Armor as Damage Reduction

[Fenris-77]

I can categorically state that hit locations will not be featured in any system I produce. There's nothing wrong with them if that's the level of complexity you're looking for, but it's very much not what I'm looking for. The randomization bit is an excellent idea, and it's dead easy to implement in die pool systems, but I'll have to find another way to do it for a more OSR approach.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Cyberpunk had armour as DR and also had hit locations and had called shots. It was super deadly. It worked fine for the kind of system it was.

I don't see why you'd absolutely need a 'called shot' rule to bypass armour if one were to implement DR as armour. There's no called shots to bypass AC bonuses in 5e games. 3.5 had 'touch attacks' which bypassed armour so you could, potentially, have an armour bypass as a type of attack rather than combat feature. "this spell ignores all armour".

In fact, I could see metal armour causing you extra damage against magical electricity. Once again, that should be a feature of the spell rather than a penalty to armour unless you want a massive table for each type of armour.


******

@Fenris-77 do you think it would be possible to do a FATE stress system with what you're trying to do?

Example: armour negates damage. Damage that gets through ticks a stress track (maybe one equal to your CON). Then, anything that gets through causes some kind of exhaustion(you were mentioning fatigue earlier). After 'x' numbers of fatigue, you go unconscious/start dying.

So, instead of HP, you have a certain number of times that you can take 'real' damage. I've been toying with the idea for a while but never really crunched numbers or anything or tried to refine it at all...

Spoiler: Example

Example: CON 14 gives you a 14 stress track:
000 000 000 000 00

you take 22 damage from a hit and 8 is soaked from your plate mail. you take 14 damage so you tick you 14th stress track. 000 000 000 000 0X

The next round you take 10 damage after armour: 000 000 000 X00 0X
If, at any time, you take any more than 14 damage, you take one level of 'Fatigue' (with whatever consequences that entails...penalties to hit or decreased movement or whatever)

 

[Celebrim]

I don't see why you'd absolutely need a 'called shot' rule to bypass armour if one were to implement DR as armour.

You don't absolutely have to, but if you don't have one you end up in situations where it's pretty easy to get absolute immunity to most common sources of damage. In Pendragon, damage is normally like 4d6, 5d6, or 6d6. Even with Pendragon's seemingly generous DR, it's very hard to get immunity to common sorts of damage. But in D&D games and especially OSR D&D games have damage like 1d2, 1d4, 1d6, etc. So it wouldn't take many points of DR to become a tank in D&D.

But Pendragon is doing all sorts of subtle things to get around it's fixed DR aside from having incredibly high damage attacks. Like it's got a hidden random DR roll in the fact that on partial success you get to add your shield's DR to your armor. It's got chivalry rules that limit the sorts of combats the game is normally going to handle to other things with high armor and high damage attacks, and it's really free with handing out armor to foes ignoring "realism" and favoring keeping the system working and genre emulation - like giving lions the same DR as if they were wore mail which you can't really justify from a real lion's hide.

Looking at the Pendragon system, it feels to me similar to the problems that I'm having with dice pools in Star Wars. A knight can wade through 3d6 or 4d6 foes even with mail and shield, much less gothic plate, but 5d6 or 6d6 foes get super lethal super fast. There is this either things aren't very dangerous at all or else we are risking characters being killed or removed from the scenario and there isn't much in between.

Now think how this plays out when we reverse that situation and the PC's are the mooks hitting up at a foe that out DR's them. Let's say you are doing 5d6 damage and the target has 24 DR. Is that a fun combat for the PCs when they have no levers to pull to bypass that DR and they are really just trying to get a lucky crit? Think in OSR terms you are the cleric and thief with a 1d6 damage attack that is normally say 50% as effective as the fighter's 1d10+1. Then you start playing in a world where suddenly things start having 3-5 DR, and now combat that already sucked for you starts sucking way more.

Pheonix Command is known for having these elaborate systems and tables for generating its combat results. But the most interesting thing to me about the PC combat process is that not only does it not actually generate realistic results, but to the extent that it does generate realistic results you could generate a very closes approximation of its results by just having low hit points and random high damage attacks. All the reification PC doesn't actually do but hide the math by making it so difficult to analyze that someone using the system can't easily see what it is actually doing.

 

[Fenris-77]

@TaranTheWanderer - Yeah, I think something like that could work. Savage Worlds has DR and already has a somewhat similar system.

 

[gorice]

And like I said, the random DR roll is less complicated and easier to balance than a hit location and critical hit system. Of all the possible approaches, abstracting the armor's protection leads to the least complicated system. Otherwise, you end up with things like, "Well, I can't push this rondel through the breast plate so I'm going to grapple the knight and make a called shot on his armpit."

That sounds like exactly the sort of thing I do want in my games! Players actually engaging with the fiction rather than rolling dice until numbers go down. Naturally, you can't do this in a system with big HP pools like D&D, as others have said.

I'm actually working on a system in which I use armour as DR, plus hit locations and other special stuff on criticals (a bit like special effects in Mythras). The idea being that, if you want to get past your enemy's armour, it's wise to try and get some kind of attack bonus from positioning that you can leverage into a critical hit. It's working pretty well so far, though it needs more testing.

[edit] Also, since I don't think anyone's mentioned it yet: Lancer uses armour as DR and it works really well. In that case, HP and damage are pretty strictly bounded, and there are no hit locations. It gives things an interesting flavour: if you put your points into your agility stat, you move quickly and are hard to hit, but you tend to get shut down hard when you are hit or grappled. If you put points into 'hull', you're good at breaking out of grapples, can take lots of hits, and benefit from taking a slow, heavily-armoured mech -- but you will get hit and grappled a lot.

 

[payn]

Traveller has armor soak. Works great, but the game also has flat progression which likely makes it easier to design.

 

[Celebrim]

That sounds like exactly the sort of thing I do want in my games! Players actually engaging with the fiction rather than rolling dice until numbers go down.

Which is fine. I like levers for letting players engage with the fiction as well. Even if you have an abstract system, it is nice to have a framework for handling what is a stunt in that system like the aforementioned grapple and called shot.

But as someone who has gone down the path you are going down ("working on a system") several times in the last 40 years, I got to tell you that it doesn't always get to where you want. The question you need to ask yourself is whether you really need to handle the above stunt concretely or whether you can get "good enough" results abstractly with fewer steps. Think of the game engine like a black box and you don't know how it works, you only know what answers you get. If the answers you get could be made by a simpler engine to a reasonable approximation it might be worth it to use the simpler engine instead of taking 5 dice rolls and seven steps to get there. Otherwise you are going to need to be like Pheonix Command players and write a computer program that handles your combat engine for you to avoid slowing down play.

One example of the sort of design decisions you need to make is to make sure your system is consistent with respect to whether it resolves things as Fortune at the Beginning, Fortune in the Middle, or Fortune at the End. If you start switching around how you handle situations differently so that you are doing FITM for normal attacks but FATE for called shots (for example) you are going to create incoherencies and balance problems. "Called Shots" tend to move people's thinking toward FATE, that is to say, when making a called shot you are pretty strongly setting the stakes before the fortune roll - "on success, a dagger ends up stuck into this guy's arm pit" - in a way D&D doesn't normally do. D&D normally tends to do the fortune in the middle and interprets the result from the fortune. So "Called Shots" introduce to a system that is basically D&D with its FITM process of play the same sort of problem D&D has historically had with things like falling from heights and contact with lava where the stake seems to be set from the situation and not the fortune. It's the same problem that people have with hit points when they mentally set the stake on success before rolling the dice "The sword ends up running through the target", leading to people asking questions like, "How does a guy survive being run through with a sword five times?"

In 3.5e I have house rules that handle something like, "I grab the guy and try to shove a dagger in his arm pit" abstractly. Without getting into details, it's essentially a well-defined stunt where the player is asking, "If I win this contest, can I get a bonus to hit and damage? I recognize I could take a penalty if I fail to win the contest". Thus, we are adding a step to the combat, but not breaking the assumptions of the system without getting into the gritty details of simulation of process where you decide on things like how hard it is to hit an arm pit when someone is trying to resist you and how deep the dagger goes into the body if you do and what wounds result from that.

 

[gorice]

Which is fine. I like levers for letting players engage with the fiction as well. Even if you have an abstract system, it is nice to have a framework for handling what is a stunt in that system like the aforementioned grapple and called shot.

But as someone who has gone down the path you are going down ("working on a system") several times in the last 40 years, I got to tell you that it doesn't always get to where you want. The question you need to ask yourself is whether you really need to handle the above stunt concretely or whether you can get "good enough" results abstractly with fewer steps. Think of the game engine like a black box and you don't know how it works, you only know what answers you get. If the answers you get could be made by a simpler engine to a reasonable approximation it might be worth it to use the simpler engine instead of taking 5 dice rolls and seven steps to get there. Otherwise you are going to need to be like Pheonix Command players and write a computer program that handles your combat engine for you to avoid slowing down play.

One example of the sort of design decisions you need to make is to make sure your system is consistent with respect to whether it resolves things as Fortune at the Beginning, Fortune in the Middle, or Fortune at the End. If you start switching around how you handle situations differently so that you are doing FITM for normal attacks but FATE for called shots (for example) you are going to create incoherencies and balance problems. "Called Shots" tend to move people's thinking toward FATE, that is to say, when making a called shot you are pretty strongly setting the stakes before the fortune roll - "on success, a dagger ends up stuck into this guy's arm pit" - in a way D&D doesn't normally do. D&D normally tends to do the fortune in the middle and interprets the result from the fortune. So "Called Shots" introduce to a system that is basically D&D with its FITM process of play the same sort of problem D&D has historically had with things like falling from heights and contact with lava where the stake seems to be set from the situation and not the fortune. It's the same problem that people have with hit points when they mentally set the stake on success before rolling the dice "The sword ends up running through the target", leading to people asking questions like, "How does a guy survive being run through with a sword five times?"

In 3.5e I have house rules that handle something like, "I grab the guy and try to shove a dagger in his arm pit" abstractly. Without getting into details, it's essentially a well-defined stunt where the player is asking, "If I win this contest, can I get a bonus to hit and damage? I recognize I could take a penalty if I fail to win the contest". Thus, we are adding a step to the combat, but not breaking the assumptions of the system without getting into the gritty details of simulation of process where you decide on things like how hard it is to hit an arm pit when someone is trying to resist you and how deep the dagger goes into the body if you do and what wounds result from that.

Yeah, I think a key point here is not to try and emulate D&D w/r/t how resolution works.

That said, I think the '5 dice rolls and seven steps' stuff only comes into play if you insist on doing everything using stochastic methods, like dice, for each step discretely. If a player says 'I want to stab this guy in the armpit where he has no armour', and they roll well, and it then just happens... This is quite simple.

 

[Fenris-77]

I've seen a variety of interesting ways to reduce die rolling in combat, for both DR systems and in general. Mostly, I'm all for the fewest rolls necessary to achieve play experience X.

 

[Celebrim]

If a player says 'I want to stab this guy in the armpit where he has no armor', and they roll well, and it then just happens... This is quite simple.

Well, theoretically, yes. I agree with you. You can do that.

But then you run into the next problem. If you have a FATE type system where the proposition also sets the stakes, how hard should you make the fortune given that the stake may be effectively "I win."? Like what happens when NPCs start setting stakes like, "I stab the PC in the armpit/groin/throat/eye"? Are NPCs not allowed to set stakes in order protect the PCs from instant death? But if NPCs and PCs are playing by different rules are you losing an aesthetic of challenge since PCs just are inherently advantaged and everyone can see that from the rules?

One problem I've had with implementing called shots is that it's very hard to set the difficulty of a called shot in such a way that attacking a particular body part every time isn't the winning strategy in all situations. This happens whether you make the called shot an optional stunt or required declaration of each attack. An example of the breaking point for me is I realized in one system that I created and thought was looking pretty good was that "called shot (eye)" was pretty much what you should do every round versus a dragon or other heavily armored beast. Does it make sense for Robin Hood to shoot out the eyes of a dragon? At some level yes, but at the same time we now have a horrible balance problem. Turning back to Pendragon, how much more difficult does the attack roll need to be if the reward is effectively +16 damage? Bypassing armor is like getting a critical hit on every successful attack. So it's hard to set one linear modifier that balances the advantage of the attack versus difficulty of achieving it.

So then if you start trying to break down what goes into making a called shot difficulty you end up with potential fiddly status effects like, "Does the opponent suspect what body part you want to attack?" And that could get really fiddly in a hurry if you are going to test that, but it's even fiddly if you just assign an additional penalty if you called a shot on that body part for your last attack. The sort of cinematic fights people love and want to have happen in their fiction involve fighters pulling all sorts of tricks, but if you do this process of play and don't have fiddly conditions and stances one result you get is everyone is trying to pull the same trick every single time. Abstract systems may avoid that by allowing you to apply different narrations to the abstract results.

Another thing that I have tried is that you have to obtain some advantage over the opponent before you can call a shot on difficult target. So maybe you have to do a successful feint maneuver the prior round in order to get a chance to hit a target like an armpit, groin, or throat. But again, you see how this increases the complexity of the rules way past "if they roll well, then it happens".

And what exactly should the implementation of that stake look like? For example, should the target now suffer a specific status effect like "Crippled left shoulder" given that we know now the fiction has been changed by the concrete event of a dagger in the arm pit?