Celebrim
Legend
Any model of weapons and armor is going to have some, because how that actually works is complex and to represent it well requires a level of detail virtually no game wants to engage with. I'll stand by the idea damage absorbing armor as a model has less problems that to-hit-reducing armor the moment you're anything but zoomed way out, though.
It works best when you have an assumption of parity or near parity going on and the only combats that matter are between those near peers. Fundamentally, Star Wars D6 uses the BRP model along with a wound track rather than a small supply of hit points. They work similarly. In both cases, things work out well when you have heavy constraints on the ranges that damage can come in and so can predict the results the armor will achieve and you've heavily constrained the armor that you can obtain. So for example, it works really well in Pendragon between typical foes and Pendragon has a bunch of meta that makes sure that foes will almost always be typical. Or, it works well most of the time in Call of Cthulhu where you have heavily constrained damage and armor on the investigators, but very open-ended amounts of damage and armor on the monsters because well, with investigator versus monster combat you just want investigators to go squish.
But it starts breaking down in situations where the meta is more open ended and anything can fight anything with anything in any situation. Pendragon gets away with it by having a meta where all fights are in armor against things pretty similar to the knight and all the fights happen where being in all that ironmongery makes sense. But that isn't going to work in D&D or generic fantasy, and in particular in addition it's not even HEMA. It's fantasy combat, and not all how armor actually works or is bypassed. In reality armor is bypassed by hitting the chinks in it, and as such a dagger is as good or better than a sword as a finishing blow. Swords don't really do more damage, they keep distance better. So you aren't actually modeling anything more realistic anyway.
One way you deal with it is the way D6 deals with it by having the armor roll also be random. But that adds complexity/time to resolution of combat and it wouldn't work necessarily for BRP/Pendragon where without that consistency combat would get excessively lethal very fast.
But pulling back a bit, regardless of which model you use, it's balanced on an assumption of on average X damage is done to the target in a round. What process of play generates that turns out not to matter all that much except in your head.
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