I need some advice on how to deal with firearms in an upcoming scifi campaign.
Normally with early firearms I have no problem with the rules as-is. With post renaissance dungeonpunk campaigns I make firearms deal dex to damage instead of hitting touch AC and misfire is gone. But futuristic weapons are getting problematic for several reasons.
Firstly, with third party involved there are actually a lot of ways for PCs to deal with the touch AC. This becomes a bit of an issue because the game starts becoming a rock paper scissor game between melee, energy and ballistic weapons.
Armor defends very little against ballistic and energy weapons. Scatterlight suits cap at +9 with a shield bringing that up by +2. There are third party armors that don't take touch attacks from ballistc but they do for weapons. Energy weapons are easy to shield in other ways because energy resistance isn't hard to come by, such as the HEV suit.
Combat Expertise can be very useful, and between third party things there are two feat lines that boost dex bonus to AC capping at +7 over two feats or +12 over three feats. But since this counts towards your max dex bonus your armor options are limited. Plus you have to spend feats to do it which is a precious resource.
I could make firearms deal dex to damage instead of target touch AC but it makes a little less sense with energy weapons. Also it defuncts several items that specifically deal with firearms targeting touch AC and also makes ballistic weapons extremely powerful as they hit harder.
What is a good way to keep this balanced out? I'm not too concerned about Monsters getting heavily killed, as a large mob of monsters is more exciting that one big one.
Okay, so I ran through some math and I think my current problem is mixing HEV suits with a third party material.
As it stands a HEV suit grants a +4 armor bonus and has a max dex bonus of +3. It also grants energy resistance 10 to everything but sonic damage. With third party material the suit can be made of a lighter weight plastic to bring that max dex bonus to +5. Giving it bulletproofing would give it a separate AC track against firearms that caps out at +7. With a hard light shield that's about +14 AC against energy firearms and +12 against ballistic firearms and with most energy firearms dealing 1d8, they become virtually useless unless Clustered Shots are involved.
Is this too high of a defense against firearms?
I'm running a campaign that will go into dragonstar and I'm houseruling that modern armour, being ballistic, protects against firearms at full access where regular uses touch at first range increment. But modern weapons SHOULD be deadly. You can get magical bonus's vs energy damage fairly cheaply that doesn't take up enhancement bonus so that part gets covered easy enough. Check out dragonstar for some ideas. It's 3.0 though.
But one of my primary issues now is that energy weapons are fairly easy to negate due to energy resistance not being hard to come by. I think right now I'm trying to figure an appropriate house rule to give energy firearms more of a kick because they are currently less dangerous than ballistic firearms.