Armor
Body armor comes in various shapes and sizes, providing varying degrees of protection.
Armor comes in three types: Simple, Archaic and Tactical.
Simple: Normal clothing that provides protection, even if it is not designed for that purpose. This includes biker jackets, leather coats and football pads. All characters are proficient with simple armor.
Archaic: Old-fashioned armor, such as medieval chainmail or plate. Archaic armor requires Armor Proficiency (Archaic).
Tactical: Modern body armor, often possessing pockets, clips, and other attachment points for carrying weapons, grenades, ammunition, flashlights and other items. Archaic armor requires Armor Proficiency (Tactical).
Tactical Armor with the Concealed trait can be work underneath normal clothing. If you utilize the Concealed trait, opponents must succeed at an Awareness check against your passive Deception to notice that you're wearing armor.
Armor Rules
Armor Bonus: The bonus your physical armor provides to your Armor
Nonproficient Bonus: The bonus your physical armor provides to your Armor if you don't possess the proper proficiency.
Max Dex: This number is the maximum amount of your Dexterity modifier that can apply to your Armor while you are wearing a given suit of armor. For example, if you have a Dexterity modifier of +4 and you are wearing a suit of half plate, you apply only a +1 bonus from your Dexterity modifier to your AC while wearing that armor.
Str Requirement: This entry indicates the Strength score at which you are strong enough to overcome some of the armor’s penalties. If your Strength is equal to or greater than this value, you no longer take the armor’s check penalty.
Penalty: While wearing your armor, you take this penalty to Strength- and Dexterity-based skill checks, except for Archery, Heavy Weapons, Firearms and Melee Weapons. If you meet the armor’s Strength threshold (see Strength below), you don’t take this penalty.
Armor Categories
Simple Armor
Clothing: This represents standard street clothing. While it provides no tactical benefits on its own, it can be enhanced with warding runes to offer protection.
Leather Jacket: This armor is represented by a heavy leather biker's jacket or a duster, or other similarly resilient clothing that can turn away knives.
Sports Gear: Easily obtainable, sports gear is designed to protect players from harsh impacts. This includes football pads, hockey pads, or similar heavy gear.
Archaic Armor
Breastplate: Though referred to as a breastplate, this type of armor consists of several pieces of plate or half-plate armor that protect the torso, chest, neck, and sometimes the hips and lower legs. It strategically grants some of the protection of plate while allowing greater flexibility and speed.
Buff Coat: This standard piece of light leather armor was favoured by cavalry officers during the Age of Reason.
Chainmail Shirt: Sometimes called a hauberk, this is a long shirt constructed of the same metal rings as chainmail. However, it is much lighter than chainmail and protects only the torso, upper arms, and upper legs of its wearer.
Leather Armor: A mix of flexible and molded boiled leather, a suit of this type of armor provides some protection with maximum flexibility.
Studded Leather: This leather armor is reinforced with metal studs and sometimes small metal plates, providing most of the flexibility of leather armor with more robust protection.
Plate Armor: Plate mail consists of interlocking plates that encase nearly the entire body in a carapace of steel. It is costly and heavy, and the wearer often requires help to don it correctly, but it provides some of the best defense armor can supply. A suit of this armor comes with an undercoat of padded armor and a pair of gauntlets.
Tactical Armor
Bomb Disposal Armor: These tremendously bulky suits made of Kevlar are designed to protect wearers from explosions. If you are wearing bomb disposal armor, you can treat an attack roll made by a grenade or bomb as one step lower, turning a success into a failure or a failiure into a critical failure. If you do so, your Bomb Disposal Armor gains the Broken condition.
Concealable Vest: Standard issue in many police forces, this vest provides maximum protection in a garment that can be worn all day long under regular clothing. While it may go unnoticed by a quick glance, it is usually visible to anyone looking closely for it, granting a +4 bonus on Awareness checks to notice the armor.
Forced Entry Unit: The most powerful protection available is built into this suit, which consists of a heavy torso jacket with ceramic plates over the chest and back, neck and groin guards, arm protection, and a helmet. Heavy and cumbersome, this armor is generally only donned by tactical officers heading into a dangerous assault.
Light-Duty Vest: A lightweight tactical vest designed for extended use by riot police and forces on alert for potential attack, this armor sacrifices a degree of protection for a modicum of comfort, at least compared to other tactical body armors.
Light Undercover Shirt: Designed for deep undercover work in which it's critical that the wearer not appear to be armed or armored, this garment consists of a T-shirt with a band of light protective material sewn in around the lower torso.
Tactical Vest: The standard body armor for police tactical units, this vest provides full-torso protection in the toughest flexible protective materials available.
Special Response Vest: Built like the tactical vest, but incorporating groin and neck protection as well as a ceramic plate over the chest, this armor provides additional protection in battles against heavily armed opponents.
Undercover Vest: Covering a larger area of the torso, this vest provides better protection than the light undercover shirt, but it's also more easily noticed. It's best used when the armor should remain unseen but the wearer doesn't expect to face much scrutiny, granting a +2 bonus on Awareness checks to notice the armor.