Damage Reduction
Surviving fights comes down to preparation more than hit points. Two characters with identical health can take wildly different damage from the same shot, depending on what they wore, what they're carrying, and the damage type involved. This page walks one hit from the instant it connects to the moment your health bar moves.
Want to take less damage? In order of impact:
- Don't get hit. Defense is folded into the attacker's roll, so the better you dodge, parry, or block, the more they miss outright.
- Cover the threats you actually face. Armor protects the struck body part, per damage type. There's no global "armor value" to max.
- Match armor style to the fight. High threshold eats swarms of small hits; high reduction blunts the occasional big one. (More on this below.)
- Mind your gear's condition. Worn armor protects less, and below 15% it's basically decoration.
Want to deal more? Bring the damage type your target doesn't cover, or a high-penetration weapon that chews through their threshold.
The pipeline at a glance
The rest of this page is the detail behind those boxes.
Landing the hit
Before damage matters at all, the attacker has to beat your defense. That's an ordinary skill check: their weapon skill against your active defense — dodge by default, parry if you can parry the weapon, or block if you've got a shield raised.
You don't roll separately. Your defense is baked into the attack as a penalty against the attacker, so the better you dodge, the harder you are to hit — up to about 30 points of penalty, unless you're specialised in evasion. Fail the roll and you slip, deflect, or block clean and take nothing.
Two things swing this hard:
- Momentum. Pressing the attack grants the attacker up to $+15$ to hit; getting rattled costs you up to $15$ off your defense. Lose the initiative and you get hit more. (Pain-editing cyberware cancels that defensive penalty.)
- Accuracy & rate of fire. Accurate weapons add to the roll; automatic weapons trade per-shot accuracy for sheer volume.
Raw damage, before anything stops it
On a hit the weapon rolls raw damage per damage type (each type has its own min–max range), then scales the roll by how well the attack landed:
$$ \text{multiplier} = 0.75 + 0.25 \cdot \frac{q}{30} $$
$q$ is the attack's quality (the margin from the attack roll). A clean, decisive hit pushes past $1.0$; a barely-landed one sits near the $0.75$ floor. The weapon's primary type also collects any flat bonus damage (strength, mods, ammunition, etc.), and badly damaged weapons — below 30% condition — hit softer.
The output is a little {damage type → amount} table that gets handed to your defenses, one layer at a time.
How armor works
This part is worth understanding, because it's why there's no single "best armor."
Two layers, two jobs. Every armor piece defines a soak profile per damage type — a threshold, a reduction, and a pass-through:
$$ \text{soak}(\text{type}) = {\, \underbrace{t}{\text{threshold}},\; \underbrace{r}{\text{reduction}},\; \underbrace{p}_{\text{pass-through}} \,} $$
- Threshold ($t$) shrugs off a flat chunk every strike. Great against many small hits — full-auto, swarms — and near-total immunity to anything below it.
- Reduction ($r$) removes a random further bite. Great against fewer, larger impacts.
- Pass-through ($p$) guarantees a sliver always lands. Armor caps your intake; it never makes you invulnerable.
And because damage types are hierarchical, listing a soak for kinetic automatically covers its children (sharp, blunt, …) unless you override a specific one. That's how a leather jacket can be "decent against blades, poor against fire" with only a couple of entries.
Reading a profile
Higher threshold = better at ignoring lots of small hits. Higher reduction = better at blunting a few big ones. A representative spread (illustrative of the tuning, not any specific item):
| Protection style | Threshold | Reduction | Best against |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light/flexible | low | moderate | glancing blows, sustained fire |
| Plate | moderate | high | single heavy impacts |
| Hard carapace | high | low–moderate | swarms of small hits, automatic fire |
And here's the shape that matters — note how the curve hugs the floor, then climbs near one-for-one once incoming damage clears the threshold-plus-reduction band:
Armor sets a price of admission rather than a flat percentage discount. Below the threshold a hit is almost wholly absorbed; above it, surplus damage passes through nearly untouched.
The exact soak math (for the curious)
Wear shaves it down first. Armor's effectiveness scales with its current condition:
$$ e = \mathrm{clamp}!\left(\frac{h - 0.15}{0.35},\; 0,\; 1\right) $$
where $h$ is the armor's health fraction. Above 50% condition it's at full effectiveness; below 15% it's functionally useless, scaling linearly between.
Penetration eats the threshold. The weapon (or its ammo) carries an armor penetration value that bites straight into $t$, so the threshold that actually applies is:
$$ t_{\text{eff}} = \max!\big(0,\; t \cdot e - \text{penetration}\big) $$
Then the strike resolves — once per strike. Rapid-fire weapons get soaked many small times instead of one big time, which is exactly what lets armor blunt full-auto. For an incoming amount split across $n$ strikes, each strike of size $a = \text{amount}/n$ becomes:
$$ \text{floor} = a \cdot p $$ $$ d1 = \max\big(\text{floor},\; a - t{\text{eff}}\big) $$ $$ d_{\text{taken}} = \max\big(\text{floor},\; d_1 - \mathrm{rand}(0,\; r \cdot e)\big) $$
Step by step: the threshold removes a flat chunk (a strike smaller than $t_{\text{eff}}$ is almost entirely stopped); reduction then removes a random further amount up to $r \times e$ — the "got lucky with the plating" layer; and the pass-through floor ($p$, typically $0.15$–$0.20$) guarantees that sliver always gets through.
Shields go first
Blocked with a shield? It soaks before your armor and passes the remainder on. A shield soaks exactly like armor, with two shortcuts: it ignores penetration and doesn't lose effectiveness to wear mid-calculation. A good one erases a light hit before your armor is even tested.
Cyberware and mutations
After worn armor takes its pass, any installed cyberware or mutations with protective properties get a soak of their own — subdermal plating, hardened hide, and the like — using the same math. It stacks after armor, so it's your last line before the hit reaches you. See Augmentation.
What's left: wounds, health, and stagger
Whatever survives every layer of soaking finally lands.
Health. The remaining damage comes off your health. Zero is fatal.
Wounds. A hit leaves a lasting wound on the struck part — graded by how hard it landed — if it was a critical, or if the total damage clears your grit threshold:
$$ \text{grit threshold} = \text{current health} + 0.5 \cdot \text{grit} $$
High grit raises that bar, so tough characters pick up fewer wounds from glancing blows even at low health. Criticals skip the check entirely. For what a wound then does to you and how to mend it, see Wounds & Treatment.
Stagger. Heavy weapons carry impact. Per strike, impact above your gear's impact resistance (and above what you shrug off with a resist-stagger check) piles into a stagger meter — fill it and you're knocked off balance. Some states grant outright stagger immunity.
The damage-type tree
Armor and weapons share one hierarchical vocabulary. Soaks match by inheritance, so protection can be written broadly (cover a whole branch) or narrowly (override one leaf).
The strategy comes down to two habits: aim your damage type at the gaps in their armor, and wear protection for the threats you expect to face. A blade that shreds the unarmored will glance off a carapace built to stop sharp damage, while that same target folds to energy or a high-penetration round.
See also
- Skill Checks — the attack, dodge, parry, block, and resist-stagger rolls all run on the same engine.
- Augmentation — cyberware and mutations that add soak or remove combat penalties.