo, then you're going to forget something and/or it'll make the game slow. If you give a character 30 some-odd special rules that you custom design but that are all interrelated somehow (IE they all deal with variations on how to use a custom psychic ability in different situations) then it's less about a stack of complex rules than it is about a style of play suited to a character's unique abilities (I'm going out on a limb here Marco and assuming that's the situation with the character you described above with a ton of abilities). In that scenario you're less apt to forget the rules because that's tantamount to forgetting what character you're playing. Much the same way, giving power armor its own sheet feels right. You aren't going to suddenly forget the character is wearing power armor and send them sprinting across the board when the rules state they can't (because it's a primitive model of armor and you can never more faster than a run). When someone shoots you with a plasma gun you aren't going to apply it to your character's sheet and forget you have an entire other sheet where the damage is supposed to go. I really think this is an example where something fits organically and extra rules add richness rather than confusion. It would actually encourage players using power armor to field less models as when they select their PA character they already have two sheets to be working with. The kinds of players who build two separate models for a character (one with PA and one without) will really be able to feel the difference now that their shiny custom PA mini comes with an entire character sheet of its own. I can tell you that just writing this paragraph has made me contemplate which characters I'm going to decapitate when I get home so I can magnetize their head onto a power armored torso.

I understand I'm throwing out a lot of hypotheticals at this point, but hopefully when I can show what I'm talking about it will all seem a bit more sane.

[MarcoSkoll]

IIf you give a character 30 some-odd special rules that you custom design but that are all interrelated somehow (IE they all deal with variations on how to use a custom psychic ability in different situations) then it's less about a stack of complex rules than it is about a style of play suited to a character's unique abilities (I'm going out on a limb here Marco and assuming that's the situation with the character you described above with a ton of abilities).

Pretty much. Maya has very focused psychic disciplines through which she can channel her powers*, but she's incredibly creative and skilled in how she uses and combines those seemingly narrow options. 

* Her pyrokinesis is fairly unrestrained, but her telepathy is largely limited to empathy (she can read and manipulate emotion, but not conscious thought or memory) and her telekinesis doesn't work on anything bigger/heavier than photons or air molecules.

The other thing is that I didn't want her to always fall back on just throwing fireballs everywhere if it came to a fight, so I've tried to make sure that I've given her a lot of options while staying within the defined limits of her power.
Hence she has abilities that relate to instilling fear, hope, doubt, rage, disgust and more, all with their own interesting effects in game, plus a few seeming oddities that do find use from time to time - she can summon up some moderately powerful sonic effects through manipulating air vibrations and the like.

That many abilities is an unusual case even for me, but it all fits quite a tight theme, so she tends to work reasonably fluidly in game.

[DapperAnarchist]

I'm really impressed when someone makes multiple versions of their character, and would be tempted to do it myself, but it takes time, money, and a commitment to replicating enough details to make it reasonably clear that they are in fact the same character. The only one I got anywhere with was a plan to make bound and unbound versions of a Daemonhost, united mostly by sharing the octopus head from the Spawn kit. This gets harder when you want to make an inscale 54mm Marine - not easy! Though if you really do want to, the Spawn torso piece is pretty close to the right size. But generally, because PA will be unique to a character and not shared around much due to narrative and practical concerns, for the most part my rule idea seems mostly an explanation of what the rules will always be, and not that different from the existing "+X% Strength, Autosenses" type rules we have. Sorry to be a downer on my own rules, I'm always glad people like stuff I write.

[Raghnall]

To my mind, power armour is rather like daemon weapons, in that it is a unique form of equipment with its own personality. By the LRB, all power armour is identical, and fairly simplistic. Going by the background however, there are eight patterns of astartes power armour, with countless other chapter specific patterns and designs for regular humans, not counting the unique custom models which must be fairly common (by the standards of power armour) in the Inquisition.

Power armour isn't just regular armour, and it seems far too bland if you treat it like it is. Even if it does add an extra layer of complexity, I think that giving power armour its own character sheet is a much better representation of how its should function, and someone fielding power armour likely doesn't have a large number of other characters with complex rules on the table, so I support it.

[blacknight]

Thought I might add my comment to this one.  I love the idea of unique power armour getting its own character sheet, and special rules.  whether it is just slightly different armour or strength bonuses between the different types or armour or resistance to knock down or whatever.  (Watching Iron Man 3 could lead to a whole host of different unique power armours)

Another thought is that a lot of the fiction does comment around power armour having a machine spirit that needs to be appeased.  Maybe this could be represented by giving the armour an intellegence value and then testing against it in certain circumstances where if successful the armour gives additional bonuses (such as instead of 20% strength gain can get 50% for a single action to force open a door or dig yourself our from a landslide; bonuses for the test from doing additional things to appease the machine spirit).

Just some thoughts to throw into the mix (I now really want to do a power armoured character or three).

Marc/Blacknight

[KaptiDavy]

The machine spirit seems intriguing - WP and Ld would justify that sheet more than any of the previously mentioned things