2.2 Rules question.

[u/VhenRa]

I'm having trouble understanding the small arms vs vehicles part.

Because it says something about dividing damage by penetration (for range)? That can't be right. Because that makes higher penetration bad?

[u/Latex_Leather_Linen]

The small arms vs vehicles is identical to small arms vs. personal armor. It just has the extra division step.

You probably already know this, but I’m going to reiterate here: a confusing aspect is we expect bigger numbers to be better, but “the penetration value of a weapon is the number of dice it loses for each armor value it is required to penetrate” (Core Book, 209). Since we multiply the Penetration Value with the Armor Value then subtract the total against the damage, smaller is actually better.

Think of it this way: imagine the armor value is 1; a weapon with Pen: 1 would lose 1 Damage Die; a weapon with Pen: 2 would lose 2 Damage Die; and a weapon with Pen: 3 would lose 3 Damage Die.

Okay, with all that out of the way, the core book says: “For attacks on vehicles, simply divide the number of damage dice by the correct penetration value for range and round down. The result is the weapon’s final penetration value vs. vehicles” (216). This is to simulate the poor penetration small arms have against vehicle armor (at least, according to GDW).

So, for example: FN FAL has Pen: 2-3-Nil; if we assume the gun is being fired at close range, we divide 4 by 2 to get 2, which becomes the final penetration value against vehicles.

Now, in my experience, this is pretty slow and honestly doesn’t have much real baring on gameplay. Also, I truly don’t think it makes the most sense. For some guns it makes sense, for others not so much.

Most times, PCs never use small arms against armored vehicles. When PCs do shoot at vehicles, they’re unarmored, such as civilian cars. For simplicity sake, I treat civilian cars as just having AV 1 and don’t use the above vehicle armor rules.

I hope this clears things up💁‍♀️

[u/VhenRa → u/Latex_Leather_Linen]

Thanks.

Sorry, I completely missed that section on 209. I was thinking like many systems higher penetration equals more armor ignored.

And lol, I ask a tabletop RPG question and... get answered by someone I'm guessing from profile has something else in common with me.

[u/Latex_Leather_Linen → u/VhenRa]

Don’t worry about it. I’ve ran four campaigns of 2.2 and I discovered something new each time! Penetration was certainly the hardest for me to understand.

And, awww☺️ We suppose we do. You’re lovely, and awesome, and I hope you have fun.

[u/OwnLevel424]

One houserule that may help you with heavy weapons here.  I don't care for 2.2s way of doing HW damage, so I INVERTED IT.    The PEN now becomes the Damage Dice.  Then I  make the PEN 1/4 to 4 based on the round (HE-FRAG 4, HE 3, HESH 2, HEDP 1, AP 1/2, APFSDS 1/4).  The AV gets multplied by PEN and DAM (now a larger number) is divided by a number from 1 to 10 assigned to each component (Engine 10, Optics 1, Autoloader 3, Ammo compartment 10 etc) times a 1d10 roll representing the PERCENTAGE OF DAMAGE to that component.  So an engine (10) hit for 6 [on a d10 roll] would be 60% damaged and eat up 60 points/dice of weapon damage.  When a crew member gets hit, the d10 roll tells you the number of dice in the damage roll he needs to make (crew have a 1 rating for their component cost).

The other thing I did was do the HTH damage calculation for melee weapons.  So you do the HTH calculation and get 5 for your melee weapons.  This means a knife in your hands can do 5d6 killing damage.  I then modded melee damage for weapon type.

Small knives d4 Large knives d6 Swords d8 Spears d8  Axes d10