Weapon and Armor Ratings

Several of the entries in this section refer to Weapon and Armor ratings. You can use them in grittier games as a blanket assumption rather than relegating them to extras, if it’s appropriate—getting hit by a weapon will damage you more, and having armor keeps that from happening. A Weapon value adds to the shift value of a successful hit. So, if you have Weapon:2, it means that any hit is worth 2 more shifts than it would normally be. This counts for ties, so when you’re using a weapon, you inflict stress on a tie instead of getting a boost. That makes weapons very dangerous.
An Armor value reduces the shifts of a successful hit. So, Armor:2 makes any hit worth 2 less than usual. If you hit, but the target’s Armor reduces the shift value to 0 or below, you get a boost to use on your target but don’t do any harm. We recommend setting a scale for Weapon damage from 1 to 4, keeping in mind that on a tie, a Weapon:4 hit will take out four Average nameless NPCs. Then set your Armor ratings based on what you think you’d need to fully protect against the weapons on each level.
Amanda talks to the group about adding Weapon and Armor ratings. They agree, so now she’ll set up examples of weapons and their corresponding ratings. It’s a fantasy world, and fairly gritty, so she thinks about the “Weapon:4” guideline above and decides that any large, two-handed weapon (like a polearm or claymore-like sword) would spell doom for a nameless NPC group, even on a clumsy hit.
Extrapolating from there, she ends up with the following:
Weapon:1 corresponds to items like brass knuckles and small saps, or most improvised weapons. Armor:1 is padded clothes.
Weapon:2 corresponds to short blades or clubs, such as a dagger or a truncheon. Armor:2 is padding and mail.
Weapon:3 covers most swords, maces, and anything you use one-handed. Armor:3 is mail and plate.
Weapon:4 is reserved for large, two-handed melee weapons. Armor:4 is full-plate.

Zero-Sum is Boring
Before you go crazy making weapons and armor charts for your campaign, you should stop and think about whether their inclusion is really going to make that much of a difference in your conflict scenes. The reason we say this is because the first thing your players will want to do is eliminate the effectiveness of whatever their opponents have by armoring up. And unless you want your NPCs to get slaughtered, eventually you’re going to have to do the same. If ev eryone tends to be the equal of everyone else in terms of weapons and armor, you have a zero-sum game, and you might as well just go back to making everyone roll their default skills . One way to handle this is to create a deliberate disparity be tween Weapon and Armor ratings, allowing one to go higher than the other. History is on your side here—most armor couldn’t completely protect against the weapons they went up against. Chain mail might keep a blade slash away, but it’s not going to do much about the blunt force trauma of a mace hit. Likewise, a set of plate might deflect a mace away, but a spear or a thrust sword that can slip between the plates ruins its day. Another one is to make really good armor unusually scarce, the province of the extremely privileged, rich, or otherwise elite. So while it might be really easy to find a Weapon:3 sword, only the Royal Guard of Carmelion has the master blacksmiths necessary to make armor that’s its equal. Players might spend a lot of time trying to buy, cheat, conquer, or steal their way into such a set of armor, but at least you’ve squeezed some drama out of the attempt. Just keep in mind that if you’re going to set armor and weapons up to be complete equals, you run the risk of wasted effort when their presence doesn’t actually matter.