Damage to Armour

[Eccles]

Rather than the mechanic of Damage Reduction, I've decided to let armour block all damage from blows.

However, since being repeatedly bashed and slashed by an enthusiastic orc with a greataxe is likely to damage your puny leather armour pretty quickly, I've given all armour and shield types their own Hardness and Hit Point scores.

Thus, all attacks that hit the armour or shield rather than the person inside still roll damage, and eventually the armour will be reduced in effectiveness and maybe even fall off.

At high levels of damage, the armour's AC is reduced and the Dex Penalty increased.

This way we might (shudder) see the paladin actually needing to pay a blacksmith to beat the dents out of his precious full plate, and it gives the DM an excuse to have the bad guys' armour (and weapons - remember the sunder rules!) not even worth the PC's consideration.

Any thoughts?

 

[Steven McRownt]

I am still trying to make an house rules like yours. I still don't find the right balance between making thins simple and having armour deteriorate. The main problem is keeping track EVEN of armor's HP. BTW here's my considerations:

-If the character suffers from 0 to 10 points of damage, where the 0 means that all the damage is absorbed by the armor, the armor loose 1 HP.

-Between 10 and 15 points of damage taken by the character, the armor loose 2 HP

-Between 15 and 20 points of damage taken by the character, the armor loose 3 HP

-Over 20 points of damage, simply add the 3 points loss to each of the damage point over 20. Let' do an example to clarify: if a character suffers 26 points pf damage, the armor will loose 9 HP (3 HP because it is over 20, and other 6 subtracting 20 from 26).

Light armors have -as an average- 'round 20 HP.
Medium armors have 'round 35 HP.
Heavy Armors have over 50 HP.
*of course this numbers vary a lot between each armor....

Steven McRownt

 

[Eccles]

Righty ho.

Rather than base the numbers on the amount of damage done, which would require a bit too much maths, and with one dyslexic in my group, maths is something I try to avoid, as it slows things up for all of us, but makes him feel awkward.

Therefore I've taken all the calculation duties on myself. I just inflict the damage on any rolls which don't hit the character but would hit on a touch attack roll (ie. which hit the armour or the shield). Eventually, the armour suffers, even through hardness.

I'm trying to attach a zip file which contains my excel 'stat book' sheet. It's all useful aids for running combat, and contains: -

1. A combat roster on which I have details of my PCs and NPCs, so I can tell by looking whether a hit has touched armour, shield, or missed outright.

2. An initiative chart. My group's rececntly taken to rolling 5 initiatives in advance, so when we're surprised, we're REALLY surprised - nobody gets a clue when the DM says 'roll for initiative!' - the NPC initiatives are added at the time of the combat. (I intend to add a column for characters with special search rolls, etc - for instance a dwarf walking down a corridor may deliberately go back over a bit where the DM told him to roll a search. It's metagaming but we all do it... - A pre-rolled table's great - I have 10 rolls, and he'll never know when I'm using them!)

3. My home-made fumble table. Whilst I'm happy with 'critical = double damage', the rules for fumbles aren't clear enough. The one on line at the moment is far too dangerous, and the way we were playing it meant I threw away my sword once every 20 attacks. Not satisfactory.

4. The Chart of Hardness. Hardness and HP details for weapons (from the book) and armour (made up). Note that I've disregarded the rule which states that magical armour can't be damaged by anything unless it has a similar or better bonus. Magic is hard, but not indestructible.

So there we go. I'm also thinking about adding a line of pre-rolled DM dicerolls, although the psychological value of a few dice hitting the screen tells me I probably shouldn't...

Anyway, take a look at 'The Eccles System', and let me know what you think!

 

[Thorvald Kviksverd]

I just inflict the damage on any rolls which don't hit the character but would hit on a touch attack roll (ie. which hit the armour or the shield). Eventually, the armour suffers, even through hardness.

Sounds a lot like Palladium

While I'm not a fan of this--too much bookeeping involved--if I were to implement it, I would probably allow armour to provide a small amount of DR (as the Barbarian ability) on a successful 'hit'--otherwise armour has been made less effective (i.e. it now degrades), without being granted any additional benefit to compensate.

Of course, that might be the very effect you're going for in your campaign--which is perfectly fine

 

[Chacal]

IIRC, we used to have some house rules in 2e about armors.

Each time a character took a hit with a weapon, (or similar attacks), he substracted some points from the damage he
took (a kind of DR/-), and count 1 armor damage point.


An armor had HP equals to 10 times its bonus in points, and every time it lost 10 points it decreased its protection by one unless you had it repaired.
Some really big sized attacks meant more damage: giant 2 , dragon 2, 3 or 4 depending on size.

Magic (or special materials) armor had more points by protection points . I don't remember exactly how many.


The damage reduction was added because we found it boring to have every fighter wearing bracers instead of armor.


We re-introduced this concept in 3e in a simplified way : Medium armor provides
DR 1/ -, and Heavy DR 2/-.

For some reason, we don't use
damaging armor rules anymore.

It was quite unrealistic but very easy to implement and acheived what we wanted :
having the armor destroyed or repaired sometimes.

Chacal

 

[Thorvald Kviksverd]

BTW, you could also check out Hackmaster, they have rules for this as well.