Orchestra: Armor And Protection

One of the slightly annoying things about StoryNexus is that it does not, at least of the time of writing, support conditionals. It’s really not a huge deal, but there are times when it forces an indirect approach to certain things, namely in this case, healing and armor.

Because I cannot check to read a person’s armor every time they get hit, and because I cannot use functions to subtract an armor rating from damage taken (not that I’d necessarily want to, that linear system gets a little unrealistic and forces upward escalating spirals of damage) I wind up having to take an indirect approach.

Currently Orchestra uses a system of checking for wounds that involves a Bloodied check. The game’s been on hiatus, but in the meantime I’ve been working out some interesting systems, including armor, to be implemented once I return.

Armor will work as follows:

The player still takes full damage from each attack. Per normal rules, they get Bloodied when they take particularly large injuries. I may add another system to this, Bruised, to measure when characters take damage while wearing armor that massively overprotects them (basically if they’re wearing Hardened Armor, which I’ll get to in a bit), which still knocks them out of commission but is removed for free, without the recovery normally associated with Wounds.

When wearing any armor, when the Bloodied stage is entered a different mechanism is used. The character adds their Armor Rating to any healing tests (which, since Bloodied currently kicks in only after 4 or so damage in a single encounter, restricts the realistic range of armor to 1-3; anything else would have to be augmented to increase the user’s healing). In addition, Armor Rating can be gained through regeneration nanites or the like, meaning that it is possible to have insanely high health.

Bruised damage is removed at the end of any mission or encounter chain in which it can be earned (namely, attacks that do 1-3 damage against hardened armor and are things like melee combat or ranged combat, as opposed to being lit on fire, dosed with radiation, or a variety of other nasty things).

Since hospitalization only kicks in after a character has gotten 10 or more wounds and has run through their Bloodied (and soon Bruised) health loss, they will no longer have to worry about going to the hospital; they may have failed their mission (if my mechanisms work as I hope, though I haven’t actually tested them because everything has been one-shot material that ends if the player gets too many wounds, and I have a “Oh look, a squirrel” thing going on whenever I go to debug this sort of thing [note to self: man up and test this]), but they will still have their money intact and no risk of stat regression (which happens if you’re cheap and don’t want to pay the hospital fee), in addition to many fewer Wounds, which can save Actions on getting healing supplies, or money to remove them (mind, there are/will be [that testing thing again] things that heal players for relatively low costs, but they must be unlocked per-location).

One thought on “Orchestra: Armor And Protection”

  1. I haven’t gone back and updated this, but StoryNexus now supports the sort of calculations that would allow me to implement armor as a direct damage reduction. Now, that’s not necessarily what I want to do with Orchestra, but you’ll see the functionality in Dust Watch.

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