How to make armor piercing maces, flails, picks?

[RangerWickett]

In historical battle, swords were great against flesh, but you wanted concentrated swinging force to get through armor. Picks, flails, and maces were better against plate armor than swords.

I'm trying to come up with a way to model this, with minimal rules complication.

My first thought was to change picks a bit:

Light War Pick, loses high-crit, gains armor piercing 1.
Heavy War Pick, loses high-crit, gains armor piercing 2.

Armor piercing says that if the attack targets AC and misses, but hits Reflex, the weapon deals its armor piercing value.

As for mace and morningstar and flails, maybe reduce their damage die by 1 and give them AP 1. Heavy versions thereof gets AP 2.


But that seems weak and fiddly to me. Any ideas?

 

[keterys]

Reducing damage die by 1, in exchange for AP 1, is a bit of a losing proposition.

It's an interesting idea, but I'd suggest throwing it on some monsters and seeing how well it works on the players, whether it slows play down, etc. I've played with monsters that targeted 'AC or Reflex, whichever was better' before and it did slow play some, and this would slow it quite a bit more.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, then the issue is going to be "which types of armor does this really help against?". 1e and 2e had these kinds of rules and they were essentially totally ignored by AFAIK 100% of players. It just doesn't add that much to the game vs the work involved.

Mechanically it seems to me your proposal on average would give "Armor Piercing" weapons a +2 to-hit, but since the AP damage is so small that will add insignificantly to damage. Assuming you can hit AC on 10 and REF on 8 an Armor Piercing 1 weapon would do on average 0.1 DPR more damage than an otherwise identical weapon. High crit is worth more than that, so is brutal 1. Each reduction of one damage die is worth about 0.5 DPR, so really there isn't anything you can remove from the weapon that is trivial enough to balance against Armor Piercing.

Personally I think its too trivial to bother with, and D&D combat is unrealistic enough now that any minor "realism patch" IMHO isn't going to change that noticeably.

 

[RangerWickett]

Maybe "If it hits Ref, but misses AC, it does half damage. Three-fourths damage if the attack normally deals 1/2 on a miss."

 

[keterys]

Or make it work more like Hammer Rhythm.

 

[RoyalB]

What about this? If you roll 10+ and miss, you add the armor piercing damage. This would not take that much time to track. It would also have the effect of becoming more beneficial as enemy AC goes up. I think it would cool to add the armor piercing to any miss damage. As far as making the weapons lose something to gain Armor Piercing, you could probably just add it to liven up the maces and picks.

 

[LostSoul]

Basic melee attacks target Ref instead of AC?

Maybe some feats to make it better?

 

[willows]

Referencing two defences instead of one is going to create a disproportionate amount of handling time in play.

Maybe try, "Apply the wearer's armor check penalty to his AC against AP weapons." It's very simple and clean, and relatively easy to handle.

 

[Alex319]

Referencing two defences instead of one is going to create a disproportionate amount of handling time in play.

Maybe try, "Apply the wearer's armor check penalty to his AC against AP weapons." It's very simple and clean, and relatively easy to handle.

Monsters don't have listed armor check penalties.

 

[keterys]

How about make them go through resistance to damage instead? It's not quite the same, but has a similar feel.