Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8798476" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

Verification