Armor as Damage Reduction

[DeviousQuail]

I'd go with DR can drop damage to 0 but on a high roll or crit the minimum damage is 1/halved/etc. That way low damage attacks can potentially do something but you are still rewarded for your high DR. I'd also limit things that do so much damage that DR becomes irrelevant. If everyone is walking around with 1-5 DR and you're regularly hitting them with 5e fireballs then what's the point of spending resources to get 5 DR? I'll admit I have limited experience with OSR, at least at I understand it, so take my points as an outsiders prospective.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Just responding to a few of the points brought up above:

I don't see an issue with DR reducing damage to 0. It fits with the fiction.

Hero System has two types of damage - BODY to represent serious wounds and STUN to represent shock and pain. All attacks do both BODY and STUN. STUN damage from attacks is usually higher than BODY damage, making it possible pound someone into unconsciousness without doing lethal damage to them.

I do not like the idea of randomising DR. It's one more dice roll. I am for minimising dice rolling during game.

Hit locations are not an inevitable follow-on from DR. Yes, many games with DR also use hit locations, but they aren't implicit in the use of DR.

I actually like hit locations for a more gritty style of game. I wouldn't use them for every game. I do like that they allow for sectional armour. That is, DR varying for different hit locations. I like the aesthetic of sectional armour; the image of the bandit in a mish-mash of bits of salvaged armour, or the mook with nothing but a cheap bit of padding over the head and shoulders. I blame Runequest.

Do keep hit points (or whatever you're calling them) low. Unless you want long, dragged out slugfests (which can also be cool.)

 

[Celebrim]

I do not like the idea of randomising DR. It's one more dice roll. I am for minimising dice rolling during game.

The inevitable complications that result from not randomizing DR are less hassle than the one extra dice roll.

If you don't do it, you'll soon find yourself with the need for "chink in the armor" maneuvers or "called shots" with hit locations or fiat house rules because flat DR results in absurd absolute immunities. That one random die rolls abstracts out a whole lot of "realistic" process of play that you'd otherwise end up with.

While I love the aesthetic and concept of sectional armor as well, and the fact it lets you remove the abstraction of things like a helmet, in practice I've never liked any system that tries to do that.

 

[GMMichael]

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. . .

12 rodents of unusual size sound quite dangerous to me. Especially if the orcs are the typical mooks who somehow die after their armor is menacingly scratched by a long sword swipe. More likely, the point is that 12 rats can cause more minimum damage faster than 3 orcs can, which is only a problem if the GM is allowing harmless enemies (the rats?) to cause damage in the first place. ...or using the same tactics for both...

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,

Thanks for the reminder...

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. . .

Earning your DR isn't a complete no-brainer in my game, either. Armor as a barrier works both ways - protecting the wearer from the world and the world from the wearer.

That being said, you've got to be in a very tight squeeze if your realistic armor is going to get you stuck in a crawlspace. Fantasy armor, however, will get you stuck just walking through a turnstile. 100% agree on the drowning part.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

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.

Actually, most systems I am playing in right now model armor as DR.
It's the way Pendragon has done it for decades, and for Fate I'm not sure I've seen it tried any other way.
For me, armor decreasing the chance to hit has always been one of those weird D&D-style abstractions that is a just a bit wonky.

 

[Celebrim]

It's the way Pendragon has done it for decades...

I own Pendragon but despite admiring a lot of things in the system I've never actually played it and really doubt I ever will.

As far as the armor thing goes, it shares a lot of its system with Call of Cthulhu, and it deals with it by more or less building armor into its game expectations in the sense that it's a game of knights so pretty much everyone should be wearing armor and all the armor everyone wears (or is likely to be wearing) is very similar. It can therefore build what balance it actually cares about, and I'm not sure Pendragon cares much about balance at all. It would be very hard to adapt a game where average damage is like 5d6 and a small dragon does 16d6 x2 damage to OSR.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

The inevitable complications that result from not randomizing DR are less hassle than the one extra dice roll.

If you don't do it, you'll soon find yourself with the need for "chink in the armor" maneuvers or "called shots" with hit locations or fiat house rules because flat DR results in absurd absolute immunities. That one random die rolls abstracts out a whole lot of "realistic" process of play that you'd otherwise end up with.

I don't know what you mean by "absurd absolute immunities."

If I'm running with the idea that I need some randomised way of getting around DR, any more than what a damage roll provides, I'd rather it be a hit location or critical system. It feels better to me to have the attacker say "I aim for their head" rather than the defender say "I took it on the shoulder pad."

I actually like hit location systems because they give the attacker options of what to aim for. This usually means: a head shot, for moar damage; or a disarming shot (usually meant literally); or a nut shot, for the comedy. Less often a leg shot to stop someone running away.

I don't think that using DR necessarily leads to more and more systems being added. Although I agree DR is frequently found with such things as hit locations. It seems to me that it's more a case of such things frequently being co-morbid than one causing the other. I think both these things appeal to the folks who want more complexity in their game systems and so when one appears so does the other. Me? I like having a lot of buttons and levers in my game systems. I know not everyone does and that's cool too.

At about this point I feel the need to point out there's nothing stopping an otherwise bog standard DnD game from using hit locations.

 

[Argyle King]

The two games I enjoy the most are GURPS 4th Edition and Edge of the Empire.

Both have DR. (Edge calls it "soak.")
Both also have strengths and weaknesses associated with heavy armor.

Neither tends to have a bucket of HP as part of the system.

GURPS has hit locations and Edge doesn't (barring some critical hit results and special abilities).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

They’ll have the same HP at 8th level as they did at 1st. So HP are precious.

One thing that is really important to my game, and is an element of the game that has remained over 3 iterations designed over 10 years, is that “health” rises very very slightly, unless you significantly invest in it (a trait of the same category as traits like having a powerful companion or patron or a major magic item), and damage increases very little as well but does become more reliably on the high end (the number of damage dice you roll remains in the same band, but you more reliably hit the high end of that band and can afford to boost it more often).

So armor as DR just makes sense.

 

[Celebrim]

If I'm running with the idea that I need some randomised way of getting around DR, any more than what a damage roll provides, I'd rather it be a hit location or critical system. It feels better to me to have the attacker say "I aim for their head" rather than the defender say "I took it on the shoulder pad."

And like I said, the random DR roll is less complicated and easier to balance than a hit location and critical hit system. Of all the possible approaches, abstracting the armor's protection leads to the least complicated system. Otherwise, you end up with things like, "Well, I can't push this rondel through the breast plate so I'm going to grapple the knight and make a called shot on his armpit." That's vastly more complicated than using fortune in the middle to decide whether or not the attacker managed to stab a weak spot based on an armor roll and will slow the game down more.

I actually like hit location systems because they give the attacker options of what to aim for. This usually means: a head shot, for moar damage; or a disarming shot (usually meant literally); or a nut shot, for the comedy. Less often a leg shot to stop someone running away.

All I'm seeing is how impossible it is to balance a system which can bypass armor or hit points, which is what you are really describing.

At about this point I feel the need to point out there's nothing stopping an otherwise bog standard DnD game from using hit locations.

I've tried. Multiple times. The balance of the game changes so drastically and the complexity of the game increases so drastically that while you can do it, it becomes a very different game. Think of all the body types you have that you need to account for. Think what happens when high level characters can make called shots on eyes and necks.

What seems like added levers at first quickly turns into false choices, because there is almost always one best thing to do given a target's AC and your attack bonus. You almost are admitting yourself when you say things like "this usually means a head shot for more damage". That doesn't strike me as fun in the slightest.