Question about armor

[bobjob]

This has been nagging me for a bit. Let me break out the math real quick to help illustrate what I'm asking and then see what I get back with answers.

Scenario 1: Dresden shoots a vampire with Supernatural Toughness that has armor:2 with a gun that is weapon:2. Dresden rolls his Gun skill and gets a total result of 4 (roll+skill). The vampire rolls his athletics and gets the same result. Dresden hits, he generates no shifts and the armor and the weapon cancel out for no stress.

Scenario 2: Dresden shoots a vampire with Supernatural Toughness that has armor:2 with a gun that is weapon:2. Dresden rolls his Gun skill and gets a total result of 4 (roll+skill). The vampire rolls his athletics and gets a result of 0. Dresden hits, but the armor and the weapon value cancel out.

My question is, even if Dresden had rolled higher or the vampire had whiffed his athletics check doesn't the armor cancel out the base weapon damage regardless of how well the skill roll is? So how does rolling even better actually give you the ability to damage that target when the base damage is still negated by the armor? This isn't ablative armor like the Hecatean Hag. 

I don't know... it just seems to me that this is the scenario where you break out the bigger weapons.

[gojj]

In Scenario 2 Dresden would deal 4 damage because he still rolled four higher. Damage = (skill+roll+weapon damage) - (skill+roll+armor). Of course aspects can add or reduce damage and you won't deal any damage at all if you miss in the first place.

[computerking]

I think the answer to your problem lies in this concept: if you shoot someone in a Kevlar Vest under the arm or in the head, it will bypass the armor, but there's no way to reflect that directly in the mechanics. So the added stress reflects good placement of your shot. 

[noclue]

Dresden does no damage in any event. He does stress, and eventually consequences. Doing stress doesn't even necessitate doing physical damage wthi the weapon. Its all an abstraction.

So in example #2 Dresden did 4 stress. That may be damage, or something else. But the fact that the armor held is just incorporated in the narrative.

[EdgeOfDreams]

noclue has the right idea here. It's all an abstraction.  A character rolling Guns may have fired one shot or a dozen shots, but it's still one roll.  A 'hit' (i.e. an attack roll stronger than the defense roll, causing stress) may not be a literal hit.  It may be a shot that bounced off the armor, or passed right by your ear, or forced you to dodge by rolling on the ground.  When a character is too stressed, they start taking consequences, but even those can be out of the ordinary.  For example, against a steel-plate wearing opponent, the minor consequence "dinged up" might be appropriate, representing that they've been hit, their armor withstood it, but it might not continue to do so.

Also, don't think of the weapon rating as how much 'damage' the weapon does, nor the armor rating as how much 'damage' is prevented.  Instead, look at it as threat and stress.  A big honking two-handed sword (weapon 3) is going to worry and stress you out a lot more than a little dagger (weapon 1), but your chainmail suit (armor 2) does comfort you somewhat.

[gojj]

While I agree with most of what you are saying (the emphasis on stress not damage makes more sense then what I said), I think that the weapon value of weapons refers directly to their lethality. Personally, ,I'd be more freaked out by someone holding a pistol (W2) than a Claymore (W3). Or maybe it's a combination of the two. But yes, like you said, if you have gotten shot a few times wearing a Kevlar vest and even if you were never "hit" (damaged), you'd still be soar and growing increasingly exhausted, a.k.a more stressed. I was just focusing more on the G aspect of RPG, I keep forgetting that it's the R and P that make this game so much more in depth (and in my opinion more fun) than games where your character's personality pretty much doesn't matter and you're just killing everything in the room.