How would you handle Shields?

I'm thinking Riot-police / bulletproof shields, or maybe just large pieces of old cars that get grabbed and used for protection.

Is this just extra armour? No mechanical effect?

I'd give it +1armour like the transportable cover it is. Maybe I'd add a clumsy tag I could activate as a move if I'm feeling procedural.

If it's a big shield, +1 armor, maybe clumsy. If it's a small shield, you take -2 harm instead of -1 when you seize by force and pick that option.

What's going on in the fiction that has caused this situation to crop up? It may be that if your gang has 2 armour then riot shields is a part of their normal kit, it doesn't need extra mechanics. It may be that a PC has pulled a car door of its hinges and is trying to shield themselves from a rain of molotov cocktails. In which case, it's probably acting under fire. I don't think you need a general rule, I think you just need to respond to the needs of the fiction.

For ApocalypseQuest I'm currently going with regular melee weapons as 3-harm (like a machette) and 2-handed weapons such as greatswords at 4-harm.

Light armour is 1-armour, chain and plate are 2-armour and a shield gives +1armour against a single opponent. I suppose full gothic plate would be 3-armour, but that's not an issue.

Shields should be useless against modern firearms, as would the armour types above. I suppose you could have an AW setting where ammunition is extremely rare, so combat would be more like in a fantasy setting.

Simon Hibbs

What Tim said.  Also, if it's more like, a gunlugger is customarily carrying around a riot shield, then just figure that to be part of how he's describing his 2-armor.  The armor/weapons system is very coarse-grained, so this kind of thing is generally just color.

And I'd be leery of creating a cheap and easy way to obtain +1armor on top of 2-armor.  From p242:

Bomb squad suits and the like would be armor worth 3-armor, if you feel like including such things, but they’d be pretty rare. Nobody gets them by default.

Thanks, that is all useful!

I guess I'm still hung up on the granular way of dealing with these things in "other games".

But so are my players, and telling them that "grabbing that door" has no effect, and that mechanically he could just have said "I dive for cover" with the same chances of success sound ... strange.

I guess we still think of these things too much as a tactical board/war-game.

"with the same chances of success..." doesn't mean the same thing though, right? I mean, there's a massive difference between being pinned in cover and being out in the open, advancing and carrying a makeshift wall. The NPCs are going to react differently, the PC will have difference options available to them.

It's hard to discuss the problem if we don't have the specifics of a situation at hand to see what was frustrating. Was there a specific battle that happened where this came up?

Grabbing a shield shouldn't have "no effect," it should definitely protect them. I just don't think it needs to be +1armor automatically. Ask how they're using it, what it's doing. Make them act under fire and if it works, take less or no harm, situationally. If it's a huge riot shield and they're moving in, maybe they're totally protected until a certain point.

Basically, make it count within the fiction but avoid a static +1armor, that's what I'd do.

This sounds similar to how I'm thinking of handling radiation protection when that becomes pertinent to resolving an upcoming Threat. Wondering if I should make a lead suit 1- or 2-armor vs. radiation.