D&D 5E Armor as DR. Is anyone considering this?

[Paraxis]

Alternatively, you could use a percentile model, as with 5e's current damage resistance - have heavy armour give you the full 50% reduction in damage, whilst light and medium armour gave lesser reductions. The tricky part there is that, for anything other than a straightforward halving of damage, it becomes a pain to calculate each time.

I think having the armor give you resistance just some of the time is the best way to handle it.

Heavy armor you need to roll a natural 15 or higher to ignore resistance, medium a natural 13 or higher, and light a natural 11 or higher. That way most hits against light armor will ignore the resistance effect but not all, all criticals will ignore the resistance effect, and it adjusts based on armor worn, but the amount of resistance doesn't change.

 

[ArmoredSaint]

I think simply granting armor DR equal to the armor's AC-10 and then adding your proficiency bonus would work just fine.

I admit that I'm not sure how much damage per attack is likely to be dealt by average enemies at higher levels, though, so I would worry that even the DR of plate worn by a 20th-level character (14) would be too little DR to make this worthwhile at that point.

 

[carmachu]

I know its a bit soon, but I'm curious if anyone's considering running 5th with amor as DR. If so, what are your thoughts about how to do this.

I believe Iron Heros did have either classes or mechanics that used armor as DR.

 

[Stuntman]

My friend used DR as armour back in 2E and it was a very bad experience. You hit and do very little damage. You pretty much don't get excited on any hit because of the lack of damage you do.

The idea of armour is to reduce the incoming damage from weapon attacks. The standard D&D AC method is to have armour reduce the chance of a hit. Then full damage is applied if a hit is scored and no damage on a miss. You roll once to hit and then if it is a hit, you roll damage.

Now suppose we use armour as DR instead of reducing the chance to hit. What would happen is that hits will be scored more often. Then you would have to roll damage more often. When you roll damage, you then have to do subraction.

Let's assume you design the values well so the average damage dealt ends up being more or less the same with these two methods. What you have is the DR method requires more rolls and additional math. Then the attacker when scoring a hit will do less damage with each hit. In comparison, the AC method you roll damage less often. Then you apply the full damage on a hit without any extra arithmetic.

Damage dealt in 5E, particularly at lower levels is not that great. If you do 8 damage and after DR, you only do 3, then it just doesn't feel as nice compared to dealling full damage. I find it feels nicer to hit half as often and do full damage than hit twice as often and do only half damage.

5E also has a feature called Resistance. It halves damage. Combine that with DR and you do even less damage on damage rolls.

For a game like D&D, I don't know exactly what problems a DR system solves that an AC system has. I think some people like to see a more tangible effect of armour. I can see that if one armour is better than another, players can see the armour's effect more if using DR than with AC. I don't see that making armour have a more visible effect is going to really be a significant enough improvement over the AC system.