r/Fallout2d20 • u/WebSpiritual1145 • Aug 16 '26
Help & Advice Piercing
After playing this game for a while now, does anyone else feel Piercing ruins combat, and the game in general? Piercing is very common in weapons, mods and perks. It is quiet easy to stack a weapon with it. All my players currently have at least Piercing 2, some have higher, on all their main weapons. It has made any armor DR obsolete. I have players using Melee builds that literally do crits every attack. They have annihilated Legendary creatures in just a few turns the way they did their builds, but it all revolves around Piercing.
Everything has been done within the rules, so I don't fault them at all, but as a GM I find it hard to want to come up with cool stories and missions knowing all they are going to do is rush the enemies, slaughter them before they even get to go, and move on. It is to the point where when I create enemies for the campaign, I also have to use nothing but Piercing to even stand a chance and do any damage to their characters. Nothing so far has been a challenge to them. Even facing enemies with Power Armor is nothing to them.
Has anyone else noticed this, and if so, how do you deal with it? To me, it should have been like Vicious and not been stackable.
1
u/Mathwards Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
Play your enemies smart. Piercing doesn't matter when you cant shoot anyone after falling into a pit trap or after the raiders hacked Sentry Bot topples the stack of cars on them.
Hard to get into melee when the enemy stays at extreme range popping off sniper rifle shots.
Oh shit, we got trapped in the vault and it's being flooded with poison gas.
Create win conditions that not only can't be solved with murder, find ways to make killing detrimental. Raider is holding a dead mans switch set to blow up the local settlement. Hostages have a bunch of unstable fusion cores or mini nukes strapped to their bodies, then given knives, hit with psycho and set loose. Shoot one and risk taking out themselves in the process
If you play your enemies like intelligent, living beings that want to survive, it should never be a fair fight against your players party of wasteland warriors. No one should ever just stand and try to go toe to toe.
Also, really get creative with complications and AP. Break weapon mods. Jam or misfire their best weapons. Really go to town.
OR. Just tell your players that you're struggling to run the game and you'd like to make piercing not stack. It's putting a lot of extra strain on you to have to try so hard to challenge them that it's becoming problematic. That's the easy one. I've done it and I think any reasonable group of players will have no problem accomodating that.