swest wrote:Thanks, so much, for taking the time to respond.
On the second page of "Combat Rules" (p.340), there is the following:
M.D.C. Body Armor
Combat and Mega-Damage Capacity (M.D.C.) armor works even easier than S.D.C. combat. There is no Armor Rating to worry about and the attacker either hits or misses, or his opponent parries or dodges the attack.
As always, a roll of 1-4 misses.
A roll of 5 or higher on a D20 is a potential strike. The only way for the defending character to avoid getting hit and taking Mega-Damage (M.D.) is to parry or dodge. For example: Two opponents clad in body armor with 50 M.D.C. each are locked in combat. This means the attacker must roll 5 or higher to strike his opponent. A roll of 5-20 (or higher with combat bonuses) will strike, unless the defender parries or dodges. Deduct damage from the M.D.C. of the body armor (or force field, etc.), reducing the M.D.C. of the armor accordingly. When all the M.D.C. armor is gone (reduced to zero), the armor is so tattered that it no longer provides any protection. After that point, any attacks that are five or higher will strike and do damage to the character's body, unless they are parried or dodged.
Every time the M.D.C. armor or living Mega-Damage creature is struck by a Mega-Damage (M.D.) attack (Vibro-Blade, energy blast, magical energy, magic weapon, Supernatural P.S.) he takes damage.
So, I don't see '
Main Body' here (or anywhere else in the Combat section.) I do see '
all the M.D.C. armor' and '
body armor' referred to.
in other words, I'm still confused.
- s.west
Rifts is confusing, so don't worry about it!
When the passage in question was written for the Original Rifts book, standard body armor didn't have MDC by location, only one number. Heavy Dead Boy had 80 MDC, end of story, end of list. There were no ways to run out of armor MDC for one body part without running out of the total.
They added the MDC by location later, and Palladium is infamous for updating rules in one place, but not changing all the relevant text to match the update.
Also, Kevin Siembieda generally tends to have a kind of easy-breezy attitude toward rules in general, so there are a lot of places where the rules aren't spelled out clearly, and/or conflict with other rules and/or passages. It helps that Rifts has SO many books, of course; it'd be hard to do that many with zero conflicts or issues.
For example, the passage you quote just flat-out states that a 1-4 is a miss, BUT...
-because they didn't specify that they were referring to the
modified strike roll, many people thought (and still think) that they're describing an unmodified
natural roll, meaning that 1/5 of all attacks just plain miss. They didn't clarify this point until RUE, I believe, in the Combat Terms section in one small point.
-While the 1-4 bit originally applied to firearms and other ranged weapons, it was later changed to 1-8 being a miss for those weapons.
While it's always good to try to get the rules right, the best attitude with Palladium games is to know that you will never get all the rules exactly correct, and you'll make get a lot of stuff wrong all along the way.
Don't sweat it; focus on having fun more than playing By The Book.
You'll pick up more and more rules as you go, via on-the-job training as it were.
And feel free to ask questions here, as you're doing--we have a lot of good people who like to help out.
