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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 7131040" data-attributes="member: 6795602">There's a 2 part defense system.  The HP defense and AC defense.  Your HP defense is the part that protects you against little blows better than big blows.  The AC defense is the what is used as general protection and it is allowed to be a combination of glancing blows and dodging the attack outright.  When you are hit that generally represents the monster landing an on you in a place that you will be hurt.  As such it really doesn't make sense for your armor to provide damage reduction.  To hit you in plate the goblin rolled a 17 and landed a well placed attack at one of your armors weak points.  In other words, in order to land an attack in D&D terms he hit you in such a way as to bypass your armor.Now I'm with you that "in reality" plate maybe shouldn't have as big of a comparative bonus to avoiding and glancing giant hits as more dex based armors since glancing a goblin blow is easy for plate but glancing a giant blow is hard.  And while damage reduction could possibly solve this, it actually further convolutes what HP and AC are supposed to stand for in the first place (as noted above) and that's perhaps the bigger crime.That's my take anyways.  Damage reduction is a cool mechanic but it's not really a more realistic mechanic IMO.  Also a whole system needs designed around DR in mind or it's going to remain a pretty fiddly mechanic.  I don't think there is a good way to "hack" d&d to solve the simulationist situation you want solved.  If I was designing a game from scratch I could keep that in mind and maybe have certain monsters ignore your armors contribution to AC while keeping your dex contribution.  Of course if you are going that far you probably don't give damage bonus to weapons based on dex and stuff like that.  Or I could design a system where AC was your chance of dodging an attack and damage reduction was what armor provided.  But just to make sure it's said, taking a system without those "ideas" already planned into it and just adding damage reduction or some other solution to goblin vs giant attack realism isn't going to work well IMO.</blockquote>

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