Ablative Armor

[The Lost Muse]

Has anyone experimented with using Ablative armor? I was thinking of something along the lines of armor has DR based on its composition, and a certain number of hit points.

Padded armor might be DR 1/slashing or piercing with 5 hitpoints, whereas chainmail might be DR 3/piercing (I'm making this up as I type).

The effects on the game would make combat longer but assuming that armor did not make you harder to hit that might balance out at lower levels.

Any thoughts?

 

[hong]

Repairing armour after every fight sounds like a pain. It's bad enough that someone has to be the party medic, I don't see the need for someone to be the party blacksmith as well.

 

[Rhun]

I play-tested a system that I crafted like this...each type of armor had a different variable DR against the different damage types. For example, padded armor might provide DR of 1d4 vrs blunt damaage, but only 1d2 vrs slashing and 0 vrs piercing. It was alright, but I found that during playtesting (with 2nd and 3rd level PCs) that hardly anyone got injured and that battles took much longer to complete because each hit was usually reduced to a couple points of damage.

I didn't try playtesting it at higher levels where the DR amount wouldn't make as much of a difference.