Remember the glory days of Unearthed Arcana when Full and Field Plate absorbed damage?

Ahhh.... the air was sweeter back then. The sky... more blue.

What type of mechanic one uses to represent armor also needs to account for how damage is done in the system.

Do you roll for damage? A sword does 1d6 dmg

Or is damage a fixed value? A sword does 3 damage + degrees of success on attack roll?

Is the attack roll done just to hit? or does it have an affect on damage done like in some diepool systems?

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1107186This is where D&D's deflection approach also has an edge over soak-based approaches, even most hit location-based soak mechanics, as they too generally fail to address deliberate hit placement at soft spots.

Most? RQ and the BRP family do. BoL does. Star Wars D6 does. That's a limited sample but it covers a wide range of settings and systems. What systems are there that don't provide for greater skill penetrating armor more frequently?

Quote from: Bren;1107318Most? RQ and the BRP family do. BoL does. Star Wars D6 does. That's a limited sample but it covers a wide range of settings and systems. What systems are there that don't provide for greater skill penetrating armor more frequently?

Ah yeah, you're referring to critical successes on the attack roll bypassing armour. Sure, you can take that into account. Fair enough. KotBL does that too. And I suppose there's also called shots in various systems, which are of course more feasible choices with a high skill. But that's not what I had in mind when I wrote the above.

I was just thinking that in most systems there is no direct correlation (other than the above) to defeating armour. Like, in WFRP, you reverse the attack roll percentile dice to determine hit location. But it's entirely random. It's not that higher skill allows you to select an unarmored location. In Hârnmaster 1E, it's also random, although you can make called shots at specific body regions. But it's not becoming increasingly likely to hit unarmored locations as you grow more skillful.

I guess the combination of critical attacks and called shots in various systems is a sufficient abstraction to avoid having to build a more complex model.

Quote from: Jaeger;1107304What type of mechanic one uses to represent armor also needs to account for how damage is done in the system.

What if damage is not expressed as a simple numeric value?

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1107355Ah yeah, you're referring to critical successes on the attack roll bypassing armour. Sure, you can take that into account. Fair enough. KotBL does that too. And I suppose there's also called shots in various systems, which are of course more feasible choices with a high skill. But that's not what I had in mind when I wrote the above.

Me either.

In Runequest and some versions of BRP your chance to get an armor ignoring hit or an increased damage hit (which is more likely to penetrate armor) is directly proportional to your skill level, unlike most D20 systems. And in RQ there are also ways to target a specific location. It's actually a problem for Humakti who had a geas not to wear armor on some location.

In Pendragon highly skilled characters have an increased chance to critical over the usual 5% chance that less skilled characters have. I don't recall if there is a way to bypass armor other than a critical hit.

In Honor & Intrigue you can use the Called Shot maneuver to attack a location or bypass the armor. (Note: anyone can attempt the maneuver, but your chance to succeed is heavily affected by your combat ability, with an additional bonus if you have mastered Called Shot.

Called Shot: You attack for a vital area, or the gap
in the opponent's armor. This attack takes a penalty
to hit of up to -4. For each point of penalty, you do
+1 damage on a successful hit. A Called Shot can
instead bypass armor with a -1 Penalty to avoid Light
armor and a -3 to avoid Heavy armor (a helmet adds
another -1 to the penalty).