HTH: Assasin House Rules

[asajosh]

DarkSaint -
From your post on sniping and now hand to hand, I notice a trend: At some point you want to get around MDC armor. It's not going to happen with hand to hand.
If you want to by pass MDC armor, try psionics! Possession, Telekinetic Throw, a whole host of illusions...

[Killer Cyborg]

Except, of course, there's no real way TO bypass MDC armor with normal attacks.

Just because people WANT to do something, doesn't mean that they CAN do something.

What would a real assassin in Rifts do?
Same thing they tend to do in the real world; bide their time and wait until their target is vulnerable.

Nobody can be in MDC armor 24/7; they have to eat, drink, urinate, etc, and body armor gets uncomfortable.

If you want to play an assassin, actually PLAY one; don't just play some schmuck with handwavium attacks that ignore physics.
Use your head.
Stalk your prey.
Strike when they're NOT READY, like any good assassin would.

[Rimmer]

Or you could just do what everybody else does, which is get a bigger gun

Funny story, the PC's had to assassinate a coaition officer out in the feild, long story short, they rigged a fusion bock with a presure sensor and hid it in the officers toilet, you can guess the rest.

[KillWatch]

You do realize of course that claiming that HTH Assassin is evil that all cia/nsa/fbi field agents are evil,... heywaitaminute

[KillWatch]

um no uber munchkin would allow for a DB at level 2 after you get your +10 attacks at level 1. The DB would be Fist of the North Star-ish with body parts exploding in a rain of blood. THe downside would be that you would HAVE TO no if ands or buts get at LEAST a modified 5. Level 5 would allow you to Dim Mak Suck their soul, level 10 would allow for Spirit Bomb ala DBZ, lvl 7 would allow for a AoE DB, and level 15 would allow you ascension into the heavenly court to whoop ass on the demon kings and take their thrones because they suck and you would do such a better job

[asajosh]

Yeah, thats one thing that made me shy away from M.D.C.

Giant Robot vs Giant Robot or Dragon or Building, etc, it's great.

Giant Robot vs Armored Soldier.

"I step on him."

'Rats, he failed dodge, K, roll 2d6.'

"8"

'Ok, his armor takes 8 MD, his turn, he's going to shoot at you.'

"Uh, did I say I lifted my foot off him? Oh, and how come he isn't smushed inside his tin can, with his limbs flensed from his body by his own megadamage suit being battered by the ground as my foot sunk into the earth?"

'Well, it just isn't written that way in the rules.'

Because the Earth is SDC (with unlimited capacity) and the armored soldier is simply pressed down into the ground. The MDC taken off is from the initial contact with the robot foot. Nothing wrong with using a giant robot to pin a man down, the reason its not generally done is giant robots dont fight one soldier, they fight a swarm! So go ahead, pin that dude down, drive him into the earth like a rail road spike if you like, he has 1000 little friends crawling all over you blasting away with plasma cannons. Or maybe that is what Hand to Hand: Anti-Giant Robot is for ...?

[asajosh]

I find it difficult to swallow that MD body armor can absorb so much kinetic energy that it won't transfer at least some of it to the wearer. In fact, it can't. The rules for taking damage while falling illustrate that.

If an Enforcer were to punt a guy in body armor and he smacked against the wall, I as a GM would have to say "Ok, you're going to take some SDC damage from that"

Absolutely correct, but the wearer could survive that SDC damage. I was responding to the notion that such a giant robo stomp would flatten an armored soldier like a soda can... perhaps if that stomp inflicted the last of said armor's MDC.

[Rimmerdal]

He's gotta open the visor or take off the helmet sometime.

[Killer Cyborg]

Now, I do agree with you that a good assassin is going to wait and strike when a target is vunlerable. It would be foolish NOT to take advantage of those situation.

However, I disagree that you can't hurt someone in body armor. If I have my 4th level crazy grab someone in plastic man armor and start swinging him around, bashing him into a rock over and over, the guy inside is going to be paste. The armor will be fine, if gooey. Could he do the same with someone in Power Armor? No. Power Armor provides an exo-skeleton that would protect against such damage like that.

Actually, so would Plastic Man.

Body armor is a series of plates around the body that are strategically placed to stop and disburse energy, primary from energy attacks or attacks like bullets/rail guns. If a 900 lb dragon were to land on someone in dead boy armor, do I simply say "Ok, your armor takes 18 points of mega damage and you're now stuck under a dragon".

To me, that seems kinda silly. 900 lbs of anything landing on someone in just body armor means the armor takes some damage but they are smushed. I can't justify the idea that damage cannot be taken in body armor simply because it is Mega Damage.

Damage can be taken in body armor; there are rules for it.
High speed crashes and explosions can inflict some damage the the person in the armor, even when the armor isn't damaged.

Let's say you have a martial artist. He is facing off against a reletivly inexperiaced person in ancient full plate armor. Now, this martial artist knows that if he tries to punch the breast plate, he is going to hurt his hand and the guy inside will be ok. So what happens if he snap kicks the knight in the face? The guy inside probably will go down, his head rattling around in the helmut, maybe even get a bloody nose. A sure sight better than taking a kick to an unprotected face, but it's still going to hurt.

The martial artist is going to be able to hurt the person inside the armor, not to the degree that he could if the person were unarmored, but through joint locks, attacking seams in the armor, jump kicks to the head, stomping up and down on fallen opponates, the guy in the armor is going to get hurt. It just would take longer.

1. An inexperienced guy in plate armor would likely get knocked over, not knowing how to properly balance all the weight.
2. But I doubt that he'd get as much as a bloody nose from the encounter. And depending on what style of plate armor he's wearing, there aren't any seams that are vulnerable to punches and kics.
Joint locks could still be effective, depending on how the joints of the armor are put together. Some types of armor wouldn't protect against locks, some would effectively make the wearer immune to them.
Stomping on a steel helmet won't accomplish much, unless the inside of the helmet isn't padded, which is why the inside of helmets is padded.

I'm even open to the suggestion that a person with this modified HTH: Assassin could cause SDC damage to a person in MD armor if only it was his strength bonus. Actually, that's not a bad idea.

It's a less bad idea.

[Killer Cyborg]

Except, of course, there's no real way TO bypass MDC armor with normal attacks.

Just because people WANT to do something, doesn't mean that they CAN do something.

What would a real assassin in Rifts do?
Same thing they tend to do in the real world; bide their time and wait until their target is vulnerable.

Nobody can be in MDC armor 24/7; they have to eat, drink, urinate, etc, and body armor gets uncomfortable.

If you want to play an assassin, actually PLAY one; don't just play some schmuck with handwavium attacks that ignore physics.
Use your head.
Stalk your prey.
Strike when they're NOT READY, like any good assassin would.

sorry kc i got to argue with you here

if someone had the field armorer skill and spent weeks examining a suit of body armors design and schematics i think they could find a chink in the armor maybe a weak point that can only withstand a few md worth of damage say in a joint for example lets say you shank a guy in dead boy armor in the air intake fan found on the back destroying it the armor is environmental if said soldier would like to breath he has to remove his helmet and bam you got a squishy

Somebody could do that, IF there were such a weak-point in the armor.
But there's nothing in the books to indicate that any suits of armor on Rifts Earth have such weak points.

[Killer Cyborg]

He's gotta open the visor or take off the helmet sometime.

Exactly.

How many famous real-world assassinations can you guys think of?

How many of them involved attacks that bypassed some sort of heavy armor or defenses?

Lincoln- Shot in the back of the head at the theatre
Kennedy- Shot while riding in an unarmored convertable with the top down.
Yamamoto- Had his transport plane shot down by US fighters.
Alexander Litvinenko- Poisoned by a radioactive substance
William McKinley- Shot while shaking hands with the public, while his bodyguards were away
James Garfield- Shot in a train station, on his way to give a speech.
Archduke Ferdinand- Shot while visiting the civilians injured by the bomb used in a previous assassination attempt.
Mahatma Gandhi- Shot while going for his nightly (unguarded) walk.
Indira Gandhi- Machinegunned by her own bodyguards, while walking in her garden.
Rajiv Gandhi- Blown up by a suicide bomber while walking through a crowd to make a speech.

Sure, none of the above people owned a suit of MDC EBA, but even if they had it wouldn't have made a difference, because they wouldn't have been wearing it when they were killed.
They were all killed when they weren't expecting it; when they thought that they were safe.
Assassins aren't fighters, they're killers.
This is how assassins operate; they don't go after targets when the target is at it's most protected, they kill when the target is undefended (or lightly defended).

Assassins don't need to know how to bypass EBA (especially in melee combat!); that's now how they operate.
Armor doesn't matter to a good assassin, it's not even an issue because, as a rule, they're not going after armored targets.
In the few cases that they DO go after armored targets, like an armored limo or such, they don't use special techniques to stab or shoot through a hypothetical weak-point in the armor, they just use enough overwhelming force that it makes the armor irrelevent anyway.

Who does, in the context of Rifts Earth, go after armored targets?
Soldiers.
But they don't get to bypass armor either.
Sure, they'd like to, but just because you'd like something doesn't mean you can actually do it.

[Rallan]

MDC = Broken

Convert everything to SDC, give armour an AR ... happy gaming

Hey MDC worked fine in Robotech. THe proper equation is

MDC for anything except gigantic killing machines = Broken