Armor and Equipment in RPGs

[Quartz]

Well, they are a lot more expensive for largely the same benefit.

That really doesn't put off a party with the relevant item creation feats.

That's 3e's solution to them being a bit better than the equivalent suit of armor. 1e's and 2e's solution was to make them pretty rare on the treasure tables compared to magical armors.

Something I thought about using but never got around to trying was to make them charged items. That is, you expend a spell slot and the level of the spell slot used determines the AC bonus. The charge would last 24 hours.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Encumbrance, where is it now?

You play to your strengths.

• If you are quick, go light armor.
• If you are slow, go heavy.
• If you have the hit points, go light.
• If you do not have the hit points, go heavy.
• Style and fad are everything.

Armor is designed to defeat a weapon type or fighting style, that is real world. In gaming you have them all thrown together. I like to set a standard type and make it the common item in my games, everything else becomes the exotic, hard to get and find. Yes, this creates stereotypes, all fighters start to look alike and all rogues wear cod pieces.

 

[Ratskinner]

There are basically two different ways to mitigate damage in the real world and three in fantasy games:

1st is to avoid it completely by dodgeing, parrying or misdirecting your foe. In D&D this is a passive system like your dex bonus to ac and possibly wisdom as well if you have monk or swordsage levels, it can be boosted by actions like All-Out defense. If Hero it's also a passive system modified by your actions called DCV. In Gurps it's your active defenses like dodging or parrying.

2nd is the ability to mitigate the damage taken. In the real world armour does this by blocking the edge or point from making contact and dissipating the energy of the blow over a large enough are that it doesn't do any real damage (hopefully.) In D&D this is ignored for mundane armour or rather folded into the option 1 defense. It does show up as DR for Adamantine armour or the UA option. In Hero this is your PD and ED which can represent anything from natural toughness to a magic forcefield. In GURPS it's your armour's DR.

Its even worse than just armor, because HP are supposed to represent some of each of those as well.

In the real world the argument againt heavy armour has never been the superiority of dodging. Armour is expensive, heavy, requires maintainence and is hot. That last bit is a huge factor that most games ignore completely. But in reality you don't have the option to ignore it and it does you no good to be arrow-proof if you die of heat stroke. Full plate is expensive to creat and hugely maintainence intensive, also something most games ignore, but was one of the real reason Knights had Squires. Simply keeping up all the gear was more than one man could do in the field. The heat and the expense was why the Romans and Conquistadors stuck to a heavy breastplate and helmet to protect the vitals and learned to admire scars on the arms and legs. Chain mail was also historically popular becuase it's much easier to field repair and can be cleaned by rolling it around in a barrel half-full of sand, labor intensive as hell to create however.

I'd be perfectly fine with very disproportionate protection if the game took all that into account. As it is, I just think about all the stuff above and quickly come to the conclusion that trying to actually have the HP/AC model reflect reality somehow is a bit of a fool's errand. This is one of those places that "its magic!" works in the fighters' favor.

 

[Ratskinner]

A mechanic often forgotten is that different armours take different times to don. Watch The Two Towers and note how quickly Aragorn kits himself in chain versus how long it takes Gamling to dress the king in plate.

Well that's why most D&D fighter types just never take it off.

Seriously though, I've had plenty of tank-players tell me how sleeping in their armor is perfectly legit.

...kinda weakens the "I'm so tough 'cause I play realistic gritty old-school" vibe some of my buddies try to put on.

 

[Argyle King]

Some threads in the D&D and Pathfinder forum I recently read showed how different the expectations of the workings armor and also general equipment progression is. Out of interest I want to hear from you what you prefer and if there is a broad consensus about it or if the opinions are mixed.

Armor

One complain from the latest D&D playtest is that light armor users can get a better protection than someone with heavy armor and shield while also having less disadvantages. But even when this is fixed, in recent D&D editions light armor users were always able to be nearly as hard to hit/damage than heavy armor users. The protection newly generated characters had were most of the time equal as long as the armor was matched to the dexterity score of the user.
Personally I think such systems are a result of the popularity of swashbuckler characters like Jack Sparrow or even Indiana Jones. Such archetypes are very easy to emulate when you can keep up with the protection of frontline fighters while wearing no armor or just very little at all.

On the other hand there are the heavily armored knights. People in plate armor, sometimes also with a shield, who are immune to many forms of attacks. At least that is the expectation of many players. And it is also not all that unfounded in history either as unless you had specially designed weapons, getting through plate armor in combat was quite tricky. In most RPGs there is also a downside to wear heavy armor. They often tend to be slower, have troubles doing some actions because the armor hinders them, the armor itself is expensive and not socially appropriate in many situations. And because of all those limitations, some born out of the urban myth that plate armor did turn knights into lumbering hulks hardly able to stand or walk, people expect characters wearing heavy armor to be much better protected than people without.

What is your opinion on this divide? Should light armor protect as good, or nearly as good, as heavy armor or should heavy armor offer much more protection than light armor no matter the situation?

Equipment progression

This ties a bit into the armor debate but can be expanded to include all equipment or rather the statistics of characters. Again in the playtest package there were different tiers of armor for people to progress through. You had regular leather, dragon leather, etc. so basically the same system as in 4E where you kept your armor type but made it stronger by trading it for one with more prefixes.
Some people were not too happy with that money is used for progress and rather wanted only a skill progression for characters, meaning that the armor or general equipment do not change over time but that the character gets better with inherent bonuses.
If you answered that heavy armor should always be better than light armor above, then there is a third type of progression. Like the first type presented here it is a money progression, but instead of buying the next prefix you buy the next heavier type. Your leather armor turns into chain, your chain into plate, etc.

Again I ask on your take on this. How much should money be used for progression and how much skill? And how should equipment get better, if at all, by getting better versions of the equipment you have or by getting better types of equipment?

Armor

I don't believe being hard to hit and hard to damage should necessarily the same thing. A lightly armored opponent might be more agile and quick... tougher to land a hit on; however, once you do connect, more damage is going to get through. A heavily armored opponent might be slow and easy to hit, but your attacks might not make it through the armor to actually do damage. This is my preference. I also prefer active defenses -meaning being able to parry, dodge, or block an attack. I also prefer hit locations. Really, in general, I prefer more granularity when it comes to both attacking and defending.

D&D and Pathfinder both simplify everything into the abstraction that is AC.


Progression

I think the progression you described is necessary in D&D because of the way D&D levels (at least in the editions I'm most familiar with) work. 3rd and 4th are both heavy on assuming a character has certain numbers at a certain level. 5th Edition with it's claim of flatter math remains to be seen.

I'm not really sure how to answer this part of your question.

First, I'll simply say that I prefer for special items (i.e. armor forged by the gods; dragon bone armor; etc) to be special rather than something which everyone is assumed to have.

Secondly, I think D&D levels assume too much and have too much metagame built into them. My preference is for this to not be the case. Even with 5th Edition's claim of flatter math, what I've experience in playtest makes me believe it would still be hard to break away from some of the game's underlying assumptions. My preference would be for more breadth of play rather than so much linear vertical stacking of game math.

Overall, while I enjoy D&D, it tends to be pretty different from my preferences when it comes to how character advancement works.

 

[Quartz]

I don't think it would be too game-breaking in 3E to give armour some extra resistance to Sneak Attacks from Rogues / Precision damage from Duellists / etc. E.g. light armour gets 0d, medium armour 1d, and heavy armour 2d.

 

[Jhaelen]

I don't think it would be too game-breaking in 3E to give armour some extra resistance to Sneak Attacks from Rogues / Precision damage from Duellists / etc. E.g. light armour gets 0d, medium armour 1d, and heavy armour 2d.

But does that make sense? Precision damage is precisely (!) what used to be most effective against heavily armored knights, i.e. attacks targeting the joints and gaps in the armor. They're also more vulnerable to stealthy attacks because their senses are impaired (assuming they're wearing a helmet).
If anything, sneak attacks should ignore armor. I.e. armor should protect from anything _but_ precision damage.