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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Isawa Sideshow" data-source="post: 239302" data-attributes="member: 1107">But it's no longer very simple. You've just replaced one AC bonus with 3 DR ratings, dependant on how my opponent attacks me.  As a GM, I'd have to keep track of exactly how each attack is phrased, because "I slash at him with my short sword" now has a different mechanical effect than "I stab at him with my short sword". And if the player just says, "I attack him with my short sword," I'd have to figure out if he meant stabbing or slashing. And that doesn't even count other kinds of damage. Would leather have a different DR against fire damage? Cold damage? Electrical damage? Laser damage? Force damage? You're either going to have to draw the line somewhere and risk some non-realism, or you're going to have to have every piece of armor have more DRs than anyone should have to keep track of. We haven't even begun to count deflection bonuses to AC, either, such as the shield and Japanese armor previously mentioned. You're missing my point. I'm not saying that the players or GMs have to track the actual physics, but by adding extra complexity to the system to model those physics accurately, you're adding more complexity to the rules that they have to use. Take the leather armor example above. You've taken one simple abstraction - this armor adds +X to AC - and replaced it with at least 3 other conditional abstractions - it might reduce damage by X, or by X/2, or by X/4, or in some cases it might not reduce damage by X at all. That is NOT a simpler system. Straight up replacing AC with DR, that would be simple. Throwing damage-type conditional modifiers in the mix gives players and GMs another entire block of combat stats to juggle.But at what cost? And will they make sense to use?To you, perhaps.  I don't have any problem making sense of hit points. They are but one of many systems for tracking character health and well-being, and I don't see anything really wrong with them.The damage a baseball bat delivers as your benchmark, eh? I've been hit in the head with a baseball bat by accident before... well, clipped in the eyebrow, but it split my skin to the bone and knocked me to the ground.  How much damage did I take? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />If I'd been hit in the arm with the same amount of force while wearing a leather jacket, how much damage did I take?If I get hit in the head while wearing my leather jacket, do I get a DR to the damage? Or does my head need a separate DR?Do you see what I'm getting at? Too much complexity, and you spend more time tracking hit locations and variable DRs than you do playing.</blockquote>

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