Armor

Some people wear their armor on the inside, as some sort of metaphorical refusal to emotionally connect with others. I find that kevlar vests are much more effective at stopping bullets.

Characters will sometimes wear armor. Armor makes it less likely that a character will die when placed into a deadly situation. Armor is heavier than normal clothes, and wearing it is tiring. However, there are characters in After Sundown who have Patience of the Mountain and literally do not get tired. And they often wear armor all the time, even to sleep. It should be noted however that most of the world has a level of civilization that makes wearing armor problematic socially.

Armor has a different rating against different kinds of attacks. The Ballistics rating applies against guns and explosives and the like. The Melee rating applies against knives and claws in addition to baseball bats and large thrown objects like rocks and cars. And finally, the Heat value applies against getting set on fire and also cold. The rating of armor adds additional soak dice. In addition, a character with an armor rating can buy a number of hits on soak tests equal to their armor rating at the rate of 1 hit per three dice. So a character with 2 Armor against an attack could set aside 3 soak dice for one automatic hit or 6 soak dice for 2 automatic hits.

Most armor does not cover the character's whole body, and an attacker who knows about the armor can attack the unarmored bits by voluntarily increasing their to-hit threshold by 1. For armor that truly covers the whole body, such as riot gear or hazmat suits, that is not an option. Remember that outré armor like that is often rather hard to explain socially, so even characters who could wear such comfortably usually don't.