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Message: <blockquote data-quote="triqui" data-source="post: 5877682" data-attributes="member: 57948">I'm a fan of DR armors. But they really don't work well with D&D. Why? Because of anachronism. In D&D, several weapons from several different ages live together with different armors. If you give Full plate a DR, it should have a decently high DR, better than a Half Plate. Half plate better than Breast plate, and so on. That means a PC in Full plate can bassically defeat as many gobllins with shortswords as he faces, because goblins with shortswords can't touch him. Which is realistic, actually. Romans used gladius, because barbarians fighted barechested or with leather armor. If a group of roman legionaries with short swords face a group of Teuton Knights in gothic plate armor, they would be slaughtered without mercy.Armor *defined* the weapons and fighting styles. When normans started to use full hauberks of mails, weapons and tactics had to change to reflect that fact. Javelins got cut from armies arsenals: they didn't have enough piercing power to kill someone in mail armor. Longbows and then crossbows where needed. Axes slowly disapeared too, to be substituted with warhammers and warmaces. Pollaxes and Halberds were developed to counter plate-mail, and zweihanders were developed to counter polearms. In D&D, you have a viking culture next to a rapier wielding venetian-like city. You mix javelin-throwing pigmy with iron-clad full plate templars. Some players use rapier-wielding Errol Flynn clones, and some others play with barechested barbarians wavering a claymore. A DR full plate renders a lot of those themed characters inneffective. A d6 short sword can't pierce a DR 6 full plate.There's where the problem arise.Beyond that: when you have a system with armor as DR, some playstiles become better than other. A monk with two kamas that can attack 6 times for 1d6+6 might be on par with a raging barbarian who can charge for 2d6+40. But when they face a Plated Giant that happens to have DR 10, the monk is close to useless.</blockquote>

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