Editing Mass: the Effecting/Hard-Won Experience (section)

===Tech Armour===

Some combatants in the Mass Effect setting make use of what is generally termed 'Tech Armour', a complex modification to the standard mass effect patterns in kinetic barriers.  It uses layers of dangerous warping fields in amongst the usual kinetic shields, meaning that incoming attacks may be literally torn apart and spat out in a spray of fragments.  Running Tech Armour puts a heavy load on the processors used, and the warping fields cause an excess of energy emissions in the form of light.  These emissions are usually harnessed into holographic warnings that alert those nearby to the hazards of flying, shredded bullet fragments.

Tech Armour is an exception to several of the normal rules for Tech Programmes.  It does not belong to any single Tech skill; nor does it take a single library or programme slot.

Instead, Tech Armour takes ''one slot of each of the four Processes'' – so to run Tech Armour, a character must allocate one Engineering, Interfacing, Medicine ''and'' Science Process slot to it.  This is also true for storing Tech Armour in an omni-tool's library – it takes a single slot of each Process type.

Tech Armour is a running programme that provides 1 point of Armour on the character's Shield levels, affected as normal by the Armour Piercing trait.  If at any point the character switches any of the Tech Armour programme slots to another programme, the Tech Armour effect is lost (though it continues to take its other slots until they too are changed).

However, a character ''may'' choose to devote even more of their omni-tool's processing power to their Tech Armour.  They may do this by allocating an '''additional''', second slot of any Process type to the Tech Armour programme.  Doing so gives a benefit depending on which Process slot type was given, and a character may choose to do this with as many or all of the programme types they wish.  Potentially, a character may devote up to 8 Process programme slots to Tech Armour, two of each type, and reap all of the advanced benefits of the programme.

The benefits of allocating a second slot to Tech Armour depend are as follows:

'''Engineering''':  Whenever the character's Shield levels are at their maximum, any attack made against them has its AP quality reduced by 1 and loses the 9-again trait, if it has them.<br>
'''Interfacing''':  Whenever the character's Shield levels are reduced to 0, treat any enemies within 25 yards as if they were hit by a weapon with the Stun trait.<br>
'''Medicine''':  Whenever the character's Shield levels are reduced to 0, downgrade the damage of the first attack to hit them by one level (so Lethal to Bashing, Aggravated to Lethal).  Bashing damage is not downgraded further.<br>
'''Science''':  As long as the character has any Shield levels, attack rolls made against them with weapons that have the Cryo, Disrupt, Inferno or Toxicity traits suffer an additional -1 penalty.<br>

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