May I Take Your Coat, Sir? - The Fun a GM Can Have With Highly Armored Characters

One problem that crops up again and again is how great armor is in Victoriana. Some Gamemasters wonder how to keep combat exciting if they can’t even damage a PC.

Here are some suggestions for fun you can have as a Gamemaster dealing with Highly Armored Player Characters. This is not a list of ways to make your player’s lives a living hell because they chose to buy armor. If a player chose to sink his character’s money into armor he deserves to be able to use it. Players need to have their character’s moments of cool and absorbing lots of damage counts as cool. Rather, this is a list of ideas to add excitement to a fight without taking anything away from the player characters.

Called Shots
In the Victoriana 3rd Edition Rulebook there are rules for called shots on page 167. This combined with the fact only the most impressive and unwieldy armor comes with a helmet should add some spice to combat. A skilled attacker will of course attack a PC in a vulnerable place. The black dice to their called shot attack means the armor is still affecting play, and the fight is much more interesting for both sides.

Armor Piercing Weapons
The Victorian world is full of tools made to tear through hard materials. Something pointy like a Pickaxe, should be able to poke though leather and metal to do some damage. These weapons could possess an Armor Piercing (AP) stat to cancel some of the targets Armor Value (AV). Armor piercing ordinarily shouldn’t negate more than two points of Armor Value.

In a fight, player characters should be quick to make anyone with an armor piercing weapon a priority.

Armor in Society
If a player character enters anywhere civilized, have a servant offer to take their coat. This is one of my favorite things to do to my players, because it always unnerves them. Refusal is awkward and could make them stick out. Worse still, other servants may offer to take their coat which could make more witnesses later. At high society occasions refusing to take off armor could be a faux pas leading to a point of Notoriety.
I have yet to throw a fight at the players in this situation, but the unease of being defenseless certainly makes the game more interesting. Of course this only really applies in civilized populated places. The social rules of London won’t matter in the middle of a jungle.

Armor Ignoring Situations
In some situations armor just doesn’t help. These occasions should be rare and obvious. In one session a boiling water elemental enveloped a player, causing scalding burns all over his body through his lined cloak. In another case, a witch conjured a lightning bolt at a player in full plate armor. The metal armor only made it worse.

In both cases the players knew it was exceptionally rare circumstances not likely to ever happen again. Both cases also happened at the climax of a campaign. Ignore a player character’s armor very rarely and the situation has to justify it.

Concerning Steely Skin
All this is well and good, but what about Steely Skin, the spell that makes all armor impossibly good. This spell was the bane of my first Victoriana campaign before it became its blessing. Two things changed this.

Any player character that can cast Steely Skin will be hounded by the other players to have the spell cast on them whenever combat may happen. If the player is not using this power as leverage, encourage them to do so. This may not apply well to every table, but the second the magician character started doing this all fights had extra drama with no effort from the GM.

The second thing Steely Skin changed was the limit of what I could throw at the party. In the second session, before the players used this spell effectively, a PC almost died from a dog bite due to amazingly bad die rolling. After that I carefully set up each combat to be exciting but not overwhelming to low level characters. The realization of what Steely Skin offers shoved any of my foolish attempts at game balance out the window. After the shock waves settles I realized I could put any monster, challenge, adversary, and threat in the game I wanted with impunity. Steely Skin made Victoriana more fun for me as a GM and more fun for the players.