Way for armor to eat damage, w/o armor = DR.

[BASHMAN]

I never liked the idea of armor making you harder to hit-- I have always thought that armor should eat damage. But the recent Mike Mearls thing on why they didn't want to use Armor as DR in 4.0 made sense too. I think I have come up with something that won't add time to the combat round, but also makes armor mitigate damage as well. Btw-- I posted this as a comment on the Mearls thread, but since this would work in 3.x or any edition, I figured it could have its own thread here:

Armor increases your HP. Leather armor +10%, Chain +25% and Plate +50%. So a guy w/ 40HP in leather has 44HP, 50 in chain, and 60 in plate. Heck, the % could even be twice as high and I'd have no problem w/ it. Leather +20% Chain +50% and Plate +100%.
Putting on armor would not heal you. Suppose a guy is down to 20 / 40 HP w/o armor, then puts on a suit of plate mail (lets assume the +50% model not the +100%). He goes from 20 to 30 hp (+50% of his current HP).
If you get healed by someone, increase the ammount of the healing by the same %. So a spell that heals 3d8+3 damage (24 ave) would heal x1.5 on someone in plate (36 on the person in plate on ave). Why? Because otherwise armor would make you take more spells to heal you up, and that is dumb. It'd be like the spells are healing the armor.
I realize this would mean that armor would soak damage from spells. Who cares. A guy wearing a metal shell has more protection vs. a fireball than someone wearing a tunic anyway.

Now if using % system is too complex it could just be extra HP/die. Light armor +1/die, medium +2/die, heavy +4/die. So in the 40 hp character example, assuming 4HD, in light he would have 44HP, 48 in medium, and 56 in heavy.
Dealing w/ healing and injured people putting on armor is more clunky doing it this way as you'd have to figure out % of HP difference the armor would grant before figuring the effects as above. I think the straight % method works best myself.

Thoughts?

 

[Sylrae]

I like this armor system better, youd just need percentages for all the armor types. The problem, however lies in the time for calculations and what to do about like +1 Magic Armor.

This Idea is kindof comparable to my thought on LA creatures. LA is to cancel out abilitied by not giving hit dice or skills etc. What if you want a race where its big ability is more hit points. IE: A treefolk gets more hit points and DR.

Really, maybe all races should have HD modifiers. A Con Mod effects this sortof. But what if you want percentage bonuses. like the bonus hitpoints for a mage would be less than the bonus hitpoints than a fighter.

Extra Hitpoints for Armor is how its done in Final Fantasy tactics, and I thought it was a great Idea. cause who does a better job of dodging while in Plate Mail than naked.

I dont think hit points should be as abstract either. if you do damage that should be physical damage, not tiring the opponent out + physical damage. The Fighter taks a smaller percentage of the fireball damage than another mage because hes tougher and because he has more skill in the department of defending himself (getting out of the way enough to take a smaller amount (percentage wise over his total) of damage.

HereHere Epoch. Lets fix our D&D Discrepancies

 

[BASHMAN]

Oh, yeah, magic armor gives +5% or +10% per +1 bonus.

So here is my suggestion if you want armor to make a big difference. Note that this is also easier math than dealing with increments of 5%.

Full Plate = +100%
Plate Mail = +80%
Field Plate = +70%
Banded = +60%
Chain Mail = +50%
Scale Mail = +40%
Studded Leather = +30%
Leather =+20%
Padded = +10%

So we have a fighter with 36 HP and 3HD.
In Full plate he has 72 HP
In Banded he has 58 HP
In Scale he has 51
In padded he has 40

Btw-- Shields would not give HP, but make you harder to hit.

Now he is severly wounded in his Full plate, taken down to 10HP. He takes it off to catch a breather-- so his HP drops to 5. Taking off armor never lowers HP below 1.

He gets healed w/o armor for 2d8+3 resulting in 10 and his HP increases to 15. Then he puts the Full Plate back on. His HP is now 30. He gets healed for another 2d8+3 resulting in 10 on the roll-- so his HP increases by 20 to 50 (remember +100% to the healing as well).

That night, he goes to bed in the inn, taking off his Full Plate-- his 50HP drops to 25.

The next day, he has healed up to 35-- nearly max HP [btw, I'd say you cannot heal naturally while wearing armor in your sleep, or reverse the bonus healing effect so Full plate would reduce it by 100%, chain by 50%, and leather by 20%, etc]. Finding his armor missing, he just puts on his padded undercoat when he heads down to breakfast. HP goes to 39. The cleric sees him and uses a cure minor to bring him up to maximum-- 40 HP in the case of his padded-- the extra 10% of healing is wasted this time...

But as we can see, it isn't that much of a big deal to work with, I think...

 

[Nifft]

IMHO, armor should give a fixed number of HP. Also, armor can turn lethal damage into non-lethal (except crits, of course).

I prefer one level up in terms of complexity. This is how I'm re-doing Leather armor, for example:

Leather (clothing, no proficiency required, no penalty to spellcasting or skill checks, except Swim)
Leather armor is damaged by Slashing attacks
DR 2/piercing; max Dodge bonus to AC +8
Hardness 4; 20 hp
Threshold 8; 3 condition levels

This means:
- Piercing attacks ignore leather armor.
- Slashing and bludgeoning attacks deal nonlethal damage, except on a critical hit. Since leather armor is damaged by slashing attacks, on a critical hit with a slashing attack, the leather armor eats half the damage (minus 4 for Hardness).
- Any slashing attack which deals more than 12 points of damage to the armor or its wearer (Hardness + Damage Threshold) moves the leather armor one point down on its condition track.
- Leather armor which takes more than 20 hp of damage, or which suffers more than 3 "damage levels" (on its condition track), is effectively destroyed and rendered useless.

I'm only getting away with this level of complexity because I've reduced armor to basically 5 types. Leather, chain shirt, breastplate, scale armor (or piecemeal) and fullplate.

Cheers, -- N

 

[erf_beto]

IMHO, armor should give a fixed number of HP.

Final Fantasy Tactics (yes, the video game) did that. But I don't remember what happens when you equip armor in the middle of the fight... I guess only your MaxHP changes...

Why not track the character's and the armor's bonus HPs separatly? Players or DM choose between damaging themselves or the armor, or the armor always go first (and maybe every chunk of hp taken from the equipment diminushes its AC bonus). Once the Armor's HP are depleted, the item is ruined and you must get another or at every trip to town you go to a blacksmith to repair your stuff. Healing only recovers your own HP, but skill checks and/or specific magic repairs armor HP... only problem is armor will go down easy... unless every time you reach armor HP zero the armor permanently loses +1, even after repaired.

Now, if we rename 'armor hp' to Durability... I know, that's sooo Diablo

 

[wolfpunk]

In essence, what you are proposing is that armor class no longer adds to your AC, instead is adds a certain amount of hit points to your life total.

If you that is correct, here are a couple of ideas.

Perhaps armor has a threshold, meaning, if your opponents beats your AC by this amount, the damage goes straight to your HP total and bypasses the armor's hit points. Easily enough, this could be done by just taking the AC bonus that the armor would normal provide and using that. So in essence you would have a base AC if you beat that you hurt the armor, and a threshold AC if you beat that you get hurt.

The other benefit to this is, it may actually even out the debate between light armor dexterous fighter, and heavy armor tank fighter. Since there would be no AC bonus per say, you would really wear whatever armor made more sense, light armor if your dex is high, sure you don't get as many hit points, and more then likely when you get hit you are going to take the brunt of the damage but you will be less likely to be hit because of your higher dex based AC.

A fighter in full plate is going to get hit more, but is less likely to be hit in a way that completely bypasses the armor. The fighter can sit there and take a few hits at least without worrying about getting killed.

How does repairing armor work?

 

[Simia Saturnalia]

IMHO, armor should give a fixed number of HP. Also, armor can turn lethal damage into non-lethal (except crits, of course).

I prefer one level up in terms of complexity. This is how I'm re-doing Leather armor, for example:
(snips)
Cheers, -- N

Your newsletter. Let me subscribe to it.

This idea looks admirably suited to my new E6 obsession (and spares me redoing armor myself ). If you're inclined to share, PM? I'll tidy the formatting myself.

 

[Nifft]

Your newsletter. Let me subscribe to it.

This idea looks admirably suited to my new E6 obsession (and spares me redoing armor myself ). If you're inclined to share, PM? I'll tidy the formatting myself.

It's part of my huge Saga-ization of D&D project. Hopefully details around Christmas / New Year.

Cheers, -- N

 

[domino]

Rather than adding HP, wouldn't it be simpler, especially when it comes to things like switching armors, or taking them off, or putting more on, to reduce damage by x% rather than a specific number?

Leather reduces damage taken from 100% to 90% or 95%, and so on? That way, your HP always remains the same, and you don't have to worry about recalculating things, or whether healing magic will heal only normal HP, or HP+armor HP, or what.

Using your padded =10% more, Full Plate =100% more, it would work if Padded armor reduced damage by 5%, and Full Plate by half, with what would work out to be the same effectiveness in terms of damage done/death.

 

[Eidalac]

If you are wanting to reduce damage, just use DR. Figuring %'s would be a pain to do on every single hit.

While the proposed armor systems do have a degree of complexity, the bulk of it only takes place when donning/removing armor, not on every combat blow.

I much prefer Nifft's ideas, mostly because of the static HP increase not affecting healing the way the % system does.