What's your favourite armor system so far? >AC + flat damage resistance

so basically anything that tries to strike the same tier or above it is damage/2 ?

Why would't all players simply go for blunt weapons?

Always saw it as an abstraction that represented the armour absorbing all of the blow. You get hit the same damage if you get chopped in the arm wearing a cloth shirt or wearing CL20 Greater Magic Vestmented, +1 Riverine Full Plate with +9 Armour Special Abilities. It's just that the full plate takes the blow a lot more easily and is harder to deal damage against the wearer.

It's an abstract I can take onboard, or else you end up with 5e Heavy Armour Master degrees of shit where the DR becomes irrelevant unless you're wading theough boring asf mooks who shoild be fireballed.

The force needed to mangle limbs through blunt damage is a lot higher than the force needed to sever limbs or arteries through piercing/slashing damage.

Which means piercing/slashing weapons are typically just better against unarmored monsters.

this is why I like the damage soak.

the AP values can be calculated in easy as pie.
>each "tier" of armor/material/type has a higher value
>better made or specialty weapons get higher AP
>AP negates value of armor
>damage is different from AP
>a confirmed hit, at the least, does low-value stunning/subduing/non-lethal damage
>armor can be stacked/layered, at a dexterity cost.

as an added bonus you can do a rolled hit location and factor shit like "not wearing a damn helmet in battle"

personally I like the dark heresy way of doing it

I never had a good grasp on that synopsis?

>Dodge
>Block
>Soak

>systems where you have to roll for attack, doge, block and soak, maybe even with different dice(pools).

No fucking thanks.
I have better things to do than watching people picking dice for 10 minutes and doing math.

Roll to evade+damage reduction

There is a feeling that the duty of not getting your teeth kicked lies entirely on the player and that creates a nice feeling od dread during combat and keeps things quick.

AC can work as an abstraction for hits that are either stopped completely, or not stopped at all by armor. But it doesn't work for hits that are partially stopped. For example, someone swings a sword at you. Your armor stops the sharp edge of the sword from hitting you, but the force behind the swing still gets through. So your armor turned a blow that would have killed you into one that leaves a big bruise and maybe cracks a few ribs.

Or maybe the blade gets through the armor and breaks your skin, but the armor means that it doesn't cut as deeply as it would have if you didn't have the armor.

Short answer: Damage reduction.

Long answer: Roll weapon damage. Treat the targets armor as being 1 point lower for every point of penetration on your weapon. Reduce the rolled damage by the remaining armor value. Then reduce it further by their toughness bonus.

When an attack is coming your way:
> You get to choose between attempting to dodge, parry or counter attack. Succeeding at this means you avoid all damage.
> If the attack gets past your dodge/parry, you then get damage reduction that might reduce the damage to 0.

These should have three separate rolls at most. For example:
- In Dark Heresy the rolls are the attack, the dodge/parry and the damage. The damage reduction is a fixed value.
- In other systems, the attack roll also determines damage (more successes>more damage). But the defender rolls both their dodge/parry/counter and their damage reduction.

Fixed vs rolled damage reduction depends on what tone you want for the campaign. If you want characters to be able to ignore certain attacks once they are tough enough, go for fixed damage reduction. If you want every attack to be a threat go for rolled damage reduction (and low HP numbers).