In 5th, this was covered by the interaction between damage and armor rating. If the damage was less than your armor rating, then you had to resist stun damage instead of physical. This meant that wearing FBA allowed you to soak small arms as stun instead of chipping away at your physical health. The issue became skew characters that had jacked up BOD+armor pools of ~40 dice, and anything short of an assault cannon or rocket launcher was doing stun damage.
I was thinking about this and remembered one instance in the US, when a bunch of guys robbed a bank. What they did was that they put quite a few winter jackets underneath their bulletproof vests. That caused the effects of severely reduced shock, to the point, that they were able to stand their ground. They did utilise cover and helmets in addition to the armour, but the precedence stands. - Thanks for pointing this out!
Continuing with that train of thought. When a ballistic plate or kevlar stops a bullet, it deteoriorates and looses function, to put in a simple way, it gets destroyed.
How could we express this in game mechanics ? It can be assumed that armour does not cover the whole body, even with full body armour, there are vulnerable spots. I was thinking about a specific action, maybe a 3 Edge action, where you could do a one time bonus to soak from armour which than gets destroyed, or something in a similar fashion.
I do understand that the idea to add more bonuses is contradictory to what edge is trying to achieve and that is a valid point, but maybe going with an action instead of a bonus could be a way forward. There actually is a 5 edge "Create special effect" action and together with the possibility of giving 1 edge to a team member via spending 2 of your own, could add armour soak and doesn't demand to introduce a new mechanic because of it.
What do you think ?
They already started to do this in 6th with the resistive coatings armor mods. It cancels a status (Corrosive, Chilled, Burning, or Zapped) X number of times before it degrades and can't be used again (X=rating at purchase). You could do something similar with armor, but I would make it last considerably longer than protective coatings (Rating x5 or x10). But this would also mean that armor would need a rating, which seems like complexity for complexity's sake.
Or, you could just say every hit you take over the course of a mission tallies up as the repair threshold/cost for an armorer test after action. Then you raise the question of whether the time/nuyen cost is worth the repair, or if it would be easier/cheaper to buy new armor. That also means your soak tank character will need to upkeep their armor more than the decker who stays in the van.
But honestly, I don't know why they took armor out of the soak pool to begin with. They re-normed both weapons and armor downward, so the effect would be mostly the same. The best armor combo you can do in 6th is FBA (+5) with a helmet (+2) and a ballistic shield (+2). That would be +9 dice to the soak pool, or an average of 3 extra hits. But it would also be impossible to disguise, you could only use one-handed weapons, and a grenade will still ruin your day. Your average runner will be wearing something in the +3 to +4 range (i.e. a lined coat or armor jacket), which would only be an average of 1 extra hit on a soak test.
