The Gaming Den

Okay, so...I like the swiftness and ease of abstract AC in D&D...and I'm no stickler for realism in RPG's...

However the problem I have is that the assumption of heavy armors in the game math sort of shoehorns the game into a pseudo-medieval setting and makes it difficult to model games based on other time periods, say like the French Revolution or the Old West, where plate mail has been made obsolete.

Armor as damage reduction, rather than an abstract form of hit evasion, is a popular one, but I've really only seen games implement it in two ways...

1) Characters have some sort of "health meter" be it hit points or wound levels, along with some sort of variable "damage absorption" value.

The attacker first rolls to hit the defender, and if this is successful the defender rolls to determine how much damage is absorbed and compares this to the attacker's damage roll, the difference (if it is in the black) is applied to the defender's health meter.

I really don't like this because I find it clunky and slow to resolve, as it adds more dice rolls to each exchange.

Also, you sometimes have the situation where the attacker rolls a critical success on their attack roll, and the defender rolling a critical success on their "soak" roll, resulting in the attack being completely canceled out.

2) Characters have a health meter value along with a static damage absorption value.

So the attacker rolls to hit the defender, and on a successful the roll the damage is first applied to the static "soak" value, with the remainder being deducted from the defender's health meter.

I like this better than the first option, because it's a lot faster and more elegant, however applying damage to two separate values is still an extra arithmetic step, albeit an easy one.

I had considered the possibility of a game using D&D's abstract hit points as a health meter, wherein armor merely adds to your HP total.

So essentially, PC's start at roughly the same base line, say 10 + CON Modifier at 1st level, and wearing say for instance, full plate would add +5 HP or whatever to the final total.

The potential problems I see here, would be that the system kind of assumes that heavily armored characters never take their armor off, otherwise making them have to refigure their HP total everytime they go to bed at night or get dressed up for the grand ball. Also, if a character is taking 20 damage from poison each round, it doesn't really make sense for that to chew through HP granted by armor.

So what I'm wondering is, are there any games that managed to come up with a more elegant solution to the whole damage reduction thing that I'm missing? An entirely different mechanic from the ones that I've listed?

You're forgetting something about the attack/soak method--the good systems where the defender rolls a soak pool have static damages for attacks (i.e., Shadowrun). White Wolf's goofy tendency to have the attacker and the defender both roll damage/soak after determining hit/dodge is silly; rolling hit/dodge followed by soak is exactly the same number of die rolls as hit/dodge followed by damage.

So they aren't as clunky as you think, and if you scale your damage and soak numbers right, work out quite well for this sort of thing. If you want characters to be more evasive as opposed to armored, such as in a wild west setting, just make armor expensive or rare and dodge bonuses easy to come by (or stringently enforce things like range and quick-draw fire penalties on attacks).

Shazbot79 wrote:I had considered the possibility of a game using D&D's abstract hit points as a health meter, wherein armor merely adds to your HP total.

So essentially, PC's start at roughly the same base line, say 10 + CON Modifier at 1st level, and wearing say for instance, full plate would add +5 HP or whatever to the final total.

This is going to be poorly-remembered as it was like 20ish years ago, but I played under a DM that ran with a system like this for 2nd edition. What I remember from that system was that just about anything you wore had a hit point pool. So, the wizard's robes or a blacksmith's gloves and apron had 5 hp, and full plate had 50 hp. However, armor didn't have to get entirely chewed through to damage you, as he had some charts or something that determined how much damage the armor took vs. how much damage you took from an attack. You would also repair some damage to your armor with the armorsmithing proficiency during the evening at camp. Unfortunately, I don't remember how armor affected your actual AC under this system.

I remember playing a fighter and having to track my HP pool and my armor's HP pool (I'm pretty sure the armor HP pool was bigger than my personal HP pool), and the DM would say things like, "Okay, the wyvern hits you, but the blow is mostly absorbed by your armor, so take 2 HP damage to you and mark 8 HP off your armor." Poison applied damage directly to the character, but there was some chance that the armor would prevent you from being poisoned if it was an injury or contact type poison.

The reasons this all went fairly smoothly was:
1. The DM knew this system well.
2. The DM had it set up to where we were essentially just tracking 2 HP totals, and he told us how much came out of each pool.
3. We only played a single adventure with pre-gen characters over three game sessions.
4. We fought mostly "nude" enemies. I.e. Wyverns, zombies, and chimera--stuff that didn't wear armor and so didn't interact with the system in a way we could see.
5. We didn't get into any potential edge cases like partial armor, or the wizard trying to wear an apron, or mixing and matching things.

Anyway, there's my on-topic, but probably pointless, anecdote. I don't know that it would help solve your problem of everyone wearing heavy armor, as this seemed to encourage people to wear the heaviest armor they could. Then again, I didn't know the whole system, and there might have been things in there that made heavy armor a bad idea, or some variant once you introduced guns and rapiers that incentivized people NOT to wear heavy armor.

Archmage wrote:You're forgetting something about the attack/soak method--the good systems where the defender rolls a soak pool have static damages for attacks (i.e., Shadowrun). White Wolf's goofy tendency to have the attacker and the defender both roll damage/soak after determining hit/dodge is silly; rolling hit/dodge followed by soak is exactly the same number of die rolls as hit/dodge followed by damage.

So they aren't as clunky as you think, and if you scale your damage and soak numbers right, work out quite well for this sort of thing. If you want characters to be more evasive as opposed to armored, such as in a wild west setting, just make armor expensive or rare and dodge bonuses easy to come by (or stringently enforce things like range and quick-draw fire penalties on attacks).

You have a point about good roll to soak systems, however in my experience players seem to have more fun rolling damage than they do soak...so I'm still more inclined towards rolled damage vs. static damage reduction myself.

violence in the media wrote: So essentially, PC's start at roughly the same base line, say 10 + CON Modifier at 1st level, and wearing say for instance, full plate would add +5 HP or whatever to the final total.


This is going to be poorly-remembered as it was like 20ish years ago, but I played under a DM that ran with a system like this for 2nd edition. What I remember from that system was that just about anything you wore had a hit point pool. So, the wizard's robes or a blacksmith's gloves and apron had 5 hp, and full plate had 50 hp. However, armor didn't have to get entirely chewed through to damage you, as he had some charts or something that determined how much damage the armor took vs. how much damage you took from an attack. You would also repair some damage to your armor with the armorsmithing proficiency during the evening at camp. Unfortunately, I don't remember how armor affected your actual AC under this system.

I remember playing a fighter and having to track my HP pool and my armor's HP pool (I'm pretty sure the armor HP pool was bigger than my personal HP pool), and the DM would say things like, "Okay, the wyvern hits you, but the blow is mostly absorbed by your armor, so take 2 HP damage to you and mark 8 HP off your armor." Poison applied damage directly to the character, but there was some chance that the armor would prevent you from being poisoned if it was an injury or contact type poison.

The reasons this all went fairly smoothly was:
1. The DM knew this system well.
2. The DM had it set up to where we were essentially just tracking 2 HP totals, and he told us how much came out of each pool.
3. We only played a single adventure with pre-gen characters over three game sessions.
4. We fought mostly "nude" enemies. I.e. Wyverns, zombies, and chimera--stuff that didn't wear armor and so didn't interact with the system in a way we could see.
5. We didn't get into any potential edge cases like partial armor, or the wizard trying to wear an apron, or mixing and matching things.

Anyway, there's my on-topic, but probably pointless, anecdote. I don't know that it would help solve your problem of everyone wearing heavy armor, as this seemed to encourage people to wear the heaviest armor they could. Then again, I didn't know the whole system, and there might have been things in there that made heavy armor a bad idea, or some variant once you introduced guns and rapiers that incentivized people NOT to wear heavy armor.

That's still pretty fiddly. What I'm talking about is having Armor add to your overall health meter, rather than having to keep track of two separate health meters.

So you have a character who has like 15HP to start, for the sake of argument.

Wearing no armor, the characters HP total is 15.

Wearing heavy armor, the characters HP is 20.

Like I said before, there are certain verisimilitude problems with this, because many spell effects and such seem to effect the character internally rather than externally, like a sword or axe blow would.

I'm wondering if there are any games out there that have used this method before.

Rifts (Palladium) uses a system like the one you're proposing, where armour effectively adds to HP.
The armour there is high-tech power armour though, the incoming attacks are largely off high-tech energy weapons or explosives that would straight up disintegrate a normal PC (though many superhuman PC have innate 'mega damage' and could survive some hits without armour).

Aside from the "armour adds to AC" and "armour absorbs damage", there are a couple of systems where you get a roll to penetrate armour, separate to the initial attack roll. Dragon Warriors is probably the first that comes to mind (a D&D clone from the mid-80s, republished recently by Mongoose). Villains & Vigilantes did this as well (and included armour damage into it too!) - you roll against your armour's remaining HPs on d100 to see if it stops damage.

Oh also on soaking, of the White Wolf variants there was at least one, Aberrant, where a fixed soak just applied to the damage dice pool before it was rolled.

The main problem I see with adding hp due to armor is that at higher levels you have to find a way to keep armor relevant. There's no way anyone's going to bother with armor if at level 15 it gives you a +5 boost to hit points.

I've played under a DM who did something like this. Essentially armor gave you Temp HP that re-upped itself every round. I don't remember the exact amount but it seemed to work fairly well.

I've been thinking about armour as HP, if you can iron out some of the wrinkles I think it would be better than having armour give DR. Having two HP pools seems really ungainly though. The most glaring problem with having one pool is what happens if a character wants to switch armour? You can just say no, which will piss people off, you can do some math involving fractions, people are going to hate that or who can rule that all the HP damage is applied to the person or the armour which sucks as well.

FantasyCrafty handled this with armors not giving AC bonuses (but character classes do), and adding DR/- to all armors. Plate has huge DR, but hurts your AC lots, etc. Generally, that system is a quick way of playing all the least fun parts of logistics and dragons, but their armor soluion worked out fairly well.

I don't think you could just drop thier table into your games though, because they also reworked all the to-hit bonuses and added a lot more AC from character advancement.

Bihlbo wrote:The main problem I see with adding hp due to armor is that at higher levels you have to find a way to keep armor relevant. There's no way anyone's going to bother with armor if at level 15 it gives you a +5 boost to hit points.

Well clearly at high levels you have to have high level armor.

Full Plate adds 20HP, but Full Plate +5 adds 120HP. People would probably care about 120 HP. Fiddle with numbers until you get results you like.

Juton wrote:I've been thinking about armour as HP, if you can iron out some of the wrinkles I think it would be better than having armour give DR. Having two HP pools seems really ungainly though. The most glaring problem with having one pool is what happens if a character wants to switch armour? You can just say no, which will piss people off, you can do some math involving fractions, people are going to hate that or who can rule that all the HP damage is applied to the person or the armour which sucks as well.

From my experience mentioned above, I think you could just ditch a suit of armor that was mostly depleted and put on a new suit. So you could just replace your suit of leather armor or chain mail or whatever once it was down to a few hit points. As this was 2nd edition with pre-gens, I don't recall that anyone was casually carrying around an extra suit or two.

Two HP pools don't seem hugely ungainly to me, as by mid-level 3.x you're already tracking the HP of your cohort, your summons/minions, spell durations, spell slots, charges, and myriad other shit--what's a couple more pools on the pile?

You got Armor-as-HP from Final Fantasy eh?

It works only in a super-abstraction, which D&D really isn't at heart.


Go with #2, armor as DR. If guns are meant to penetrate it, have them ignore DR by a certain amount such as 5 to 10.

violence in the media wrote:Two HP pools don't seem hugely ungainly to me, as by mid-level 3.x you're already tracking the HP of your cohort, your summons/minions, spell durations, spell slots, charges, and myriad other shit--what's a couple more pools on the pile?

Most people don't actually do multiple of those things specifically because they are a lot of work. I personally will not play a self buffing character without persist spell or an equivalent cheat in order to not track durations. I don't think this is a valid argument at most tables because many people do in fact see that kind of paperwork as a problem.

Bihlbo wrote:The main problem I see with adding hp due to armor is that at higher levels you have to find a way to keep armor relevant. There's no way anyone's going to bother with armor if at level 15 it gives you a +5 boost to hit points.

Well...the solution to this problem is that armor would either bump HP by tier...or it would bump HP by level.

So if you divide the game into like 4 tiers (1-5/6-10/11-15/16-20) and have armor give 5-10 HP each.

Or have Heavy Armor Grant like 3HP per level.

This might work if the classes share a unilateral HP progression.

The idea is armor that is nice to have, but not ultimately necessary to the game math.

fectin wrote:FantasyCrafty handled this with armors not giving AC bonuses (but character classes do), and adding DR/- to all armors. Plate has huge DR, but hurts your AC lots, etc. Generally, that system is a quick way of playing all the least fun parts of logistics and dragons, but their armor soluion worked out fairly well.

I don't think you could just drop thier table into your games though, because they also reworked all the to-hit bonuses and added a lot more AC from character advancement.

Other than having to apply damage to 2 separate numbers, the other problem with this system is that it highly encourages light armor over heavy armor by making it easily a better choice. It's always better NOT to get hit, than to get hit and soak a bunch of damage, since getting hit at all means you're still subject to status conditions even if you don't take damage. Also, how many weapons in that game have armor piercing?

The reason DR in any form is bad is that it either is too small and ineffective against boss monsters or too large and regular encounters can't challenge PCs. More HP is better because it has an affect on both types of encounters. Armour HP would need to scale by level, if you tied the extra HP to either hit dice or BAB you can keep it relevant for the first 10 levels, but melee monsters starting getting progressively more dangerous at higher levels.

The advantage of having Armor-as-HP is that it has a built-in "breakage" mechanic.

When HP hits 0, the armor or shield breaks ala Dragonball style. Until then, the damage prevention is perfect.

Then you could use the Craft skill more often. Yay!

Question is, how much HP should each category grant? IMO full plate should drastically increase the lifespan of a warrior by at least threefold.
There's probably a numeric equivalent one could derive from the AC bonus due to the average number of hits one receives compared to the extended life expectancy, but I haven't the foggiest as to how that would go.

sigma999 wrote:The advantage of having Armor-as-HP is that it has a built-in "breakage" mechanic.

When HP hits 0, the armor or shield breaks ala Dragonball style. Until then, the damage prevention is perfect.

Do we really want to keep track of the status of armour? HP is abstract already, I figure a system where armour gives HP is just an abstract way of saying a person can absorb more punishment with armour on. Wands of Mage Armour would become incredible then because they will give you a boat load of temporary hit points.

Armor breaking that easily is a terrible idea. Mind numbingly terrible.

Juton wrote:

sigma999 wrote:The advantage of having Armor-as-HP is that it has a built-in "breakage" mechanic.

When HP hits 0, the armor or shield breaks ala Dragonball style. Until then, the damage prevention is perfect.

Do we really want to keep track of the status of armour? HP is abstract already, I figure a system where armour gives HP is just an abstract way of saying a person can absorb more punishment with armour on. Wands of Mage Armour would become incredible then because they will give you a boat load of temporary hit points.

Yeah...I'm really not looking at this for things like armor breakage rules...I don't really want to play a game with that level of minutiae.

What I'm really after is an easy way to do armor as damage prevention, without dividing it into a complicated subsystem...that is to say, a subsytem that has as little to it as possible, while still doing it's job.

I figure that the baseline for HP per level is 5 regardless of class...then armor would increase this, maybe 1HP per level for light armor, 2HP for medium armor, and 4HP for heavy armor...that's off the top of my head without crunchy the numbers. All in all, that means that compared to like a Wizard, there would be 20HP difference for a Rogue, 40HP difference for a Cleric and an 80HP differene for a Fighter from level bumps alone.

Oh a couple of other armour systems I missed:

*In a success-counting system where damage dice pool is rolled, Armour can be used to set the Target Number of the damage roll itself, instead of being rolled separately as soak dice. I can't recall a system that uses this approach offhand, though.

*Advanced Fighting Fantasy: characters are assumed to be armoured. Damage rolls get a bonus against characters who lose their armour for some reason.

We could throw it all together, if Armor-HP-only is bad.

• Armor grants AC bonus.
• Armor grants DR/ER and reduces damage dealt to armor as well.
• Armor has about 5 HP per point of AC bonus. It still grants AC bonus and DR/ER when broken, but ceases to redirect damage to its own HP pool.

BearsAreBrown wrote:Armor breaking that easily is a terrible idea. Mind numbingly terrible.

I dunno, it could be cool.

While I think that armour as bonus HP has some potential, I've been adding DR to existing armour in my D&D campaign.

The stuff still gives AC as normal but also gives DR based on its type with bonuses from modifications and materials.

For instance, all armour gives DR/adamantine at base. Light gives 2, medium 4 and Heavy 6. If you use adamantine or similar counts-as materials, that'd be 3/-, 6/-, or 9/-. There's also an armour mod that raises it as well, but yeah. Additionally, I've had like DR stacking with like, not that it often comes up.

While it is fuck all in the big picture, it can at least reduce the sting of hits, since you'd probably be wearing armour anyway.

Personally, I think Sigma's idea last idea has some merit.