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A heavy shield would also be strapped to a minifig's arm. Nobody would want to carry around a heavy metal slab everywhere if they had to actively hold it.

Why can't you just say that a shield is just an armour plate that can be picked up and dropped at will (just in terms of ranged combat)? seems to make perfect sense to me.

Keep in mind that cover is for situations where you're trying to hit the target, but you might accidentally hit the cover instead. If you're shooting at a guy with a huge shield, chances are you're trying to just shoot through the thing. That's why I think it should act more like armour than cover.

aoffan23 wrote:Why can't you just say that a shield is just an armour plate that can be picked up and dropped at will (just in terms of ranged combat)? seems to make perfect sense to me.

Keep in mind that cover is for situations where you're trying to hit the target, but you might accidentally hit the cover instead. If you're shooting at a guy with a huge shield, chances are you're trying to just shoot through the thing. That's why I think it should act more like armour than cover.

A good perspective on it. Not to mention, against small-arms fire, doing it this way is more powerful than going by cover.

My hope is that shields affect ranged combat so rarely that they almost never matter. They can't be used to Parry a ranged attack, and it's only in very very rare cases that they'll happen to shield an entire minifig section (head, torso, legs) from a shooter's view. That's why the Heavy Infantry's "Shield Wall" specialty will be so unique: it'll make shields effective as non-Parrying armor.

If I make regular shields as effective as armor plates against gunfire, then I'll have to give them the same half-move penalty to balance it out. But in real life, soldiers didn't carry shields that heavy. They were designed for active parrying rather than passive blocking.

Maybe you could create a second category for shields. Small shields would only come into play in hand-to-hand combat, whereas large shields could be used to brotect against ranged attacks.

I know I just spent two posts talking about making things simpler, but I just feel like large shields fit into so many settings. Tower shields, riot shields, personal force fields (I haven't read the rules for force fields yet, so I don't know how well they apply here). These aren't very effective in close combat because their size limits the ability to swing them (and force fields tend not to block people). My thought is that CC shields (or small shields) would be used to parry HTH attacks, and only confer the Armoured bonus in those situations, while projectile shields (or large shields) would grant the Armoured bonus against ranged attacks, and act as a portable armour plate.

This may make things too complicated, but I just feel like it would be useful for creating that differentiation.

I'm willing to abstract this away to keep things simple. Smaller shields are easier to swing, but larger shields cover more area, so I don't see any problem with making them equally effective in close combat from a mechanical standpoint. The size difference will make an effect if they can be used for cover, but the physical pieces and sightlines take care of that by themselves without having to add any new rules.

aoffan23 wrote:brotect

I spotted that when reading stubby's reply, but I decided it was much better to leave it.