Armor as Damage Reduction

[John Dallman]

RuneQuest used armour as damage reduction back in the 1970s. It didn't cause any trouble for the group I played in during the 1980s. In general, it goes well with systems where characters have few hit points and taking any damage is a major event.

It's more likely to be a nuisance in systems with large numbers of hit points, where the arithmetic of taking damage is more of a burden, and adding another set of subtractions feels more complicated.

 

[GMMichael]

Increasing hitpoints by armor just makes combat take longer and combat tends to eat up time anyway.
It also increases math exercises, and that slows turns when you have multiple attacks hitting armored characters.

I beg to differ. In Modos RPG it adds some interesting dimensions to combat:

• Light/no-armor combat becomes a race to cause damage the fastest or to flee/parry at the right time.
• Armed and armored combat becomes more about attrition and/or quantity of attacks.
• If DR is effective all the time, then armor class (and equivalents) doesn't have to be so.
• Since DR affects only progress (damage), it doesn't affect fast combats that are made with only one or two rolls (eschewing the rest of the "time eating" combat rules.)
• A minimum damage rule is needed to prevent the stalemate of "zero damage again! You didn't pass my threshold." This rewards aggression in combat and forces defenders to either have a plan or flee.

My preference is for simple roll to hit, roll some damage and get 'er done.

Whatever floats your boat! My preference is to roll attack and damage, describe my effort, listen to the defender's effort, and narrate the exchange based on how much progress I made and what the defender tried to do. It takes a little more time but never feels like a wasted turn.

 

[Fenris-77]

In both HarnMaster 3 and HarnMaster Gold, armor reduces damage when a character is successfully hit in combat. Some armor can be layered (e.g. padded armor under plate armor), further increasing the protective quality of such armors.

This is a keen suggestion. I have the game somewhere but I hadn't thought to give it a look in my survey of extant DR systems.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

This is a keen suggestion. I have the game somewhere but I hadn't thought to give it a look in my survey of extant DR systems.

Mythus (dangerous journeys) by Gygax has this. Hit location. Non vital(X1 damage), vitals(X2 damage), super vitals(X3 damage) and ultra vitals(X4 damage) (always protect your Supervitals!). Different armour protected different locations. I will post the table for each type of armour. (Because Gygax=tables)

 

[Dioltach]

The first edition of The Dark Eye (don't know about later editions) used armour as DR. Coupled with high hit points and a combat system that involved separate rolls for the attacker and the defender, combat took forever. We dusted the system off a few years ago and played about a dozen sessions, but there were times when the dice were rolling low and it would take half an hour to whittle away a single orc's hitpoints.

 

[Fenris-77]

The first edition of The Dark Eye (don't know about later editions) used armour as DR. Coupled with high hit points and a combat system that involved separate rolls for the attacker and the defender, combat took forever. We dusted the system off a few years ago and played about a dozen sessions, but there were times when the dice were rolling low and it would take half an hour to whittle away a single orc's hitpoints.

This kind of outcome is a key design point for me. I want a DR system, but I don't want to bog things down at the table either. High hit points are an obvious thing to avoid IMO. I'm also in favor of minimum damage not being 0, but perhaps one, or even one per damage die, or something like that. I'll probably tie fatigue into combat as well and that will also help as I plan to have levels of fatigue reduce defense and armour effectiveness (among other things).

 

[Redneckomancer]

Shadow of the Demon Lord has some neat alternate rules for armor as damage reduction. The damage reduction is variable, based on how many dice of damage you're about to take, so Light armor stops 1 damage per incoming die, medium 1d3 and heavy 1d6 (everything other than tests in SOTDL is a d6/d3).
The effects are that characters that wear light or no armor don't really notice a change, but heavy armor characters get hit more often for less. The variable aspect might make it sound like it'll make combat take that much longer but I got in the habit of calling out "5 damage from 2 dice" pretty quickly so it was a non issue. You can even do that with total damage from multiple hits too; say a be-tentacled horror hits someone 6 times, well that's 14 damage from 6 die, easy.

One thing you have to decide in these systems upfront though is what kinds of damage does armor stop. Does it stop cold damage from a magical icicle? What about blast of cold air? Its easy to write that off as "I'll figure it out in the moment" but it's good to have an idea upfront, because that's where I noticed the biggest "slow downs" while I was running.

 

[Celebrim]

1) I find that it plays pretty well at low level but is very hard to balance at higher levels. The best variations seem to be the ones that make DR itself a random value to prevent undesirable levels of invulnerability. This is about the only increased complexity I would suggest given how much it will complicate the math and slow the game down but I find it is pretty essential otherwise you get into a situation where it becomes too easy to build tanks that are invulnerable to attack.

2) Introducing armor as DR into a system will affect class balance, as suddenly armor proficiencies which usually have very low value become very high value. This may or may not be a good thing, as IME, D&D has always favored medium or light armor with heavy armor really only having value in a tournament or duel type situation.

3) Remember that monsters will need more DR to compensate. Remember that this will mess up game balance even more.

4) Probably the biggest problem with armor as DR is it conceptually pairs with hit location, and IME hit location is very bad for high fantasy type games and quite possibly bad for any game with heroic combat. The problem with hit location is it vastly and I mean vastly increases the lethality of the system by opening up strategies to attack the weakest link in a system. The hit points of any location are usually a tiny fraction of the total hit points of the system, which creates this situation where you hit a weak link and trigger either instant death or a death spiral. It's also nearly impossible to balance the ability to pick a target to attack. There is basically no level of increased difficulty to hit that is going to balance with the advantages of by-passing armor and by-passing hit points (the two outcomes of hit location). So systems either have to give soft "no" to intention to attack a specific location by making it ridiculously difficult or accept that all high-level combat is going to trend toward taking large penalties to hit in order to get a chance for either instant kill or instant suck. And very often when you do the math, there is an inflection point where below this point it never makes sense to target a location and above this point it always does. The result is not an increase in tactical depth, just an increase in suckage and mathematical complexity.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

5e already has DR integrated.

Heavy armour master gives 3 DR if you wear heavy. Also, damage resistance is a thing. I’m not sure how complex it really is.

The simplest way to implement this is:
Light Armour: 1 dr
Medium:2 dr
Heavy: 3 dr.

 

[Fenris-77]

To address @Celebrim 's post from above, I wasn't planning to just bolt DR onto an existing system exactly, but rather use a somewhat fuzzy OSR d20 base and then redesign or add whatever parts need it to make the system work. Ideally it's a core mechanic with all the specific design decisions that entails, not just a widget.