Suits Or Pieces Of Armor?

[Jhaelen]

Or do you prefer systems that use armor pieces by location?

For example, Harn does armor pieces by location. You have head, torso, right and left arms, right and left hands, right and left legs, right and left feet locations.

Personally I prefer to use an entire suit of armor. It greatly cuts down on the book keeping.

Depends on the system. I dislike Harn's for the reason you mentioned. But I really enjoyed the system in Runequest.

As I am fond of saying, Runequest really offers the best compromise between realism and playability. Combat is fast and furious and doesn't require mutliple table lookups.

I'm unsure if you actually need rules supporting the use of 'mismatched' armor pieces, though. But I like systems taking acoount of body zones.

 

[Neonchameleon]

What sort of game am I trying to run? The larger than life 4e works well with suits of armour, the grittier WHFRP with pieces.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Think a system has to account for both but I like the mix and match look, where the system can allow for players to devolop a fighting style. Example of this would to have one arm high AC that would allow a feat or add to blocking for that facing. Another, spike knee caps for a blow type of feat.

 

[Roadkill101]

I'm another one for it depends on the system.

If armor is used simply to provide a target number to determine if an attack is succesful allowing for damage as D&D does, then I prefer to go by suit's.

When used as a form of DR or when hit location must needs be determined, then I prefer to go by individual pieces of armor.

 

[Plaguedguy]

I in general prefer less to keep track of. So I like systems that assume armor is an entire suit and operates with a collective property.

Not to say systems that use multiple pieces and hit locations and so forth are necessarily bad. I understand the appeal. It's just a bit much for me.

 

[El Mahdi]

Have you ever seen "Pants" in any equipment list? No, you haven't.

Because pants aren't allowed in D&D!

For the love of God...Put some pants on that PC!!!

 

[Umbran]

If the combat system tracks hit locations, then dealing with pieces on the same level of resolution makes sense.

If the combat system does not track hit locations, then it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to track armor pieces.

 

[TarionzCousin]

For the love of God...Put some pants on that PC!!!

She was wearing a chainmail bikini, but since you insist....

 

[MortonStromgal]

I like pieces of armor but more for the "look" rather than hit locations. I don't really like to bother with hit locations.

 

[Wik]

Loved it in Dark Sun 2e, but was ambivalent about it in other versions of D&D. The reason it fit Dark Sun so well was because it reduced the amount of treasure you could reward, and it made the game seem even more gritty and harsh - you were literally stripping off single pieces of a guy's armour in the hopes of one day putting together a full suit of scale mail or something.

Same attitude for post-apocalyptic games in general - it's much cooler to have to slowly assemble your armour than to just find a full suit, throw it on, and write down on your character sheet that you get an additional +1 on defence or something.