Okay, so...I like the swiftness and ease of abstract AC and Hit Points in D&D...and I'm no stickler for realism in RPG's...

However the problem I have is that the assumption of heavy armors in the game math sort of shoehorns the game into a pseudo-medieval setting and makes it difficult to model games based on other time periods, say like the French Revolution or the Old West, where plate mail has been made obsolete.

For this reason I'm ruminating on the old idea of armor as damage reduction rather than hit evasion.

I've pretty much seen damage reduction handled in two ways...either the defender rolls to soak the attackers damage, or the attacker rolls damage against the defenders static "soak" value.

What I've been considering, mostly as a thought exercise, is a third method wherein characters start with the same baseline for hit points, and armor simply adds to your HP total.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, say your character has 10HP to start...

Wearing no armor, the character has a total of 10HP.

Wearing heavy armor, the character has a total of 15HP.

I see two potential problems, one is that this system pretty much assumes that the character is armored all the time, meaning they'd have to refigure their HP everytime they go to bed, or get dressed up for the duke's grand ball.

The other is one of verisimilitude...as most magic effects seem to attack characters internally, rather than externally like a sword or axe blow would. So if the character is taking 5 damage from poison every round, it doesn't make sense for that to eat away at the HP granted by armor.

I'm wondering...has anyone seen anything like this used in an actual game...and if so, how did it work out?

Not really, Kevin Seimbieda solved this one a long time ago.

You just have the armor take damage first.  The character and the armor's hit points are separate.

I used something similar in Incandescent, which you can see here on a thread down the board a bit.  Armor has a maximum number of hit points it can absorb from a single hit and a total number of points it can absorb before being destroyed.  Most of the time it will mean that you take some hit point damage but the armor prevents you from taking significant amounts of wound damage from a single hit.

In Cosmothea, poison, disease and other aspects that at least IMO shouldn't be regulated by how well you swing your sword, are handled using a different mechanic, so the system you suggest wouldn't be an issue to incorporate, from that standpoint at least.

If you want armor to have hit points, then you can simply apply the armor hit points to the attack first (as mentioned), but don't apply it if the attack is an internal attack. Hence, if you are poisoned, it bypasses the armor's hit points.

I've actually mulled over armor hit points before as a possible alternative in Cosmothea, but there's more to it all than what has been discussed so far (what does the damage do to the armor, for example, and how criticals are handled, armor repair, etc.).

I wasn't actually looking at armor breakage rules or anything like that...I'm okay with a high level of abstraction.

Really what I'm after is an easy way to portray armor as dmage reduction, without splitting it off into a complicated subsystem.

Question --

Since armor is taking damage, is it a perishable?  How is the diminishing HP of the armor justified?  It makes sense in terms of things like ceramic bulletproof vests or Kevlar, where the more hits it takes, it degrades, but then the armor is pretty-much useless afterward because of its weakened state.

Well, you may want to consider the Vitality and Wounds system from D20 Star Wars, Revised and the 3.5 D&D Unearthed Arcana (p. 115).  Just assign the power armor a Vitality total.  Any damage is subtracted from the power armor's Vitality total, and then once that reaches zero any further damage goes directly to the character's Vitality and Wound points.  Repairing the power armor restores its Vitality points.

I wasn't suggesting further complication of the system, just trying to indicate that the issue would benefit from explanation within the rules, which may or may not make additional rules appropriate. Regardless, the suggestion to simply allow things like poison to bypass it is sound and simple.

Personally, I always prefer to give a sense of realism, but make the fun factor much more important than the realism factor.

Quote from: Peregrin;423478Question --

Since armor is taking damage, is it a perishable?  How is the diminishing HP of the armor justified?  It makes sense in terms of things like ceramic bulletproof vests or Kevlar, where the more hits it takes, it degrades, but then the armor is pretty-much useless afterward because of its weakened state.

If we were looking at things as being wholly realistic, then of course armor would be subject to some manner of ablation as it is taking damage. However, most fantasy games I've played assume that characters are performing the necessary maintanance on armor and weapons during downtime.

Another thought I had is to put a cap on exactly how much damage a character can be healed, similar to the new Gamma World, where you can be healed up to 1/2 your HP total each encounter, and once inbetween. This would help model the degrading nature of man and metal without adding any extra minutiae.

However, I don't recall D&D ever accounting for what happens to one's possesions when they are hit with a fireball.

RPG's generally do a piss poor job of modelling reality.

My idea, mostly as a thought exercise, was how I could portray armor as something that increases one's ability to take damage, in the easiest and most condensed way possible.

To me, having armor simply give a character more hit points is the easiest way to do it, but that of course doesn't stand up to close scrutiny from the whole realism perspective...which I agree should at least get a token nod in the design of a game even if it isn't one of the driving goals.

Quote from: Shazbot79;423506However, I don't recall D&D ever accounting for what happens to one's possesions when they are hit with a fireball.

RPG's generally do a piss poor job of modelling reality.

Actually, they get saving throws.  I think AD&D talks about it a bit, though I'm not sure if that part of the rules was ever modeled in 3e.

Agreed on part 2, there.  Although maintaining armor in the same way that a cleric "maintains" the party may be a good use for a craft skill or feats.

That, or maybe any healing done to the player stacks on their natural health first, and then extra healing power overflows into the armor.

Quote from: Peregrin;423547Actually, they get saving throws.  I think AD&D talks about it a bit, though I'm not sure if that part of the rules was ever modeled in 3e.
.

You roll saves for your items if you roll a 1 on your own save.

Quote from: Shazbot79;423471I wasn't actually looking at armor breakage rules or anything like that...I'm okay with a high level of abstraction.

Really what I'm after is an easy way to portray armor as damage reduction, without splitting it off into a complicated subsystem.

(Necroing an old thread).

Are you thinking of how armor is done in the mid-1990's video game Quake, and/or the early-2000's game "Grand Theft Auto 3"?

I was playing Quake earlier and noticed that armor functioned very much like hit points.


A few weeks ago I was playing "Grand Theft Auto III" and "Grand Theft Auto - Vice City".  It just dawned on me that armor in GTA3 and GTA-VC functions very much like hit points.

In GTA, full health without armor is 100.  Armor just adds on another 100 hit points, which gives a total of 200 "hit points".  When one sustains damage, it gets deducted first from the 100 armor hit points.  Once the 100 armor hit points are gone, then it starts deducting damage from the 100 health hit points.

The case of damage being deducted directly from health hit points directly regardless of how high the armor hit points are, is usually stuff like drowning in water in Grand Theft Auto.  (The main character can't swim).

Quote from: Shazbot79;423506I don't recall D&D ever accounting for what happens to one's possesions when they are hit with a fireball.

Saving throws. AD&D1e DMG p.80.

Quote from: Shazbot79RPG's generally do a piss poor job of modelling reality.

"Circumstantial adjustments" on the following page may be of interest to those speaking of realism; the GM needs to use their judgment, as usual in older games.

In the computer game Mount & Blade, armour, weapons and so on are given descriptors like "battered hauberk" and "tattered padded armour" and "heavy balanced longsword." These descriptors act as modifiers to the statistics of the item in question, and of course affect its price.

It's like having "wound levels" for items, and of course wound levels are just a hit point system with few hit points. After a combat in which your armour either saved you from a vicious blow, or in which you were knocked down despite the armour, it might be "battered" or "tattered", lessening its protective value - but of course its encumbrance remains the same. So your few scraps of mail provide as much protection as your intact padded leather, while weighing more - so you wear the leather, or get the mail repaired at a cost.

Quote from: Shazbot79;423506My idea, mostly as a thought exercise, was how I could portray armor as something that increases one's ability to take damage, in the easiest and most condensed way possible.

To me, having armor simply give a character more hit points is the easiest way to do it, but that of course doesn't stand up to close scrutiny from the whole realism perspective...which I agree should at least get a token nod in the design of a game even if it isn't one of the driving goals.

Probably the easiest way, since you don't have a problem with abstraction, is to simply grant damage reduction of some value for the armour.

The big problem using that in D&D is that the entire combat system is predicated on armour making things more difficult to hit.  Getting around that is going to be where things get sticky.  Off the top of my head, you could use HD or level as some kind of modifier or base to-hit, or perhaps the difference in HD or level between opponents.  A combination of the two wouldn't be entirely unworkable, either, but that might raise complaints of double-dipping.  If plate armour provides a high AC and damage reduction of eight or ten points, things can get out of hand with the few hits that actually connect being absorbed by the DR.  This works for the PCs and against them as, well; the Fighter or Cleric become nigh invincible, making it virtually impossible to avoid TPKs from moderately higher level monsters/NPCs, while at the same time removing any real threat to the PCs.  When the PCs and NPCs are of roughly equal level, it is the recipe for an endless session of combat.

For a quick, easy solution, I would say just give armors hit point values. The players record it separately from their usual hitpoints. When the PC is wearing armor and is hit, the player can choose to apply it to their armor, or their hitpoints, or divide it between the two, as they like. If armor reaches 0 hp, it's ruined. Make some simple rule about how damaged armor can be repaired, and you're done.

The only hitch I see is exactly the point Kyle made, about how it screws with D&D's statistical assumptions.

Quote from: two_fishes;441819For a quick, easy solution, I would say just give armors hit point values. The players record it separately from their usual hitpoints. When the PC is wearing armor and is hit, the player can choose to apply it to their armor, or their hitpoints, or divide it between the two, as they like. If armor reaches 0 hp, it's ruined. Make some simple rule about how damaged armor can be repaired, and you're done.

The only hitch I see is exactly the point Kyle made, about how it screws with D&D's statistical assumptions.

That's how Palladium does it. That's how I do it in my home brew.