So, I've been diving into how "fair" battlesuits are. A problem I always run into when running sci-fi games in Ultra-Tech is that characters in battlesuits are always cooler than people not in battlesuits, and people who pay through the nose for additional ST and DR (for example, cyborgs) get left in the dust of a single character who just bought some power armor as, maybe, signature gear. Can we fix that?
But you might not agree with that premise. You might be running it differently. After all, battlesuits come with a host of problems. For example, your heavier suits can't easily take cover or sneak around (though cybersuits and such certainly can). You can't wear battlesuit to a party, while a cyborg with the right sort of biomorphics certainly can. But there's other things that we might reasonably contemplate applying to the mechanical presentation of battlesuits that strike me as quite realistic and, with enough of them, we should "compensate" for the difference between a character with and without a battlesuit, to the point where we can bring such characters more-or-less in line with one another. As we look at these and work out the "effective point cost penalty" we'll see how we can use it to "balance" my rough estimate of ~50 points.
This still won't fix robots, who struggle to keep up with just normal humans who invest in skills, but that'll be out-of-scope for this generic series, as fixing that involves a lot of fundamental changes to how GURPS prices things, and perhaps some unpleasant kludge.
DX Penalty
Particularly ungainly (Environmental) suits might give -1 or more to DX on top of this, regardless of skill level – Environment Suits, B192
I’m shocked that we have rules for DX penalties for Environmenal Suits like Battlesuits, and even an “Armor Familiarity” perk that lets you ignore them, yet there are literally no forms of armor that actually have these that I can find. Not even the space suits from GURPS High Tech, at least not that I can find, and those things should. Astronauts are always complaining that using one is like being inside a balloon.
A DX penalty for battlesuits make a ton of sense. First, you run into issues with the way the armor itself has to be structured: it's "amplifying your strength" but it's also wrapped around you. Human strength is internal: our muscles attach to bones and joints inside us, and now we're creating a second support lattice outside of us that's supposed to work well with, for example, the ball joints of our shoulders or hips, or the flexing of our spine, and augment it. Then you're layering chunky plates of armor on top of that structure. Even setting aside the difficulty of precisely controlling such a thing (a factor of the Environment Suit skill), There's going to need to be compromises that reduces the wearer's flexibility and agility.
At a guess, I'd say that heavy battlesuits, combat walkers and similar "large" suits should apply a -2 to DX, Commando Battlesuits and other "form fitting" armor would apply a -1, and very fitting and slim forms of power armor, like a cybersuit or an exofield suit apply no penalty, but adjust as appropriate for your game.
Such a penalty is worth about -1 point (as it only takes a perk to eliminate).
No Peripheral Vision and Hard of Hearing
The Vacc Suit Helmets before TL 9 have No Peripheral Vision as do Low Tech full helms and High Tech vision gear. Why don't Ultra-Tech helmets give No Peripheral Vision?
Probably because of advances in armor design, really. As armor design gets better and more ergonomic, and materials become stronger, it becomes more plausible to maintain the integrity of the armor while greatly expanding the wearer's field of view. Clever armor designers can also integrate sensors which feed information to the wearer. LT Helmets also give Hard of Hearing, and it's quite plausible that surface sensors would also allow one to "hear well."
Still, if we're looking for ways to diminish the effectiveness of Battlesuits, we can plausibly reduce the field of view of the wearer. We can justify this with the design of the helmet, but it's also as plausible that structures on the shoulder and back of the armor (structures that might be necessary to power shoulder movements) sharply limit the ability of the wearer to glance over their shoulder, or possibly even to their left and right. It's also certainly in genre in Psi-Wars to have helmets limit vision (“I can’t see a thing in this helmet!”. No Peripheral Vision is worth -15 points. Hard of Hearing is worth -10 points, but I'm a little less sold on that, not because I find it unrealistic, but that's the sort of thing that people often forget. It's also worth pointing out that the character likely has the equivalent of No Sense of Smell while the armor is sealed.
Numb
A common solution (to armoring the hand) in science fiction is to make the powered armor hands to be waldoes. The human operator's hands are not actually inside the powered armor hands. Instead, they are in a hollow big enough to allow all finger movements, and the hand is held in a small exo-mocap. The powered hands are mounted just forwards of the human hands. --Man Amplifiers, Atomic Rockets
Realistically, the hands (and the whole suit) has limited feedback functionality. There are obviously several millimeters of armor between you and whatever you’re touching, and it’s entirely possible that the only feedback you get on your hands is the barest resistance. If you're using waldos, there's literally no connection between your hands and the thing you're touching other than whatever feedback your controls are designed to give you. Holding an egg with out crushing it might be virtually impossible!
This suggests the Numb disadvantage, possibly with additional levels of Ham Fisted, though that might be covered well enough with the DX penalty. Working by touch in power-armor would be impossible, and very fine manual tasks would be exceedingly impractical. This also fixes some of the additional comments I’ve had, like “no stealth” as it’s very difficult to move carefully if you can’t feel what you’re doing, such as quietly laying something down, or opening the door as gently as possible. This is, in fact, one of those blindingly obvious rules that I suspect most readers will go “Yeah, of course!” but you have to remember to apply the -3, and “working by touch” is not something a lot of people often think about.
This costs -20 points.
Vehicular Dodge
One option might be to introduce the vehicular dodge rules for battlesuits. After all, you don’t use your own Basic Speed as the basis of your dodges in a car, why in a battlesuit? You would choose some handling value (+0 to +5) and apply it to Battlesuit/2; given how much more agile power armor tends to be when compared to, say, a tank or a car, I’d see +3 to +5 pretty easily. I’d argue against this, however, mostly from the perspective of point cost. Every +1 to dodge would cost you 8 points, rather than 15-20 points of Enhanced Dodge or Basic Speed. And +3 to +5 means that your “floor” is about as high as basic Dodge. Thus, this would actually buff power-armor, which is the opposite of what we want to do.
Battlesuit Skill
My discord has quite some discussion over the Battlesuit skill. At least one fellow hates it as “skill tax.” I see what he means. You create odd situations where being a sniper in a battlesuit requires you to be good, first and foremost, at using a battlesuit, almost to the point where any other skill is irrelevant. Furthermore, it creates weird issues where someone who has no Battlesuit skill who tries to wear one for the first time is effectively useless. This seems odd. After all, the point of power armor is that you can just move and it’ll mimic your motions. It should be intuitive, but with no training, it drops all of your skills to 5 (if you have a DX of 10). For example, if our Commando in the playtest stepped into a battlesuit, his rifle would drop from 17 to 9, which is a catastrophic -8 to skill! If he spent a single point, it would still drop to 13, which is only a -4 to skill.
It might seem weird to have me complain about this. After all, don't I want to diminish the power of battlesuits by "taxing" the characters? If we remove the battlesuit skill cap, you've just made the armor much "cheaper" for characters. And that's true, and it's not what I'm proposing. I'm just noting that the current design makes it basically impossible for a character without the skill to function at all in the armor, which is odd and runs against what the intention of the armor seems to be, while being good with the armor requires weird character-design gymnastics where the DX skill a character has to be best at must be Battlesuit, followed by everything else.
It seemslikely to me that the problem with battlesuit operation is that it’s not hard to move it into a particular place or position (if it is, then it’s bulky and should apply a penalty to DX). It’s just difficult to do it quickly or with grace. If you take extra time you should be able to acquire the needed precision, within the limits of what the armor will allow. Thus, you should be able to perform like normal if you take your time. If you double the time necessary to perform an action, you should either be able to ignore the skill cap or perhaps get a +4 to your skill cap (I lean towards the latter).. I think I’d also suggest that if you take on a strenuous action, such as moving quickly or dodging, you should roll Battlesuit to keep your balance. On a failure, you’re off balance for the turn (-2 to actions, -1 to defense), and on a critical failure, you fall down.
This would imitate how I imagine an unskilled battlesuit operator to act: they’d move with great deliberation, and when they ran or dodged, there would often be moments where the additional weight would take them by surprise and they’d need to pause for a second to regain their balance.
As a disadvantage, this is worth maybe -1 point.
Extra Effort
This risks sounding obvious, but you shouldn’t be allowed to use Extra Effort in a battlesuit. It’s running speed is its own, not yours. The power behind its punches are its own, not yours. And yet, we don’t think twice about allowing someone in a battle suit to take a feverish defense! This seems like a small thing, and it is (It’s a quirk), but it makes an impact.
This is effectively a quirk (-1 point).
Wear and Tear
When researching this, I often came across a variety of logistical issues associated with battlesuits, such as:
Power requirements
Maintenance (sand getting into the joints, etc)
Damage to the power armor
The inability to armor certain parts well.
Ultra-Tech largely seems to handwave away power-requirements. The Commando battlesuit has a day of power, the Heavy Battlesuit has ten years(!) and the cybersuit has a week of power. If we add super-science cells, you can basically power except as a background concern.
Maintenance is almost certainly a thing, but it also amounts to busy work. I don’t mind exploring it in grittier sci-fi, but I’m exploring this mostly from the perspective of action-packed space opera, and asking someone if they maintained their armor every session is just tedious. Obviously, they’re maintaining it, it’s fine. If you’re in an environment where it might see problems, like a swamp or a desert, we can roll against ham clause penalties or something.
The inability to armor everything is not something Ultra-Tech talks about all that much. No matter how cool your armor is, it just can’t armor the back of the knees well, and your gauntlets will need to be lightly armored (unless they’re waldoes, but even then, they’ll be quite delicate). I suppose this is generally covered by “chinks” which, given the size of power armor, are at least slightly easier to hit. But if we’re going to point out that this is a problem for power armor, it’s also a problem for combat hardsuits.
Finally, realistically, the armor will take damage that the wearer doesn’t. When the commando lands a shot on that trooper and penetrates the armor, even if the trooper survives it, his armor might be badly damaged and cease to function. We can even determine the HP of a suit of power armor: a Heavy Battlesuit has about 30 HP based on its weight. This HP should act as cover, or it should be damaged before the user is in some way. If we wanted to, we could make the argument that any attack that does over some threshold value of DR, such as 2/3 or ½, damages the armor but not the wearer. It’s possible to shoot armor to hell without killing the wearer. However, this requires extra book keeping, and I’m not sure that it adds much. It might be easier to treat this as yet another Ham Clause thing, where if you take damage close to your DR threshold, the GM can ask you to roll the armor’s HT or your Armoury to see if the battlesuit is damaged. If so, treat it as a momentary stunning that you have to roll the Armor’s HT or your Armoury to recover from.
Also, an aside: I often see things about failure to control the armor well can result in catastrophic damage to the wearer as the armor moves joints too far and damages the wearer. Perhaps we can add a rule that if you critically fail a roll in power-armor, you have to roll Battlesuit; on a success, it’s just a normal critical failure (your gun jams, etc). On a failure, you hurt yourself in some way.
Signature Gear
One last way we can mitigate power armor’s power in some way would be to push more of the cost onto the player. Characters who get standard issue power armor should expect to see that power-armor fail, or be taken away from them, or get damaged, etc, just as happens with any “free” gear at the GM’s discretion. If we require Signature Gear to reliably access power-armor, this increases the cost of the power armor. We can also assign an unusual background to get access to it as signature gear, claiming such armor is rare enough to justify it, thus inflating the PC investment into their armor.
Harsh Realism for Battlesuits
So what do we have in the end?
Characters may take twice as long to perform an action to gain a +4 to their Battlesuit skill for the purposes of skill caps, and the minimum a character’s skill can be reduced to is (12 – the armor’s DX penalty, if any).
Characters who perform risky physical actions, including sprinting at full speed, Dodging during the same turn they attacked, kicking, or making a chase roll for anything more complex than a straight run the GM may require a Battlesuit skill roll (no more than once per turn) or they become unbalanced and suffers a -2 to DX and a -1 to defense. Character’s with armor familiarity for their armor may ignore this rule.
Battlesuits apply a -0 to -2 DX penalty to all users, depending on the model of Battlesuit.
Wearers of a Battlesuit have Numb and No Peripheral Vision and No Taste/Smell while using the Battlesuit. They apply a -3 to all fine manual control tasks, and may not perform any “work by touch” tasks.
Wearers of a Battlesuit may not use Extra Effort to empower the suit in any way, including Extra Effort in Combat.
In harsh environments (See Slime, Sand and Equipment Failure, B485) that could damage the moving parts of the armor, the GM can require the wearer of a Battlesuit to roll the HT of the Battlesuit or his Armoury (Battlesuit) skill or suffer a -2 to all rolls for a scene.
Once per scene, if the Battlesuit takes damage that comes within 90% of its DR or exceeds its DR, the GM can declare that it struck a vital component of the armor and the character must roll the armor’s HT or Armoury (Battlesuit); characters who explicitly target “actuators” at a -5 can force this. If this roll fails, the section of the armor struck is disabled. The effects last for 1d seconds, after which the character may roll Armoury (Battlesuit) to try to restart the system.
Limbs are effectively crippled
A hit to the head Blinds the wearer
A hit to the torso “stuns” the armor.
I’m going to contemplate adding a variant of the Armor Gaps rule from LT into Psi-Wars, but I think it would apply to all armor that isn’t solid or non-optimized flexible (in fact, this rule might already exist, I’d have to check), but instead of ignoring DR, it would just halve DR, like armor chinks (but easier to hit).
I will note that I reference the better of the armor’s HT or your character’s Armoury, but for Psi-Wars, for simplicity, it’ll just be Armoury; if the character doesn’t have it, they always suffer the penalty noted.
Mitigating Harsh Realism
We can create some new traits to compensate for some of these:
Armor Familiarity [1]: This works as written, allowing you to ignore the DX penalty for a particular model of armor.
Standard Operating Procedure (Fastidious Maintenance) [1]: the character always spends at least an hour a day, if possible, maintaining a single piece of equipment. The character can ignore the Slime, Sand and Equipment Failure rules for their fastidiously maintained piece of equipment. The GM may require an appropriate Armoury or Mechanic skill of 16+ to get this perk.
Unusual Background (Battlesuit) [5]: We can price this however we want, but in worlds that can justify it being “rare” we can require this before taking Power Armor as signature gear. You can also require it for the Battlesuit skill. This will help inflate the cost somewhat.
Heroic Battle-Trooper [40]: This trait allows you to ignore (most of) Harsh Realism rules for Battlesuits, creating a more "cinematic" battle trooper. The costs are noted below, but we need to apply a slight discount to the “final value.” As with all bundled traits like this, it should be “worth the cost”.
You’re not Numb [+20]
You have normal Peripheral Vision [+15]
You may use Extra Effort in power armor [1]
You can ignore the DX penalty for any power armor as well as the Unbalanced rule [~5]
You can purchase power armor as signature gear [5]
You gain +4 to your battlesuit skill cap and at skill 16+, may ignore it entirely. [~5 points}
Excellent. I'm stealing this for my game.
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