Armor hourse rules: any test experiences?

[Elmoth]

hello all!

We are about to start a new TOR dcampaign, so I would like your collective thoughts on a long debated topuic (arise thou, dead horse!).

Armor and its usefulness has been debated before, and looking at the forum I can find several suggestions for house rules. What I am interested is in knowing what direct expertiences people have with said house rules. We are unsure if this is something that needs fixing. I have played TOR in the past without any house rules here, and while armor was not used a lot, it *was* used when the PC expected heavy fighting as an integral part of the adventrue (like th Celduin crossing) instead of travelling light.

My own concern is that you either invest in *real* armor (3D at the minimum) or you are better off without any armor at all. And the heavy armour is quite heavy for the general usefulness you ge tout of it.
My Loremaster's impression is that armor is simply not used at all. What is the general impression around here? In LOTR and the hobbit, characters carry few if any armor while tyravelling (what companies generally do) so not having prevalent armor does not seem a problem to me, but other people have different ideas here

Our Loremaster is suggesting a HR that says "decrease the Edge of all weapons in the game by 1 point". Is that too much? Does it make armouir worthwile? ANY armor or only the heavy ones?
Any other tested ideas?

Thanks!

Cheers,
Xavi

[Rich H]

I created some house rules for the heavier armour to be used in combination with each other. I'll collect them up when I can and summarise here or you can just wade through all my houserule documents in the link in my signature.

[Falenthal]

I played for a long time with a HR that said:

Reduce the Endurance lost by the armour rating -2.
Also, increase the TN of tests with Movement skills by armour rating -2.

In other words: An armour of 5D decreases every loss of Endurance by 3, but has a malus of +3 to the TN of Athletics, Travel and Stealth tests.
As leather armours are up to 2D, only chainmails gain those benefits/penalties.

It worked well in numbers, but in reality we forgot to calculate the benefits and penalties most of the time. In the end, we dropped any HR for armours and played with the RAW. No player changed the outfit of his character because of the rules change. Probably I have to add that my players aren't min-maxers at all, and even refuse to know the rules in depth: if they imagine their character with chainmail and shield, they don't bother to look up the different Encumbraces or stats to figure out if there's a (mechanically) better configuration.

[Robin Smallburrow]

As a general comment, lighter armour is better in most cases because the PC's have to do a lot of travelling. Heavier armour is best only when the heroes know they are about to enter a battle scene (just like the heroes in the movies!)

Robin S.

[Glorelendil]

I know it's not what you're asking, but the one rule variation I would like to see is for armor penalties to be different when not traveling. Metal armor should be more viable if you're just putting it on for a battle versus dragging it across Mirkwood.

[Corvo]

I use house-ruled armor rules since... 2013? I can say I gave it a fair shake

I went for an intuitive approach, and I'm pretty sure a lot of people devised similar systems:
-every armor die gives you a point of damage reduction (3d= -3 DR)
-every armor die gives you a point of malus on fatigue rolls (3d= -3 to fatigue rolls)
-every armor die requires a level of Standard of Living (3d= Martial)

Context matters, tough. My games aren't about typical "adventuring parties": we got more of a Pendragon vibe, with Fellowships made of pretty martial characters hailing from similar cultures (all Bardings, 2 Woodmen+2 Beornings, 4 Dwarves, 3 Dunlendings+1 exiled Dwarf, etc).

[Rich H]

Off the top of my head my big changes were:

1) Heavy armour (3d+) gave damage reduction on endurance loss
2) Heavy armour (3d+) also affected travel/fatigue tests
3) Heavy armour (3d+) also affected TNs on some tests either positively of negatively depending on the situation - eg, bonuses to Awe, penalties to swim, etc
4) I introduced some rules around Wounds (calling it Critical Wounds) where wounds give temporary negative traits much like Shadow traits work. This made wounds more mechanically significant which I feel is lacking in the RAW
5) Added an action in combat similar to Knockback, called Absorb Impact
6) Added a Dwarven 'boon', Second Skin, which meant a such a PC could ignore the Wearied condition when making Protection Tests and reduce the Travel Fatigue of any armour they may be wearing by one point. This meant the Dwarves the eminent heavy armour (ie, 4d/5d) wearers as there's not really a lot of need to wear those in the RAW in my experience

I think those are the main elements. My signature link has other house rules etc that I've used for many other things; quite a lot at the end of the day!

[HorusZA]

We're into the second year of our campaign and have been playing with the following two house-rules regarding armour:
1.) A character subtracts his normal Body rating from his Fatigue score.
2.) Protection Rolls are Unaffected by being Weary.

Worked well for us without problems: Armour is still pretty useful without being debilitating. Weariness from travel is also not as common, which allows me (as LM) to pile on more fatigue as a result of story-events.

[Indur Dawndeath]

I’ve just added a bonus on Endurance recovery after combat equal to the number of protection dice.
So, if the hero is uninjured and wearing leather he recover Basic Heart +2 after a short rest. The impact of a wound is even greater this way!
I don’t think it has made any difference, but it has also not ruined anything.

Cheers

[Elmoth]

Good feedback everybody. Passing this to the LM. Thanks!