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Armor as Damage Reduction
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8799424" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8799424, member: 4937"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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