Armour house rule

[Glorelendil]

Heck, after a century we cannot agree if .45 is better than 9mm!

Who can't? 9mm is a girlie round.

But .454 Casull ftw.

P.S. To elaborate on my idea for armor skill, it's basically saying "Yes, heavy armor is bad if you haven't trained for it. If you're used to it then it's better." That feels realistic to me, and gives superior armor a cost (other than actual treasure cost) that forces a real trade-off.

[Michebugio]

Going back to your armor house rule, Corvo, now that we (only me, you and Rocmistro apparently, since maybe Elfcrusher's Persuade roll TN seems higher than mine ) have some kind of agreement on its rationale, still I must say that something does not convince me.

First: let's consider, for example, a Dwarf with a Hauberk and a Helm. That means Damage Reduction 6, which makes him invulnerable to all lesser enemies. Among them: Goblin archers (Damage 4, 6 on a Great or Extraordinary success), Snaga Trackers (same as Goblin), Attercops (Damage 3, 6 on a Great or Extraordinary success), Common Wolves (same as Attercops). How do you handle this?

Second: I'm totally uncomfortable with the idea of a bonus that comes into play every time a character is hit, without any kind of expenditure from him. Think about "Rolling with the blows", AB 160 (I have the italian version, maybe the english translation and the page are not correct): you can halve the damage, but you lose your next action. Or think about Hideous Toughness of the monsters: it's a form of Damage Reduction, but they have to spend Hate to use it.
On the other hand your house rule is free, it has drawbacks only outside combat, and can let a character last forever, if his opponent is weak enough. This is not in the spirit of the game, where you can feel that practically all hero's resources are somehow scarce, limited and diminishing.

Third: as you can see in Elfcrusher's simulations, this rule definitely grants an advantage to armored characters, up to 20% higher win rate in comparison to unarmored ones. I guess this even enlarges applying your other Damage house rule, since unarmored characters will be totally unprotected against the tons of Damage that will come. I understand, though, that it suits very well your Arthurian's style campaign.


But, as I have a twisted tinkerer mind, all this discussing has made me develop some tweaking for your rule, that may very well keep the game balanced while providing a nice rules symmetry. Let me do some maths before, and I'll share it after your next answer

[Rocmistro]

Rocmistro: I'm not disagreeing with you about HP. I did not mean "D&D Hit Points", which are a combination of health and endurance. I meant "Meat Points".

As for the part about weapon damage, that has occurred to me, and to some extent one simply has to admit that game mechanics might not model reality. But to offer a counter-rationale: think of endurance as a kind of poetic "luck" pool, of the sort that only fictional heroes have, and we have to spend from that pool in order to avoid bad things. Getting hit by a great axe is so much worse than getting hit by a dagger that we have to spend more of our luck to achieve it.

- I'd also like to say I don't think this an antagonistic argument we are having; I hope at least I am not coming off that way. And it's not like I'm overly passionate about this - I don't lie awake at night thinking about how to rebut yours or anyone else's comments.

But for the life of me I can't understand why anyone would prefer to interpret Endurance as a kind of "poetic luck pool", as you say. To be sure, I do agree that there is ample room in the definition of Endurance for what you are saying, but the greater part of it's definition can simply be understood as physically landing blows from a weapon. I don't understand why it's not obvious that Endurance damage = weapon blows (at least, most of what Endurance damage is defined as can be described as weapon blows). But even if one doesn't accept what might be seen as "my" interpretation of Endurance, what about the book itself? :

"Endurance: Endurance is the expression of a playerhero’s physical stamina and determination. It is reduced when a character is subjected to physical harm, stress .and exhaustion." (bolding mine, note the order in the sentence) (Page 23 AGB)

"Damage is the harm inflicted, in Endurance points, on a successful hit." (Page 78 AGB)

"When a character hits his opponent in combat, he inflicts lost Endurance equal to his weapon’s Damage rating." (Page 78 AGB)

"Endurance represents a hero’s resistance to injury, physical or psychological stress, even torture. Whenever a character is subjected to some form of harm or toil, his Endurance score is reduced accordingly." (Page 104 AGB)

"Endurance During play, player-heroes lose Endurance points to blows suffered in combat, as the consequence of strenuous efforts, and to other sources of physical harm." (Page 104 AGB)

"When a melee or ranged attack roll succeeds, then the attack was successful in hurting the target in some way: the target suffers an immediate loss of Endurance..." (Page 160 AGB)

Let me say again that I do support other, less-literal interpretations of what constitutes Endurance damage (including your, Elfcrusher), but I think the above language supports that the primary definition of it (and what should probably be used as the default interpretation) is as physical, non-life threatening trauma to the body.

If I have thus swayed you (or anyone else) in seeing my reasoning in this matter, then the natural leap in intuition is that armor can (and in fact, should) be useful in mitigating damage taken from such sources. Hence, damage reduction. And in this very naming of the dynamic - damage reduction it goes on to give respect to your particular interpretation of Endurance, for it does not block all damage received, only a part of it (the argument then becomes in determing "how much damage" and "under what conditions" ; and it is here that we are forced to make some concessions for the sake of game-play, convenience, balance, and fun)

At least we agree on the .45

Oh, and also, Elf, I like your ideas on Armor as a skill, but I would save that for another thread.

[Corvo]

@michebugio.

I'm in a hurry, but can answer your first question. A goblin archer damage is 4/8/12, as by my house-ruled damage (I wrote it earlier)
Edit: I got another break. I'll try to answer your points as good as I can at the moment.
As already pointed, my houseruled damage got higher than RAW.
The hypothetical 5d armour+helm is a whopping 26 fatigue. Add some weapon and we are in the 28-32 range.
Most PCs don't have such endurance! The PC is already tired or will be at the first blow/fatigue roll.
Speaking of fatigue roll: that is a +6 to tn! Even a stroll around Beorn's home would be tn18. A trek on the elf path is some 22 or more (going from memory).
And here we come to the third part of my house rules: Parry is a skill, and combat is an opposed roll. Being weary makes your parry less effective, so you take more blows, in a vicious circle.

I play tested these rules for some months: my PCs started with armour 3+helm. Then they ditched the helm. Some went 4d. Another went 5d (paid 12 treasure points). Now they are getting back to 3 'cause being weary is killing them. And since they got a Parry skill of 4 now, they feel that their skill is a better defense than armour.
Maybe at higher skill they will go around with zero armour, like Aragorn

About armour vs no armour: historically, people who can afford armour bought armour. Outside of money the only limit was usually the climate (hot climate was bad for tin men): but that is fatigue rolls-ground, TOR-wise. And despite the climate even Muslim heavy cavalry used chainmail when they got the chance.

Hope that this can answer some of your questions

[Glorelendil]

Second: I'm totally uncomfortable with the idea of a bonus that comes into play every time a character is hit, without any kind of expenditure from him.

How about RichH's idea of armor taking damage and losing its value until it's repaired?

[Glorelendil]

I don't understand why it's not obvious that Endurance damage = weapon blows

Mostly because of how quickly it heals. You can get "hit" by an axe in TOR, wearing absolutely no armor to absorb the blow, and between post-combat and overnight healing have it be completely "healed" the next morning. That doesn't sound to me like the axe actually hit you, more like you spent some resources turning a hit into a miss.

But...maybe I do need to mitigate that position. Counterexample: It can take 2 weeks to "heal" from very low endurance, even without a wound, which does suggest physical damage, not just exhaustion.

I crashed a dirt bike a while back and managed to get the handlebar into a spot on my thigh where there was a gap in the armor. Worst charlie horse ever. Hurt like a motherfucker, and I limped for several weeks. (I couldn't even get the bike back into the truck afterwards...thankfully a stranger helped out.)

Was it a "wound"? No. Would I have counted all my 1s 2s and 3s as zeroes on subsequent Motocross Skill rolls? Yes. Would a bit of armor in that spot have helped? Yeah, definitely.

So....maybe DR should only kick in once endurance drops below a threshold? I.e.: "you've used up your luck, now you're spending meat." Sounds too complicated, though.

[Rocmistro]

I don't understand why it's not obvious that Endurance damage = weapon blows

Mostly because of how quickly it heals. You can get "hit" by an axe in TOR, wearing absolutely no armor to absorb the blow, and between post-combat and overnight healing have it be completely "healed" the next morning. That doesn't sound to me like the axe actually hit you, more like you spent some resources turning a hit into a miss.

But...maybe I do need to mitigate that position. Counterexample: It can take 2 weeks to "heal" from very low endurance, even without a wound, which does suggest physical damage, not just exhaustion.

I crashed a dirt bike a while back and managed to get the handlebar into a spot on my thigh where there was a gap in the armor. Worst charlie horse ever. Hurt like a motherfucker, and I limped for several weeks. (I couldn't even get the bike back into the truck afterwards...thankfully a stranger helped out.)

Was it a "wound"? No. Would I have counted all my 1s 2s and 3s as zeroes on subsequent Motocross Skill rolls? Yes. Would a bit of armor in that spot have helped? Yeah, definitely.

So....maybe DR should only kick in once endurance drops below a threshold? I.e.: "you've used up your luck, now you're spending meat." Sounds too complicated, though.

I can appreciate all of this, though I rather think it's a problem with how healing is resolved, than it is with the definition of Endurance.

That being said, i think the speed and ease of natural healing in TOR is a compromise on the designer's part to NOT have magical potions of healing and cure light wounds spells, but also NOT have heroes cooped up in bed for 3 weeks while they recover.

Interestingly enough, having damage reduction on armor could help solve both of these problems: You would prevent more damage being taken, but you could also change the healing rules (if you are so inclined) to reflect a greater recovery period.

In either case, I also support Rich's armor degradation rule (although I feel it's not quite enough to make 4d/5d armor worth it, as protection tests are fairly rare, and protection tests on which you roll an "Eye" are even rarer, and if you do roll an Eye, you are more than likely to back out of combat altogether so that you don't risk taking a 2nd wound).

With respect to the other suggestion about when DR kicks in, I agree that it's probably too complicated. Let me also add that the DR scale that Corvo has initially proposed is way too high for me, (both for reality reasons and gameplay), and for both these reasons I would lobby for either of these 2 DR schedules:

-DR 1 for leather armors and 2 for metal (mail) armors.
OR
-DR - / - / 1 / 2 / 3 for leather shirt / leather corslet / mail shirt / mail coat / hauberk respectively.

[Woodclaw]

Okay I'm tossing my 2 coppers in the ring just to see how things goes.
In general I think that the armour problem depens from a combination of factors that are hard to reconcile:

• On one hand Weary is much more problematic condition than Wounded in "short" terms battles, hence heavier armour can be a disadvantage since it makes very easy to get Weary soon;
• On the other packing heavy armour while travelling doesn't inflict any kind of penality which doesn't make much sense since no traveller will burden himself with 20+ Kg on metal armour even if travelling on horseback.

Apparently, the solution to these issues seen to be obviously to reduce the armour base encumbrace and make it count up to a point against Travel rolls which, I think, works decently.

Another can of worms is the issue or reducing damage. Technically the game alredy offers a way to do that, which is Knockback. Now I was thinking: why not linking the two together, so that a character that choose to go Knockback reduce the damage proportionally to his armour (and maybe his Body score) instead of simply halving it?

[Michebugio]

Here's my proposal: check Adventurer's Book, page 160. Yes, that option that I bet that all your players always forget: the possibility to halve the Damage you get (rounded up) at the price of losing your next turn.

To make armor relevant, and more interesting, maybe we can change this rule as follows.

Instead of simply halving the Damage, we can require the player who wants to "roll with the blow" to make a TN 14 Protection check. He doesn't lose his next turn doing so.

- If he fails, the character can't avoid the Damage. On a Sauron roll on the Feat dice, the hit is also considered a Piercing Strike (requiring immediately another Protection roll to avoid the Wound).
- On a Normal success, he ignores 1 Damage from the blow.
- On a Great success, he ignores 2 Damage from the blow.
- On an Extraordinary success, he ignores an amount of Damage equal to 3 or to his Body score value. (A dwarven Ancient Hauberk may let his wearer use his favourite score of Body to determine the Damage reduction)

The character can also choose to spend Hope to automatically gain the benefit of an Extraordinary success.

We then have rules symmetry both with the Inspire ability in the Open Stance, and with the Hideous Thougness of some monsters in case of Hope expenditure. Moreover, it's not game breaking, while still giving a substantial advantage to armor, more so the heavier they are.

What do you think?

[Rocmistro]

Woodclaw, those are both great suggestions as well. Perhaps make the basic armor encumbrance something more like: 4 / 8 / 12 / 15 / 18 with a failed travel fatigue of 0 / 0 / 1 / 2 / 3

And make the "Knockback" equal to 1/2 half damage + 0 / 0 / 1 / 1 / 2 ?