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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4995042" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's a fair description.  However, I'll warn you ahead of time that if you continue to go down this path of non-abstract mechanics you'll get as clunky as GURPS (or worse).  The problem is really simple.  The more you try to make your game mechanics match the real world action that you are arbitrating, the more you run up into the problem that the real world is complicated and clunky. But anyway... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Yeah, I could design one and I've seen some other attempts.  The problem I ran into designing mine was it was only balanced at low levels.  Various problems start to happen with called shots at high levels.  One is that D&D likes having big impressive monsters.  But big impressive monsters depend on having a huge natural armor bonus and massive reserves of hit points to survive and be consistant challenges.  What happens when you can target eyes or feet/locomotion of the monster and cripple it so that afterwards, its just a matter of attrition?  And you bring into the game one of GURPS worst combat features - the combat death spiral (after the first blow, the longer the combat goes the less equal it is).I've seen peicemeal armor systems since OA and none of them really work.  If you try to assemble the peices into a single score, you quickly run into a problem.  Either the contribution of a single peice is so low that it doesn't contribute anything (which means you have the same AC whether you wear it or not) or else if everything contributes its very easy to create a suit with AC that vastly exceeds what you could do with a single whole suit.  If on the other hand, you try to avoid this with a called shot system so that you only have to worry about the attributes of a single peice, you risk a situation were the character is crippled by his weakest peice either because you can kill someone by hitting any unarmored part of him ("I strike his foot and deal lethal damage!") or else you can cripple them by attacking and easily disabling their smallest weakest features ("I cut off his hands!"). Armor as DR works essentially as a filter that makes you immune to 'bad hits', but doesn't protect you much against good hits.  The combination of frequent criticals and exploding criticals allows armor as DR to represent something other than invincibility.  The first problem with this is that you quickly realize armor as AC accomplishes much the same thing more simply.  The second problem with this is that it makes the game more swingy.One of my least favorite mechanics of all time, precisely because it works just as I've described armor as DR working.  Random DR does help because you can then reduce the randomness in damage and hense the swinginess, but it comes at the cost of adding another die roll and another bit of variable arithmatic and slowing the game down.D&D flirted briefly with armor as hitpoints in 1e.  I think the real problem with it is that it increases the complexity of the game.   Now you have to keep track of not just how how much healing you recieve, but how much healing your armor recieves.Yes, it would, because it would give you granularity that you couldn't have otherwise.  Of course, on the other hand, armor has HP also abandons realism, in as much as putting on your gloves protects you from blows to the chest.I assumed that.  Doesn't solve the problem though. I'm already doing that.  You get 8 hit points just for being a medium creature in my game.  It does alot to solve the 'House Cat vs. Commoner' problem (also resolved by the fact that the tiny cat's fine claws do natural nonlethal damage to medium creatures), balances smaller creatures with larger ones (medium is the suckiest size to be in the RAW) and makes low level play more survivable.  On the other hand, I'm unhappy now that low level characters can no longer kill each other with single blows barring a lucky critical (they can't even reduce the other to dying, much less instant kill them).  When average humans have 11 hit points, suddenly the 1d8 damage from a longsword or arrow no longer seems that threatening.  It harms the 'casual realism' of the game at low levels, but it seems a reasonable trade off. Doesn't really matter.  Let's say your average character has 22 hitpoints - period.   Maximum damage for a level 1 arrow is 24.  Even if we drastically reduce the damage as level increases, we still quickly overwhelm wound points, with the result of making the game more swingy and deaths occuring more unpredictably.  I simply don't believe you can change the game enough to prevent 30 to 50 points of damage in a single from being a regular thing at higher levels. Sure, a degree of success system would solve the problem, but it vastly increases the complexity of your mental calculations at each step and would force you to totally revise half of the games feats and combat subsystems.  You'd probably also need to make base hit points a multiple of constitution to compensate.  And remember how you were complaining about how clunky GURPS is?   Or, you could make some assumptions and just simplify things.  If the simplier system produces roughly the same number in the overwhelming number of situations, go with the simplier system even if there isn't an intuitive 1:1 relationship between the number and and the factors that contribute to it anymore. They resolve some problems with high level play at the cost of possibly giving everyone more excuse to do math before attacking. I would recommend that.  And defense bonus would almost certainly have to mitigate incidental damage in some fashion, otherwise spellcasters (weak hp progression) would benefit to much compared to fighter types.</blockquote>

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