Shooting through Material (like Transparisteel)

Rules & Game Mechanics
#1

Hello =)

I’m currently preparing for my next session and it’s likely that the focus of that session will be an assassination attempt (one of my player’s characters is a assassin / sniper) and since it came up sporadically in the past I wanted to make sure I have everything ready when it comes to shooting through Material.

I was not able to find anything in the Rule Books though, so I’m unsure if there are any rules for this.
In the past it only came up in form of taking cover behind a table so it always came down to a Setback / Setbacks.
But for this session it’s likely my players will try to snipe the target, which lately has become quite paranoid and has had all their windows replaced with transparisteel.
As far as I’m aware low-grade blasters will have a hard time piercing that, but a high-powered sniper blaster might be another cup of tea.

I’m inclined to solve this with either setbacks or upgrades to the difficutly but I’m unsure about it and would like to know if any of you have dealt with something like this before and which ways of handling that you used =)

I’d be grateful for any insights =)

2 Likes
#2

Sonic Scope in Special Modifications suggests that for shooting through materials, the GM add Defense and, depending on the material, add additional Soak.

I’d suggest you make a hotsheet of various materials and gauge how much Soak they’d add. Some materials might add +10 Soak, others might only add +1 or +2, it depends on the nature of the material. For transparisteel, I’d add 2 Defense and probably +7 Soak. With a decent soak of 3, that means the PC in question has to do 11 damage just to wound the target.

Transparisteel is a really tough material, so even +7 seems a little low when you consider that it mean it’d only take a heavy blaster pistol to punch right through. My inclination would be to make it 10 Soak, the equivalent of 1 Armor, but that might be a bit much for trying to target something through it. +10 would be “realism” suggestion, +7 my “balancing” suggestion.

But my approach is Setback and Soak, as suggested by the Sonic Scope.

4 Likes
#3

Ah very nice.
I completely forgot about that part in the sonic scope description, thats a great way to go I think.
Will need to do some digging about which Soak / Defense values will be appropriate for which material, but that helped me alot =)

Thanks again.

(If I come up with a good Cheatsheet for different materials I will post it here).

2 Likes