Fading Suns Energy Shields

[Michael Tree]

I'm going to try running a Fading Suns game with the tRoS rules soon.  Most of the conversion is pretty easy, a matter of creating new skills, improvising new skill packages for PCs, and making up how Psi and Theurgy work on the spot.  Most won't come up very often, so hand-waving works just fine.  The trickiet part is figuring out how dueling energy shields work, since they'll come up often.

Shields are much like the shields in Dune.  They essentially act as Armor against strongly hitting weapons.  However, they have a certain threashold at which they activate, so it's possible to slip a subtle weapon or attack in to wound your opponent.  In the Fading Suns rules it's pretty simple - attacks that do less than 5 points of damage don't activate the shield, but anything more than that activates the shield, which takes away the first 10 points of damage from an attack.  So, a rapier strike doing 4 points of damage does 4 points, a heavier strike that does 8 points activates the shield and is deflected, while a powerful blow doing 12 points activates the shield but partially smashes through it, doing 2 points of damage.

I'm having several problems with converting it.  Simply converting it over and applying it to the damage of an attack is problematic because a) damage from attack successes have more to do with placement of the attack than the force of the attack, and b) it possibly makes high-Toughness characters immune to attacks while wearing a shield.

The D20 version works slightly differently.  It requires a shield activation roll, a D20 roll with set difficulty, to which is added the the damage done by the attack.  I've considered doing a simiar roll based on the base damage of the attack (ie. strength + weapon damage) but I can't think of an elegant way of doing so, and I'm concerned it will give an undue advantage to high toughness characters.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to represent slipping through an energy shield by attacking softly enough to not activate it?

[Lance D. Allen]

You could base it on how many dice are used in the attack. For instance, if I throw more than.. say, 6 dice into an attack, the shield activates.

One thing that it would be important to know.. How powerful is a 12 point attack in Fading Suns? In TRoS we know that a 12 points of damage will cut through you and your buddy both. Determine the equivalent amount of damage, and adjust accordingly. Perhaps the shield will only take away 3 levels of damage.

[Salamander]

Maybe PM DarthTang. He was running a Fading Suns Campaign at one point using TRoS Melee Rules.