Building better rules: Houserules

Behind the Screen

Sometimes, the Rules As Written way of doing things is... well... it's like bashing your head on a wall. The mechanics may be clunky. They may be poorly worded. They may even be straight up crap. These are the pitfalls of dealing with big business. They don't always have the best stuff.
Thus it falls to us, the players, to come up with hotfixes for these little hiccups in sense and tinker until we get something that works better for our needs.

Case in point: the Armour rules for cyberpunk 2020.



Or more accurately, the layering armour rules for Cyberpunk 2020. These are a beast.
Boiled down it works as such: More armour you wear, the slower you are due to EV (Encumbrance Value), with additional layers adding extra EV, over and above it's regular EV, whilst still providing most of it's protection and  not including skinweave or subdermal bodyplating (effectively nanites turn your skin into kevlar andyou can add actual metal plates under your skin as well).
What did I mean by 'most of  it's protection'? Well that's where proportional protection comes in. You subtract the smaller armours' SP (Stopping power) from the larger armours' SP, ad ADD that to the higher armours SP to find the total adjusted SP of the combined armours.

WHEW! That's a lot of math and number crunching.... And this all changes as armour degrades as it gets hit in game.

See what I mean about clunky mechanics? The funny thing is, this all makes sense in game... If you understand the system well. If you don't, or gods forbid, you're new to the game, good luck figuring that jargon out (I have paraphrased the rules FYI, they are substantially more wordy and convoluted that I have typed. roughly 700 words/2 pages all said and told). So... Next question is.... How do we fix this?

The simple way I came up with is to divide the Armour types into 3 categories: Light(Lt), Medium (Med), and Heavy (Hvy) and assigning a number to each one (1,2 & 3 respectively).
Through this system, you can compare it to a player characters BTM (Body Type Modifier, an essential part of a characters profile as it determines quite a few other things in the game such as carry capacity, lift, damage reduction, etc.) and figure out, not only how much armour a character can layer (on a 1:1 basis, BTM:Armour type number) and still move around, but ALSO include the bonus of what the armour adds to other armour already worn.

Observe: the House rule

If multiple layers of armor are worn the highest SP is counted first, with each additional layer providing a bonus equal to it’s type (Lt = 1, Med = 2, Hvy = 3), up to a maximum number of layers equal to a players <reversed> Body Type Modifier (BTM). Each armor type equals the equivalent in BTM points.
(ex. A player with a BTM of -4 wears a kevlar T-shirt (SP 5), a Kevlar Vest (SP 10) and a Medium Kevlar Jacket (SP 18) for a total of 18(Med)+ 1(Lt)+ 1(Lt) 20. The Med kevlar jacket uses 2 points of BTM, and the Vest and T-shirt each use 1 a piece (Lt). This is the maximum that player could have worn. Conversely the player could have worn 1 Hvy item and 1 Lt item OR 4 pieces of Lt armor.)

Yes it's  slightly complicated, but this is Read  as Written. If you follow it word for word it's spells out what it means, step by step. Indeed it's also a LOT less wordy and much easier to phrase (This + this + this = this. Compare it to this. If it's (equal to or less than) this, it's all good. If not then you have too much so take some off.)
Problem solved.

It's simple(ish) and significantly less clunky. Elegant even.

That's the aim. anyways.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Until next time,
There's no system is perfect.
Bean out~