Radical Idea: Armor

[K]

What if armor gave DR to attacks, but lowered AC (because it makes you move slower).

Then, you'd have lightly armored guys who boosted AC to get hit a few times for more damage, and heavily armored guys who get hit a lot for little damage.

Then touch attacks could be eliminated entirely. AC would only mean "gets hit" and not "gets hit and may or may not be damaged."

[JonSetanta]

If you go down that road, why not remove attack rolls entirely, like in WarCraft 3?

Then you're sure to reach MMO Town.
Nothing but DR and Concealment miss chance as far as the eyes can see.

[CatharzGodfoot]

That's exactly the same as forcing characters to split a single resource between dodging and DR, except you put in in the armor rather than the character.

It would certainly be worth considering if you wanted to get rid of attributes.

[Ice9]

Well right off the bat - the DR would need to scale with level. A +4 to AC is still a 20% difference at 20th level, but DR 4/- is a lot more than 20% of 1d8+3, and a lot less than 20% of 7d6+39.

Even scaling by level, there would be a huge difference in effectiveness against different types of enemies. For instance, armor that would make you almost invincible against an archer or thrown weapon attacker would be your demise against a greatsword-wielder or big monster. I think there'd be a great demand for fast-remove armor.

Essentially, any DR that was sufficient to justify the tank wearing armor against BBEG-types would render them nigh-invulnerable to weaker foes.

[Cielingcat]

What if armor just gives you a percent reduction in damage taken? It would require a calculator and rules on rounding, but it's a lot easier than calculating the absolute average damage per level and giving DR equal to that.

Or you could go with a setup where you have a roll to hit and a wound threshold and armor raised your wound threshold by a certain amount. If the relative values of attacks and defenses don't change, then DR doesn't have to change.

[Psychic Robot]

If you go down that road, why not remove attack rolls entirely, like in WarCraft 3?

Then you're sure to reach MMO Town.
Nothing but DR and Concealment miss chance as far as the eyes can see.

Simply because Warcraft does something does not mean that it is a bad idea.

[Username17]

Not really workable in D&D as things currently stand, for a number of reasons. And I haven't been super impressed with most games that went down that road, though usually (ex.: Paladium) that was not even a noticeable reason as to why.

Whatever system of attack and damage rolls you use, people are generally going to cause some kind of real damage on a "hit." Full soaks are usually pretty rare even in games that allow them at all (something of a minority as it happens). And that means that avoiding getting hit is a really big deal, and artificially lowering that chance would have to come with enormous amounts of cookies to possibly be worth it.

There are numeric systems that you can use that will make it work. SAME has one - a -1 dodge penalty coupled with a +2 soak bonus is a net advantage. But D&D suffers from the fact that while a +/-1 to AC means pretty much the same thing at all levels, a +/-5 or even 15 to damage intake fades into obscurity pretty quick as higher levels are reached.

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Thinking way outside the box, I have been thinking about TNE damage/to-hit paradigms. And this is what I've been throwing around:

To-hit rolls a d20 + a stat.
Damage rolls 3d6 + a different stat.

Your ACs are based on your stats, and every attack targets one of them.

Your basic battle attire gives you DR equal to an associated stat or X, whichever is lower. It gives a bonus DR against attacks related to that stat of like 2.

Wound and Effect Thresholds apply as normal.

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What this means is that people who are unprepared for battle get squished pretty fast. Characters have a range of armor options available to them, which are different for different characters.

We could from there throw in additional complication of having heavier armors that gave a higher max DR and gave a penalty to ACs. Since it would be moving things up and down on the effect curve, it would often be a good plan.

-Username17

[Bigode]

To-hit rolls a d20 + a stat.
Damage rolls 3d6 + a different stat.

I meant to ask about that for some time: while I know swapping the 3d6 for a d20 will make damage a lot more random, is there any really pernicious side effect?

[Voss]

It makes it less random, doesn't it? 3 dice converge to 9-12 a lot more often than a d20 does.

[ckafrica]

What if armor just gives you a percent reduction in damage taken? It would require a calculator and rules on rounding, but it's a lot easier than calculating the absolute average damage per level and giving DR equal to that.

Or you could go with a setup where you have a roll to hit and a wound threshold and armor raised your wound threshold by a certain amount. If the relative values of attacks and defenses don't change, then DR doesn't have to change.

This is exactly what I had queried about. using eighths I worked up a 1 to 100 damage conversion chart that was only a page so it would have been very quick to convert the damage. The one thing I noticed was that you were going to have to have average damage of 8+ to make it relevant at all times. I also figured that you would have to add multiple attacks together to minimize rounding off.

[Username17]

Looking up charts is, in general, bad. It slows down the game more than it should, because no one leaves books open to common charts.

-Username17

[MagnaSecuris]

Armor Class. When a knight gets hit with a sword, it often doesn't hurt because he's wearing armor.

Armor as DR is already covered in the rules. It's DRinfinity/high to-hit rolls.

[Voss]

Gosh, thats helpful. But you'll note that most of the heavy armors (except plate) are mechanically inferior to wearing leather and having a decent dex. The term 'armor' in AC is pretty meaningless when wearing almost nothing is just as good as wrapping yourself in metal.

The main point of the discussion is that once you're actually hit, its more reasonable that the guy in plate takes less damage than the guy in leather. For a test of this, wrap a piece of leather around your hand and stab yourself. Then put a piece of metal over the leather and stab yourself again. Which wound is worse?

[Maxus]

Ideally, there should also be some rules for armor taking damage. I mean, how the heck do you inflict lethal damage through full plate without in some way damaging the armor itself?

But apparently armor is indestructible while it's worn.

[Talisman]

Ideally, there should also be some rules for armor taking damage. I mean, how the heck do you inflict lethal damage through full plate without in some way damaging the armor itself?

But apparently armor is indestructible while it's worn.

That's literally true. By RAW, it's impossible to sunder armor while it's being worn.

While I like this concept, I think the "percent off" system is the only one that would really work...and my game crew thinks d20 is crunchy enough without yet another calculation to keep track of.

Of course, taken to its logical extreme, this system would have to account for blugdeoning weapons vs. plate armor, crossbows/picks vs. chainmail, etc., etc.

[Username17]

The protective value of armor, magic charms, or sexy poses can be modeled in game terms by causing people to be hit less often, or take less damage when hit, or some combination. Over the long run, it's not terribly important because either version reduces your average damage intake and must be carefully balanced with the rest of the game numbers or everything pretty much falls apart.

For example, in original D&D DR and such didn't exist at all. Armor reduced your chance to get hit and that was that. If I recall correctly in original WHFRP wearing armor had no bearing on whether you were struck but reduced incoming damage. And of course who can forget the original rules of Star Wars where wearing armor actually caused you to get hit more often and take more damage (because you took extra damage based on how much they hit you by and the damage reduction afforded by wearing armor was less than the bonus damage that enemy attacks received for the defense penalty it granted)?

You could very plausibly have a system where wearing armor caused you to get hit more often and take less damage (or vice versa) and have that mechanically viable. Inherently that would normally be expected to be advantageous against attacks which did very little damage or which hit very often, and to be disadvantageous in cases where the enemy hit very infrequently or did a fuck tonne of damage. But of course using different variables could change that.

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The golden target I think is one in which people who engage in melee naturally want to wear heavy armor and people who carry bows don't. Off the top of my head that could be achieved by giving melee attacks massive to-hit bonuses or higher rates of fire. In short, nearly the complete opposite of the D&D model where bows get rate of fire bonuses in exchange for low damage output.

-Username17

[shau]

The golden target I think is one in which people who engage in melee naturally want to wear heavy armor and people who carry bows don't. Off the top of my head that could be achieved by giving melee attacks massive to-hit bonuses or higher rates of fire. In short, nearly the complete opposite of the D&D model where bows get rate of fire bonuses in exchange for low damage output.

Another way to do this might be the character stat synergy route. In Tactics Ogre, for example, any character can wear any type of armor you want to give them. You can totally give your mages fullplate. For the most part however, you want to give agile characters like ninjas and archers light or no armor because their best means of defense is just to dodge or parry and heavy armor interferes with that. Knights and Dragoons aren't dodging anything and just want to wear lots of plate to soak damage.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Having mages wear full-plate armor might be a good thing. It certainly messes around with flavor in an interesting way. Assuming that plate armor is slower to move in, it's really no different than a bubble of force or circle of power that slows your movement rate (which is in keeping with 'normal' wizard flavor).

[JonSetanta]

OK here's a plan:

Armor AC bonus stays the same, but we give it a buttload of Hardness to the user (or DR, whatever you call it) of, say, -10 damage.

I decided on -10 because a longsword, that classic standby of European medieval warfare, won't be able to scratch the target except on a crit, which (ideally) occurs every 10 blows. So, melee is drawn out, right?
Wrong.
We also give melee attack bonuses, as Frank put it, to reward melee warriors for doing so. Call it "accuracy", whatever, it could just be rule for a flat out +4 to hit for being within arm's reach of their target.
Or the bonus comes from the melee weapons themselves.

For the next part of this concept I propose the armor-to-user Hardness scales with level or BAB of the user.
It could be an additive of base 5 Hardness and +5 for each BAB, but whichever number it increases by each level would have to be in line with the damage output of your average (or optimum?) melee warrior to make armor 'worth it'.

I was also considering that armor could apply the Hardness against elemental/energy damage, making a kind of universal Elemental Resistance against all types, to reward tankers for putting on that suit of reinforced, padded, ablative 150 lbs of formfitted steel.
While unrealistic, since overheating is a serious threat to wrapping oneself in metal, it would be a good solution to the many monstrous and environmental threats of fantasy combat.
Wear armor = stay alive better, at the expense that you are (possibly) hit more often and a little bit slower (due to weight rather than 'armor slows you down X amount?)

Stronger the character = better the armor you can wear without being slowed down, obviously steering STR-based melee warriors towards that niche.

[Psychic Robot]

My system would be to go with the "Armor as DR" variant in UA, but change the values a little.

[Username17]

A complete overhaul of the values would be required. The Armor as DR variant in UA just nut punches fighters badly. The DR you get from even the heaviest of armors is pretty meaningless in the face of even a CR 3 Giant (Ogres + Greatclubs for the ~15 points of win). Meanwhile the AC you lose has a real and persistent penalty associated with it at all levels.

Or to put it another way: moving AC up and down by 1 means a 5% absolute shift and usually about a 10% relative shift in how much damage you take from every enemy attacks. A point of DR can be quite impressive against some enemies, but at high levels it seriously expires as something which is even worth thinking about. The to-hit roll is always on a d20 and every point always matters as long as you stay on the Random Number Generator. Damage and Hit Points are divergent - characters get and inflict more of them per level each level. A 1st level rogue comes in for 8 points of damage when he hits while a 15th level Rogue comes in for near to 200 average (misses included).

DR just does not and can not keep pace with damage in the high end world of D&D on a linear basis. So no simple tweaks to the UA system will ever work well. It's a bad system that pays little or no attention to the numbers that D&D actually uses.

-Username17

[Caedrus]

Not sure if anyone mentioned this already, but I didn't see it.

It occurs to me that there is a very easy way to make armor as DR, have it scale to percentages, and not have to do even basic math. This is actually a system I considered using in my own "new D&D edition" project.

Basically, you increase the focus on dice for damage rolls, rather than lotsa modifiers. Let's say a normal attack uses d10s for damage dice. Armor types change the die type you roll.

For a rough example:

Damage vs. Weakness: d12s
Damage vs. Unarmored: d10s
Damage vs. Light armored: d8s
Damage vs. Medium armored: d6s
Damage vs. Heavy armored: d4s
Damage vs. Puzzle Monster DR: d3s or d2s? Heck, maybe just plain 1s.

No doing math after the fact, just changing the dice bag you pull out of. Alternatively, you could have +/- X damage per die rolled (So, if you have heavy armor, -3 damage per die rolled).

You could use this system for energy resistances, attacks, whatever, if you wanted to. Medium fire resistance? Fire attacks roll d6s against you instead of d10s.

It also could potentially have a nice aesthetic effect.

[Talisman]

This is how armor works in the Deadlands system. Of course, in Deadlands, d4s are remarkably deadly because all dice explode...which leads to lines like "Oh crap! I rip off my kevlar vest just before the grenade goes off!"

[JonSetanta]

d3s?

I hate you.
Treat "puzzle" as "heavy".

[Talisman]

d3s?

I hate you.

d6: 1-2 = 1; 3-4 = 2; 5-6 = 3.

Heck, I think we should include d5s, d7s and d9s.