Cover & Protection

[dph]

Hi all

In the heat of combat (particularly given how often players take cover) I always find the process of calculating cover, and damaging protection bogs down the flow.

I was considering keeping cover as is but just making Protection like an armour bonus. Seems to me too, that unless the cover is small, there's not much point worrying about whether it's destroyed or not, the PC can just reposition.

has anyone else out there found a simplified way of handling cover/protection?

Thanks
_________________
Check out my campaign and others on Obsidian Portal!

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/roguetraders

[garhkal]

Not really. Cover/protection it grants is always a pain to keep up with in combat, whether running SW, ADND or other systems.
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[nuclearwookiee]

I would just suggest not rolling damage against the cover, but that's functionally what you've already suggested by just treating it as an armor bonus. A lot of other games don't worry about damage to cover (off the top of my head, D&D 3.0/3.5, Pathfinder, Star Wars Saga ed.). Some games don't even differentiate degrees of cover. In Star Wars Saga ed., for example, any amount of cover simply increases the difficulty of the attack by +5. If you're really looking to simplify the Star Wars d6 cover rules, you might consider adopting this. A +5 increase in difficulty from Star Wars Saga is magically exactly one increased difficulty level in Star Wars d6. You can't get much more simplified than that.

[Naaman]

Yes. Rolling damage against cover is annoying unless the cover is being damaged by an attack sufficient in power to render it useless as cover. A .50 caliber bullet might penetrate a steel plate, but the hole it makes doesn't somehow disintegrate the plate or vaporize it. A grenade might not do huge damage to a wooden table, but it will likely render the table useless AS COVER with a moderately high damage roll as it splinters the wood into many smaller pieces.

I am in favor of treating cover like armor AND increasing the difficulty to hit assuming that the shooter cannot actually see the target (whether because the cover is transparent or he has some kind of optich that sees througj the cover).

Think of like makeshift "shields," I suppose.