What's your favorite way of implementing armor as a mechanic, and why?

I like muh damage-reduction and/or soak. I also like armor-penetration as a weapon differentiator, although it usually gets a bit crunchy.

Also, hit chance reduction is for the dodge-monkeys, not the armor tanks. I like having that distinction.

So would you say that a DR-based system is misplaced in a game that allows for big creatures with big damage, or is it fitting that armor isn't much use if you get into a brawl with a kaiju?

>people who aren't much stronger than they are

This is the part that's really tripping me up since you seem to imply that they are on the same power level.

But then you say that armor should provide damage resistance, which would make someone with armor on a completely different power level than the "legions of people."

I'm just having a hard time imagining the system you are trying to invoke here.

Damage reduction works best when damage scaling is small. If armor worked as DR in DnD it'd quickly become redundant past the early levels.

>So would you say that a DR-based system is misplaced in a game that allows for big creatures with big damage, or is it fitting that armor isn't much use if you get into a brawl with a kaiju?
It's all about incentives, mostly. It's "fitting" that armor is useless against kaiju in that it's logical, but whether you actually want that logic to hold is something that's up to genre convention / what you want the players to do and behave like.

Like, I could see armor-as-DR in a system where most of the things players will face are orcs or whatever, just to make their few fights against big dragons that much scarier and riskier.

>But then you say that armor should provide damage resistance, which would make someone with armor on a completely different power level than the "legions of people."
It's not really about "should," I'm just talking about a situation where armor-as-DR actually provides some statistically significant amount of DR.

If your armor system provides 8 DR max in a system where attacks almost always deal 20+ damage, you just flat out don't have an armor system; you have intentionally set things up such that armor is having very little effect, so it's not worth talking about.

So I focus more on a hypothetical system where armor provides DR comparable to the amount of damage that PCs give out / take in against 'equal' foes. If the average damage a PC can dish out is 1d20, and armor provides somewhere between 5 and (say) 20DR, now you have something that's affecting how they play the game, and who they decide to take on.

Damage Reduction is probably the most "realistic" way of describing how armor works while also having a lot of flexibility for getting around armor.

Ah ok.

This gives me an idea for an enchanted suit of armor with scaling DR. If an attack deals 5 damage, the armor gives you 1 DR and then it scales harder and harder the more damage it receives so that the player isn't immune to stabbing but he can still go full Siegfried and stand himself between the innocent and the Eater of Cities.

That would be pretty cool, actually.

1.

5. ARMOUR WORKS

3. Damage Reduction.

It makes sense that armor reduces the amount of force that's hitting you and that it translates into losing less HP than you would without it.

>that great bascinet/armet fusion

MY DICK

I prefer

5) Armor has a dex defenses skill and an armor value. Either somebody manages to make a high enough Dex check to do damage to a joint, or you have such a high armor-piercing rating on your weapon you just go through it, such as muskets.

It has a chance to turn away damage, and it can turn deadly into subdual.

3 and 2, if the weapon is too weak it wont do any damage.

I use 1 and 3.

Damage reduction

Agile chars negatell damaget by not getting hit, brawler chars via high Dr.

As the campaign goes on and scarier shot comes out the fighter types mix and match (using feats to improve dodge) as well as magical armor to improve Dr/ be harder to hit/ extra hP.

Have minimum damage no armor is so good it will stop the effects of a weapon.

Can I get a source on the pic? I wanna find more of those.

>If your armor system provides 8 DR max in a system where attacks almost always deal 20+ damage, you just flat out don't have an armor system; you have intentionally set things up such that armor is having very little effect, so it's not worth talking about.
Baloney. That's like saying, "if the most a shield does is make it one or two points harder to hit you, it's not worth having it in the game." 8 points out of 20 is 40%. That's fucking huge. That's slightly bigger than the difference between having d10 hit dice and d6 hit dice. Or is that another issue that's not worth talking about? What about having a +4 chance to hit on a d20? In most cases, that's significantly smaller than the 40% difference we're talking about with damage reduction. So maybe attribute modifiers aren't worth talking about either?

>wooden spear
>Steel plate
Okay.

Steel plate doesn't cover very inch, plus impact damage; while it might not be enough to pierce the steel it still will transfer energy through to your body, even if it is just bruises around the edge of the plate; hence minimum damage.

wiktenauer.com/wiki/Paulus_Hector_Mair
From Paulus Hector Mair's Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica.

>40% DR not worth talking about
He's probably used to 3.x where he has 800 ways to become effectively immune to regular attacks.

Read the preface!

You can get smacked full force in plate and not even feel it.

>a two foot long sharpened piece of tender fresh cut oak will do a significant amount of damage to a person wearing full steel plate with steel mail and leather underneath.
Its a homebrew based on fatal, its not gonna be perfect.

The given hypothetical is a piece of wood, not like a specially designed and crafted warhammer or mace, user.

you'd need a huge HP pool for this to make sense.

How should we make a realistic armor system?

Plate armor and even maille to degrees makes sword cuts useless. Same with axes unless they're great two handed ones. I suggest three systems woven together.

>All armor has a dexterity stat, which is the required dexterity roll to make a successful attack to a vulnerable area. The more of the body covered by the armor, the harder it is to succeed on the check. Certain armors are completely impossible to strike a weak spot, because they lack any.

>Additionally, every armor comes with an armor soak value. Likewise, every weapon deals a certain amount of damage. Soak values also stack. So for example, you might feel it hurt if somebody strikes you with a longsword while -just- wearing a breastplate and nothing else, wearing a stiff arming garment supplies enough armor soak to basically make that strike worthless and not even deal damage.

In summary, let's say you're wearing a large akerton, which covers your entire torso, arms, and thighs down to your knees. The dexterity check to strike at a weakspot on this armor would be very very hard, because it actually covers quite a lot. But the armor soak value is minimal, so it's more effective to just to swing a Dane Axe at their body and cleave through it, maybe needing two or three swings to kill.

Meanwhile, another enemy is wearing full plate armor like pic related. Its armor soak value is so high it can even shrug off some muskets. It's more effective to try to make a dexterity check to shove a swordpoint up his groin or elbow-pit, which will deal full damage as if striking a normally clothed person because he doesn't have maille on his joints.

You also need to account for armor damage, so it needs it's own HP and reduction.

>What's your favorite way of implementing armor as a mechanic, and why

Getting rid of it. Martial are shit compared to casters, so there's no reason for anyone to wear armor when they can just Fly/Wind Wall/Contingent Dimension Door away from melee and missiles.

I mean, I guess you can choose to wear armor if you want to play a dumb jock, but there's no reason why you should have any sort of in-game advantage for choosing to gimp yourself.

I forgot to add that in, yeah. The more damage you sustain, eventually the protection of your armor will diminish. Weather might affect it as well, such as if your character leaves his shit in the rain and it gets rusted.

>realistic armor system

Go play Blade of the Iron Throne, otherwise don't sweat it.

Damage reduction is the best. Combine that with a critical system that can let you hit unarmored parts for full damage, and you got yourself a dead simple but still realistic implementation of armour. To add flavor, make different kinds of damage behave differently and make armour impact dodging skills, and perhaps a rule where grappling gives you extra room for those armour-ignoring criticals. Hit locations are a plus, but not too necessary.
Simple, realistic, fun.

>eventually the protection of your armor will diminish

Not an armor-guy, but for maintenance, I'd probably say that like, every month without care or proper storage means that you roll to see if it gets a defect. Maybe it goes down to each week in which it's subjected to heavy adventuring-tier violence like a battle or a dungeon-crawl. Proper care most likely involves throwing a few gold at an armor-repair NPC (or having one in your army). And if you want it to shine, that probably means spending some time polishing and cleaning it each day.

I was not aware that we had invented armor that ignores Newton's laws of motion.

Wearing a rigid plate over padding is really good at distributing force.

Have a table for it. Maybe make it absorb proportionally more damage on powerful hits? Exponential scaling or some such?

In my adventure system, armour uses #3. Depending on the armour, a portion of incoming damage is negated. There's a couple of catches though.

>Bullets and some magic reduces the DR
>Damage that bleeds through can fuck you up
>Massive damage can break armour but that's more a narrative thing
>Each point of armour is one point off your dodge save

In my horror adventure armour's still just DR, but it's much harder to come by. It's mostly a stat for enemies that represents supernatural toughness.

One more thing

All armour and weapons have type tags. I couldn't be fucked doing Dwarf Fortress Rolemaster Edition levels of complexity, so I didn't.

Instead there's simple "tags" on items and basic guidelines on how they interact. Heat attacks ignore some DR on armour without an Insulated tag. Bullets ignore some DR on armour full stop.

It's mostly a narrative thing to let me abbreviate written descriptions, honestly. But my players don't mind a bit of abstraction (especially not in a homebrew) so I don't feel the need to turn simulationist about it. Likewise I feel like tracking armour HP would probably slow down the pace a bit too much (especially when I'm a first-time GM and we have first-time players present).

1. Terrible mixing of hit evasion capability and hit soaking capability. Screw D&D.
2. Something like that.
3. Is fine too.
4. What?! No! Palladium pls go.

Sigh. People still defend this D&D mechanic in 2016.

2. allows for that, especially if the chance is high enough.

Someone hasn't watched Battle of Nations for even 2 minutes yet.

D&D armor works fine for its scaling.

It doesn't mean that you dodge more. It means that blows that would normally cause injury don't.

Normally you'd hit on a 10, but armour makes it a 16. That doesnt mean that you miss more, it means that rolls of 10-15 that normally would hit and injure are NOT injuring.

It's not a great system but it's less dumb than people think.

then why don't more powerful weapons increase your attack roll? it's pants-on-head retarded, a pure legacy mechanic.

Because D&D sits in the uncomfortable middle ground between accessibly freeform and customisably complex?

Mechanically speaking, armor as an accuracy-reducing apparatus works better than as a damage-reducing one. You don't have the issue where low-damage attacks get completely eaten while high-damage attacks suffer comparatively little.

The problem is that it doesn't play well. Regardless of how you rationalize it, it usually plays like you're actually missing the guy in heavy armor. Armor as damage reduction divides the attack process into two logical steps:
>Did I hit?
>If I hit, how well did I hit?

Armor as accuracy reduction, on the other hand, turns this into a mess:
>Did I hit and do so well enough to cause harm?
>If I hit well enough to cause harm, exactly how well did I hit within that range?

Ofc, ; the sys must be built around it.
In a sub-10 wounds system, the use of +wounds is a nice choice. In my shitty d6 homebrew, PC health goes from 3-12; and when armored, it would go from 6-18ish. Armor reduces Initiative. A mook does 1-3 damage on a successful strike, regular monster does 4-6, and a boss might rake up to 10 damage per strike. Fast and lethal, but PCs and foes have damage mitigation options with shields, dodges and other shit. This isn't in any way perfect but works alright for my table.

1. AC is an old and clunky solution, but it usually works. The devil's in the fluff, and having characters "miss" big, meaty foes is kinda off putting. A good DM will tell you that your hit bounces off thick hide, or something along that line. Just saying "you missed the slow-ass fat ogre" is fucking with our suspension of disbelief.
2. This requires an extra roll doing combat and is slower, but very elegant and nice. Think TRoS does this.
3. Damage reduction's problematic in two ways: extremely good against weak yet numerous foes and really useless against really hard hitting foes. The other problem's with armor penetration, and what penetrates what/ignores DR and how is a pain in the ass.

4. Good for simpler systems and wound systems, but godawful ugly in normal HP systems and breaks your suspense of disbelief; wearing some armor suddenly grants you HP; how is that HP healed and other silly questions follow.

5. Here's one video-gamey idea; Armor's a number, and soaks half damage from any source. When the armor's number reaches 0, it's broken and doesn't soak any more, like in oldfps/Doom/Wolfenstein. This puts characters on armor treadmills and constantly scavenging new shit to wear until it's inevitably destroyed.
Blacksmiths can repair armor back to max Armor. Needs to have a system made around it, naturally; won't work just being shoehorned into something, but it gives fighters and clerics something interesting to worry about.

My favorite mechanic is in my homebrew where wearing armor makes it harder for the pc to dodge attacks, but gives a static damage threshold, under which damage rolls don't actually do damage.