D&D (2024) Crazy armor idea

[Horwath]

A lot of people have tried to come up with "better" armor rules and it's not easy. If you were to be realistic, leather and studded armor basically don't exist. Padded armor was the low end armor, made of several layers of fabric. The next step up (putting aside many, many alternatives) was chain armor. While quality varied, it was better at stopping piercing or slashing damage, but didn't do much for the concussive blows. That, and the weight distribution wasn't great because most of the weight was on your shoulders. That arrow may not pierce the chain armor, but it's still going to leave a bruise.

High quality plate armor on the other hand, was practically impervious to most blows. The scene in movies where someone stabs someone in the chest and it easily gets through the breastplate isn't at all realistic. It was even pretty effective against early firearms. But even in that high end armor concussive blows could still hurt, although unlike chain armor it could spread the force of the blow out. For the most part the way to kill someone in high quality plate was to wrestle them to the ground, pull of their helmet and stab them in the face. But that's not very exciting.

Which is my long winded way of saying, there's just not a good solution. If I were to change things I'd probably go with some sort of combination. Retain traditional AC indicating that the blow landing effectively then combine it with armor HP reflecting how well the armor is absorbing the impact. Of course you'd also want to throw in repairs and patches, especially to the lower end armors.

But it would take a lot of playtesting and some armors should be vastly more effective than others which isn't necessarily a good thing for the game. In other words, you're hardly the first person to go down this road and while I understand why people want to do it I just don't think there will ever be a great way to model armor for something as over-simplified as D&D.

agree.

while I would like some other mechanics of armor, current simply works good enough.
better AC, less chance to be hit, more effective HP.

only thing I would change is remove +X/+X from weapons to +Xd6 damage
and armor +X bonus to 2X damage reduction to all damage. Reduce rarity of +X armor by one category.

 

[Xeviat]

I love mucking about with the rules.

At a glance, +1 AC is a 5% reduction in hits, so if you want it to be balanced against core then it needs to provide near 5% extra hp.

Boiling things down to 2 variables is the best way to make things work easily. AC and HP is 2 variables. When you add in DR, it gets 3 dimensional figuring out the balance point.

For balancing, so you want to leave combat round length the same as they are?

 

[Horwath]

I love mucking about with the rules.

At a glance, +1 AC is a 5% reduction in hits, so if you want it to be balanced against core then it needs to provide near 5% extra hp.

not really.

you must start with base hit value and it is not 100%

if it is 60% then drops to 55%, that is 9,1% decrease in damage.

if base hit chance is 25% that drops to 20%, that is 20% decrease in damage.

 

[mellored]

Final Fantasy Tactics did this. It works fine.

Note AC isn't a 5% chance, since all the spells and such don't target it.

So off the top of my head.
+1 AC = +1 Max HP per level.

 

[Charlaquin]

I had this idea to have armor give Armor Points instead of a bonus to AC. Armor Points would act like Hit Points. First you lose Armor Points, then Hit Points. When your Armor Points reach zero, you need to repair your armor before you can gain its benefits again.

Assuming this is a good idea--let's pretend it is for now--what would a good AC bonus to Armor Points conversion be? Something like +1 AC = 5 Armor Points, +2 AC = 10 Armor Points, etc.

Any math geeks out there who can help?

This isn’t easy to covert to bonus HP, because it depends on the amount of the incoming damage. I think the best way to accomplish what you’re trying to do here would be to add different armors for different tiers of play, and have each tier grant “armor points” based on the average damage for a monster of that tier, using the rules for calculating offensive CR as your guideline. My prediction would be that a PC’s combined HP and armor points would end up very comparable to the HP of a monster with CR of that character’s level.

 

[Flobby]

these numbers surely need to be playtested, even just in theory white room.

maybe "armor HP" is reset after short rest.

if removing AC bonus turns hit rate on your from 60% to 90%, then you are taking +50% damage and your HPs need to be 50% higher, so 5th level fighter with 50HP should get +25HP from armor.

maybe light armor could increase HP by 25%
medium by 50%
and heavy by 75%

dex limit would apply normally.

shield is +2 AC normally

That might work...

 

[Flobby]

What would be easier to track?

Bonus HP that reset each fight appears easy. Say I have leather armor and get 5hp or plate and get 30hp, it would be easy to have a side column to track this on next to me real HP column.

What about just tracking a number of hits. Leather armor lets you negate one hit and plate might get 4 hits per short rest. Per encounter might be a bit swingy for this. There is also a problem in math with a goblin hit and a giant hit.

Whatever it is, it should be easy to use. There is an optional rule that lets you destroy your shield to turn away a critical hit. It is easy and comes with a bit of disadvantage since now you have no shield.

Oh, I like tracking the number of hits, but your right, that wouldn't take into account huge variations in damage... I'd probably have to add a DR then.

 

[Flobby]

I love mucking about with the rules.

At a glance, +1 AC is a 5% reduction in hits, so if you want it to be balanced against core then it needs to provide near 5% extra hp.

Boiling things down to 2 variables is the best way to make things work easily. AC and HP is 2 variables. When you add in DR, it gets 3 dimensional figuring out the balance point.

For balancing, so you want to leave combat round length the same as they are?

I wasn't thinking to change the length of combat, but I'm not sure what you mean...

 

[Flobby]

not really.

you must start with base hit value and it is not 100%

if it is 60% then drops to 55%, that is 9,1% decrease in damage.

if base hit chance is 25% that drops to 20%, that is 20% decrease in damage.

So what would you say the conversion from AC to bonus HP would be?

 

[Oofta]

Another way to do this, not that I'm going to, would be to to damage absorption for armor. So lightweight armor might absorb 25% of the damage of a hit, medium 50%, heavy 75%. Or whatever percentages make sense.

To ease calculations have a chart with damage ranges and the HP damage that would result. Along with this, reduce a PCs target AC significantly (by, sa -5) so more (but not all) hits do damage.

But the disadvantage of this of course is the monster side of things, as well as monks, barbarians and so on. What happens when the wizard with no armor gets attacked, and how is it affected by mage armor and shield?