Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 1386676" data-attributes="member: 537">What is it with this fetish that people have with armour-as-DR?It does not help solve the problem mentioned here, namely lightly armoured people in melee. If anything, it makes it even worse, because most people are going to want heavy armour to soak damage. If you combine this with the VP/WP way of handling crits, then EVERYONE is going to want heavy armour, simply because WP damage is so dangerous.It's not any more realistic than armour-as-AC either. If you have a dagger or a sling, you do not damage someone in full plate by trying to poke a hole in their tin can. You do it by aiming for weak spots like the joints, the eyes, etc. Ie, you take a penalty to hit in return for the chance of doing damage -- a bonus to AC, in other words. There are just as many tradeoffs involved in armour-as-DR as there are in armour-as-AC, they're just in different places.It scales horribly to different sizes of creature, at least if you want to give characters some semblance of a fighting chance. Giving a guy in full plate lots of DR to represent their imperviousness to sword blows is fine. Now try doing the same thing with a 50' long dragon. You might say that it's entirely plausible that a 50' long dragon is going to shrug off most blows from a 3' sword blade, but that makes for a pretty boring game. Unless you never intend for PCs to fight dragons and giants, but if so, you're throwing away much of what makes D&amp;D, D&amp;D.To some extent you can fix all these problems by making Power Attack (or some modification thereof) an option available to everybody: by taking a penalty to attacks, representing aiming for weak spots, you can gain a bonus to damage. A called shot option, in other words. But if you do that, you're just back to armour-as-AC.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="hong, post: 1386676, member: 537"] What is it with this fetish that people have with armour-as-DR? It does not help solve the problem mentioned here, namely lightly armoured people in melee. If anything, it makes it even worse, because most people are going to want heavy armour to soak damage. If you combine this with the VP/WP way of handling crits, then EVERYONE is going to want heavy armour, simply because WP damage is so dangerous. It's not any more realistic than armour-as-AC either. If you have a dagger or a sling, you do not damage someone in full plate by trying to poke a hole in their tin can. You do it by aiming for weak spots like the joints, the eyes, etc. Ie, you take a penalty to hit in return for the chance of doing damage -- a bonus to AC, in other words. There are just as many tradeoffs involved in armour-as-DR as there are in armour-as-AC, they're just in different places. It scales horribly to different sizes of creature, at least if you want to give characters some semblance of a fighting chance. Giving a guy in full plate lots of DR to represent their imperviousness to sword blows is fine. Now try doing the same thing with a 50' long dragon. You might say that it's entirely plausible that a 50' long dragon is going to shrug off most blows from a 3' sword blade, but that makes for a pretty boring game. Unless you never intend for PCs to fight dragons and giants, but if so, you're throwing away much of what makes D&D, D&D. To some extent you can fix all these problems by making Power Attack (or some modification thereof) an option available to everybody: by taking a penalty to attacks, representing aiming for weak spots, you can gain a bonus to damage. A called shot option, in other words. But if you do that, you're just back to armour-as-AC. [/QUOTE]

Verification