Attacking Armor

[Water Bob]

Let's say you want to focus on ripping up a character's armor. If you had the right tool, it seems that this should be possible.

By the rules, if I read them right, it takes 20 hit points of damage to reduce the effectiveness of armor.

That's seems a little crazy, doesn't it? If you're wearing a leather jerkin, it takes 20 friggin' points to tear it up some?

I think armor should have a Hardness and Hit Point value just like other items in the game. The DR can serve as Hardness, right? If we wanted to, we could look at the materials that make up the armor and use the rules in From Stone To Steel to give armor hit points. Heck, you could use that book to also give the armor a Hardness rating if you didn't want to use the DR rating.

Then, you could take something like a war hammer and pound at breastplate until you knocked the thing off your opponent.

What about damage to the target while you're doing this? Certainly, you wouldn't do full damage, but how about some non-lethal damage while you're pounding away at a breastplate or trying to cut holes in a leather jerkin with yoru dagger.

Or...maybe this is a ludicrious thing to do in the first place. Should it even be possible? Is it so hard that it's just easier to kill the opponent?

Maybe so. Maybe a rule like this shouldn't be in the game.

Just thinking out loud here.



But, what about animals and monsters? What if Conan is fighting some tough-hide nasty beast and tries to use is sword to cut out an armored scale and then attack the monster's soft fleshy skin beneath it.

Could this be a special case where you use From Stone to Steel? Or should it be a standard rule in the game?

Thoughts?

 

[Ashtagon]

If you are going to use anything from From Stone To Steel, you might want to be aware that this same book also includes rules for damaging armour. iirc, any attack that isn't a total fumble will hit him somewhere, just not hard enough to do him damage. And that somewhere, if armour, may well damage the armour.

 

[Water Bob]

If you are going to use anything from From Stone To Steel, you might want to be aware that this same book also includes rules for damaging armour. iirc, any attack that isn't a total fumble will hit him somewhere, just not hard enough to do him damage. And that somewhere, if armour, may well damage the armour.

I am familiar with the FStS rules, but that's not where I got the idea for the above post. That, I got from reading through Codex Martialis, which uses a different (neat, but different) system that is compatible with d20 games.

It made me wonder how to implement it in the Conan game.