Hi,

I have a player who took the Armorer skill tree and they want to combine the two sets of armor to make something superior to both. I don't have anything to suggest whether this is possible or not, and I'm having trouble thinking of the game-mechanics for such a thing.

I'm thinking of allowing to spend the HP of one piece to add an upgrade from the other (e.g. one rank of defense, one extra soak, one special mod, etc.) but I'm not sure if that's game-breaking or not worth the player's time.

To be specific, my player wants to combine some Laminate Armor with Cresh 'Luck' Armor. Any advice would be helpful.

(First post, sorry for any errors on my part)

I'm not sure exactly what the player is going for, but it sounds like you wan to check out Keeping the Peace and it's system for building your own armor.

Merging two different armors is a little beyond the scope of what the system supports, but crafting your own armor gives you lots of options, though is rather time consuming.

You don't actually combine armor but you can modify it or use it for parts when making it from scratch. However your take on Mods is correct, the Cresh armor has 1 Hard Point and if you add the Superior Quality, call it adding plates or something like that, can increase it's Soak by 1 or add other qualities.

Just a side note, Armor values don't stack so you wont get any benefit putting Laminate and Cresh armor together anyway because both have Soak 2 and they don't stack because they are both from the same source (Armor). So the only way to increase it it through mods or building the Armor from the ground up.

PS. The important thing to remember is not to get caught up in the name of a Mod but instead focus on what it does and call it whatever you want. So if your player doesn't like the name Superior because it doesn't evoke the feel they want, call it something else. The important thing is what the Mod does not what it's called.

I've used a house rule of you end up with the best of each quality (Defense, Soak, Hard Points). They don't add up. EXCEPT for Encumbrance, which does add up. And you only apply the worn reduction to Enc once. I also include common sense eliminating some options (Heavy Battle Armor plus Laminate).

So in RAW there's no way to do what you describe, however you can achieve what they intended (putting the unique quality of the Cresh 'Luck' Armor on Laminate Armor) through the Attachment/Mod system.

Namely, the Threat Monitor Attachment from Lords of Nal Hutta has a very similar effect to the Cresh 'Luck' Armor and can be 'slotted' into a set of Laminate Armor. You can even make the resultant armor better than the Cresh 'Luck' Armor by modding the Threat Monitor.

In my opinion make reinforced clothing and upgrade everything except soak and defense, so that you can put armor inserts (from cyphers and masks) then you fully mod the armor inserts, then you apply superior armor attachment to get soak 3, defense 2, in clothing you can wear anywhere and it adds 3 black set dice to people trying to determine if you're wearing protection with probably an advantage to negotiation and assuming vacuum seals and amphibious attachments can protect you from vacuum for something like 4 to 6 hours, but if we're trying to break the system don't bother with that and craft a ring/amulet of protection using the alchemical crafting rules from unlimited power, and two 1 hp attachment one of which can't add soak because it comes from the integrated attachment armor crafting upgraded, but why stop there, the artisan has a talent that can add 2 hp, so you could even get the cortosis quality on this thing.

Point is that the weakested crafted armor when maxed out within RAW is already suitably awesome so you don't need to go outside raw to make things more over the top ridiculous.