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Hi Guys, i'm a new player of Alien and planning on my first campaign as GM in this game.
After reading the whole book the armor rolling appear to be quite annoying, damage are already automatic but the fact you must roll to negate damage seems like a time loss, it will make fights a bit too longs.

I'm looking for fix values to give each xenomorph species, human armor and vehicle.

For xenomorph i was thinking to give 1 fix armor point to eggs, facehuggers and chestburster, 3 for Drones and Runners, 4 For Soldier and Queen guards, Five for the Queens and Praetorians, and finally 6 for the Crusher.

To give humans a chance to fight, each success allow them to apply the basic damage of their weapons instead of just +1 to the basics damages. The impulse riffle M41A would deal 6 damage with 3 success for exemple.

For humans armor i thought about 2 points for the M3 and IRC mk35 and 1 for spacesuits and the p-5000 (unless the p-5000 is a military version, it would have 2 ou 3 depending on the model)

For now i'm still struggling on theses values and i need some advices

Damage is not automatic, though; it is base DMG of a weapon/attack + successes scored on the attack roll (Characteristic + Skill pool or, in the case of monsters, a straight attack pool as given by their signature attack table result).
Armor roll counters this by every success (=statistically 1/6 dice) canceling an attack success/DMG.

If you want to speed things up by don't rolling, you could simply count one success for each 6 points total of the Characteristics + Skill attack pool, and similarly 1 DMG blocking for every 6 Armor point of the attack target.

Ovomorphs have Armor 2, which means that one in every 3 eggs would auto-block 1 point of DMG.
Similarly, Soldier Xenomorphs have Armor 8, meaning that every one auto-blocks 1 point of DMG, and in addition every one in three blocks another point of DMG.
A Queen -- Armor 18 -- would autoblock 3 points of DMG, and so on.

Let's do some further math: If you give a Queen 5 auto-blocks to DMG, that means the best human being in the Colonial Marines, armed with a smartgun cannot touch her. That might be appropriate for your game, but you should be aware of the fact before deciding.

Let's start by simplifying the equation = the smartgun has a DNG of 3, so lets remove 3 points from the Queen's 5 auto-blocks. The Queen now has 2 auto-blocks left, which means the human needs to score a consistant average of 3 DMG on their roll to cause a single point of actual DMG... which is statistically impossible according to the current rules.

Let's for the argument say that the Colonial Marine has an Agility of 5 and a Ranged Combat of 5; the smartgun has a bonus of +3, which means we start out with a best-case-scenario dice pool of 13. To that we add Full Auto (+2) and let's also give the ubermench the Weapon Specialist - smartgun Talent, which adds another +2. That gives us a grand, best-case-scenario total of 17 dice, which is 1 point short of potentially being able to score a reliable average of 3 DMG on top of the base weapon DMG of 3, to inflinct 6 total DMG, which causes the queen to suffer a single point of damage (against her Health of 14).

This means that, if you give the Queen an auto-block of 5 DMG to every single attack, Queens will be statistically invincible. You have to roll above average to score a single point of DMG to the Queen, and scoring 2 points is neigh impossible.

Now, I can totally see games where this is appropriate, but you could just as well tell your players that: "Guys, just as you know, in our game Queens cannot be killed by a squad of smartgunners; sorry, it can't be done."

To give humans a chance to fight, each success allow them to apply the basic damage of their weapons instead of just +1 to the basics damages. The impulse riffle M41A would deal 6 damage with 3 success for exemple.

Ok, I totally didn't read your full post... Sorry.

So, every attack success scores base weapon DMG, right? Well, you're still making it extremely difficult to kill xenos.

3 successes are statistically impossible to consistently score (see above for the best-case-scenario where you will, with a dice pool of 17, score just shy of 3 successes). Bigger critters could just as well be deemed invincible, and medium-size xenos will be a nightmare to defeat, especially in larger numbers.

FYI, a pretty consistant complaint for the Alien RPG -- and one that I don't agree with but I acknowledge that it's there -- is that the xenos in our game is already too powerful for Aliens (or Aliens-inspired computer games) style of gaming to cope with, and by upscaling armor you will make them even harder to kill... and combats even more drawn-out.

Best of luck, mate!

HI All

Welcome, Cain, to this community and great name . And thanks Angelman, your stats analysis is always awesome.

Cain, I like your thinking around the house rules for less combat rolls. With Free League games I also tend to invent a lot of house rules while I'm learning a new set of mechanics, but want to run it before I've fully assimulated what is a very large ruleset and setting.

The nuances between say their Blade Runner vs Twilight 2000 vs Walking Dead lines(All A-F skills with multi dice types) and Aliens(all d6) are pretty subtle. After about 5 years of reading and running all those I think I'm starting to understand some of the design choices, which are generally to try to give the system the 'feel' of the movies/tv series they are based on. It's these sorts of choices that I think Angel is alluding to, i.e. the real stress and fun at the table is when the party succeed or fail against _almost_ impossible odds.

I generally use house rules for my NPCs that players don't really care about, and let them play the NPCs they want to.
If you are looking to streamline combat rolls for larger groups of both humans and aliens, have you seen the Xenomorph swarm rules discussion in this forum?

DX

To give humans a chance to fight, each success allow them to apply the basic damage of their weapons instead of just +1 to the basics damages. The impulse riffle M41A would deal 6 damage with 3 success for exemple.

Ok, I totally didn't read your full post... Sorry.

So, every attack success scores base weapon DMG, right? Well, you're still making it extremely difficult to kill xenos.

3 successes are statistically impossible to consistently score (see above for the best-case-scenario where you will, with a dice pool of 17, score just shy of 3 successes). Bigger critters could just as well be deemed invincible, and medium-size xenos will be a nightmare to defeat, especially in larger numbers.

FYI, a pretty consistant complaint for the Alien RPG -- and one that I don't agree with but I acknowledge that it's there -- is that the xenos in our game is already too powerful for Aliens (or Aliens-inspired computer games) style of gaming to cope with, and by upscaling armor you will make them even harder to kill... and combats even more drawn-out.

Best of luck, mate!

Actually i've used auto dice roller bot and app to do some test, and seeing more than 1 success isn't that rare. Not usual but far for impossible. To use the Queens exemple let's see how i imagin it work:

The Queens has 5 armor, the marine shooting that bi... bad creature use a smartgun. He shoot with let's say 14 dice with the smartgun +3 and some stress dice.
He's lucky and get 3 success, with my rule it's the smartgun damage 3 time, wich mean 9 damage. Now we remember that smartgun has armor piercing ability, we divide the Queen's armor by 2 but we round down the result. The armor 5 of the Queens become armor 2. So the marine deal 9 damage, we substract 2 from the Queen's armor, she suffered 7 damage confirmed, as she has 14hp she lost half hers life.

The key is the armor piercing part, if we round down the armor a soldier xenomorph with 3 armor fall to only 1, meaning that with only 1 success even the M41A can deal at least 1 damage confirmed.

If you are looking to streamline combat rolls for larger groups of both humans and aliens, have you seen the Xenomorph swarm rules discussion in this forum?

Actually no, but i'm interested

HI Cain

For the Xenomorph Swarm house rule discussion see this same forum: viewtopic.php?t=12534

Regards
DX

HI Cain

For the Xenomorph Swarm house rule discussion see this same forum: viewtopic.php?t=12534

Regards
DX

I've just look at it and it's absolutly great! Managing a pack of xeno (or other kind of threats) was one of my interrogation, it's no longer the case now. It can even help me with other tabletop rpg who lack massive battle rules