Rules design general

Do you prefer armor as a reduction to the odds of taking damage, or a reduction to the amount of damage taken?

Are your reasonings based on mechanical design, or on concepts of realism and narrative integrity?

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>armor as a reduction to the odds of taking damage
This sounds stupid, but having it stated this way finally made armor class make more sense to me.

Armor has no effect on anything. It's only there for aesthetics.

Is that the Hobbit part III?

Depends on what the system is trying to achieve

Armor as extra HP since HP was always about avoiding (real) damage.

Armor as hit-neg doesnt make a ton of sense because it means that being jumpy is just as good as wearing armor, when the two have totally different benefits.

Armor as damage reduction is fine, but I have another solution I like to use: Armor as minimum damage, i.e. you dont take damage if its less than your armor value. As long as damage done by weapons is fairly reliably variable in your game, it makes things require much more planning. That dude in plate isnt going down to your arming sword unless you make a great roll. Alternatively, you'd better just fight the troll without armor, because its not going to do you much good.

>That dude in plate isnt going down to your arming sword unless you make a great roll.
You mean, like, rolling above their AC on your to-hit roll, signifying that you managed to maneuver your blade into a weak point on their armor?

Neither because I don't really like combat resolution working in terms of "damage".

Though, in general I prefer armor as adding bonus to generalized "defense"

My reasonings are simple - the game is a narrative first, everything else, crunch included, is secondary, and overcomplicating it doesn't add anything for me, as long as the abstractions don't generate results that are either anti-climatic or disbelief-breaking, I'm totally fine with very rough approximations instead of complex models.

>or a reduction to the amount of damage taken?
this
>Are your reasonings based on mechanical design, or on concepts of realism and narrative integrity?
makes sense and feels cool, if that answers your question

Damage reduction. It's not as much as an abstraction, it's what armour does in reality and it is the easiest to work with mechanics wise. Tradeoff between being able to relatively unreliably dodge all damage and being able to soak low damage hits creates a nice dynamic. For example, armour is very useful when fighting within own power level (as in human vs human) but not so much when fighting a dragon, unless it's enchanted or something.
Armour circumventing could be done on a good roll, and armour piercing is also a pretty straightforward mechanic.
It just works the most intuitively, for me at least.

>guys mirin each other's balls
how little military changed over the centuries

trips of truth

>Reduction to the amount of damage taken
Best option.
>Mechanical design or realism/narrative?
Both. Armor as damage reduction works well mechanically, especially if you have differing damage types, and feels good as a mechanical application of how armor actually fucking works.

That's the mechanical effect, but the way it is framed creates ludo-narrative dissonance. Feels yucky to think about armor and armor class that way. Also, the armor rules are pretty broken, generally. The limitation on dex bonus to AC, for example, how fast one can don and doff armor, etc.

>Minimum damage to get through
>Better fight the troll w/o armor because it's not going to do you much good.
Eh. I like how GURPS do: (Damage - Armor Damage Reduction) -> Damage Type multiplier for that which gets through the armor -> damage that character actually receives. Very similar, but subtly different from what I think you're describing.

>It just works the most intuitively
Nail on head. Far fewer mental gymnastics to prevent breaking the suspension of disbelief.

Three ways to do it.
AC is quick and simple and conveys how hard it is to inflict damage to an armored guy.
AC has pitfalls of being weapon-defense independent, so a quick guy and an armored guy have the same AC, and the Sword and the Warhammer (the pointy one) have the same bonus vs. AC (regardless if your target is dodgy or shieldy).
AC is video-game-y, quick, and simple, and these are its strong points.

DR is damage reduction and it conveys how hard it is to inflict damage to an armored guy... By having armor reduce damage down to 1 or 0. This way, the dodg-y guy will dodge blows and take 0 damage, and the armored guy will take damage but reduce it to 0. This works a bit better but it adds a whole step to the whole health-reduction deal; which will slow down gameplay.
It has minor pitfalls with different armor types soaking up different damage types better, and does armor soak up fireball/magic damage or amplify it and so on.
DR is slightly more realistic, relatively quick, simplish, but adds a whole step to damage receiving (where you do health = health - (damage-DR)).

Third one, and my favorite one, is +Health Points if armor is worn.
This is the dirtiest, least realistic and quickest one out there, and that's why I like it. DR and AC are reducing damage, while this is a "net increase" of how much damage a character can take.
It's tricky as fuck to balance though, because after a while you get Knights that can take sniper shots and Thieves that die if they get sneezed at.
Armor can't be too limiting (penalties to skills and shit) and it can't be too lenient either (or else everyone should wear it).

There are also other suboptions, such as having piecemail armor and hit locations, called shots and so on. I don't do this shit, I make my games simple as fuck so that you can game shitfaced drunk or high.

Realism and narrative integrity fall before simplicity and gamism for me; with Realism I can't get enough of it and start reading up on barrel lengths and twist rates pertaining to specific subsonic loads of 5.56 and find myself system'd out of doing anything to that miniscule detail (if you're rolling a d20, you're not gonna add a +3 because your ammo type's the perfect one... It gets into fractions, and even then, it's a +1 on a d%). Similarly, you're going to get into different types of forging, finishing, making armors, hardening, materials (there are thousands of types of STEEL, let alone any other material), thickness and coverage.

Realism doesn't do it for me unless it's fucking Dwarf Fortress.

I don't know what narrative integrity is, probably something about Fate points.

I like having hit locations, called shots and possibly different armour points. Sure it's more dice to roll to see where the hit lands with random locations, and possibly complicates bookkeeping with multiple hit points, but I think it's worth the little effort to make combat more in depth, and it actually doesn't slow down the combat that much if you know what to do. I think Mythras does it right, with the addition of special effects to the mix.

Damage reduction system is really easy to work with, although I see why and how AC works too if the game is not that much about combat. I think AC armour is ok system when facing stuff like other humans or orcs or bears or whatever, because armour does help against those possibly more than dodging. Armour does make it kind of hard to land damaging blows on you, so I see how that abstraction works.

When it comes to things like giants and dragons though, armour should be almost completely useless against their attacks, but because it's usually just a AC matter, dodging is also usually affected, which shouldn't be the case.

Both. When you roll to hit, the amount by which your attack exceeds the target's defense gets added to your damage.

Flat hp bonus, nut I prefer changing odds to changing damage.

>It's not as much as an abstraction
You have to explain how that's good, if it's to help you case.
>it's what armour does in reality
Broadly speaking, no.
>and it is the easiest to work with mechanics wise
Subtraction is harder to work with than addition.
That's why no one likes THAC0.

Not even that user, and I'm pretty sure this is bait, but even so. Your argument is bad and you should feel bad.

>Have to explain how reducing abstraction is good
Feels better, meshing mechanics with their framing in a way that is intuitive. Requires fewer hoops to jump through for the suspension of disbelief. Nobody cares about the abstractions of SPECIAL from Fallout because it is framed through the lens of the mildly campy humor of the game, and the suspension of disbelief lies in the storytelling, not the mechanics. (Also, to their credit had Damage Threshold and Damage Resistance from armor, in addition to AC). In DnD, you interact with the mechanics of AC directly, it's in your face in every combat, it is very gameist, and the framing and its narrative application don't mesh well.

>"Broadly speaking" armour doesn't reduce damage in reality
Wut. You basically have three possibilities: miss, hit but do no damage, hit and still do damage. Now, a sword blade against a breastplate isn't gonna do dick. A sword against a hauberk over a gambeson is not gonna break the skin and bleed a sucker, but it's still going to do some concussive damage. A war pick, though, that might punch through and do some damage, but certainly not as much damage as if there no armor. So do you call that the ability to avoid damage entirely, or the ability to reduce damage from weapons, potentially to nothing.

>Somehow conflating THAC0 and the reason for its distrust with subtraction
No, subtraction is not why nobody likes THAC0. Granted, the lower-is-better thing was non-intuitive for AC, but that's not it. Nobody liked THAC0 because it was a convoluted mess that was poorly explained and practically required lookup tables unless you had memorized it or could remember the mental math.

Cont.

Abstraction is not inherently a bad thing, but it is a double-edged sword. If you fail to frame it in an appropriate way, it hurts how good it feels to play with. That kind of shit is the line between an HP-bloated cartoon adventure and a gritty (read: plausible/easily believable), low-fantasy dungeon crawl.

Poor framing and mechanical application also leads to ludo-narrative dissonance. AC isn't "ability to dodge" or "ability to soak damage", it is "ability to avoid wounds". However, its narrative effect can be any of: "you miss", "the goblin dodged", "at the last second the sword turns in your hand", "you hit, but failed to penetrate his armour", "you grabbed him", etc. A lot of these things are not supported mechanically by AC, they're just there, and shitty or new GMs will doubtless return descriptions of battle that are bland at best.

Compare this with another system, where you roll to see if your character was even competent enough to potentially hit, roll to see if the defender successfully blocked/dodged/parried, and roll for damage, and armor functions as damage resistance. (Psst, for a quick and fun way to speed this up, hand the players a handful of color-coded die. One color is their character, another is the defense, and the last is the damage. Handfuls of dice are fun). Now, each part of the mechanic directly supports a different part of the scene, forcing even shitty GMs to narrate with some variation. The same descriptions earlier now all have distinct, observable mechanical causes. Mechanically dodgy characters are more reliably dodgy, and tanky characters can actually tank a hit.

I'm not going to say that the mechanics themselves are easier to work with for damage resistance versus AC, but they aren't harder to work with, either. They are on par, but with the added benefits of superior framing for the mechanics, easier to intuit rules, especially for beginners, and better synergy with the narrative.

>Do you want to have it retarded way or as it should be
Here, ftfy.

But aside throwing a fit about armour class and shit related with it It was always bad game design, ok? Doesn't matter if it was mid-70 or last Sunday, it was, is and will be bad crunch design, I find the concept of armour inheritently related with reducing damage. Because that's what armour is for. You get hit, but you (probably) won't take anything else than blunt force of the impact spread over your body/armour/layers of it. Best case scenario, you will just know someone tried to hit you somewhere, without as much as getting a bruise from it.
It won't magically make it impossible to hit you. It will only make the hit itself less severe. If you want to avoid getting hit, there are dodges, feints and parries, all three achieving the same in three different ways. But armour is for making the hit that already reached you less dangerous.

Damage reduction is the same as extra HP, only that it doesn't deplete. At least it doesn't most of the time.


also, tl;dr for entire post:
KISS is the most important rule of design of tabletop games, especially for combat. If you end up with bloat like SoS did, you shouldn't be designing games - you should instead consult a shrink about your autism. It's entirely possible to keep your armour rules in few paragraphs while keeping them as "realistic" as 200 pages long sub-rulebook.

I'm sorry, did you just said that armour is not about making sustained hits less severe in reality?
Are you this fucking retarded, or just desperately fishing for replies?

>Complains about lack of explaination
>Explains nothing himself
>While saying horseshit
The power of D&D

Danage reduction with an option to bypass it by a special maneuver/good attack roll.

You're just shifting the burden from the hit roll to the damage roll.

>Damage reduction is the same as extra HP, only that it doesn't deplete. At least it doesn't most of the time.
But it should. Armor takes damage and need to be repaired.

I prefer how GURPS handles armor.

You have DR, and damage is subtracted from that. There are armor divisors, which represent armor piercing rounds, magical blades, etc, that divide DR by whatever the divisor is.

Easy to imagine and easy to work with when making new armor.

>i don't like armor as damage reduc-

Instant pleb.

My system differs full hits from minor hits. Full hits are like critical hits but occur a little more often but are less impactful. Minor hits are like normal hits in terms of occurrence but overall deal less damage. The ratio is about 70/30.

Leather armor: Slashing minor hits against leather armor deal no damage.

Chain armor: Minor hits against chain armor deal non-lethal damage.
Slashing minor hits deal no damage.

Plate armor: All attacks that hit plate armor deal non-lethal damage.
Piercing and slashing minor hits deal no damage.

Maneuvers and certain attacks can ignore armor proprieties.

>Armor takes damage and need to be repaired.
First, that is what we call an optional rule.

Second, I think you're reading too much into user's statement. It doesn't deplete most of the time, but it does some times, I think that's a reasonable statement. The main point of his statement is that most of the time, you shouldn't expect armor to be useless after only one combat, not that it won't ever show signs of abuse.

Third, consider the risks of damaged armor. What can happen with it? Will it suddenly cease to stop weaker blows? Probably not. Dented armor is, perhaps, easier to put a bolt or arrow through, if it is thin enough. It might have a chance, if something really fucks up, to come unhinged, or for a leather strap holding the breastplate on to break.

The mechanical effects of armor shouldn't vanish if it takes damage, but degrade over time? Sure, I don't think anyone is saying

Yes, because armour is made out of paper and cardboard, so it gets totalled each and every time and needs to be completely rebuild every 5 times it's hit.
Or you've stopped huffing stupidity already?

What about armor gives you extra hit points?
You can only recover them with successful blacksmith or whatever skill check when not in combat.

Real life armor does both. Why not have a game do both?

Look into Rolemaster and it's hit charts for various weapons versus all the Armor Types it has in the game. You will notice that real damage (which are criticals in Rolmaster) is far less likely to happen the higher your armor type. But you are far more likely to dodge all damage, even the bruising damage of hit points, if you wear no armor. Problem with the light/no armor is of course 0-to-100 in nothing flat. If you get hit, it hurts. Also it requires more skill to use heavy armor effectively, so there is that.

>Real armour causes hits to never reach the target, displacing them in the time-continuum

Long division, wonderful. I expected no less from the game whose vehicle rules require differential calculus.

>long division
I didn't know dividing by 2 or even by 4 was so hard.

Also what's a calculator? Most phones carry them these days. Fucktard.

Bulletproof vests are only good for a few bullets. Armor isn't an unstoppable force.

Armor as damage reduction is bad because it sucks for players to get a hit in only to find that it didn't do anything.

You may not like it from a gameplay standpoint, but he is correct.

Armor does not 'reduce damage' in real life. It mostly mitigates it. If you're wearing a breastplate and a sword slashes your chest, it just glances off and deals 0 damage. It's not like you receive a tiny catch-scratch underneath your armor since it greatly reduced the damage, it just stopped you from getting hurt in the first place.

The exception to this of course is blunt damage, which in most games has anti-armor properties to begin with.

And most people ban phones at the table.

I'm a GURPSfag, and even I recognize when something is contrived. That shit, right there? That's contrived as hell.

A sword that has to cut through a gambeson first is going to do a less severe wound.

Likewise, a poleaxe pick is going to penetrate significantly less far into your body if it has to punch through armour first.

Why does it matter?

If you equip armor that gives you +6 AC or reduces your chance to be hit by 30%, or if the armor reduces all damage taken by 30%, what's the difference? You're still taking less damage, you're still tanky.

>Armor doesn't reduce damage, it mitigates it
Pic related. So, armor reduces damage, potentially to 0? No fucking shit.

>Sword glances off a breastplate deals 0 damage. It's not like you receive a tiny scratch underneath your armor...
The balance should be such that it works out this way, anyway. And, no, you aren't getting a scratch beneath the armor, but you might take concussive damage and get bruised, or maybe the sword caught on the lip of the armor and nicked an unprotected part of the skin. The mechanics should support the notion of taking some damage but changing its type and severity.

>...stopped you from getting hurt in the first place
Which damage reduction can do, if it brings the damage to 0.

For the purposes of combat expediency, I'd honestly prefer accuracy and damage to key off of the same roll, but I can't figure out a way to do it without bringing out the REEEE brigade or encouraging minmaxers.
In terms of realism, how it should probably go is that armor acts as damage reduction.

>Pic related. So, armor reduces damage, potentially to 0? No fucking shit.

Real life is not a video game. You do not get a sword swung at you that deals 100 damage and your armor reduces all damage taken by 100, so since it hit zero you didn't take anything.

In real life if you want to kill a man in armor, you either put a dagger through his eye-slit or drown him in a puddle by sitting on his chest. Armor in reality is a physical object meant to block attacks from hurting your skin, it does not reduce damage. Stop shitposting.

>For the purposes of combat expediency, I'd honestly prefer accuracy and damage to key off of the same roll, but I can't figure out a way to do it without bringing out the REEEE brigade or encouraging minmaxers.

Easy, your damage is a static number, and your roll decides how much you apply.

say, on a d20 (numbers from thin air):

More than 5 off: miss, 0 damage
Less than 5 off: graze, half damage
Equal or less than 5 more: normal damage
More than 5 more: double damage

Not a convincing argument, sorry.

Not sure if bait or just retarded.

>Hit the unarmored part on the enemy to kill them.
Thank you captain obvious.

But what about some joker hitting the armored part of an opponent? And with what weapon? Sure, a sword edge isn't going to help much, but the murder-strike might. A war-pick is going to hurt someone in maille in a different way than a sword will. A bolt from a crossbow can knock a man off his feet if it has enough power; I've been there.

What about bullets? Generally, one is trained to aim at the center of mass first, and the braincase secondarily. Assuming humans aren't bullet-sponges in the setting, bullets fuckin' hurt. They hurt a lot fucking more if someone is not wearing a "bullet-proof" vest. But is it bullet-proof, or bullet-resistant? Ballistic vests and similar armor probably won't stop a large rifle caliber outright, but they're effective at stopping smaller handgun shots. Even then, someone who gets hit squarely while wearing a ballistic vest gets a shitload of concussive damage, definitely a bruise, possible a couple cracked ribs. So how do you gamify that?

Armor in real life reduces or distributes incoming kinetic energy. Sometimes, like with swords and plate, the kinetic energy is negligible and only leaves a minor wound. What else would you call that but damage reduction? AC as a mechanical abstraction is not a suitable way to deal with these different situations, and it reduces armor down to a pass-fail to hit mechanic, which is dumb. Armor as damage reduction if you actually get hit is superior.

Stop it. Get some help.

Do you have a better idea of how to handle something which is designed to be armor-penetrating, or is especially effective against certain kinds of armor? Straight up buffing the damage is not an appropriate solution, here.

Flexible armor as compared to rigid armor, for instance, is less susceptible to damage from a crushing force, but generally more susceptible to a piercing force. A bodkin tip arrow shouldn't get a damage buff just so that it can get through armor, but it should reduce the effective protection of flexible armors. It still isn't going to do much against someone wearing plate.

What about AP rounds for dealing with modern military tanks? An explosive round is going to hurt a truck more than an AP round is, because of how they're engineered. An AP round would pass through some targets completely, while an explosive round would detonate on impact. Meanwhile, an AP round is going to be much more effective at dealing with a tank than an explosive round is.

What about fractional armor divisors, which actually make armor more effective? Assume a rifle bullet and a shotgun do the same average damage in your system. Buckshot will still hurt someone in combat gear, but because of how each ball of shot has individually less energy than a bullet does, wearing armor makes shotguns much less dangerous than rifle rounds, compared to their respective original damage.

If you find the magic solution to gamifying these situations, and it is anything other than an armor divisor, let us know. Bonus points if it isn't just a straight buff or a buff against armor specifically, cause those are obvious and not as satisfying.

A game that makes you use a calculator is inexcusable given how many quality games don't make you do that. A piece of design that makes you do an extra thing for no good reason, even if that thing is easily doable by the average user, is bad design, period.

See

"Ignores X points of armor" is an old standby. As for specific weapons receiving bonuses and penalties against specific kinds of armor, they tried that in AD&D 1e, and it was such a fiddly mess that everyone learned their lesson.

What about something like this:
Characters have 2 AC values- one for avoiding (dodging, blocking, etc.) damage, and a higher one that represents damage mitigation through armor and magic barriers and stuff.

Weapons have two damage values- one for "glancing" blow where you make contact but its mitigated by armor, and one for a solid/well positioned strike that bypasses the armor. Blunt weapons may deal more damage on a glancing blow, less on a solid blow.

>"Ignores X points of armor" is an old standby
It is incredibly inflexible and only handles a few situations gracefully. Try again, with something that ticks all those boxes for situations involving armor. Get something composable.

>Bonuses and penalties against specific kinds of armor in ADnD 1, and it was a fiddly mess
That's because they did it poorly and it wasn't widely applicable. That was in the infancy of rpg design, and people have learned since then. Newer solutions to the problem are much more elegant, not requiring cross-referencing. It is the difference between emergent properties of combining elements and specifically accounting for individual cases.

You're working backward from a foregone conclusion that it has to be as granular as it is in GURPS. If that's really what you want, I have good news for you: it's already been made. It handles absolutely nothing "gracefully," but it is available right now.

GURPS represents the upper limit of how much crunch a significant number of players will tolerate. Anything designed by you or me should be simpler than that. No game needs that many gradiations of ballistic armor and the ability to pierce it. A thing is either a person or a vehicle and it's either armored or not (perhaps with distinctions between concealable, visible, and movement-restricting armor for each category of armorable thing.) A gun is either anti-personnel or anti-materiel and a round is either good at piercing armor or not. Any distinction finer than that is pointless even for /k/tards.

>Damage reduction is the same as extra HP, only that it doesn't deplete.
Not quite. Damage reduction is better when taking lots of small hits. Extra HP becomes relatively better when taking fewer but bigger hits.

That's equivalent to (typed) DR.

This seems to be the same as the "DV, PV" system. ASOIAFRP uses it too (called Combat Defense and Armor Rating). Basically, armor has a dodge modifier and a protection modifier (DR), and the heavier the armor, the more negative the former becomes, and the more positive the latter becomes.

Degrees of success.

Nice deflection. Way to avoid the point of how to deal with game designs that are better at handling armor. 8/8 m8

>That is has to be as granular as it is in GURPS.
It really isn't that granular, it's just applying properties to a class of things, and then letting those things interact. Most of it is optional anyway, and the Lite rules don't even list a lot of it, but it is there if you need it in the full rules.

>It handles nothing gracfully
What handles nothing gracefully; GURPS? I'd like to know why you think that, especially in comparison to what you think is a graceful way to handle things. I'll come back to my own opinion on that.

>Ballistic armor... bullets... guns... anti-personnel or anti-materiel... etc.
This isn't even about guns, dude. It's great to have those extra things like overpenetration, etc, if you're doing an operators operating game, but that's not the point. The point is that Armor Divisor is an elegant way to handle anti-armor damage from bronze to space age weaponry. When coupled with Damage Resistance from armor, it is a very satisfying way to deal with almost all the situations you'd encounter. What does it require to implement? Exactly two things: Dividing the DR by the divisor, which never requires more than mental math and isn't even present on the vast majority of weapons, and then subtracting the quotient from the damage roll. Seriously, it isn't that hard; I've yet to see a weapon for GURPS with an armor divisor in the double digits, and that would probably be high-tech anyway.

As for the grace with which it handles the gamut of situations, armor as DR and armor piercing as a divisor is more flexible, less gamey, and less contrived than AC or "ignore x points of armor". I'm not looking for realism, I'm looking for plausibility and how satisfying it is to engage with the mechanics.

Use both? Armor provide DR, but any damage greater than that is reduced from the armor "HP".
Once armor "HP" is zero, is it considered "damaged" and confers only half the default DR.

Then again, if we're talking about a CRPG where players don't need to do outcome calculations in their head, things become different. They only need to be able to eyeball different numbers to compare them reasonably.

>Long division
>Dividing by 2 and 4
Did you by chance dropped out of school in 2nd grade of Elementry?

>You may not like it from a gameplay standpoint, but he is correct.
He was explicitly talking about REAL LIFE, trying to apply to it d20 mechanics. Are you just as stupid as he is?

>What's the difference between not getting hit and being hit for less
The same as between being decapitated and slapped on the face, you mongoloid

>armor affects hit chance or damage
Damage only.

>for game-design or realism
Both.

>Armor has no effect on anything. It's only there for aesthetics.

This. There's no point in wearing armor in a fantasy game anyway. If you aren't casting spells, you've fucked up your PC and should start over.

Without the math.

fucking shit you seriously can't divide by 2? Never heard the subtract 1, divide, then add .5 rule?
Its easy
What's 2 divided by 15? Well if you subtract 1 you get 14. Divided by 2 that's 7. Add 0.5 and you get... 7.5! It's MAGIC!

Fucking moron.

Fuck I just forgot you don't even need to do that last part. In GURPS, you round down in this case! So all you need to know is your multiples of 2 and MAYBE 4 and you're good!

If you can't manage that then you should probably give up tabletop RPGs because you're literally fucking inept.

2 divided by 15 is .1333 you retard

Yeah, he definitely fucked up the infix wording. You damn well know what he meant, though. "2 divided into 15"

Do mongoloids actually do this? Are there people who actually cant divide numbers by 2

I'm currently working on something that tries to handle armor realistically without being too crazy.

Basically armor gives you a hard and a soft target number for damage. If the damage fails to meet the soft number then you take 0. If it exceeds soft but doesn't exceed hard, then you take total damage - soft number in fatigue. If it exceeds both soft and hard, you take total damage - hard in wounds, and the difference between your hard and soft numbers as fatigue.

So if you had a soft of 7 and a hard of 13, then damage =< 7 does nothing, 8

That's a pretty neat idea. Wonder how well it works in play.

You couldn't tell that I make a typing error? Boy, you are lost!

I personally don't do this trick. I just divide by 2. I just found out that's what I was subconsciously doing all this time.

I'm a bit worried it will come across as confusing, but I figure a more carefully worded section on it with examples would remedy that. As of right now weapons and armor are still in the exhaustive spreadsheet phase. I'm currently looking at various weapon qualities that could modify a defender's hard and soft values, and how it all interacts with called shots.

I also tend to balance things around normal folks, so I figure the more and more pc centric character creation options are added that they'll help to keep the pacing up.

Or it could create a horrible slough of a fight that drags on forever with 0 sense of satisfaction for the victor, but hey, I'll find that out during playtesting.

Well, at the very least, I like the idea of taking fatigue damage even when your armor blocks the damage, if it is over a certain limit. That's definitely a mechanic I'll implement in my own games.

I am very much a systems kind of guy, but lately I've been trying to find a good mindset that replicates your philosophy in an attempt to avoid confusing or alienating my recent players, who are fantastic RPers, but gloss over when we get to complex numbers and system bloat.

>Do you prefer armor as a reduction to the odds of taking damage, or a reduction to the amount of damage taken?

Damage Reduction for Armor. Always. Every day.
STATS should be responsible for reducing the odds/chances of taking damage. (Dexterity allowing you to just dodge or snooker your stupid self outta the way as just an example, or having a big muscley brain that bitch slaps psychic damage).

>Armor isn't an unstoppable force.
I assume you meant "immovable object". I hope?

>Ballistic vests and similar armor probably won't stop a large rifle caliber outright
That's being generous. Any round with real stopping power (eg your typical 5.56 nato) would likely go right through and out the other side. And even if it didn't penetrate, there's still enough force to cause a fatal wound just from the concussion. Very heavy personal armor, with rigid plates and all that, might save you IF you're far enough away and IF you're lucky.

>but they're effective at stopping smaller handgun shots.
Again, they'll save your life (hopefully). As long as you're far enough away and lucky. But you're still quite likely "taken out" for the purposes of any kind of game encounter.

Point being - at most, armor against bullets stops you from having to roll up a new character. But within the timeframe of the encounter, if you get hit, you're done.

Hey, here's hoping you do something great with it.

meant to reply to

This is honestly pretty much how I do it in my system. It uses a d100 and above 70 is a full hit, so the full damage of the weapon, 30 and below is a miss, and any number in between is a graze, which is half dmg.

In my roup, we do both, depending on what sort of armor the character is wearing, and how they react to an attack.

We use the Conan D20 ruling for parrying, dodging, and taking the brunt of the attack. (Though, over the years we've modified the rules quite a bit.)

If a character is focused on his foe, and relatively nimble, he may attempt to parry an attack. Doing so means that he can reduce or negate incoming attacks, depending on the result. A particularly skilled swordsman in light armor can even counter attack.

Characters that are partially aware of their target can attempt a Dodge. This will either prevent the attack completely, or they will take all the damage. It essentially works like Touch AC.

Taking the brunt of an attack is reserved for heavily armored warriors. Each type of armor gives a different degree of dice to dage reduction, and most allow you to add some of your dex bonus to the result.

Basically, with this system there is a different defensive option for each type of character, and a player may choose for themselves what seems best in any situation.

, >Requires fewer hoops to jump through for the suspension of disbelief.
More hoops. You need more mechanics to cover more fiddly bits and to introduce messy edge-cases.
>and the framing and its narrative application don't mesh well.
>games and narrative aren't the same thing
What a shocker!
Good think *your* new mechanics aren't gamiest at all. *wink* *wink*

>but it's still going to do some concussive damage.
In the long run, you can fold that into the next successful attack rolls.
In the short run, it's not meaningful.

>practically required lookup tables unless you had memorized it or could remember the mental math.
You know that THAC0 and BAB are interchangeable, right? Algebra gets you from one to the other.

>and shitty or new GMs will doubtless return descriptions of battle that are bland at best.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Do your own descriptions if you need them. We've already established that
>A lot of these things are not supported mechanically
it clearly doesn't matter what's said.

armor bonus as AC enhancment AND weight category as DR (light dr1, medium dr2, heavy dr3) with magic enhancement bonuses increasing both. That +5 legendary full plate with no special features gives the knight that earned it a +14 ac bonus and a base dr of 8 that also works against force damage like magic missile

>At most ballistic armor stops you from having to roll up a new character, but in the encounter, if you get hit, you're done.

Sure, I don't dispute that. It is very lucky the person who gets shot and can keep fighting. I thought I acknowledged as much in my post. That does not change the fact that armor actually, in real life, really does behave in a way that is most well simulated with damage reduction. I was trying to make a point about how armor reduces or distributes kinetic damage such that, hopefully, the wearer doesn't sustain lethal damage. You have even helped my point, "heavy personal armor... might save you IF your far enough away and IF you're lucky." AC as a mechanic can't handle that.

Shooting bullets at people in games with a realism bent quickly turns into rocket-tag. That's why GURPS has a shitload of cinematic optional rules to make gunplay less lethal.

>a base dr of 8

This is why DR in d20 systems doesn't work, though. Who gives a single fuck about DR when enemies after 5th level are routinely applying +20 (or more) static damage to their attacks? I mean, great, you reduce their attack by 1, 3, 5, or 8 damage...but when they're attacking and dealing 40+ damage each time they did, your DR doesn't fucking matter. Or facing any sort of Power Attack build that's throwing +80 or more damage on top of the (meaningless) dice roll.

I accept that there's an argument about armor should be useless against some attacks - and I AGREE with that - but the problem swiftly becauses *all* attacks by an enemy who wants to be in melee are going to render your armor meaningless through the sheer static damage applied to their hit.

WFRP does DR well, because the system pretty much limits damage from any enemy. At the absolute most, unless you're being jumped up and down on by a giant or sticking your head down a Great Cannon barrel, the biggest damage numbers are 1d10+10 or thereabouts, where armor generally soaks between 2 and 8 points. There's always the possibility of a lucky shot (Ulrich's Fury; where the die roll keeps exploding as long as you keep rolling 10s), but in general, you never feel like you've wasted your time building a PC that cares about armor.

Unlike D&D.

>mfw someone else plays WFRP

>Conflating the amount of explanation of how armor works in a system and how you need to ignore that little feeling in the back of your brain that it is gamey with the number of mechanics.
Whoo, boy. DR is not hard to explain, and it feels consistent internally and with the real world, and you get damage resistance only from things that would resist damage. AC is an abstract mechanic which is a composite of DEX, natural bonuses, and other things that are not actually ARMOR, and then, finally, armor. Then you have to explain how those things collectively make it so that you don't take any damage from anything. Even if you are a fat, slow target that should have been hit by that orc's greataxe, but you have a masterwork breastplate so it's all okay. Or, maybe you were hit by the orc's greataxe, but you were expecting your badass armor to, y'know, help blunt the damage? AC requires more hoops to jump through, you fucking mong.

>Need more mechanics to cover more fiddly bits and messy edge-cases
wut. What other mechanics do you need to make armor do DR instead of AC? Perhaps to make dodging a separate mechanical entity, you need something in addition, assuming that the character wants to dodge. So you do a dodge check with the same fucking resolution mechanic as everything else, big deal.

>Games and narrative aren't the same thing
The game mechanics and the narrative which they influence should play nicely together. AC doesn't feel like an application of real phenomena, it feels like a mechanic for a game. Good lord, you're thick. The term ludonarrative dissonance literally refers to when the game mechanics and the narrative are in conflict, as they are with Armor Class. Read an article once in a while, damn. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative

cont.

cont.

>Rolling blunt force damage into explicitly lethal damage.
Do you not give a single fuck about damage types? You can play that way, but you're missing out. The method you describe not only plasters over the narrative or mechanical consequences of concussive damage, but it cannot handle damage types elegantly.

>in the short run concussive damage isn't meaningful
So cracked ribs and the struggle to breathe aren't meaningful? Being stunned for a turn has no tactical significance? Come the fuck on dude, use your fucking brain.

>THAC0 and BAB are interchangeable w/ math
Sure, the end result from these is the same. However, the implementation and explanation of these means that BAB is enormously more popular with all but the groggiest of grognards. THAC0 was a flawed counter-intuitive mess and you fucking know it. Seriously, google THAC0, and look at how the top several articles all feel the need to use a page or more of paragraphs to informally paraphrase to internet strangers how it works on a basic level.

>Mechanically supporting or guiding narrative is a bad thing for lazy people
That's you. That's what you sound like. Get a grip on reality, man. Players who care about the game in any way other than mechanically like to hear cool descriptions of how they vanquish their foes.

I'm not sure if you're baiting or if your reading comprehension sucks, but your argument is pretty damn shallow.

Armor as damage reduction is easier to work with and, frankly, makes more sense.

Here's another question instead: do you prefer magic that gives people access to fantastical abilities, or magic that gives people access to a variety of abilities that can for the most part reasonably be replicated by mundane means?

If the former: how do you balance this? If the latter: How do you make the magic interesting then?

Finally: do you prefer tying primary base mechanics to resources, or should only particularly special abilities have usage limits (i.e. a fireball costing no MP but a SUPER fireball costing MP).

I think both types of magic have their place. Generally when I make a magic system or heavily modify one for a lower magic setting, it will exist to provide an alternative means of augmenting existing abilities. So a mage won't be particularly useful in a fight unless they're assisting a trained combatant or themselves are sort of a spell sword type. How you keep this interesting comes from the mechanical interactions and specific effects on a case by case basis there.

I think the best way to balance fantastical otherwise not possible magic is to keep spellcasters in check by making them roll based on their own arcane skill, alongside either risks or costs associated with the spell casting, shorter duration spells really help here as well. If the only way to fly is through magic, limiting that to a number of rounds (perhaps with a maintenance cost to prolong it), with a range of personal, and requiring a roll to avoid fatiguing one's self really go a long ways towards making it more reasonable.

For resource uses I like keeping the standard free. Make everything else either have a limited use through costs or an upside/downside. Though I personally prefer in world ability costs, like the sorts of things that require a wind up time, or can only be used based on an ingame factor. Easily abusable by a shit gm but they present a much more flavorful, tactical, and reasonably sensible option when used as intended.

>Do you prefer armor as a reduction to the odds of taking damage
Bad games do this
>or a reduction to the amount of damage taken?
Good games do this

Great games do both.

>Being stunned for a turn has no tactical significance?
I'm going to assume you mean round, so that we're talking about minute intervals instead of 10 minute intervals.