I've often felt this way about the attack vs. defense chart... A character wouldn't necessarily miss someone because of his defense, that's more heightened defense.  Their power just wouldn't affect someone with a defense that works against their powers...  It's just hard to figure out something that works for all powers.  I think this is a great idea, what do you think about it applying to more defenses than just Force Field?

I'll have to play around with this, but I think I like it.  I was never very happy with the Force Field as written (aka drop the hammer on the force fielder).  By the way it is written, the Invisible Girl would be toast early in any fight.

[Note - I'm copying and pasting some of my comments from another forum, so some of it may look familiar to some of you]

I've always liked Force Field (FF) and we have a PC who has weilded it effectively for nearly two decades.  We've always used it as written, and I find it to be one of the more fun powers in V&V, since it's such a double-edged sword.

That PC - the hero Quiasar - started being called "Pierce" back in the day, because attacks pierced his FF so often.  He soon learned to be more judicious both in when he used it (and who he protected with it).

It is a bit complicated, until you figure it out and start using it regularly (having Quiasar in our group for years helped). As I've mentioned before, I write down all of the attacks and defenses for my adventures ahead of time, so I would write down something like this:

Bad Guy X
Power Blast 6 (22)

Where the numbers shown would be what you get when you cross-referenced an attack from Bad Guy X attacking a hero with a FF. This would tell me, essentially, that when Bad Guy X attacks FF Hero, you roll a 20-sided die, then:

1-6: Hits through the FF (piercing it), doing full damage to both the FF and the intended target (often the FF wielder, who is in essence taking double damage)
7-19: Hits on the FF (doing half damage to the FF wielders' Power score)
20: miss

The only thing my chart doesn't take into account is range (which hardly ever comes up in V&V since you ignore it up to 30") and facing (which is easy to add or subtract on the fly).

I've always felt that this decently shows what we see of FF in the comics (as Hammer mentions); they often strain their user, and they have the potential to protect incredibly (but also to make one vulnerable to lots of damage).

I'm not saying the way in the rulebook is perfect, and I can see the point in doing it the way John suggests above (1/10th of damage repulsed); in fact I've done it this way with characters before myself and find it very effective.  But FF as written is a solid and effective defense, when used wisely.