Penetration (PV)

This article has information that is missing or not up to par.
Reason: What is a critical hit's role in all of this? TODO: add probability calculation table for quick reference

PV or Penetration Value or → is a value assigned to all weapons and plays a key part in damage calculation during attacking.

Melee Weapon PV Calculation

Melee weapons have a base PV of 4. The PV will increase by the creature's Strength modifier with an upper limit dictated by the weapon's bonus cap. Two handed weapons and the Sharp mod also increase base PV by 1. However, during penetration calculations, the base 4 PV is not calculated, making the 4 starting PV merely cosmetic. This means that a sword with 7 PV and a vibro blade (which PV matches AV) against a creature with 7 AV do not have the same PV value (in this case, the vibro blade has 4 more PV).

A critical hit(natural 10) is guaranteed one penetration.

Ranged Weapon PV Calculation

This article has information that is missing or not up to par.
Reason: is this the same for grenade launchers, thrown weapons, or bows?

Ranged weapon PV is determined by the PV of the gun itself. The PV of the bullet does not matter.

Critical hits on ranged weapons add a flat +4 PV to the shot.

Penetration Formula

This article has information that is missing or not up to par.
Reason: This formula is close the actual formula, but isn't quite correct. Until this page gets updated, see the Melee combat article for a more accurate description of how PV rolls work.

To check how many times an attack penetrates, the game rolls the following value three times:

$[{\text{Penetration Roll}}]=1\mathrm {d} 10+PV$

Each roll is then compared to the target's AV. If at least one roll is higher than the AV, the attack penetrates a single time. Then, if all three rolls are higher than the AV, the whole process is repeated; this allows the attack to penetrate more than once. However, each time this happens, the PV value is reduced by 2.

Step by Step Process

Step 1 - Roll the attacker's PV value against the defender's AV value 3 times (let's call this a triplet).

Step 1a - Each individual roll within the triplet works as follows (let's call each roll a singlet):

Step 1a.i - Roll 1d10-2. Each time that the maximum result of 8 is rolled, perform the 1d10-2 roll again and continue adding the results together.

Step 1a.ii - Add the attacker's PV value to the total roll calculated in Step 1a.i.

Step 1a.iii - Note whether the total PV roll from Step 1a.ii is greater than the target's AV.

Step 1b - If at least one singlet roll was greater than the target's AV, the attack penetrates one time (or one more time if this is a subsequent triplet). If all three singlet rolls were greater than the target's AV, reduce the PV value by 2, return to Step 1, and perform another triplet of rolls to determine if the attack penetrates an additional time. (Continue this loop, reducing PV by 2 each time, until at least one singlet fails to roll higher than the target's AV.)

In summary, the attack penetrates once for each triplet of rolls where at least one singlet was higher than the target's AV.

If all three rolls in the first triplet are equal to or lower than the target's AV, the attack fails to penetrate at all.