mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

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OgreBattle
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mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by OgreBattle »

In some tabletop RPG's you got Armor Class stuff, armor makes you harder to hit
In some games you got Armor as soaking and reduction, taking less damage when hit

Some games do both, so what games do y'all find do both well? Where armor coverage and armor quality are both taken into account in a way that's fairly fast
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by Foxwarrior »

Well, I can't think of any tabletop games that do both at once great, but to clarify: the ideal is that armor is most effective against a shower of poorly aimed light attacks, and it can be bypassed with attacks that are either: sufficiently strong to just go right through, especially if it's thin; or sufficiently accurate to hit an unprotected spot, especially if it's partial coverage. Doing that by representing it as a chance to avoid the armor based on aim followed by a reduction if you didn't aim well enough seems like it'd violate the "fairly fast" requirement almost every way it can be done...

Dicepool games with the hit and soak should in principle be able to represent bypassing armor either by aiming around it (high hit roll) or by going through it (high damage value), but in practice I've found those games' damage models feel rather detached from reality so I can barely tell what an attack roll's success counts are even supposed to mean in the fiction most of the time.

And yes, of course Gempunks has a take on this, you didn't even have to ask: you can choose to take a penalty to your attack roll if you want to shoot around instead of through the armor (so instead of representing both possibilities in the same attack resolution you just do whichever one is more relevant)... but armor is kinda a niche and minor thing because it's trying to support Jackie Chans and people failing to use entire brick walls as armor.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by JonSetanta »

For the pseudo-d20 RPG I've been working on for 6-7 years, I tried armor bonus functioning like D&D but that didn't bode well with Dodge rolls as it was a two-step barrier to hitting people in combat.
Then I mentioned Armor-As-HP and the idea got shot down here on this forum so I tried Damage Reduction, which was terrible because unoptimised characters actually could NEVER damage a tough character in Full Plate.

So, in the end, I did three types of armor (Light, Medium, Heavy) and a Shield, and each has its own HP value that when reduced to 0 does not protect a bearer.
Between combats the HP of armor and shields can be repaired as part of a Rest and no other action is required. GM/DM can micromanage the situation by saying "you need materials" but as the RPG designer by RAW it is literally only requiring 1 hour of rest.

Besides, there's a Shield spell (thinking of calling it Protect though) that does the same thing as armor but requires mana, and absorbs more damage before failing as a character gains levels.

So, whether or not an attacker in my RPG hits with a weapon depends mostly on the Dodge roll vs. a static TN called "Threat" that is actually not even tied to stats but rather to class selection, feats, and level, so you can be weak but trained and hit almost every time unless the target is really, really fast, rolls near perfectly/spends an Action Point to maximize their d20 roll, and took the Dodge feat.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by angelfromanotherpin »

The only game I can think of where armor actually does both is older GURPS, where armor both boosted your defense roll and reduced the damage of hits. Most games that are that granular just have some proportion of hits be hits on the armor, which then reduces the damage.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by Grek »

Worlds Without Number has an interesting system where armour increases your AC in the usual D&D way, turning 'hits' into 'misses' but where most melee weapons have a minimum "shock damage" applied to anyone without a high enough AC, even if the attack misses. For example, a greatsword does 1d12+Str damage and 2+Str/15 shock - if the attack roll misses, or if you roll a 1 for damage, you still do a minimum of 2+Str to anyone with 15 or less AC. Various Fighter abilities let you ignore the AC requirement for shock damage or to ignore shock damage vs. people who aren't good enough at fighting.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by erik »

For my last RPG I use armor as DR+ablative only. Attacks are pretty easy to hit with unless the defender is dodging, and dodging is penalized in heavier armor.

So light armor can dodge better but get punished on hits more. Heavy armors cannot dodge as well but soak better.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by Foxwarrior »

I see a lot of system suggestions here that don't distinguish between a chunky metal breastplate and a full-body leather suit :razz:
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Both Riddle of Steel and GURPS have armor coverage rules that are fairly fast relative to the rest of their system, because they already have full hit location mechanics and aiming around armor is just using those. For more speed, you could try One-Roll Engine, which determines both hit location and attack MoS with a single roll.

If you aren't using Hit Locations at all, you could abstractify your coverage, but the exact method would depend on the attack/defense mechanic.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by erik »

A lot of the granularity depends upon how much you want to care about that stuff. MERPS/Rolemaster went whole hog having separate critical tables based upon whether your armor was leather, chain, included a helmet, and whether they were attacked by slashing, bludgeoning, electricity, etc.

But we aren't living in 1980, nor crazy. So most armor rules will be a lot fuzzier.

My ideal d20 armor rules would be an even *more* vague set of 3e weapons and armor. Where you just have light, medium, heavy and the rest of it is fluff. And weapons are bladed, polearm, bludgeons, etc.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by Harshax »

OgreBattle wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 4:23 am
Some games do both, so what games do y'all find do both well? Where armor coverage and armor quality are both taken into account in a way that's fairly fast
Others have mentioned GURPS 3, but that’s no longer true in GURPS 4.

HarnMaster has an extensive armor system. 4 types: soft and hard leather, chain and plate. Each are rated against three types of injuries: bludgeon, edges, piercing. These four types can be layered in limited, but logical ways. The game has one of the most detailed hit location charts I’ve ever seen. Encumbrance penalizes all physical skills. Armor is expensive and time consuming. Some Armor has a military grade, which prevents those outside certain castes to even own.

But even this doesn’t have passive defense in a general sense, only damage resistance. Where armor in this system makes you harder to hit, is when an attacker chooses to swing high or low; which can skew the hit location possibility; or chooses to strike a specific hit location. Each of these attacks are made at a penalty, but again, the penalty is not inherent in the armor but rather the attackers choice.

EDIT - you needed a fucking spreadsheet to calculate armor and standard rigs for cost, coverage and encumbrance. Or about 4-6 landscape sheets of paper to make easy-reference charts for this game. I actually wrote a lot of the original vbcode in the sheet offered on the warflail, but once that was done, hitting, hit-locations, injury and shock rolls moved along fairly fast.

Car Wars had ablative armor and heavier metal DR armor. There were modifications you could make to your vehicle, I think it was called sloping your chasis. I’m pretty sure this made you harder to hit. I think other rules, the book that describes tanks, also listed reactive armor. These were essentially one-use point-defense items that negated a certain amount of damage.

Some games, like Barbarians of Lemuria, and a few OSR clones let you treat shields or helmets as devices that make you more difficult to hit. These come with the added option to have them sundered to negate attack damage. For light-rules gaming, I like this rule very much.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by deaddmwalking »

In our homebrew Armor provides both a defense bonus and DR. All classes have scaling damage with level and DR stays small. Ie, Full Plate has a +6 defense bonus and 6 DR. There are other ways to increase DR a small amount, but we generally try to keep it under 10. Giving even relatively small amounts of DR makes characters tougher against lower-level opponents. Ie, a 1st level character might be dealing 8-12 damage per hit; 6 DR means you are going to be very durable against those opponents; to have a DR of that amount you're probably at least 40 hit points, so you can count on taking 10+ hits. On the other hand, 3rd level opponents will probably be doing 12-20 points of damage. You might only reasonably survive 4 hits.

Adding a calculation step when applying damage to your character sheet is an additional step, but players have an incentive to calculate it. Taking 2-3 damage off every hit is easy to do.

We apply the DR universally; you can't target an area without armor to avoid it. If you get a critical hit, you do extra damage and since the DR is small we find that models 'avoiding' the armor reasonably well.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by Harshax »

deaddmwalking wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 8:36 pm
Giving even relatively small amounts of DR makes characters tougher against lower-level opponents
Is it worth calculating DR in armor to make low level PCs less squishy when ultimately that same amount of effort and math is hardly a speed bump at higher levels?

I ask because a reoccurring theme about Hit Points is that 1st Level PCs fall down fast. In a campaign where a character funnel isn't ideal, many MC's grant some combination of maximum HP at first level, CON as HP at first level, or CON as HP at first level plus a HitDie as soak, eg: Star Wars/D20 Modern.

All that padding at first level doesn't seem to amount to shit later on, so is it actually worth it to introduce DR when Hit Points in D&D is already represent some aspect of passive defense and damage resistance? I've never enjoyed extra Hit Points for PCs, never ever. It makes things like Armor fiddly and pointless in a game system where RAW, a high level PC can fall from the lower atmosphere and survive (20d6). People create and tweak various armor-less PC Classes to have lower Hit Points but higher Armor Class or vice-versa and the result seems similar to writing a game with dice pools that have both Target Numbers and Numbers of Hits as a mechanic for success.

Maybe the OP should clarify precisely what they're looking for and where they're looking for it?
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

Harshax wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 2:06 am
the result seems similar to writing a game with dice pools that have both Target Numbers and Numbers of Hits as a mechanic for success.
I got hooked on an anime browser game back in 2008 that did exactly that. I guess it's not as bad when you have a computer go from rolling 4 dice where 2 need a value of X to rolling 40 dice where 25 need a value if XX. It was still patently insane and wound up just having people reset their characters over and over and gaining minuscule bonuses each time until you had gone through the 'story' over 30-40 times and unlocked a few new arcs and game mechanics.
Uh, anyway, personally I'm just going with armor giving you DR. Generic light armor (because who cares if you're wearing gambeson or boiled leather) gives you a little DR against Physical or Special attacks - think of chain mail or fancy warding robes. Heavy armor gives you a little DR against both. You can always add in more capabilities for fancier, more expensive shit, but that seems basic enough to get in the way and generically desirable enough for people to want to pick up and customize as needed.
Foxwarrior wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:04 pm
I see a lot of system suggestions here that don't distinguish between a chunky metal breastplate and a full-body leather suit :razz:
Just going off of what I have written (I really need to get back to my thread, I've had it open in one tab for months...), I'd say a chunky metal breastplate is Heavy Armor that loses its DR bonus vs Electric attacks (maybe Fire, too?), while full-body leather is just Physical Light Armor. Maybe with the Dampening enhancement if it's oiled, to make the user more silent.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by OgreBattle »

Harshax wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 2:06 am
I ask because a reoccurring theme about Hit Points is that 1st Level PCs fall down fast. In a campaign where a character funnel isn't ideal, many MC's grant some combination of maximum HP at first level, CON as HP at first level, or CON as HP at first level plus a HitDie as soak, eg: Star Wars/D20 Modern.

All that padding at first level doesn't seem to amount to shit later on, so is it actually worth it to introduce DR when Hit Points in D&D is already represent some aspect of passive defense and damage resistance? I've never enjoyed extra Hit Points for PCs, never ever. It makes things like Armor fiddly and pointless in a game system where RAW, a high level PC can fall from the lower atmosphere and survive (20d6). People create and tweak various armor-less PC Classes to have lower Hit Points but higher Armor Class or vice-versa and the result seems similar to writing a game with dice pools that have both Target Numbers and Numbers of Hits as a mechanic for success.

Maybe the OP should clarify precisely what they're looking for and where they're looking for it?
I want to know what I don't know, so a broad spread of games especially lesser known ones is good. Stuff with vehicles is also good
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by JonSetanta »

The only good thing to come out of 4e was CON score as HP at level 1. I keep using that in homebrew 3.5e games and it works fine, but still requires players to boost CON as the second best score aside from the caster score or the STR/DEX focus for warriors and rogues.

Adding 10 HP at level 1 for everyone would also do fine but I never thought of that until recently.

In my Domain RPG, everyone gets +20 Health at level 1, another +10 each time they choose Warrior (it's like gestalt), and +5 when they choose Mage.
It's not truly compatible with d20, though, since HP-to-damage outputs are a bit higher, but the numbers for stats and ability checks are pretty much parallel.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by deaddmwalking »

Harshax wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 2:06 am
All that padding at first level doesn't seem to amount to shit later on, so is it actually worth it to introduce DR when Hit Points in D&D is already represent some aspect of passive defense and damage resistance?
I think so.

If you have a hydra with 15 heads, and each head does 2d8+6 damage, one character having 10 points of DR is actually really significant compared to one that does not.

One of the things that can be hard to model is whether a higher level character should ever be afraid of lower level characters. In 5th edition, dragons die when a group of 20 1st-level archers attack. If the dragon has DR 10, that doesn't happen. If 5th level characters are dealing 15+ damage, they'll deal damage reliably, but the dragon is still more durable.

DR also potentially gives you another variable that you can tweak to regulate challenge. A quest that allows you to overcome the DR also becomes a reasonable goal for an adventure. It's potentially a way of saying 'you must be this tall to ride' that makes sense in the game world.

For example, let's say you give all zombies DR 10. Now the villagers who typically do 1d8+4 damage are going to definitely die. But a blessed weapon automatically overcomes that DR. Sprinkling weapons with holy water makes them blessed for 10 minutes. Suddenly you have a whole adventure - the PCs say the words badly and wake an army of the dead. Recognizing that they're coming, they crawl through a catacomb to retrieve the holy water and return in the nick of time. That's already more interesting then 'zombies attack and you have to kill them all'.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by Foxwarrior »

deaddmwalking wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 4:55 pm
In 5th edition, dragons die when a group of 20 1st-level archers attack.
Indeed, you switch to 5th edition for this observation, because in 3rd then AC actually performs that same function well enough.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by OgreBattle »

Oh yeah something I'm not looking for is RIFTS "You are massively tough wit hlots of big numbers to grind through when covered in megadamage armor, but will be vaporized by a holdout pistol one can hide in the bum if any part of your puny mortal body is exposed"
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by deaddmwalking »

Foxwarrior wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 5:18 pm
deaddmwalking wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 4:55 pm
In 5th edition, dragons die when a group of 20 1st-level archers attack.
Indeed, you switch to 5th edition for this observation, because in 3rd then AC actually performs that same function well enough.
In 3rd edition, a Red Dragon can have 660 hit points and damage scales for shit. But even there, without DR, enough little men can kill a dragon. At an average of 8.5 damage you need to hit 78 times. Not counting the small number of critical confirmations, if you have 1500 people with bows, you can kill a CR 20 dragon in 1 round. Except you can't because they have DR 20/magic.

That's WHY they have DR 20/magic. Even a relatively small amount of relatively easily bypassable DR keeps high level foes completely safe from low-level opposition in a way that AC and hit points don't.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by Foxwarrior »

deaddmwalking wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 6:44 pm
Not counting the small number of critical confirmations, if you have 1500 people with bows, you can kill a CR 20 dragon in 1 round.
I dunno about you, but I think that going from 20 archers to 1500 archers is a significant difference.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by deaddmwalking »

I think that depends on your world view.

If you're fielding armies like the Ancient Persians, having 100k troops isn't weird. That still doesn't mean you want them slaughtering dragons.

The English had 5k archers at Agincourt. Again, not necessarily a force you want dragons running from.

If 1st-level people can reliably do damage, then enough of them can reliably kill even the most powerful monsters. DR is a simple way to ensure that they can't do damage, and therefore can't kill powerful monsters. Now there's probably a point where it ceases to matter - but if you want to ensure that high-level people are REQUIRED when you want to solve high-level threats you need to think about these things.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

Going from 5k to 100k feels like a lot less than 20 to 1500, because I can envision the latter comparison a lot easier. One is like, a baseball team and the other is a military force.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by Foxwarrior »

Just because a volley of 1500 arrows could slay a dragon, and the king has 100,000 archers, doesn't mean that the king is actually dumb enough to believe that he can defeat a dragon with his archers. The dragon is several times faster, the archers might even be humans who can't see in the dark. Basically if the king is bad at his job, he sends out fifty platoons of 2000 archers each, and then the dragon flies around and eats all their supply lines, and then the pathetic humans die. If 20 arrows is enough, however, then he could split his archers into 4,000 groups of 25, and plausibly have like, groups randomly hiding in buildings all over his kingdom, pop out, ambush the dragon and instantly kill it. A group of 25 warriors could fit in a dragon's cave and attack it there like the heroic knight is supposed to, while a group of 2000 guys really can't fit in the lair at all. Maybe you get 10,000 guys to hang out right around the entrance (none of them want to go in because if they go in in groups of twenty the first fifty groups are just going to do chip damage and then die)... and then the dragon uses (gasp!) tactics to make a cunning escape at some point in the night and tells the neighboring nations about how this country's entire army parked outside its lair leaving the rest of the country undefended.

As a random aside, I think people should probably think more about power:weight ratios, because... a Huge dragon weighs maybe as much as 16 tons, or 160 Human Fighters. If it's less powerful than 160 Human Fighters, that makes it a big, clunky monster; if it's more powerful than 160 Human Fighters, it's comparatively a sneaky commando unit.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by Lord Charlemagne »

I include easier ways for the player characters to get damage reduction in potentially meaningful quantities on their character if they so desire in the 3.x games that I run, albeit I don't have it prebuilt into the armor. That way, players who want to have DR can easily get it if they want to do the math & find that it is a valuable investment while those who don't want to do the math or don't think it'll be worth it for their characters can choose to not get it.

I personally feel that there is a solid range of levels within 3.x where the players are durable enough HP wise & AC wise in comparison to the enemies they face that a decent AC combined with DR can make some characters soak a lot more damage than they normally would be able to.
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Re: mechanics for armor quality / Soak + armor coverage

Post by pragma »

This conversation is dumb because 20 archers would have a really hard time with a dragon in 5e. 20 bandits do 10.1 average DPR with disadvantage (which I assume they have either because of range or frightening presence), which means the dragon will last for 17 rounds. If the dragon starts outside crossbow range, is visible and the same distance from each archer during its whole approach, and the archers fall back after each shot, then they get 2 rounds before he's in breath weapon range, and 3 before melee. After the first breath, DPR will drop further. You'd need 175 archers to knock it down in 2 rounds.

(This analysis is neglecting the tedious discussion of the GM having the dragon be crafty and the archers be dumb. My take on which is that dragons are dangerous to much larger forces because they don't have to fly into fortified balls of archers.)

Calculation details
* I used this calculator, which accounts for crits correctly: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread. ... tor-(v2-0)
* I used the bandit stat block for archers https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/bandit
* I used the young red dragon https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/young-red-dragon
* Accordingly, I set up the calculator with an attack modifier of 3, damage of 1d8+1, and 20 attacks per round. AC was 18.
* The dragon has 178 hit points, and removing all of those in 2 rounds requires This resulted Need 89 DPR.
* A dashing dragon moves 160 feet per round and shooting archers move 30, resulting in a net gain of 130 feet per round.
* Crossbow long range is 320feet, so after two round the dragon has gained to within 60 feet for the breath weapon, is on top of the archers in 3.
* Longbows or better troops make this a bit more favorable to the humans, but not enough to knock it to 20 troops.
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