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"Roger that. Holding fire."
Barbara takes a wild shot and accomplishes nothing.
I am? Huh, I thought I already went.
Barbara is too badly hit to do anything.
Barbara sees the Ulti-Max barreling down on the team and decides she has to try to do something to help. "Firing!"
She misses with the Boom Gun.
Barbara scrambles up to her feet again, pivots, and decides to make a Glitter Boy stand. The pylons crunch through the hard ground as she brings the rail cannon down over her shoulder and hopes that she can absorb enemy fire long enough to counterstrike.
Barbara manages to scramble back onto her feet and keeps running toward her team.
I did some more reading and noticed that the 4d12+4 heavy rail guns are basically the heaviest non-missile-array vehicle weapons you can get, which seems a bit wild for a starting adventure, but I guess you have to have something to threaten those really powerful characters, eh?
Uuuugh my PDF is the out-of-date version? Well that just makes everything worse! I did built my character using the Savaged.US site, which says my Toughness should be 45 (27), so it should be using the latest rules, but something may be slightly off. Anyway yeah I think where my head is going is that it seems more interesting to me if combat is a slugfest where the Glitter armor takes hits and then you have systems failing and you have the pressure of trying to decide when to flee or whether to stand and fight. Obviously it is not fun if it's (1) invincible or (2) effectively unarmored. BUT I don't want to generate reams of house rules just for me. Sooo I'm futzing around with various alternatives and trying to figure out the best way moving forward without bogging down the whole game for everyone else. ALSO My sample size of fights so far is 2, so it's possible that I'm just getting skewed by bad luck. I hate to see what would happen if the Glitter armor winds up against something that is actually dangerous to it in original Rifts, though. If it's been nerfed this hard, it would just get folded and spindled.
If I were going to redesign robot power armor in SW Rifts in general, that's probably the direction I would go: Giving power armor and robot suits their own wound track, and then tacking on a list of critical system failures that you roll for each time it takes a wound. (Palladium did this with mecha in their Robotech RPG, in which you could take critical hits that could result in special damage to subsystems, so you might have an arm lock up, weapon targeting go offline, etc.) For the moment I'm going to do a deep dive re-reading how the Glitter Boy armor works in both original classic Rifts and SW, and see if there's something that I've missed. It may just be a case of them changing it deliberately and now players are supposed to adjust their expectations. Obviously, the Glitter armor can't be invincible, that's no good. But it also feels odd for the armor to constantly be getting crushed because everyone has armor-piercing railguns. I'm not sure if the system supports something else. One element that I'm checking right now is how all of the Toughness/Armor is supposed to work. The Glitter Boy is 18 M.D.C. Armor and +6 Toughness, but I'm looking into the stacking rules. Even if it all stacks, I'm not sure if that includes Barbara's innate Toughness when soaking mega-damage, because she's not a mega-damage entity. The system also includes an abbreviated table for technical complications (the Technical Difficulties setting rule on pp. 122–123), but it's very short and only happens when you score a Critical Failure on a soak roll.
Gamecraft wall of text for a moment. I think the problem is a mismatch in the systems between original Rifts and Savage Worlds, which makes the Glitter Boy (and other power armor/robot power armor) unable to function the way it was originally envisioned. Original Rifts, of course, famously uses mega-damage as a hit point pool for large, durable, or supernatural targets. Like other early RPGs, this hit point pool erodes over time, so a target with lots of mega-damage capacity can take a lot of punishment, while a character with a small mega-damage capacity pool can only take a couple of hits, and a character with no mega-damage capacity is vaporized by even a single point of mega-damage. Savage Worlds does not use a hit point system. Its wound system for Wild Cards means that everyone has an abbreviated track of a death spiral, so there is no such thing as "taking a lot of punishment." Either your ability to absorb damage is so high that you cannot be hurt, or you can get hurt and then you drop after taking a handful of wounds. Original Rifts also uses dodges and parries as damage avoiders all over the place. Savage Worlds does not; you cannot dodge in the same round that you make attacks. Your dodging is effectively rolled into the defensive rating for how hard it is to hit you. Thus, your only SW way to mitigate incoming damage is to be so tough that it bounces off of you. Even the Dodge Edge simply makes it harder to hit you with ranged attacks; you do not have a mitigation roll the way that you do in original Rifts. The end result of this is that you cannot create something in SW that is a damage-soaking juggernaut. The original Rifts Glitter Boy armor has 770 mega-damage capacity in a system in which a starting hand-held laser weapon might inflict 1d6 mega-damage. The Glitter Boy has, in the original system, the highest mega-damage armor known, even including robot power armor, in the core book. Like a boxer, it's designed to take punches and keep dishing them out with its Boom Gun. The drawback is that as your mega-damage capacity erodes, you have to worry about getting out of the fight and finding a way to repair the armor. You eventually must move or be destroyed. While the armor and your defensive skills hold out, though, the Boom Gun functions as semi-mobile artillery that has a devastating damage output. In SW, you cannot make this. The system does not support it, because its "fast, furious, fun" combat isn't designed to go long. It's designed to have you fight lots of crunchy minions, and then fight a boss or two who are Aces, and the minions go down with one hit while the bosses go down with three. The players' characters use the same rules, so they cannot have staying power. If you get hit, you probably take a wound. If you take three wounds, you're out of the fight. There is, under the existing SW system, no way to model the Glitter Boy as armor that takes damage over time and slowly gets worn down until the pilot has no choice but to disengage or die. It either deflects all incoming attacks, or it functionally isn't armor at all, it's just cosmetic tissue paper with a big gun. In the game fiction, the Glitter Boy is described as "godlike" and "remains one of the most powerful, feared and respected fighting machines on the planet." But the game cannot emulate this fiction, because the systems don't exist to do it. The result is that you can't make the Glitter Boy armor satisfactory. I hadn't played a Glitter Boy in Savage Rifts before, so I wasn't sure how the implementation would pan out. It's clear now, though, that it's a deeply unsatisfying proposition, because they cannot let the armor actually absorb damage. Otherwise, if it's so tough that it absorbs enemy hits, you just wind up with an invincible character who can't be stopped, and that's not what they want to emulate, either. Nor is that what I want to play: I think the Glitter Boy should be tough, and it should be able to dish out real damage, but it is also a target that draws fire, and the pilot has to worry about real-life situations outside of the armor as well. You can't model this in SW. The end result is that while the Glitter Boy has a massive armor bonus, everything you fight is armor piercing and does huge amounts of damage, so it doesn't matter. You might as well be fighting in your underwear, because the armor's just going to be ignored. So, I'll start coming up with alternative character ideas.
Since Glitter Boy armor doesn't seem to work in this edition, I'd like to change characters after this encounter. Probably a fine time to kill Barbara off.
Once again, the Glitter pilot is laid out, wrecked and prone.
"Thanks for the heads-up, boys. Think I spotted a Juicer or other augment on the move. Heading your way now." Barbara retracts the stabilizer pylons and does her best to stay in cover as she tries to circle back around toward the team.
Barbara pivots slightly as she sees someone openly directing enemy forces. Bad idea to call yourself out as the team commander. The targeting reticle inside of her helmet shifts to follow her gaze and the gauss cannon moves along with it.
The tremendous boom rocks the Glitter armor in place again as the massive magnetized bars slam home in the middle of the commander issuing defensive orders. (AP 25)
Barbara passes through the shield like an angry Frosty the Snowman, then moves rapidly to bolt in with her left flank anchored to one of the structures inside the dome. The Boom Gun mounted on the armor's right shoulder comes down into position, and even though the targets inside of the dome are scurrying for cover, the signature sonic blast comes only seconds later as she takes a quick shot. The wave of force from the blast knocks all of the snow off of the armor and clears the ground for two meters around her suit. The superspeed flechettes don't manage to impact anything critical, but they don't exactly miss, either. In a confined space like this, it's like dropping an ice cube into a blender—sharp, hard corners intersecting at speed with chunks of something that now looks like a smoothie. After firing twice, Barbara uproots and moves again, not just to take a different cover position, but to "encourage" her quarry to move in a specific direction to try to avoid her.
"All right, here's hoping they don't have any rail guns like last time!"
"I mean with the power armor! You saw what happened to the roof of that truck when I dug the Glitter armor's hands into it."
"Happy to support in whatever way the team thinks makes the most tactical sense," says Barbara. "If we're in close quarters, the boom gun might not be the best choice. The sonic backblast will be a problem for anyone near me. Can still punch and kick though."
While it looks like we're going to try to find a way to include the Glitter Girl in this scene, I want to reiterate that I went into this character knowing that there will be times when a ten-foot power armored suit with a giant artillery cannon is just not appropriate to the scene, and this is a built in part of the character. So don't worry if we come up with plans (here or elsewhere) that require Barbara to hang back, sit them out, or come in without the armor: this is one of the challenges of playing a Glitter armor pilot, and it's one that I knowingly signed up for.
The Glitter armor gives Burt a large thumbs-up.
"Well, either I can stay back and provide covering fire when everyone makes their exit, or I can leave the suit behind and try to slip in as a foot soldier with the rest of you," says Barbara. "Which is it gonna be?"
"So is it magic or tech? If it's a tech-generated field... maybe the energy-distorting properties of the Glitter armor's refraction plating will affect it. It's possible I could just walk right through. But I wouldn't want to test it openly, obviously."
"Didn't bring a swimsuit for this one, but if I need to go in without the armor, I'll do my best."
"I'm going to scout for a secluded spot that I can use for supporting fire if you need to make a hasty retreat."
Barbara hops on her frequency scanner and starts idly checking for anything that might be an encrypted comm. Or heck, something in the clear. You never know, some days you get lucky.
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