Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sir Brennen" data-source="post: 2744056" data-attributes="member: 553">Warning: I like to italicize for emphasis.Yes, I'm aware of the limits on things that are affected by criticals.  I was just trying to find a mechanic to tie damaging armor into other than Sunder.  And as an axe would be more effective at hacking up armor than a sword, basing the damage to the crit multiplier seemed to make sense, too (*but see below.) However, It's not really a "critical" on the armor, just an extra effect tied to a crit result which would let you damage the armor at all.  In a sense, this would allow someone who has specialized in feats/weapons to maximize crits to not be totally nerfed when fighting a blackguard vampire (for example.)  They may not be able to do normal crit damage, but they still have a chance to damage his armor.However, there are precidents in the game for doing critical/precision-based damage to targets normally immune in the form of feats and PrC abilities.(The following  is drifting into the "should/should not use the mechanic" discussion, and I apologize up front for that, but bear with me...)The issue I have is that while I think the mechanic sounds OK, there are problems with the concept, as others have mentioned as well.  Really, ANY attack roll is an attempt to either cut through (sunder) the target's armor or bypass it to do damage to the flesh underneath. In a life and death fight where you've taken damage, your armor should having some denting and puncturing, possibly with some broken straps/clasps/ties, and perhaps even a missing piece or two.  Even cinematically, think of all the movies where a hero has to chuck some part of his armor away because damage has caused it to be more of a hinderance than protection.None of these scenarios, however, involve someone specifically targetting just the armor and not the person underneath.  In game, I can think of no logical, realistic reason why (or how) someone would do this, or even a reason to have the mechanic at all, other than for the sense of parallelism with sundering weapons.  Even that breaks down, because sundering weapons usually involves striking at a narrow, single target like a blade or haft, where armor is spread out all over the target's body, and tightly up against it (as someone else mentioned.)  It's even worse for natural armor, tho I would think you wouldn't allow a Sunder attempt against that.  However, a method which takes into account that armor usually does receive some damage during combat I think is fine, and there are some game systems which do that (I believe it's an option presented in GURPS, for example, though usually applied to just shields.)  These often involve alot more bookkeeping, tho.Such a system should be tied to some other mechanic which causes the armor damage to happen just often enough to be interesting, and not something open to player abuse.  Again, my own house rules tie this damage to a Fumble result; Crits are another possibility, though I always kind of envisioned criticals as bypassing armor. But you could have it so a failed confirmation roll indicates normal weapon damage to target + normal weapon damage to the armor, because the armor blocked the potiential critical. Again, note that it doesn't matter if the target is immune to crit damage - you still have the confirmation roll to see if the armor was damaged (and this mechanic would apply to natural armor.)* Different types of weapons would also damage armor differently.  An arrow would only make a small hole (but small deep holes are bad for living things, hence an arrow's high crit mutiplier.)  Again, this isn't as critical on smaller targets like weapons, but for armor you might want to have piercing weapons do x0.5 damage, bludgeoning x1, and slashing x1.5.  In addition (or instead of), you could tie weapon type in again to crit threats, with piercing only doing armor damage on a natural 2 (since a 1 is always a miss), bludgeoning on a 2-3, slashing on a 2-4.Also re: magic bonus HP.  I think you have to keep the increased HP for these bonuses; just make the magic AC bonus the last to go.  After the armor has taken 5xAC in damage, the magical enhancement bonus is the only thing keeping it together.Another potential issue I see is creature size.  Armor for a Huge creature has 20hp per AC point.  A Small creature's armor (like a PC gnome or halfling) only has 2.5 HP per AC point.  Every size increment away from Medium changes armor HP by a factor of 2.  So much for keeping it simple.</blockquote>

Verification