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.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

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).

1. I want a DR system, but I don't want to bog things down at the table either.
2. High hit points are an obvious thing to avoid IMO.
3. I'm also in favor of minimum damage not being 0.
4. Minimum damage could be one.
5. Maybe set minimum damage to one per damage die.
6. Or set minimum damage to something else ... maybe a scaling table.
7. I'll probably tie fatigue into combat as well.
8. I plan to have levels of fatigue reduce defense.
9. I also plan to to have levels of fatigue reduce armour effectiveness
10 I think I'll add in some other things.

.....

1,038. Look at my new game. I call it .... Phoenix Command!

 

[Redneckomancer]

Worlds Without Number is also worth looking at, it rolls 'armor as miss', 'armor as DR' and "damage on a miss" all into one; Shock Damage.
So Shock Damage is an abstract of the fatigue of being in combat. Every melee weapon is rated as having some amount of shock damage (usually 1 to 3), and paired with an AC. So you get like "spear, 1d6 Shock 1/15". If your target has that AC or higher, you don't do shock damage to it because its armor/hide is too thick or it just dodges that easily.
And then there's some fun things added in, like Warrior feats that say "all enemies are considered AC10 for your shock damage" and a 'gang up' maneuver where everyone gives up their normal attack in favor of assisting someone to have one big attack that allows shock damage even if it manages to miss, things like that.
I haven't had the chance to run too much WWN but it was kind of interesting the few times I have. It ended up making combat faster and a bit more scary once we wrapped our heads around it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I played a session of Stonetop last night and armor was crucial to us making it through a brutal fight. It’s a hack of Dungeon World, and Armor works as DR, and the characters have Hit Points.

I think there are two things that make the system work so well (or at least two obvious ones I can think of). First, the characters don’t gain Hit Points as they advance. They’ll have the same HP at 8th level as they did at 1st. So HP are precious. Second, there are other means of harming PCs beyond straight HP damage. Attacks from monsters or enemies can have tags that can inflict specific wounds or conditions on characters.

These elements help keep combat as always potentially risky, and also help prevent it from becoming a slog because if hight HP totals combined with less damage being inflicted due to Armor.

 

[Celebrim]

Worlds Without Number is also worth looking at, it rolls 'armor as miss', 'armor as DR' and "damage on a miss" all into one; Shock Damage.
So Shock Damage is an abstract of the fatigue of being in combat. Every melee weapon is rated as having some amount of shock damage (usually 1 to 3), and paired with an AC. So you get like "spear, 1d6 Shock 1/15".

Yeah, so this would be one of those examples where I'd expect this to work OK at low levels, and then be basically pointless complexity at high levels. All the complexity of the "to hit vs. AC" tables of 1e D&D*, without any of the more interesting payoffs of those tables.

*That is this migrates the "to hit vs. AC" to "damage modifier vs. AC".

 

[Celebrim]

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.

Someone mentioned it, but I feel like the Conan system was one of the few times I've read the rules of a game with armor as DR and felt that it was actually play tested. Basically, I'm warning you that as intuitive as this idea is, the fact that it has never really caught on despite many attempts by systems to implement it should be a warning that it's tougher to get good results in play out of it than you might think.

I think of a system like GURPS, that I do have a decent amount of experience in, and the guiding principle in GURPS design was always make a system that is intuitive process to reality. GURPS has armor as DR. And the problem with that is even if your guiding principles were intuitive to reality (armor intuitively reduces the damage from a blow) it doesn't necessarily mean that the resulting combat will look anything like real combat. A great example of this is "Dwarf Fortress" that pursued this intuitive approach to simulation far beyond what you can do in a PnP game, and still ended up with a result that was massively unrealistic and even comical in its ludicrous cartoonish outcomes. The transcript of a Dwarf Fortress fight is rarely either heroic or believable.

The other thing I tend to find is that this approach doesn't necessarily lead to more fun. That is the combat more fun to engage in if the process is more intuitive to reality? Picking on GURPS things seem to work OK at first, but the longer you play it the less engrossing GURPS combat gets. A fight between two expert duelists especially in older versions of GURPS comes down to waiting for one side or the other to get randomly lucky, after which it immediately death spirals. Most attempts to fix this involved adopting more and more intuitive to reality processes to add complexity, but eventually that complexity became to overwhelming to play test. My expectation though is that if you did play it, you'd end up with the "Drawf Fortress" problem where playing out a fight in the game obviously wouldn't be fun or dramatic.

My suspicion is that things can be made to work OK if you are dealing with gritty combat that engages say someone really into HEMA, but where your combat system is so realistic that it basically deters you from having a game around combat since on average no PC will survive more than about six combats before hit with a random lethal blow. Or else, on the other spectrum, the PC's game the system and the DM keeps his padded gloves on and the PC's run around like nigh invulnerable tanks safely protected behind armor as plot armor where nothing has a real chance of both hitting and penetrating the PC's armor before being turned into chopped meat.

To be honest, I'm starting to have that problem in my Star Wars D6 game with its "realistic" wound tracks rather than hit points, in as much as we have an action focused game but the math is serving mostly to hide from the players how rarely combat has any chance to alter the results. Star Wars doesn't have armor as DR per se, because it doesn't have hit points, but it does mitigate damage through a soak roll that works similar to having high DR but low hit points. We're doing the ritual of combat, but statistically often mooks have like a 1 in millions chance of doing anything meaningful to a PC. But if the chance that the mook does something meaningful isn't very close to 0, then the math makes the chance of instant death non-trivial. And you have death spirals. So combat is either in some sense pointless or extremely lethal and there isn't much in between.

I suppose this is realistic at some level in as much as in a war zone, it only takes one bullet with your name on it. But does it make for a good game? And as a GM, it makes it really hard to prep material that makes for good fights.

 

[Fenris-77]

Mork Borg and Barbarians of Lemuria are both well designed lighter and OSR-adjacent games that use DR for armour. I'm not concerned about the difficulty of the task, only curious about the details.

 

[DeviousQuail]

Cypher uses armor as DR. The math of the game is pretty friendly to this concept. DR rarely gets above 4 (ime), there is a tradeoff between better armor and the expense of abilities, and "hp" doesn't climb nearly as much as it does in 5e. It's a fairly simple system and worth a look.

 

[Celebrim]

Mork Borg and Barbarians of Lemuria are both well designed lighter and OSR-adjacent games that use DR for armour. I'm not concerned about the difficulty of the task, only curious about the details.

DR as armor tends to reward being an outlier.

The details are that 6d6 damage is vastly more dangerous than 1d6 x 6. Against the first, the armor protects against like 15% of the damage, whereas against the second it probably protects against like 85% of the damage.

For example, the details of implementing minimum damage of 1 despite DR, is that 12 rats become more dangerous than 3 orcs which tends to be opposite of intuition and often the intention with DR as armor. Against the rats, it protects against like 33% of the damage, while protecting against like 85% of the damage from the orcs. Which is why I don't like minimum damage rules and prefer DR as a random dice roll. If you were really worried about the concerns that minimum damage is trying to address, I'd suggest having the minimum of the range be zero, so things like DR 0-5 (1d6-1) would address that problem without causing highly unexpected math where a rapid-fire BB gun is more dangerous than a .45 caliber revolver (as it were).

I guess before I can give specific advice beyond, "It works best if DR is random", I need to know what problem you are trying to fix. Were you in games where you were like, "I need a way to nerf hydras that doesn't nerf dragons." or "I need a way to nerf a fight with gnolls that doesn't nerf the classic fight with a dozen large rats in a basement?"

In my case, it might be like, "Back when I was a 10 year old DM all PCs wore plate armor and I happily said things like "plate mail" without feeling stupid, but now that my games are more realistic no one in my games ever wears heavy armor, because they've seen too many PC's drown, fall on their face fighting on a muddy jungle hillside, get stuck trying to crawl through a cave passage to get away from an oozing/creeping horror, or just simply been unable to run away fast enough from the cannibal horde. The small extra AC tends not be worth the small extra penalties to mobility, because they've learned the lesson of surviving my games is always addressing the question, "How is this character going to die?". It probably won't be by taking 5% more damage from physical attacks. How can I lure the fools into wearing heavy armor by offering heavy armor wearers some sort of carrot?" Or maybe, more seriously, "How do I make DEX less of a god stat?"

 

[John R Davis]

The new Talisman RPG has DR. And is just a generally a game with excellent mechanics

 

[Fenris-77]

@Celebrim - Well, I wasn't trying to fix a problem really, more interested in seeing how the parts fit together. The notion was to experiment and see how a DR system would fit and mesh with the (usually) tight OSR resource management play loop. There are a bunch of aspects of different OSR games that I like in addition to DR, so there's a little more to the project than just DR, but that's where it started and the notion of a DR-indexed fatigue-rest-resource loop is pretty core to the idea.