Armor Defense and Reduction variant

[Zaphling]

I was planning to put some damage reductions to heavy armors to feel their armorness for my armored PCs.

Here's my initial plan:

Hide Armor: +2 armor bonus (instead of the usual +3), but resist 1 or 2 all damage.

Chainmail: same as the original but with resist 2 damage.

Scale armor: same as the original but with resist 2 damage.

Plate armor: same as the original but with resist 3 damage.

Light shield: same as the original but with resist 1 damage.

Heavy shield: same as the original but with resist 2 damage.

How are these? do you think it's good?
and I have an issue if ever they are damaged by magic and/or elemental types: fire, cold, thunder and etc. Should they be included with the damage reduction?

 

[Amaroq]

Hey Zaphling, I think this probably belongs in the 4e Fan Creations and House Rules forum.

 

[luide]

Damage reduction is hard beast to tackle in 4e.
Specifically, plate+heavy shield (resist 5) will probably be far too good at heroic.
And it will not be good enough at epic.

Add in the complications about status effects and things get even more hairy.

As for the damage reduction on elemental types:
If the attack is vs Fort, Ref, or Will, there shouldn't be any damage reduction (you could give damage reduction for shields against Ref attacks)

 

[eriktheguy]

No reduction for shields. They give ref, that's enough.

I would suggest temp hp, that is recovered whenever they take extended rest (enough time to readjust straps and plates, etc).

Heavy armor only, and not too much. Make it scale with enhancement modifier.

Damage reduction makes minions too weak.

 

[Zaphling]

Hmmm. Maybe the temp hp is a better variant than DR.
So chainmail and scale gives 5thp
Plate gives 7thp after every short and/or extended rests.
thp increases also per tier maybe?

 

[eriktheguy]

I was thinking along that lines.
If you want it to scale with tier, you could simply say +2 temp hp per point of enhancement modifier. This scales decently well with monster damage. It is enough to prevent about 2 minion hits or 1 standard skirmisher attack.
I certainly wouldn't let them recover this with a short rest, preventing that much damage every encounter is better than most feats.

Even if it only recovers with an extended rest, the idea seems a little off to me. Heavy armor is designed to be balanced with light armor, and as far as I know that balance is pretty tight. There are plenty of armor specialization feats that allow players to feel special in their armor.
There are also lots of armor enchantments that are specific to a type of armor, and these are available to the characters as drops as early as level 1. Check out armor of dwarven vigor, heartening armor, or lifegiving armor. Drop one of these for your player's and they will be feeling tough in their heavy armor. Stoneborn armor also does stuff similar to what we were discussing here.