Armour house rule

[Rocmistro]

Michebugio:

Since Endurance loss is actually easier to heal than fatigue gain is to lose (requires a full night's rest), isn't this worse than just taking the endurance damage (since the threshold for "weary" doesn't actually change in this situation)?

I realize that taking fatigue instead of losing endurance changes the point at which you'll go unconscious, but is that worth the extra time it takes to reduce your fatigue score again?

[Michebugio]

Since Endurance loss is actually easier to heal than fatigue gain is to lose (requires a full night's rest), isn't this worse than just taking the endurance damage (since the threshold for "weary" doesn't actually change in this situation)?

I realize that taking fatigue instead of losing endurance changes the point at which you'll go unconscious, but is that worth the extra time it takes to reduce your fatigue score again?

Roc, read my rule carefully: you lose the extra fatigue gain immediately after combat (given enough time to "catch your breath", half an hour or so as for the RAW), not after a full night's rest.

[Rocmistro]

Ah. Well I appreciate that, thanks, but doesn't that then diverge from the normal rules for how and when fatigue gain gets updated? I think you're on the right track, but it breaks some of the elegant paradigms. Put more plainly, I'd hate to try to remember when different types of fatigue gain get updated; when some do and some don't.

All that being said, I'm tempted to use this. I like it a lot. It comes down to choice again, which is great: Would you rather risk going unconscious sooner rather than later, or risk being weary for a subsequent fight (if there is one today).

[Michebugio]

Ah. Well I appreciate that, thanks, but doesn't that then diverge from the normal rules for how and when fatigue gain gets updated? I think you're on the right track, but it breaks some of the elegant paradigms. Put more plainly, I'd hate to try to remember when different types of fatigue gain get updated; when some do and some don't.

I agree that it breaks the rule symmetry and it kinda upsets me too, I should find a different, but "parallel", route. Plus, I'm doing some maths on it and it turns out that medium armor benefit the most from the rule, while very heavy and very light armors are quite at a disadvantage. Unforeseen collateral effects that I'll try to fix, following your advice.

All that being said, I'm tempted to use this. I like it a lot. It comes down to choice again, which is great: Would you rather risk going unconscious sooner rather than later, or risk being weary for a subsequent fight (if there is one today).

I somehow feel that it's the right track too, but I need to streamline it a bit. There ARE rules for temporary weariness in the Adventurer's Book, but it seems that they are unrelated to Fatigue. Maybe the solution lies there.

[Glorelendil]

The more I think about it the more I think the solution should simply be to have encumbrance-based fatigue accrue while traveling. In other words, it always makes sense to put armor on in preparation for a known battle. But if you try to travel through Mirkwood wearing your Hauberk....yeah, you're gonna be weary. (Unless you're a dwarf.)

An example might be (this is off the top of my head; I'm sure this could be improved)
Whenever you make a Travel roll, if you have worn armor for any part of the time also make an athletics roll against the same TN. On a failure, increase your fatigue by the protection value of your armor (1 point per die). Each day of full rest (as per recovery rules) reduces your base fatigue by 4.

Optional: On a failure with an Eye, double the penalty. On a Gandalf, remove a point.

If you are traveling with your armor but not wearing it or carrying it yourself (e.g. boat or pony) you don't have to roll.

Helm, shield, and weapon would work as normal, since putting weights on your arms or over your head really is fatiguing, even if you put them on at the start of battle.

This would meet my criteria of making armor an "interesting choice": no choice is always the right answer, for any character. Putting points into Athletics (instead of my idea for an Armor skill) shifts the decision toward heavier armor, but still without making it deterministic. Travel distance & terrain, and RNG, make optimality unpredictable.

Furthermore, even without any Athletics, if you have a pony/mule/boat then in some cases (like knowing the orcs will attack your camp that night) you could still put armor on and get maximum benefit. In other cases you might suspect that danger is imminent, and wear your armor for a day or two. Or you might pack it up and travel with no armor, and have to face the spider ambush without it.

It gives (some) players something else to do while traveling, which I personally like. It doesn't add any new variables, or change how dice rolls are used, or require the LM to compute a new TN. The downside is you have to keep track of fluctuating fatigue score, but that's no more complex than tracking endurance, and doesn't otherwise change anything.

One additional complication: if fatigue maxes out at its current value then it does require one additional bit of bookkeeping, because you have to distinguish travel fatigue from armor fatigue. But maybe the two can be combined somehow.

(As an aside, I think Shields should have the same rule as Helms: drop them during battle to lower fatigue by half the encumbrance. But I play a Woodman with a Long-Hafted Axe, so I'm biased.)

Feedback?

EDIT: Maybe no maximum is needed. This rule would make armor dramatically better in some situations, so making it worse in others is fine. If you have low athletics traveling in your armor is just a bad idea, and even if you have high athletics you can't do it forever. But if you want to stubbornly keep it on and get your fatigue up to 100, go for it. Maybe you have Weapon skill 6 and a King's Blade so you don't care.

EDIT2: Another thing I like about this approach is that it doesn't change armor's function. Arguments for and against "absorption" aside, in the game Francesco designed armor does not prevent endurance loss from hits. So I lean toward a solution that keeps that philosophy intact. All this rule would do is tweak how the fatigue accrues.

[Glorelendil]

In another thread Rocmistro suggested the following modification:
- Halve the encumbrance of armor as base fatigue
- On a failed Travel roll, add the protection value of the armor, instead of making a separate roll

Thereby combining regular Travel and "armor travel" rules into a single roll. (In the same spirit as my idea above that your armor modifies your Travel TN.)

I prefer mine, just because I think of Travel as knowledge not fitness, but Rocmistro points out, and I somewhat agree, that "Athletics" is also an awkward fit. But I wouldn't have a knife fight over which variant is better.

And here's a 3rd variant, for people who like more rules not fewer:
- Add the Armor skill I've suggested in the past, and use that skill instead of Athletics whenever traveling with armor (again, as a second roll after your Travel check). Armor would compete with Weapon/Valor/Wisdom for XP.
- Armor skill would also be usable in combat as an active mitigation skill, based on one of the many suggestions in this thread. For example, roll vs. TN(10 + Attribute Level) to absorb damage equal to protection rating.

Because you'd have to invest XP into armor skill the penalty for Eye failures could be lower than in cases where damage mitigation is just something you get for free.

[Yepesnopes]

a bit of wishful thinking...in the Release Schedule for TOR during 2014 we can read:

"The One Ring Revised Core Manual – As stocks of the current box set are running low, we’re taking the opportunity to revise and reprint The One Ring Roleplaying Game in a single volume, clarifying some rules and adding in some new art. For those of you who own the existing set, don’t worry, we’ll make any revisions and clarifications available as a separate PDF, but we’re confident that you’ll want to add this volume to your collection all the same."

Who knows if the plan only to clarify or to also revise some rules like armour...

[Hermes Serpent]

My guess is that the clarifications will be the sort of things that the authors cleared up in posts to the old forum like the definition of Blighted Places and Journey rules and some tightening up of wording where it's become obvious that the original phrasing was unclear. I don't expect any major changes to any subsystems in the rules so the armour 'fix' threads can continue unabated.

[zedturtle]

Yeah, the only "fix" that even has a chance of showing up is yepesnopes, and that's only if Fransesco et al agree with the issue and have tested it extensively. I'm still out on how much of a problem it is; my group hasn't complained too much one way or another, but there are few optimizers in that group.

[Rocmistro]

Right. Well as much as I agree with the basic assessment of armor = bad based on the model, does it ever take into account reward qualities affecting?

For example, a player with 5 rewards, let's say he spends 3 to trick out his weapon. He has 2 left.
If you take a mithril shirt and pump 2 cunning makes into it, lowering the encumbrance to 8...you now have 3d armor at 8 encumbrance. Call me silly but that kinda seems like a sweet spot.

Hence while the theory makes sense to me, I'm not sure if the problem is really relevant for long-term play, given the choices that players are likely to make with their rewards.