Armor Implementation

[Script Wrecked]

One thing I've always liked the sound of (and I thought it had been posted previously, but I haven't been able to find it, so I'm posting it again), instead of armor making you harder "to hit", armor reduces weapon damage.

However, instead of a flat rate of damage reduction, which makes the wearer invulnerable to weapons which do less damage than the armor's damage reduction, the armor damage reduction works the same way as the weapon damage. Each time the armor is hit, the damage reduction is rolled in the same way the damage is rolled for each time the weapon strikes.

With one further modfication, the minimum damage reduction is zero, rather than the minimum damage of one. Again, this is to prevent a level of invulnerability.

So, armor damage reduction would look something like:

AC1 padded    0-1
AC2 leather   0-2
...
AC4 scale     0-4
...
AC8 fullplate 0-8

So, instead of you being invulnerable to dagger damage (1-4) when wearing scale armor (AC4), its actually balanced against it.

And against full plate, though the dagger has a much harder time of it, it still has a chance to do damage.

This then gives armor a different property than to making you harder to be hit; dexterity modifications and better armor are no longer accomplishing the same thing.

Also, perhaps whatever mechanism is used to increase weapon damage (such as strength modifications) only actually increases the maximum damage done, rather than guaranteeing a mininum +X points of damage.

Regards,

Script Wrecked.

[Script Wrecked]

I don't know if anything like "critical hits" is being implemented; the following assumes they are, working from how they are currently implemented.

I was thinking a good property for helms to implement would be critical hit threat band reduction, rather than just improving your concentration. Being hit about the head is, pretty critical.

Of course, because the threat bands are being reduced by helms, all the weapons' base threat bands would have to be increased. This then becomes the "penalty" for not wearing your helmet (this may or may not be a level of realism that you want to include).

If you wanted to distinguish between helms (closed faced, complete) and helmets (open faced, partial), the helms could reduce the threat band by two, the helmet by one. Sorry, you don't actually get any protection from that hood.

On the downside, a helm would actually restrict visibility and audibility, with possible modifications to search, spot, listen, and at the more extreme end, initiative and "to hit".

Regards,

Script Wrecked.

[stragen]

I like this the more I look at it. I was going to post my version of damage reduction and damage conversion. But it's pretty convoluted. The beauty of what script wrecked has suggested is it's simplicity.