Power Armor as a Character

[Alyster Wick]

I have a fair amount of notes pulled together, but as they're pretty scatter brained I'm going to put a summary here:

- Machine Spirit: Yes and yes. This is absolutely going to be an element of the Power Armor. Notably, I'm toying around with different basic "armor archetypes", if you will, some of which have machine spirits and others of which don't. Basically there will be some tests involved in using power armor as it's very different from walking around like a normal person. If a suit of Power Armor has a machine spirit they will be testing off of the Machine Spirit rather than their SG, or they may be able to reroll their SG test, or they may be able to bypass the test altogether depending on the situation/type of machine spirit. I'm still working out how this will all work. There shouldn't be a burdensome amount of tests, but PA is a huge boon and should come with some characterful downsides/challenges. Additionally, I'd love to add some rules for a malign machine spirit (inferring a daemonic or evil AI presence in the suit).

- Power Armor Archetypes: As mentioned above, there will be a number of archetypes that I'd like to present. These will range from Industrial (not so much power armor as the power lifter from alien), to crude (think of a wasteland overlord who may have just strapped some armor plates and machine guns to an industrial lifter), to lighter power armor (closer to powered carapace), to full battle armor (SM armor for regular humans). Each archetype will allow different options, ranging from more armor, limiting movement (you can't run in a power lifter), number of damage levels per location, etc.

- Damage Levels - Speaking of which, my plan is to come up with a variety of injury effects and make it a kind of choose your own adventure to create the power armor. Rather than saying, "all power armor will have 5 levels of damage and they are blank," I'd like to present possibly 10 unique effects per location and let the player choose which ones make sense (and in which order) based on their personal armor. This will require GM oversight as a nefarious player could just pick ten levels of ablative armor where they lose a level but suffer not ill effects (on that note, heftier suits of PA will have one or more ablative levels of damage where you tick off an injury level but suffer no ill effects). Then again, GM oversight is always required as players currently are free to take whatever they'd like. As a parting shot, each injury level will have a corresponding armor value attached to it. Thus someone wearing a pristine suit of armor may have 12 armor on each location, but that may drop to 10 after a level of damage has been done, 8 after two levels have been done, etc. Not that the value needs to drop by two each time damage is done, but just as an example. The point is, the character can still take damage even if a location isn't destroyed yet.

- Unique Stats - Each suit of PA will have it's own stat line. This won't line up exactly with what a character has, but will include strength (maybe with a bonus added based on the character's strength, but in most cases I think the suit will do all the work), toughness or structure maybe (a stand in for T that establishes BIV), base armor level (even armor has armor), a knockback characteristic (a character's strength is largely irrelevant, the weight and strength of the suit will dictate when they're knocked back). There may be some other stats, but these are the big ones.

- Special Abilities List - Armor will grant unique abilities to the wearer to further customize the armor. These could include full auto-senses, rock steady aim, the ability to wield a basic weapon one handed, implant weaponry, bonuses to movement/jumping, jump packs, etc. Any and all suggestions welcome here.

- Power Source - These things run on something, am I right? Power sources will be located in specific locations on the PA and will offer a tempting target for those trying to disable the power armored individual. SM's obviously have the backpack (a large but sturdy target) while more primitive suits may have a hidden powersource that required power cables that run throughout the suit (offering a chance to completely disable an extremity on a critical hit). There will be a few different options for what would power your suit and options for where this power source could be placed, offering a large array of options to customize your suit. Much like my idea of a daemonic machine spirit, it'd be fun to have a daemonic power source (obviously involving some substantial downsides, IE possession).

Anyway, those are my scattered thoughts. I would love any and all suggestions if any of these ideas spark your interest or ideas of your own. Honestly I think there's enough here to assemble an entire sourcebook rather than just an article (but one small step at a time).

[DapperAnarchist]

Could damage levels instead be wrapped up in a more general house rule for armour damage that allows for armour, even non-ablative, to be destroyed (or, rather, made non-effective)? Seems odd that 3 inches of ceramite and plasteel can, after a flurry of las bolts or shotgun blasts, withstand less impact than a thin steel/leather breastplate after the same impacts (assuming what's inside that armour can survive - say, a possessed entity, or Marco's funcitonally immortal mutant character). You might also want to put strong lower limits on that, to avoid the death of a thousand cuts.

I'm very intrigued by the machine spirit ideas - but perhaps it should be the exception, rather than the rule? Perhaps have it as a form of injury level, so that damage to the suit/disruption of the relationship between suit and wearer would cause, for X turns/until a test is passed, a need to use SG/MS rolls to perform most actions. Reduces the rolls, but keeps it around as a thing that could happen.

Archetypes seem like a obvious one actually, and it's weird that the closest we've had is occasional "PA, but with Carapace level armour" so far.

Would the Stat Line be a bit like the Marine Implant rules, basically applying a different but similar rule set and stat line to the character? That seems fair. I guess my suspicions earlier were based on a worry that PA could be treated very separate from the character, when in practice it isn't, usually.

[Koval]

Why are you guys trying to clutter up the game with so much crunch for a single piece of wargear? It's equipment. I agree it needs to be treated differently to how it is at the moment, but surely it's so much simpler to just take inspiration from the power armour rules and especially the history tables in Deathwatch and Rites of Battle, where that level of extra detail is relevant and pertinent. Inquisitor gets bogged down as it is by unnecessary complexity and adding more is a massive turn-off.

Change the way power armour works by all means but it needs to be kept simple, accessible and something players will want to use.

[MarcoSkoll]

Why are you guys trying to clutter up the game with so much crunch for a single piece of wargear?

Because I agree with Alyster that power armour, single piece of wargear or not, deserves to be more than a high AV, a stat boost and "if you get targeted by machine empathy, lol".

Even with something like the power armour histories in something like Deathwatch, just slapping on stat tweaks does disappear into the normal differences between character statlines. Saying that power armour has to be represented that way is like saying "Why have shooting skills? The game's already got a BS characteristic, just make that higher!"

Power armour in the game largely just makes characters powerful without making them particularly different or interesting. I'll agree that the end result needs to be efficient (maybe it'll all just come down to using a different injury chart for characters in power armour), but we're still in the phase of discussing what we could do rather than necessarily what we will.

Could damage levels instead be wrapped up in a more general house rule for armour damage that allows for armour, even non-ablative, to be destroyed (or, rather, made non-effective)? Seems odd that 3 inches of ceramite and plasteel can, after a flurry of las bolts or shotgun blasts, withstand less impact than a thin steel/leather breastplate after the same impacts.

Well, as you've already observed, it's often not really worth keeping track of armour damage as the character is usually incapacitated before armour degradation would necessarily have taken major effect. You mentioned Jax - who I might keep track of armour degradation for, but she's an unusual case (and her wearing armour more so*).

* As she's got such powerful regeneration, she finds wearing armour more of a nuisance than a necessity. Her background does mention her sometimes using modified suits of Stormtrooper carapace for high risk operations - but, yes, they tend to be kind of ruined afterwards, because she can take more hits than the armour can!

With that in mind, tracking degradation of power armour but not carapace isn't that unreasonable.

In any case, it's not entirely untrue. Ceramic armour has excellent single-hit protection, because it's hard enough to smash apart steel or tungsten-cored rounds, but it's also brittle (and tends to crack/shatter across large areas of a plate) which means it's compromised by fewer hits than a steel or kevlar based armour would be (which tend to deform rather than shatter), even if those armours aren't capable of stopping such powerful rounds.

And as far as the actual realism of it, armour rated for more powerful hits often can only take fewer hits. Ceramic armour has excellent single-hit protection, because it's very hard and is very effective at smashing apart bullets, even steel or tungsten core rounds. However, it's also brittle, and a crack will usually spread across an entire plate (many ceramic armours are tiled to reduce this effect), which means it's often compromised by the first few hits.
Steel armour isn't as hard (and is therefore much more vulnerable to AP rounds), but it has excellent toughness, meaning it can easily take multiple hits before its overall protective qualities are significantly compromised.

I'm very intrigued by the machine spirit ideas - but perhaps it should be the exception, rather than the rule? Perhaps have it as a form of injury level, so that damage to the suit/disruption of the relationship between suit and wearer would cause, for X turns/until a test is passed, a need to use SG/MS rolls to perform most actions. Reduces the rolls, but keeps it around as a thing that could happen.

I'm not sure how to handle that, because that's an often divisive part of the background.

To some players, things like the machine spirit or "Anzion Theorem of Orkoid Mechamorphic Resonant Kinetics" are literal truths (so there is a sentience to machinery or things happen because Orks expect them to), but I've always seen these as a satirical element of the background - the machine spirit is in most cases* just normal mechanical malfunction horrifically misinterpreted through the lens of superstition and dogma (the reason because your gun jams if you don't anoint it with sacred lubricants is not because it's angry, it's because you haven't oiled it!).

* In the cases of things like titans and Land raiders, I have no doubts there is actual sentience, but how much power armour is actually sentient (and, more importantly, petulant) is a lot more arguable.

[Alyster Wick]

Why are you guys trying to clutter up the game with so much crunch for a single piece of wargear? It's equipment. I agree it needs to be treated differently to how it is at the moment, but surely it's so much simpler to just take inspiration from the power armour rules and especially the history tables in Deathwatch and Rites of Battle, where that level of extra detail is relevant and pertinent. Inquisitor gets bogged down as it is by unnecessary complexity and adding more is a massive turn-off.

Change the way power armour works by all means but it needs to be kept simple, accessible and something players will want to use.

Thanks for the suggestions on the rules for Deathwatch and Rites of Battle. I'll have to check them out for inspiration.

In terms of adding clutter to the game, it's all in execution. To use the example of Marco's character from earlier in this thread, they have a huge number of abilities (30 some odd) but those abilities are inter-related and part of the character. In other words, they are extra rules that are unlikely to be forgotten because they are integral to the character and how the character is played. To forgot them is to forget the character you're playing.

And that's what I'm really going for here, creating a rules set that adds character to an iconic element of the 40K Universe. The rules as they stand do not represent power armor well at all. Its depiction in table top 40K is vastly over simplified because of that games scale but Inquisitor gives us a chance to explore PA in far more detail. Personally I don't think having a full character sheet for Power Armor is a burden, it just requires the player to make some choices about how much time they're willing to put into their warband and whether or not the potential hassle of an extra character sheet is worth it (or maybe they want to lighten the number of characters in the warband to compensate).

As for the notion that it's just a "single piece of wargear", I disagree. It's not the same thing as a pistol or a suit of armor or bionic implants. In fact, a suit of PA may incorporate all three of the aforementioned pieces of wargear and then some. Allowing players to get into this level of detail is what the game does best. Now it's true that there needs to be balance between details and practicality so the game doesn't get completely out of hand. For that reason I hope you do continue to tune into this thread as we're hashing out ideas, I'd definitely like the input of someone who will push back when we go overboard and keep the crew grounded.