It's a myth that medieval armor greatly encumbered the wearer. Modern experiments with well made and properly fitted armor shows that the wearer is able to move with impressive agility and range of motion. The weight might eventually wear the user down more quickly than not wearing it, but that's a reduction in endurance, not dexterity. Ttrpg armor systems are designed by fantasists with no clue about combat.
Hell, even Buhurt armour, which is notoriously on the bulkier end of armour (because of Buhurt's inherent idiosyncracies as a sport), still allows you to do some pretty crazy stunts xD I've seen, with these two eyes, people do dropkicks or jumpstands in it.
Armor isn't really that strenuous or limiting to wear. You do get tired faster and recover your stamina slower, and you probably accelerate- and have a slightly slower top speed when running, but the weight is distributed over your entire body, so it doesn't get to feel as heavy, and you can in fact do flips in full plate armor. Also, you can learn to wear armor better: most types of armors has weak spots, fx: in their joints, and a proficient fighter protects these, while he fights. Finally; yeah, your armor can get broken that much that it just falls apart and leaves open gaps and may be unrepairable, and depending on what weapon / ammunition you use, you may be able to shatter it in one hit, though, probably not by a handheld weapon. No sword meant for combat weighs 10 lbs (ceremonial swords may weighs that much) and it wouldn't be just 3 ft. long. A claymore / greatsword, weighs typically 6 - 7 lbs and are typically 5.2 - 6.2 ft. long. Greatswords in ttrpgs should have Reach and a cleaving mechanic: yes I'm gonna die on this hill.
I used to be a Kick Boxing pro fighter, so here are some insights from someone who actually fought for a living. I'm aware it's not the same as medieval fighting, but I believe many principles are basically the same, although they aren't expressed in the same way. For example, distance, rhythm, adaptability... it's easy to see all those things are basic principles to any kind of physical fighting. I think you can totally become better at using armor. When you are a noob, you have to actually fight (in the ring) with protection. A great deal of a newbie's training is precisely to get comfortable at fighting with protection. Even very light protection like foam shin guards, those foam helmets (I don't know how they are called in english) and mouth guards can be VERY annoying in the middle of a fight. Helmets restrict your vision, mouth guards don't let you breathe with your mouth to get more oxygen when you are tired (most people hate them), shin guards feel awkward, groin protection feels totally wrong and so on. In general, even very light armor restricts your movement, feels different and gets a lot of time to get used to. In fact, one of my greatest joys of going pro was that I finally had to fight without using that cumbersome armor, so I can only imagine how annoying and dangerous was to fight to death inside a heaume or something. But I digress. We were also taught some techniques to use those pieces armor more effectively; how to "block" a kick to the thigh so it slides along the shin and the shin guard so it doesn't get out of place and things like that. Speaking of blocking: in my school what we were taught as "blocks" were actually more like parries. True blocks were taught, but we used them rarely and we were specifically taught to use them only as a last resort; and many of those blocks consisted on positioning the body in such a way to minimize the damage. I said "my school" because most other schools taught to block and their fighters usually ended up in worse shape after the fights than us. If we were aware that armor is cumbersome and the whole body can be used to parry and block, *do you really think people who had a great chance of dying each time they fought didn't know those things*? I'm 100% sure ANY kind of armor felt completely restrictive compared to using none and I'm quite sure those fighters developed techniques to position the body in such a way the armor could parry a blow or directing an inevitable blow to a better guarded part of the armor. And all those things, you can get better at with practice and experience.
I have armoured fighting experience. You can definitely get better at fighting in armour; learn how to time your breathing, to engage the core to reduce stress on the arms, gauge when to take a movement and when not to, learn how to feel with your feet or develop a "3d spacial awareness" that goes beyond needing to visually see things coming (because you won't see shit inside a bucket xD). Also, getting used to breathing stale air is definitely something that you need to do... because you will breathe *a lot* of stale air xD This is one of the reasons why, for example, helmets like the Sallet became so frequent in the backlines; they offered protection from ranged attacks, were comfortable enough to wear (hell, I own one myself xD) and you could wear them without the gorget because you weren't expected to be frontline, so you might as well breathe properly. Also, the awareness of gauging what hit will hurt and what will either bounce off or simply cause discomfort but not to much more than that is a learned skill, too.
Actually, I would argue that you do get better at wearing armor. Adjusting to the way it shifts your center of gravity takes experience. Adjusting to limited range of motion (if relevant) takes experience. There are also defensive movements you can make in armor that are terrible choices if you're unarmored. If I'm in mail or even just a gambeson, I don't really care about glancing blows from all but the heaviest weapons, so minimizing movement to get a blow to skip off the armor rather than completely dodge it is actually _better_ fighting because it's more efficient with your motion. Likewise, there are strikes that you're not even guarding against in even light armor in the first place because there's no way to put enough power into them. Even just in terms of power I can say that being used to sparring rules that assume light to medium armor vs rules that assume you're unarmored, you're not unlikely to make mistakes going from armored to unarmored, meaning there are skills to using armor that you built up, were relying on, and then got tripped up on your muscle memory of. Likewise, for modern settings, shooting stances (especially for pistols) changed with the advent of plate carriers to square the shoulders to hide the vital organs behind the plate rather than angle the shoulders to reduce your profile. The catch is that unarmored fighting is just as much of a skill.
I actually like the AC concept to a certain extent. There is such a thing as a glancing blow. Armor is hardened in certain areas, thicker in certain areas, or has a surface or an angle that makes a strike more likely to glance off. By contrast, it takes a shit ton of skill to effectively get past an opponent's blade/shield, bypass their guard and deliver point to a specific area. Concussive force is also significantly more effective against the cranium as it causes your brain to rattle around against your skull. So a roll based system based save system (in combination with a roll based hit system) actually makes a lot of sense to me intuitively, representing your chance to hit a vulnerable area, and strike it effectively. While there is definitely room for improvement in a lot of systems are things like damage types (a narrow, stiff point is significantly more effective in piercing mail links, such as a rondel, compared to a broadsword slice which would be virtually completely negated). Also, swords have some other things to consider, like point of balance, making them more effective to wield by counterbalancing the weight and putting the point of balance closer to the hand, whereas other weapons such as axes put the point of balance further from the hand and closer to the intended point of impact. E.g., it's harder to hit, but for the same weight, significantly greater impact. Most swords - most hand weapons of all varieties, actually, including maces and hammers, are pretty much well, well under 3 pounds, just to be usable. So blunt trauma for a regular hand sword is....almost negligible. Whereas being hit in the helmet with a claw hammer would probably have a significantly more traumatic effect. Perhaps you can start to see why D&D just went for a simple roll system....damage itself is reduced to a roll as well to account for this degree of variability. It's abstracted, but not terrible.... I think a simple way to improve it is to make the armor have variable "damage reduction" to certain existing damage types. E.g. chainmail is superb against slashing, it is significantly weaker against piercing. Plate would have superb damage reduction against slashing and to a slightly lesser extent against piercing, it would have slightly less damage reduction against blunt trauma. Then have certain weapons have damage or AC modifiers (armor piercing) to represent their relative advantage. I think the CRPG Pillars of Eternity did a good job of retaining the strength of D&D roll-based AC, while having variable damage reduction for armor.
If I was designing a system, ground up, I would remove HP and replace damage rolls vs fixed defense with fixed damage vs active defense. This opens up other options such as armor being represented by "XdY take the highest" with the coverage of the armor being represented by the number of dice and how protective the armor is being represented by the die size. This would allow for armors to be roughly on par while being different, such as full (chain)mail vs plate on just torso and forearms. It would also mean that the attack and damage rolls and calculations could be happening simultaneously being handled by different people, both speeding up the game and giving players things to do when it's not their turn. Also, I'd get rid of HP because how damage is modeled in systems is the root of so many problems.
You can absolutely learn to make armor more effective. You can learn to deflect an attack with the armor that you wouldn't be able to normally. By changing your angle in relation to an incoming attack you can make the attack more likely to glance off. By knowing where you're armor is weak and where it's strong you can turn into blows so that a stronger part of the armor takes the blow. Breastplates and helmets are thickest on the front, limb armor is made thinner material. Taking a shot to the front of the breastplate is less likely to injure you than taking a hit to the arm.
I actually completely disagree when you say that impact should be the determining factor for damage and damage reduction. The impact of a sword isn't what causes damage, it is the cutting motion. That's the reason why you can half-sword. You hold the sword blade, and you can even defend against incoming impact, but it doesn't damage your hand, because it's not cutting. That's also why the katana is curved and single edged: to increase the cutting ratio (and not, it's not a superior sword😅). Same goes with bullets. The bullet is extremely light, so the impact force isn't particularly big. But if that impact is all directed towards your heart, you'll be dead. But I often think you should take a step back when talking about armor, and ask "what is health and damage?" I would say that WoD solves health in a good way, with the "/", "×" and "*" system. That way you can have two dimensions of damage: "severity" and "amount". The severity is determined by the source while the amount is determined by the "successfulness of damaging". If you compare a regular hammer, a knife and a pistol, the hammer doesn't do severe amount of damage on a blow (it could, but that's a crit). You can be hit multiple times by a hammer and still recover. A knife is more severe, A puncture wound would cause internal bleeding and you'd need medical attention. You can survive many cuts from a knife, but you're definitely in worse shape. An a bullet shot is definitely not something that is easy to survive. If you then say a hammer hass "/" severity (minor damage), a knife has "×" severity (major damage), and a pistol has "*" severity (lethal damage). But! A hammer can deal more amount of damage. It's easier to hit someone with a hammer. The impact is on a wide surface compared to the other two, so you don't have to worry much about edge alignment of the blade etc. Let's say the damage is 5 "/" damage, plus whatever bonus the user gets. The knife requires more precision. You need to do a cutting motion. If the motion is misaligned you might deal no damage at all. So we set it to 2 "×" damage. Lastly the bullet requires extreme precision. If your aim is slightly off, it won't hit the target at all. You might scrape the side, hit a shoulder etc. But hitting dead on a vital organ is hard. So 1 "*" damage. Sure one lethal damage from a gun is more deadly than five minor damage from a hammer. One requires a nights sleep to heal, the other a hospital. But this is where armor comes in. Let's say your armor can reduces amount and severity. A bullet proof vest reduces 1 severity and 1 amount. If you shoot with a gun, the 1 lethal damage is reduced to 0 lethal damage, aka you're unharmed. A hammer blow is reduced from 5 minor damage to 5 "no damage" (severity is reduced to zero), and you're unharmed. The knife is reduced from 2 major damage to 1 minor damage (both reduced severity and amount by 1). And that sort of checks out. A bullet proof vest is good against bullets. It's thickness also reduces any hammer blows to just being uncomfortable. A knife cut can cut up the armor and it can be snuck up under any gaps to deal superficial wounds. You can then play around with different types of armor, some reduced severity by a lot, some reduce amount by a lot. Some reduce severity as long as it's under a threshold value. A lot to play with other than static armor values. Again, all of this has to be based on game mechanics. If I wanted a real world simulator, I'd play a video game with a realistic real time simulation of bullets. But this is supposed to be about fun and decision making, so every weapon/armor should have pros and cons, otherwise everyone would just run around with bazookas because of high damage. Also, Video wise: I love your channel, but I'd strongly suggest you have a script or at least a loose script. A lot of the points in the video were repeated and spread out, that could instead have been summed up into one focused point. I'd also advice you to share the content/script, so it would be more of a dialog. Maybe even discuss this from two points of views (realistic simulation vs action packed gameplay, for instance). And it really bothered me that Justin wasn't in the thumbnail. Great editing and camera setup though!
[Matt] there's a lot in your comment but let's boil down to one concept: the misnomer that somehow damage - be it swords or bullets - is not about impact. The science is pretty well sorted out, and freely available for anyone who wants to research it. Let's take it in pieces: 1) Ballistic data. Virtually all ammunition is rated on three interrelated measurements: bullet weight/mass, muzzle velocity, and muzzle energy (which can be calculated from the first two.) It's purely physics - and absolutely a measure of impact. How effectively a bullet transfers it's kinetic energy to its target is directly proportionate to its ability to inflict damage. There's even a specific term for it: hydrostatic shock. Think of it as the "spash" effect in the giant water balloon that is the human body. At the risk of getting a little graphic, that splash effect creates shock ripples that compress (and even somtimes rupture) internal organs that are well away from the actual wound channel of a bullet. The hydrostatic shock to internal organs is what does the takes down 9 out of 10 gunshot victims. You don't need to hit a vital organ precisely, and in fact almost no one does. (This is the major flaw with your hammer/knife/gun example.) 2) Swords are a little muddier subject, but many of the same principles apply. For example, many people mistakenly believe that swords are made as sharp as possible to cut more deeply. Not true! Swords are often deliberately dulled slightly to increase their impact to tissue disruption ratio, because too sharp a sword will slice too deeply, get stuck, and not produce enough knock-down impact. That is why it is theoretically possible to hold a sword blade and not get cut - precisely BECAUSE it relies on impact rather than purely cutting. You speak of "cutting motion" but if you think through the physics of such a motion what it is really doing is transferring torque from human muscles into kinetic energy of the blade - a combination of rotational speed and blade mass that translates into impact energy distributed over the area of blade's edge surface area. Your comments about the katana actually bear this out. As you may or may not know, the katana evolved from the tachi - the traditional samurai sword. It was more deeply curved than the katana, and therefore had more cutting ratio - which was exactly it's flaw. More curvature meant two things: it had a weaker ratio of blade energy to edge surface area, and it required more skill to wield effectively. In earlier times that was ok for the highly trained noble class against unarmored opponents. The katana evolved because with less curvature it was easier to wield for less trained fighters and marginally less cutting ratio made it marginally better against lightly armored targets (heavy armor was a rarity in Japan.) In Europe swords with pronounced blade curvature like katanas were eschewed for a variety of reasons. Straight, heavier blades were cheaper and easier to manufacture and easier for less trained combatants to wield. But mostly it's that straight swords have a higher ratio of mass/blade energy to edge area so they have more knock-down power, and are therefore more effective against the heavier armored targets which were more common than in Japan. Katanas are showy fanboy favs, but as an effective sword they are outclassed by much more mundane weapons, which is why they were relegated to ceremonial status. All this is really just physics, and so too is armor. The ability of wearable material to absorb, attenuate, and distribute impact energy over larger surface area to prevent the material from being breached is what it's all about. In that sense WoD does do a good job. In original form it classified damage states in terms of aggravated/lethal/stun damage, which is essentially one of the things I'm suggesting could be done for other systems with respect to armor. Where systems allow, armor that distributes impact to prevent penetration would functionally downgrade/convert aggravated/lethal damage into stun damage (or slashing/piercing into bludgeoning in D&D terms). Not all systems would facilitate this easily, but ones that do would work great.
@@gameon_ct I don't know much about guns, but almost everything you said about swords are sadly factually untrue. Sharper swords cut deeper, and they also slice straight through without getting lodged. The reason why a sword would get stuck is because it's dull or you turn it mid cut. The reason why people didn't sharpen their swords top much is because of diminishing returns. After a couple of hits, a sword becomes dull, so at some point, there's no point sharpening it, because it'll just be dull after a while. Katanas were also developed as a selfdefense weapon, while the tachi was a war weapon meant to fight in military units. Whichever was invented first is irrelevant, since they were used in the same time period. Just two different tools for two different scenarios. Lastly, European weapons were both single and double edged, curved and not. They were heavier, lighter, longer and shorter than katanas. Even katanas have many different forms than what we are used to today. A thousand years of history in a large continent like Europe cannot be condensed into "Europeans wanted more impact on their swords". Anyways, IMO the realism of how swords and guns work, doesn't matter much in games, especially roleplaying games. Whether one sword has better cutting capacity than another isn't what makes a game fun. It's the decision making you do as a player. Just looking at monster hunter world, you see that the different weapons produce different playstyles. Giving the players options to choose from is what makes a game fun. In D&D for instance, you have the option to choose between a short sword and a scimitar. And literally the only difference is that the scimitar is heavier and cost more. It might be realistic that they are relatively equal in damage potential ("short swords" could be anything really), but there's no reason to choose the scimitar, since it has more drawbacks than a short sword. For a player this is a false choice, and it's not a fun option. However, if you had a game system where the dagger was good for so and so situations, and the axe was good for so and so, then the players could choose which weapons they wanted based on how they wanted to handle situations. Do they want to sneak around and assassinate, or charge forward bare chested? The weapons and armor doesn't have to be rooted in reality, but rather in what gameplay potential they unlock.
@@gameon_ct Afaik, swords didn't at all rely on impact, that's a myth created by reenactment/show fighting swords. A sword usually has its center of mass somewhere around the lower thrid of the blade. As a result they have a relatively low moment of inertia, making the weapon nimbler (or more easily controlled) but reducing the impact. It's kind of the opposite with axes and maces. So it doesn't come as a suprise that those where popular anti armor choices. It's true though, that straight swords usually appear in contexts with more armor, a result of thrusting being rather effective against it. Thrusts just have a better chance (or one at all) of piercing fabric and mail or getting in to the gaps bewtween plates (which are often covered by mail). In fact stilletos where made for exactly that (hence the rather robust diamond cross section). From what I heard, fuly plate armored ppl often don't feel sword strikes at all. Another factor to consider is that armor often is shaped to let attacks glance off, rather than just stopping them. Works epecially well against edged weapons. That's why hammers and maces are often multi pronged or flanged rather than smooth, gives a better gripping surface. If you want to fight an armored opponent with a sword, you should probably rely on thrusts, halfswording and maybe the murder stroke (or Mordhau, grab the thing by the blade and use it like a hammer or mace). Edit for clarification: What i particularly disagree with is the idea, that ony the mass of a sword determines its impact, as the distribution of mass is just as important. In the example you've given in the video its not the arc of the tip that determines it, but the one of the center of mass (roughly). That doesn't even go into stuff like bending or knockback absorbing a lot of the force.
Agree armour is poorly modeled in most rpgs. However weapons are also poorly modeled too. No 3 foot sword weighs 10lbs. What most systems miss, is the relationships between fighters through their weapons. Before you can hit someone you must stop them from hitting you and stop them from stopping you from hitting them. One of the few systems that atbleast came close is Swashbuckler! By Jim Dietz
There's also the fact that you have a sword that's like 3 foot, each unit of area in combat is like 5 by 5 feet squares or something, but you can only hit someone who's in an adjacent square, even though realistically you could easily reach 5 feet to make an attack just by stepping in and still be able to retreat back into your stance in the same square you started in
I've had similar thoughts. However, the weapon/offensive side of combat systems is just as guilty as the armor/defensive side. A knight in shining plate armor is a formidable foe, but if you wrestle him to the ground and stab him through the eye slit, his armor means nothing. Or hit him in the armpit while his attack is being blocked by someone else. How do you represent this with dice and stats without turning D&D into Battletech? Good question.
"How effective you are at wearing armor" covers being able to intentionally turn to catch a sword swing on your breastplate instead of trying to back off and losing your arm to the strike. Also, kevlar degrades with repeated hits, at a slower rate than ceramic plates, but still faster than AR-500.
there were 2 older systems one called Top Secret. the armor in that game converted lethal damage into nonlethal damage. in shadowrun 1e 2e and 3e armor had a defensive value and weapons had a power and a damage value. if you were shot with a gun that had a damage value of say 9M (9 is the power of the weapon, M is the damage it causes) the armor would have a defensive value of say... 6. you would then run a calculation comparing the power 9 to the defense 6 with some other mechanical factors and the result could reduce the damage (M) to L or even nothing.
i never liked systems that use a damage soaking system for armor (like palladium or rifts) that really only makes sense to me for force fields, the whole force field is gone when the points run out. and D&D's armor, heavier makes you harder to hit... i just cant figure out how to make characters like Conan or Drizzt as skilled in parrying without dressing them up in the heavy armor when thats not how they usually operate.
I guess a good way to do it would be distinguishing between different damage (cut, pierce, impact) and armor (mail, fabric including leather and plate). Then you could have each combination interact differently. Blunt impact just gets reduced by all types of armor to a limited extend but gets through everything. Piercing damage CAN get through plate under rare cicumstances , more often through mail and certainly through fabric (still gets diminshed by all of them). Cuts are always completely stopped by plate, most of the time by mail and get weakened by fabric. Note that most swords can cut for cutting damage and pierce for thrusting damage and many other weapons like warhammers and halberds have multiple business ends with different damage types. Also some weapons should do limited impact when stopped fully. That could be displayed as a secondary damage value in brackets.
Yeah I was thinking the same, like most videogames. But things aren't that simple either. The other day I was playing Elden Ring and that game damage reduction works somewhat similar to what you said, and does a great job at it. But then I was fighting a monsterade of stone, like the classic golem. They are weak to blunt damage, resistant to every other damage (cut, pierce). But... I found a pickaxe, which has piercing attacks, and the stone enemies are resistant to this damage type... But, pickaxes were made to easily break stone! The problem was this, the pickaxe shares the damage type of arrows and rapiers which are terrible against stone. Juwt try to break a giant rock with bow and arrow or a rapier. Pickaxe is heavier and more mass concentrates towards the pointy end, thus making the blow much more powerful... Axes, the same as pickaxes, are in the family of "cutting" weapons, but axes are far better at cutting through wood, like trees (or plant enemies). But swords and knifes aren't, maybe heavy falchions are good enough. Armor piercing weapons are waehammers, great spears and poleaxed, but they're in the family of arrows and rapiers, again, bad choices to damage through armor. The same with piercing attacks with swords. There's only one system that manages to make good representation of this differences when comparing damage types, different weapons and different armor types quite smooth and fast... But it needs a lot of charts.
It really comes down to how simulationist you want to go with it. Many try and abstract it in a way that the narrative of what’s happening feels heroic. You can try to make it more realistic but the more complex you make the mechanics the more it starts to bog down combat.
@@gameon_ct I generally agree with what is being said here. The level of detail and crunch you add decreases the speed of the game. For instance, armor damage reduction systems tend to make more sense, but they are also mechanically dense and unwieldy compared to a straight up hit and miss situation. This is actually a deep topic. You example of a sword vs plate mail raises some questions--are you talking about late 15th century full plate harness, or are you discussing a 12th century coat of plates, or something in between? A sword isn't the best weapon for delivering the kind of blunt force trauma you're bringing up when it comes to delivering damage through armor. Swords are poor tools for delivering that kind of damage (A German zweihander made for actual battle is roughly between 5-7 lbs.) Combat swords were not that heavy. And you're not cutting through plate armor. Not happening. That's why knights frequently used things like pole axes, bec-de-corbins, war hammers, etc., to help break through heavy armor, or to deliver enough blunt force trauma through the armor to incapacitate their enemy. When they did use swords against others in full plate, they frequently used half-swording techniques to better aim for the gaps in an opponent's armor. And even then fights often came down to a knight wrestling skills where the killing blows were delivered by the humble roundel dagger once an opponent was pinned. Against mail, or scale armor and other less developed armors such as gambeson, swords are excellent weapons. All that said, in lived reality armored fighting is a very different animal than unarmored fighting. Full plate harness was a game changer until firearms became sufficiently advanced. HEMA practitioners are a great resource for anyone running and thinking deeply about the interaction of weapons vs. armor. I highly recommend to anyone interested in this topic to watch the arrows vs armor video series from Todd's Workshop. Just fascinating stuff.
Problem, armor is not exclusively passive. If someone is wearing platemail for example, they can move to intentionally take a hit on the armor but in such a way that the strike is deflected without damaging the wearer. Does that count as being hit?
I had the same issue myself (as well as personal experience fighting in medieval armour), so I went for basically all 3 methods to have the mechanics to reflect how different groups in the game setting make their armour. - Every time you suffer damage, reduce it by X - Ignore the first X hits - Second HP bar that chips away I have used the first for reliable armour, the second for cheap or makeshift armour and the third to give my players the walking tank/"I am more metal than sense" feeling of "I can walk to an orc warchief, get slapped in the face with a berdiche and actually be able to punch back, now?!".
I think modern systems completely misinterpret attack rolls and armor. Attack rolls express an opportunity to materially wound the other guy. Fighting isn’t hitting a dummy as fast as you can. Armor disrupts those opportunities. You either need to hit harder (more directly, etc.) or you need to hit where the armor won’t help or help as much. All of this is massively complicated by the armor type and structure and the weapon; but the basic system is very effective for narrative and gameplay purposes. Games like white wolf are based on playing out the entire battle. Hence why you constantly call out “dodge!” Or “parry!”. In white wolf armor does have a “soak” rating, which amplifies your personal “soak”. Because you’re always a supernatural creature in white wolf. It’s also a relatively low combat system.
Rolemaster has a very good way of handling this, though it is table heavy. Effectively, lighter armour is more likely to mean you are not hit at all, but when you are, its gonna hurt. Heavy armour means you are going to take some hit points damage on most hits, but will not receive criticals as often (its the critical tablea thatll get you in rolemaster). Also, certain types of armour are less or mpre effective against certain weapon types.
Yeah, I played Role master a lot and it already solved many old problems that bothers D&D community. But most people doesn't know about it and it surprises me to find your comment! I want to add that weapon tables solves the problem of "resistant to x damage type" in other games where a powerful bec de corbin is weak against armor because their piercing "brothers" are weak against armor (arrows, rapiers, swords). The same about axes, powerful against wood and thick hide, but are weak because they share damage type with weaker weapons like swords and scimitars. Rolemaster gives more power to axes against wood and shields or thick skin than swords, even when they are both "cutting" weapons. And pickaxes, polearms and great spears are given much more power against armor than rapiers and arrows. Also, cutting weapons can do "blunt critical damage" meaning they can't cut through but the hit was powerful enough to break some bone. Rolemaster weapon/armor system is awesome, but you have to be ready to print a lot of tables! (I still love it).
Metal plates do deflect a blow that isnt well placed, hence no real hit. Much like a helmet being hit by a bullet and it glancing off. This would add 1-3 points of AC not to be hit. The rest is as you say, it absorbs damage.
the armor system has always bothered me, but so do hit points. You'd really need to rework the whole system to change it. Gotta keep in mind it's still a game and simple hit/miss/dmg needs to be.. well simple lol
[Matt] I gather you're referring to one system in particular? 😀 (D&D I'm guessing since that is the default for most.) I agree (as also I mention in another comment below). I think D&D's hitpoint/damage system often leads to power imbalences and an arms race that spirals out of control like the inflation rate of a failing 3rd world economy - things which eventually can't help but intrude on playability. But reworking that would be a monumental undertaking - its so deeply intertwined into all the specialty rules that it would be next to impossible to do. By comparison, armor rules are fairly self-contained, and could be made more realistic using existing damage mechanics and scales without making any rolls less simple if you just went with a rule like armor halves slashing or piercing damage and converts it to bludgeoning. All other damage types are unaffected.
@@gameon_ct how does that work for AC on classes where it's clearly not actually armor, it's them getting out of the way? The systems I'm most familiar with are the old old Final Fantasy games where it's basically a ton of opposed rolls. to hit vs evade/dodge, if it hit then dmg vs armor - the armor value is reduced for the dmg roll. Systems like that bog things down though when it's not a computer handling all the rolls in a split second
@@QuiniansBudgetCrafts [Matt] Armor really should affect the taking (or soaking) of damage once you have been hit - not adjudicating whether you have been hit in the first place. That sounds like what you are describing - albeit in computer driven rpg form. The problem D&D struggles with vis-a-vis it's AC value is that it dictates the to-hit roll itself. Systems like that which you describe - that use opposed dodge/evade rolls vs hit rolls - would still have that, and that phase of the attack sequence would be unaffected. As to whether such opposed roll based systems slow down combat or not...well, that's a matter of individual taste. My take: the good opposed roll systems are actually more seamless and intuitive than single roll systems that require heavy duty arithmetical adding and subtracting of numerous special case modifiers (+2 for this feat, -3 for that condition, +1 for this weapon, +5 for attacks on alternate Tuesday under a full moon - unless your target suffers from lycanthropy, in which case it's a -5 with disadvantage etc). But all that is sort of separate from the question of armor. A system that depends on opposed rolls for the damage phase (let's say an initial damage vs a soak roll) could either give armor a bonus to the soak roll itself or a flat soak value that skims a certain amount of damage off the initial damage total before the opposing soak roll is made, making the soak roll easier.
Regarding damage systems, maybe you'd like Warhammer rpg and the older 40k ones. There hitpoints are still a thing, but they just means that every hit becomes a crit once it would take you below 0 (crits can still happen naturally). Once you take a certain amount of crits (all of which have special effects) or just an insta-deth crit you are taken out (becoming unconcious and dying after a while when not being treated afaik). Overall, no one has many HP and no one is ever safe. Also crits can be such fun things as permanently loosing body parts, slowly bleeding out or insta-death.
I agree. Step 1 to making armor work well without causing the system so slow down a lot is to get rid of HP. HP is the core problem for armor as well as some other problems. Take for example, Savage Worlds. Realism isn't even a major design goal for the system, but a more realistic armor system flows naturally by simply replacing HP with a different damage mechanic. It's also flexible and modular enough that you can add more realistic complexity without completely overhauling the game like you generally have to do with d20 systems or bogging the system down too much. It's not perfect, by any means (as much as I have a great fondness for it), but I bring it up because it's telling that a pulp system focused on fast paced action ends up being more realistic on accident just by getting rid of HP...while also being able to handle everything from swords and sorcery up through futuristic settings.
Did you ever make armor rules? I am currently trying to make a hack for 5e dnd and I am planning to have evasion and realistic armor much like you discribed I would love to adapt anything you have into my system if you are willing to share
LOVE this idea. Wish I'd heard of it sooner for the hardcore tabletop game I'm working on. Being dealt at least half your max hp's worth of damage from a single hit can cause devastating effects based on a CON save made by the player. The better you roll, the less you're effected, but it's still bad. And there are attack dis/advantages based on that triangle of weakness thing, as well as element types. You know...tank>archer>mage. Like RuneScape, but more in depth to account for many of the funky ttrpg classes you'd encounter. So I think I'd do armor this way. Say your armor provided AC is 10. If 3 successful attacks are dealt against you, you lose a point in your armors AC as sort of wear and tear, and it would now be 9. A critical attack alone would drop your armors AC by a whole point, down to 8. That's all I have for now. lol Any ideas on how to improve this? Also, death is a very important part of this game. Resurrections are commonplace, but very expensive and involved. I don't have any ideas for death saves yet, aside from that I want the enemies to be able to make them too. Just because you knock them down/out, doesn't mean they're dead. The party still has to get in a couple more swings to finish them off, otherwise leaving an enemy alive could come back to bite you in the ass later. And they could have an advantage against fighting you since they've experienced your style of combat and can plan around it.
Think I might make it so that a glancing blow (just meets the AC) and slightly higher, you lose a single of the three AC points durability. Anything else up to just under critting loses you 2 AC durability points. And a crit is 3 durability points, losing a full AC point until repaired. Also, depending on the armor type/material, repairs may cost around 10 gold or more for restoring a single AC point, doubling with each AC point restored. Until it's just cheaper to buy new armor anyway.
I'm late to this discussion but how about different armours have different dice that can mitigate damage. Leather armour 1d4 damage. On enemy critical it drops to 1d3. Another critical 1d2. Another critical it only stops 1 damage. This can go up. So chainmail stops 1d6 damage and on enemy critical drops to 1d4 etc. etc. Plate maybe stops 1d10 damage but on critical drops to 1d8 and so on. Magic armour maybe doesn't drop on critical so the damage stopped for magic chainmail is always 1d6. Just my 2 cents.
Two questions you got me thinking on: 1. Do you think this would work with a rules lites system or bog it down by complicating armor values? 2. How do you feel about armor in the Genesys system? I feel like the damage output with ranged defense, soak value, kinda relates to the technical effect of armor. I think maybe armor and its gradual effects could be a home brew mechanic to games like dnd5e but it would be a bit overwhelming for me as a GM to deal with if I wanted to go for that technical realism. But otherwise it would be cool and add a sense of realism to my games.
[Matt] My intention was always to keep this a fairly rules lite add-in that could be ported into any system fairly easily. Obviously it would need to be tuned slightly to fit the scale and quirks of any given system, but anyone with enough knowledge of a system to run it should be able to do so with little difficulty or complication. The best tack is to take a median damage of a common weapon to use as a baseline for calibration - something like a longsword strike by an average human in a fantasy setting, or a mid-caliber handgun in a modern setting etc. Whether you make the mechanic a damage points absorb/conversion or a bonus to soak depends on the specific system and your preference in making it a passive or active element for the player. If the given system already has your players actively rolling to soak, giving them an armor bonus to that soak roll doesn't make it more difficult or bogged down - its just a different number. If the system uses a single step unopposed damage roll (passive - no soak) then you just have the armor absorb some of the points, and have the amount it absorbs step down very gradually to reflect armor deterioration if you want to. Or not. (Armor degradation is less important than getting the absorption aspect right.) If your system has damage step down at longer ranges, no problem. That doesn't require changing anything - it just means there's less initial damage to soak/absorb.
If you want a system that's relatively rules light (arguably more medium-light compared to true rules-light systems) and does armor decently, look up Savage Worlds. It's ironically one of the more realistic combat systems I've played and it's not even trying to be. It's also way faster to play than a medium-heavy D&D. The first step to doing armor well is to replace HP with a different damage system.
I 100% agree with you. I also dislike how most TTRPGs don't make "tanking" an "active" thing that a character can do. The danger with augmenting something like D&Ds AC system is twofold: 1) Their entire combat and itemization systems are tied to how the AC and HP components of those systems work, so modifying anything on a foundational level requires a LOT of additional changes. 2) A lot of people prefer simplicity over any type of crunch. So, I think the trick here is to find something as elegant as possible where it's complexity adds "fun," like the ability to create characters around the active abilities related to armor. I think all of that is accomplishable, but trying to modify another system like D&D to achieve it is probably not worth effort, unless WotC does it for like 6th edition.
[Matt] Yes, D&D is problematic on many levels. At its core the damage system is deeply flawed - that a 10th level fighter could ever have 7 or 8 TIMES hit points of that same character at 1st level is laughable. There's no fixing that. It's why the power level arms race in D&D inevitably leads to outrageous power imbalances that need hundreds of pages of special rule bandaids that are only partially effective. That said, converting armor to something more realistic doesn't break the broken system worse, so why not make this one thing better? It doesn't have to make it more crunchy. If you want to keep it simple then say armor no longer modifies to-hit AC, but instead halves all slashing and piercing damage and converts it to bludgeoning. Not perfect, but waaay more realistic and it doesn't change the system mechanics.
It should work by the premise of was it a hit or not then go to ok was there any attributable permanent damage or not, then go into, well than how bad? Where as stuff like leather or multiple layers of cloth might not provide as much mitigation but vastly increase your chances of avoiding damage in the first place; in properly trained hands anyway. Heavy stuff like plate should grant a better chance of actually being hit, but a better percentile on actually nullifying it all anyway, once again in properly trained hands, with a steeper training proficiency curve.
This is why I like Palladium. In that game you roll a D20 to hit, but 1-4 is a miss, 5 and up is a hit. BUT! The other player can dodge or parry. A dodge is that character's next action used up, but parries are free. In essence, a sword fight is a series of opposed rolls. You have to strike higher than the other guy's parry roll. Armor has an armor rating. A hit of 5, but equal to the armor rating, say 13 for a suit of chainmail, hits the armor. This is still a bad thing for the victim, as the armor has it's own hit points, and at 1/2 of its hit points it drops to AR 11, and again at 1/3rd hit points. So, in Palladium there are 4 outcomes. 1-4 = miss. Next is a 5 or more, but below AR & below enemy parry roll, = no damage. Third is a roll below AR & above enemy parry = hit to the armor, roll damage and subtract from the armor. Lastly, a roll that is above AR and above enemy parry, that is a hit to the character inside the armor and does wounding damage.
Thank you for the discussion. I'm actually trying to improve the way armour works in my homebrew rule system for WFRP. So, i found your discussion very useful. WFRP RAW uses a Damage Mitigation System for armour which basically reduces the damage inflicted by a hit by a fixed amount. This sounds fine but when running narrative combat or handling armour choices by players really doesn't make armour very interesting. It's like 'You get hit for 14 Damage but you're wearing a breastplate so that's -2 Damage deduct 12 damage from your character's body'. It's a bit bland and uninteresting and I am looking to make armour more exciting for characters to choose and wear. What you describe is actually very similar to the WFRP RAW as it is also based on Damage Mitigation, e.g. Your breastplate gets hit by your opponent's sword which reduces the damage by absorbing part of the blow and negating the cutting damage allowing only the impact to pass through to your body. In effect it just reduces the damage, so back to square one as far as WFRP RAW are concerned. Except that I'm looking to introduce a bit more colour to that scenario by comparing the Type of Armour with the Type of Damage. Where sone types of armour are better than others at mitigating certain types of damage. e.g. Plate Armour might be 100% against arrows, teeth and claws, but only 50% against Hammers, Maces and other bludgeoning weapons. Whereas Padded Armour might actually be 100% against Fists but practically 0% against an arrow or a stiletto blade. Have you seen anything like this sort of assessment in existence?
@@gameon_ct Thanks Justin, I'm still pondering this issue, but I've looked at several different systems now and I'm starting to get a feel for what I like and don't like at least. I'm more or less settled on some sort of Table that compares Armour-Type to Damage-Type and defines how much of that sort of damage is absorbed by that sort of armour. That seems to make sense and gives players the choice of what sort of armour is going to provide them with the best protection against the type of opponent they expect to meet, and what sort of weapon (or attack) will be most effective against an opponent wearing a particular type of armour. However, I'm trying to avoid using Armour Points to mitigate damage merely because it's too predictable and fixed. So, APs in my game will be more akin to Durability or Quality. The idea is that better quality armour has higher AP and thus can take more damage before falling apart. Finally because my WFRP rules cater for 'Critical Hits' and 'Extra Damage'. I'm probably going to include exception rules for when these occur. So, a 'Critical Hit' will be a hit that actually causes damage to the armour. It might dent it, or rip off a strap, or knock the horn off a vikings helmet. But it will reduce the AP value of the armour by a few AP points. 'Extra Damage' on the other hand is a reasonably rare event that allows a blow to inflict much more damage than it normally would and represents a particularly well-placed shot or blow that just happens to land on the best spot. This might be explained by an arrow finding a gap in your armour, or a blow just happening to catch a weak spot. Extra Damage will always cause actual damage to a character provided that it is high enough to exceed the remaining AP of the armour. e.g. An arrow fired at Short Range hits your character for 3 Success Levels and the bow adds +3 for its effective strength, so 6 Damage. But the archer then rolls a 6! for random damage which in my rules indicates Extra Damage and so another dice is rolled and comes up 5. This is a really powerful hit amounting to 17 Damage and has clearly found the perfect spot on your armour. Only the best armour AP20 would be able to negate all of that impact, but your character is wearing Standard AP10 armour and so 7 damage is sufferred. Perhaps the arrow actually punctured your plate mail or found a gap or join that was only partially protected. That seems to provide a bit more interest as a narrative for describing combat, which is what I'm looking for rather than just realism.
[Matt] So your proposed idea sounds good in theory and should provide the desired differentiation/interest level for your players in choosing armor with differing effects much the way various weapons often produce differing damage effects - both in magnitude and in category. I guess my one word of caution would be to err on the side of playability when fleshing out your armor system. A couple/few variations can add flavor, but too many can bog down combat excessively. Remember that your players are inevitably going to be less familiar with - and likely enthusiastic about - the minutiae of your system than you are. Requiring them to reference too many tables can make a combat session seem less like a game and more like an assignment. This may already be your plan, but my advice would be to set it up so that you read the tables and do the math "behind the curtain" so you can preserve the drama and effect for your players. And a big part of preserving drama is being FAST with the calcs so you can quickly get to describing the outcome. If your table is organized in such a way to maintain that speed then your system should get the benefit of increased detail/realism/interest without sacrificing pace. As to the critical vs extra damage...to each their own. Conceptually I personally don't see the need for having a rigidly defined system metric for damaging armor. Setting aside the question of whether such is realistic, in terms of game play having deteriorating armor then becomes just another consumable like food, torches, arrows, or whatever supplies that players have to spend mental energy, game time and loot maintaining to no real benefit in terms of player enjoyment. If you want to include that element from time to time you can always adlib it as part of roleplay. As for extra damage (what most gamers usually think of with the term "critical") I am wholeheartedly in favor. And that mechanic should never be "behind the curtain". Nothing gives players more thrill than rolling big and scoring a hugely consequential blow at a key moment in the game. And if they have the strategic option to choose a particularly advantageous weapon versus the opponent's specific armor type to maximize the odds of a big roll at a big moment so much the better!
@@gameon_ct I'm very conscious of the KISS principle when choosing game mechanics. So, I will certainly avoid falling into the trap of confusing more detail with more value. In fact, having looked at some of the RPG Armour Systems that advertise themselves as 'REALISTIC' I have concluded that most are confusing 'realistic' with 'complicated' and so I've tended to reject them as an inspiration for my own approach. The WFRP 4e Armour System is actually quite good in my opinion but has been badly implemented by relying heavily on a raft of weapon and armour 'Flaws' and 'Qualities' to provide variations in performance. Made worse by the fact that they are printed in different parts of the rulebook and even in different books. My own approach is to try to replace these rule-modification fragments with something much simpler and ideally with a single cross-reference table, THE ARMOUR PROTECTION TABLE' which will compare the type of armour being struck by the type of damage being delivered and provide a simple value for how much of the incoming damage is being blocked, absorbed or deflected by that specific combination. e.g. Mail Armour would defect far more cutting damage than it will prevent impaling damage. So, ideally, the final system will be handled by a single table with ARMOUR TYPE on one axis and DAMAGE TYPE on the other. However, it's early days yet and I'm still looking for good references to help create the table. I think Mike Loades did a lot of research into the effectiveness of various types of armour, so I'm hoping to go through those at some point. But if you have any other suitable sources please let me know. This is the link to my work in progress www.worldanvil.com/w/wfrp-fragile-alliances-didz/a/armour-article?preview=true? During play, I want to try and keep things as simple as possible. So, the player will declare who their character intends to attack and what type of damage they want to inflict based upon the weapon in hand. Some weapons will be able to deliver more than one type of damage. Roll for success and the location of the hit, Roll for Damage based on the Success and Strength, of the blow plus the usual random damage element. Finally, consult the Armour Protection Table to determine what if any protection is provided by the type of armour worn on that location to the sort of damage chosen by the player and apply the result. The results will either be a reduction in damage, if the armour provides protection against that type of damage, or may result in damage to the armour itself which will compromise its protection against further attacks. e.g. Plate Armour being struck by a Warhammer will transmit some of the impact to the wearer and may actually be dented or buckled by the blow, especially if it is of poor quality or fit. That's the gist of what I'm aiming for any useful reference sources or sample rules would be appreciated.
I've watched a number of videos of the fight scene in the 70's MacBeth. Or the fights of Excalibur or Robin & Merriam. The endurance required to keep you going until you get that critical hit sharpens (in chance terms) depending on the weapon. Great video, good discussion to have, I like the premise and the solution hypothesis.
DND design goals are not to provide a perfect simulationist-heavy system with great realism. Is about a bunch of medieval theme super heroes killing monsters, so its mecanics make a trade off between realism and gameability and favor the later one.
A game needs to be playable and have the ability to balance out encounters for the enjoyment of those playing. Thus realism is often sacrificed. You might prefer a system like the old West End Games where armor increased your body’s ability to resist damage and when you are hit(yes some armors reduced your ability to dodge) damage would be rolled and your Str+Armor would reduce it and if still positive number the consult wound level chart. The system also did not have Hit Points but a set number of wound levels(which were mostly static from creation) and as wound levels increased your ability to function decreased. For realism you will need to give a vast array of weapon and armor types with a matrix of how each interacts with each other. Unfortunately as the world is unbalanced any system that try’s to account for those factors becomes unplayable… yes you can apply the inverse square rule for calculating concussive force from an explosion and factor in the medium the wave is transported through and how that will effect dispersion but who wants to spend a half hour or more to calculate one hand grenade.
[Matt] Justin got me to agree on camera so now I'm committed! 😀 I'm putting together rough rules for a few different types of system, with the idea that the concepts could be adapted to others with only minor tweaks (to different damage scales etc)
"Heavy pieces of metal that impede your movement"? I may still be able to glean some ideas from this but based on that phrasing alone I think I'll have a much better time looking elsewhere for thoughts on armor systems.
As someone who once tried a suit of armor on, I speak from my own experience. It was rather restrictive - particularly in rotational movement and in reaching across the body - and it affects your balance in odd ways, although I suspect an experienced user could learn to compensate for that somewhat. Still, my impression confirmed what one might reasonably expect - that being draped in steel makes one less agile and more deliberate of movement.
@@gameon_ct 'Once tried on' a suit of (likely cheaply made, crappy metal) armor is very different from a trained fighter wearing a custom tailored suit of interlocking plates. th-cam.com/video/qzTwBQniLSc/w-d-xo.html
@@gameon_ct A set of armor that is well made and fits properly can hardly be reduced to being called "heavy pieces of metal that impede your movement". There's a lot that can vary, and of course it's made of metal (which is heavy and inflexible), but armor is made to move in. That is its function and purpose. To be functional, mobile protection for your body. It is designed to move and of course the further down the line of armor development you come the better that gets. Just because you wore "a suit of armor" doesn't mean that that armor is a reliable or good example of what all armor is like.
This exposition is rather pedantic. The ‘conversion’ you are advancing is accounted for by the interplay of AC and hit points and the concept of the ‘telling blow’ in 1e AD&D. And no suits of armor are just donned, training is class specific.
Interesting historical footnote - the Dutch pirate Grutte Pier used a great sword that weighed 14 pounds. It currently resides in a museum in the Netherlands. But it's not the largest on record. There is a Scottish Claymore in the National Museum in Edinburgh that weighs 23 pounds. And there is a Japanese ōdachi on record weighing nearly 30 pounds. And of course there are countless surviving ceremonial swords weighing 10-15 pounds. Sure, these examples are outliers, but they do exist - and really, if you're playing a game chock full of elves, dwarves, goblins, orcs, and the occasional dragon, it would be rather silly to quibble on practical grounds if a PC wanted to carry a big sword.
@@gameon_ct That sword is misattributed to Grutte Pier, as it was made before he was born. Yes, giant swords existed, but they weren't meant for actual combat, more as a means to show off your wealth and the smith's skill. Most swords weigh 2-3 pounds, with greatswords topping out at around 7. You may say that a barbarian with 20 strength would be able to wield something heavier, but they really don't need to. That same strength can be used to make a lighter sword move faster, thus doing more damage, getting past an opponent's guard easier, and being able to block better. Just cause you could add more weight doesn't mean you should. The existence of elves and dragons doesn't nullify realism. Those elements are fantastical, but they are justified through magic, divine intervention, what have you, but just because it's a fantasy game doesn't mean we can or should throw away how things actually work. Elves and dragons have a reason to exist, 15 pound swords don't.
PHB also lists longsword at 3lbs. Also, you are making the game way more complex than need be. .making armor add to HP can add to the gamification of the game by introducing the need to repair or replace armor.
You guys should look into rpgs like Star Wars by Fantasy Flight Games, or Savage Worlds Adventure Edition! Both of these games offer rules that literally describe what your talking about. D&D in whatever Edition you have is a total joke!
It's a myth that medieval armor greatly encumbered the wearer. Modern experiments with well made and properly fitted armor shows that the wearer is able to move with impressive agility and range of motion. The weight might eventually wear the user down more quickly than not wearing it, but that's a reduction in endurance, not dexterity. Ttrpg armor systems are designed by fantasists with no clue about combat.
Hell, even Buhurt armour, which is notoriously on the bulkier end of armour (because of Buhurt's inherent idiosyncracies as a sport), still allows you to do some pretty crazy stunts xD
I've seen, with these two eyes, people do dropkicks or jumpstands in it.
Armor isn't really that strenuous or limiting to wear. You do get tired faster and recover your stamina slower, and you probably accelerate- and have a slightly slower top speed when running, but the weight is distributed over your entire body, so it doesn't get to feel as heavy, and you can in fact do flips in full plate armor.
Also, you can learn to wear armor better: most types of armors has weak spots, fx: in their joints, and a proficient fighter protects these, while he fights.
Finally; yeah, your armor can get broken that much that it just falls apart and leaves open gaps and may be unrepairable, and depending on what weapon / ammunition you use, you may be able to shatter it in one hit, though, probably not by a handheld weapon.
No sword meant for combat weighs 10 lbs (ceremonial swords may weighs that much) and it wouldn't be just 3 ft. long.
A claymore / greatsword, weighs typically 6 - 7 lbs and are typically 5.2 - 6.2 ft. long. Greatswords in ttrpgs should have Reach and a cleaving mechanic: yes I'm gonna die on this hill.
I used to be a Kick Boxing pro fighter, so here are some insights from someone who actually fought for a living.
I'm aware it's not the same as medieval fighting, but I believe many principles are basically the same, although they aren't expressed in the same way.
For example, distance, rhythm, adaptability... it's easy to see all those things are basic principles to any kind of physical fighting.
I think you can totally become better at using armor.
When you are a noob, you have to actually fight (in the ring) with protection.
A great deal of a newbie's training is precisely to get comfortable at fighting with protection.
Even very light protection like foam shin guards, those foam helmets (I don't know how they are called in english) and mouth guards can be VERY annoying in the middle of a fight.
Helmets restrict your vision, mouth guards don't let you breathe with your mouth to get more oxygen when you are tired (most people hate them), shin guards feel awkward, groin protection feels totally wrong and so on.
In general, even very light armor restricts your movement, feels different and gets a lot of time to get used to.
In fact, one of my greatest joys of going pro was that I finally had to fight without using that cumbersome armor, so I can only imagine how annoying and dangerous was to fight to death inside a heaume or something.
But I digress.
We were also taught some techniques to use those pieces armor more effectively; how to "block" a kick to the thigh so it slides along the shin and the shin guard so it doesn't get out of place and things like that.
Speaking of blocking: in my school what we were taught as "blocks" were actually more like parries. True blocks were taught, but we used them rarely and we were specifically taught to use them only as a last resort; and many of those blocks consisted on positioning the body in such a way to minimize the damage.
I said "my school" because most other schools taught to block and their fighters usually ended up in worse shape after the fights than us.
If we were aware that armor is cumbersome and the whole body can be used to parry and block, *do you really think people who had a great chance of dying each time they fought didn't know those things*?
I'm 100% sure ANY kind of armor felt completely restrictive compared to using none and I'm quite sure those fighters developed techniques to position the body in such a way the armor could parry a blow or directing an inevitable blow to a better guarded part of the armor.
And all those things, you can get better at with practice and experience.
I have armoured fighting experience.
You can definitely get better at fighting in armour; learn how to time your breathing, to engage the core to reduce stress on the arms, gauge when to take a movement and when not to, learn how to feel with your feet or develop a "3d spacial awareness" that goes beyond needing to visually see things coming (because you won't see shit inside a bucket xD).
Also, getting used to breathing stale air is definitely something that you need to do... because you will breathe *a lot* of stale air xD This is one of the reasons why, for example, helmets like the Sallet became so frequent in the backlines; they offered protection from ranged attacks, were comfortable enough to wear (hell, I own one myself xD) and you could wear them without the gorget because you weren't expected to be frontline, so you might as well breathe properly.
Also, the awareness of gauging what hit will hurt and what will either bounce off or simply cause discomfort but not to much more than that is a learned skill, too.
Actually, I would argue that you do get better at wearing armor. Adjusting to the way it shifts your center of gravity takes experience. Adjusting to limited range of motion (if relevant) takes experience. There are also defensive movements you can make in armor that are terrible choices if you're unarmored.
If I'm in mail or even just a gambeson, I don't really care about glancing blows from all but the heaviest weapons, so minimizing movement to get a blow to skip off the armor rather than completely dodge it is actually _better_ fighting because it's more efficient with your motion. Likewise, there are strikes that you're not even guarding against in even light armor in the first place because there's no way to put enough power into them.
Even just in terms of power I can say that being used to sparring rules that assume light to medium armor vs rules that assume you're unarmored, you're not unlikely to make mistakes going from armored to unarmored, meaning there are skills to using armor that you built up, were relying on, and then got tripped up on your muscle memory of.
Likewise, for modern settings, shooting stances (especially for pistols) changed with the advent of plate carriers to square the shoulders to hide the vital organs behind the plate rather than angle the shoulders to reduce your profile.
The catch is that unarmored fighting is just as much of a skill.
I actually like the AC concept to a certain extent. There is such a thing as a glancing blow. Armor is hardened in certain areas, thicker in certain areas, or has a surface or an angle that makes a strike more likely to glance off. By contrast, it takes a shit ton of skill to effectively get past an opponent's blade/shield, bypass their guard and deliver point to a specific area. Concussive force is also significantly more effective against the cranium as it causes your brain to rattle around against your skull. So a roll based system based save system (in combination with a roll based hit system) actually makes a lot of sense to me intuitively, representing your chance to hit a vulnerable area, and strike it effectively.
While there is definitely room for improvement in a lot of systems are things like damage types (a narrow, stiff point is significantly more effective in piercing mail links, such as a rondel, compared to a broadsword slice which would be virtually completely negated). Also, swords have some other things to consider, like point of balance, making them more effective to wield by counterbalancing the weight and putting the point of balance closer to the hand, whereas other weapons such as axes put the point of balance further from the hand and closer to the intended point of impact. E.g., it's harder to hit, but for the same weight, significantly greater impact. Most swords - most hand weapons of all varieties, actually, including maces and hammers, are pretty much well, well under 3 pounds, just to be usable. So blunt trauma for a regular hand sword is....almost negligible. Whereas being hit in the helmet with a claw hammer would probably have a significantly more traumatic effect. Perhaps you can start to see why D&D just went for a simple roll system....damage itself is reduced to a roll as well to account for this degree of variability. It's abstracted, but not terrible....
I think a simple way to improve it is to make the armor have variable "damage reduction" to certain existing damage types. E.g. chainmail is superb against slashing, it is significantly weaker against piercing. Plate would have superb damage reduction against slashing and to a slightly lesser extent against piercing, it would have slightly less damage reduction against blunt trauma. Then have certain weapons have damage or AC modifiers (armor piercing) to represent their relative advantage. I think the CRPG Pillars of Eternity did a good job of retaining the strength of D&D roll-based AC, while having variable damage reduction for armor.
If I was designing a system, ground up, I would remove HP and replace damage rolls vs fixed defense with fixed damage vs active defense. This opens up other options such as armor being represented by "XdY take the highest" with the coverage of the armor being represented by the number of dice and how protective the armor is being represented by the die size.
This would allow for armors to be roughly on par while being different, such as full (chain)mail vs plate on just torso and forearms.
It would also mean that the attack and damage rolls and calculations could be happening simultaneously being handled by different people, both speeding up the game and giving players things to do when it's not their turn.
Also, I'd get rid of HP because how damage is modeled in systems is the root of so many problems.
Great points!
You can absolutely learn to make armor more effective. You can learn to deflect an attack with the armor that you wouldn't be able to normally. By changing your angle in relation to an incoming attack you can make the attack more likely to glance off. By knowing where you're armor is weak and where it's strong you can turn into blows so that a stronger part of the armor takes the blow. Breastplates and helmets are thickest on the front, limb armor is made thinner material. Taking a shot to the front of the breastplate is less likely to injure you than taking a hit to the arm.
I actually completely disagree when you say that impact should be the determining factor for damage and damage reduction. The impact of a sword isn't what causes damage, it is the cutting motion. That's the reason why you can half-sword. You hold the sword blade, and you can even defend against incoming impact, but it doesn't damage your hand, because it's not cutting. That's also why the katana is curved and single edged: to increase the cutting ratio (and not, it's not a superior sword😅).
Same goes with bullets. The bullet is extremely light, so the impact force isn't particularly big. But if that impact is all directed towards your heart, you'll be dead.
But I often think you should take a step back when talking about armor, and ask "what is health and damage?" I would say that WoD solves health in a good way, with the "/", "×" and "*" system. That way you can have two dimensions of damage: "severity" and "amount". The severity is determined by the source while the amount is determined by the "successfulness of damaging".
If you compare a regular hammer, a knife and a pistol, the hammer doesn't do severe amount of damage on a blow (it could, but that's a crit). You can be hit multiple times by a hammer and still recover. A knife is more severe, A puncture wound would cause internal bleeding and you'd need medical attention. You can survive many cuts from a knife, but you're definitely in worse shape. An a bullet shot is definitely not something that is easy to survive. If you then say a hammer hass "/" severity (minor damage), a knife has "×" severity (major damage), and a pistol has "*" severity (lethal damage).
But! A hammer can deal more amount of damage. It's easier to hit someone with a hammer. The impact is on a wide surface compared to the other two, so you don't have to worry much about edge alignment of the blade etc. Let's say the damage is 5 "/" damage, plus whatever bonus the user gets.
The knife requires more precision. You need to do a cutting motion. If the motion is misaligned you might deal no damage at all. So we set it to 2 "×" damage.
Lastly the bullet requires extreme precision. If your aim is slightly off, it won't hit the target at all. You might scrape the side, hit a shoulder etc. But hitting dead on a vital organ is hard. So 1 "*" damage.
Sure one lethal damage from a gun is more deadly than five minor damage from a hammer. One requires a nights sleep to heal, the other a hospital.
But this is where armor comes in. Let's say your armor can reduces amount and severity. A bullet proof vest reduces 1 severity and 1 amount. If you shoot with a gun, the 1 lethal damage is reduced to 0 lethal damage, aka you're unharmed. A hammer blow is reduced from 5 minor damage to 5 "no damage" (severity is reduced to zero), and you're unharmed. The knife is reduced from 2 major damage to 1 minor damage (both reduced severity and amount by 1). And that sort of checks out. A bullet proof vest is good against bullets. It's thickness also reduces any hammer blows to just being uncomfortable. A knife cut can cut up the armor and it can be snuck up under any gaps to deal superficial wounds.
You can then play around with different types of armor, some reduced severity by a lot, some reduce amount by a lot. Some reduce severity as long as it's under a threshold value. A lot to play with other than static armor values.
Again, all of this has to be based on game mechanics. If I wanted a real world simulator, I'd play a video game with a realistic real time simulation of bullets. But this is supposed to be about fun and decision making, so every weapon/armor should have pros and cons, otherwise everyone would just run around with bazookas because of high damage.
Also, Video wise: I love your channel, but I'd strongly suggest you have a script or at least a loose script. A lot of the points in the video were repeated and spread out, that could instead have been summed up into one focused point. I'd also advice you to share the content/script, so it would be more of a dialog. Maybe even discuss this from two points of views (realistic simulation vs action packed gameplay, for instance). And it really bothered me that Justin wasn't in the thumbnail. Great editing and camera setup though!
[Matt] there's a lot in your comment but let's boil down to one concept: the misnomer that somehow damage - be it swords or bullets - is not about impact. The science is pretty well sorted out, and freely available for anyone who wants to research it. Let's take it in pieces:
1) Ballistic data. Virtually all ammunition is rated on three interrelated measurements: bullet weight/mass, muzzle velocity, and muzzle energy (which can be calculated from the first two.) It's purely physics - and absolutely a measure of impact. How effectively a bullet transfers it's kinetic energy to its target is directly proportionate to its ability to inflict damage. There's even a specific term for it: hydrostatic shock. Think of it as the "spash" effect in the giant water balloon that is the human body. At the risk of getting a little graphic, that splash effect creates shock ripples that compress (and even somtimes rupture) internal organs that are well away from the actual wound channel of a bullet. The hydrostatic shock to internal organs is what does the takes down 9 out of 10 gunshot victims. You don't need to hit a vital organ precisely, and in fact almost no one does. (This is the major flaw with your hammer/knife/gun example.)
2) Swords are a little muddier subject, but many of the same principles apply. For example, many people mistakenly believe that swords are made as sharp as possible to cut more deeply. Not true! Swords are often deliberately dulled slightly to increase their impact to tissue disruption ratio, because too sharp a sword will slice too deeply, get stuck, and not produce enough knock-down impact. That is why it is theoretically possible to hold a sword blade and not get cut - precisely BECAUSE it relies on impact rather than purely cutting.
You speak of "cutting motion" but if you think through the physics of such a motion what it is really doing is transferring torque from human muscles into kinetic energy of the blade - a combination of rotational speed and blade mass that translates into impact energy distributed over the area of blade's edge surface area.
Your comments about the katana actually bear this out. As you may or may not know, the katana evolved from the tachi - the traditional samurai sword. It was more deeply curved than the katana, and therefore had more cutting ratio - which was exactly it's flaw. More curvature meant two things: it had a weaker ratio of blade energy to edge surface area, and it required more skill to wield effectively. In earlier times that was ok for the highly trained noble class against unarmored opponents. The katana evolved because with less curvature it was easier to wield for less trained fighters and marginally less cutting ratio made it marginally better against lightly armored targets (heavy armor was a rarity in Japan.)
In Europe swords with pronounced blade curvature like katanas were eschewed for a variety of reasons. Straight, heavier blades were cheaper and easier to manufacture and easier for less trained combatants to wield. But mostly it's that straight swords have a higher ratio of mass/blade energy to edge area so they have more knock-down power, and are therefore more effective against the heavier armored targets which were more common than in Japan. Katanas are showy fanboy favs, but as an effective sword they are outclassed by much more mundane weapons, which is why they were relegated to ceremonial status.
All this is really just physics, and so too is armor. The ability of wearable material to absorb, attenuate, and distribute impact energy over larger surface area to prevent the material from being breached is what it's all about.
In that sense WoD does do a good job. In original form it classified damage states in terms of aggravated/lethal/stun damage, which is essentially one of the things I'm suggesting could be done for other systems with respect to armor. Where systems allow, armor that distributes impact to prevent penetration would functionally downgrade/convert aggravated/lethal damage into stun damage (or slashing/piercing into bludgeoning in D&D terms). Not all systems would facilitate this easily, but ones that do would work great.
@@gameon_ct I don't know much about guns, but almost everything you said about swords are sadly factually untrue. Sharper swords cut deeper, and they also slice straight through without getting lodged. The reason why a sword would get stuck is because it's dull or you turn it mid cut. The reason why people didn't sharpen their swords top much is because of diminishing returns. After a couple of hits, a sword becomes dull, so at some point, there's no point sharpening it, because it'll just be dull after a while.
Katanas were also developed as a selfdefense weapon, while the tachi was a war weapon meant to fight in military units. Whichever was invented first is irrelevant, since they were used in the same time period. Just two different tools for two different scenarios.
Lastly, European weapons were both single and double edged, curved and not. They were heavier, lighter, longer and shorter than katanas. Even katanas have many different forms than what we are used to today. A thousand years of history in a large continent like Europe cannot be condensed into "Europeans wanted more impact on their swords".
Anyways, IMO the realism of how swords and guns work, doesn't matter much in games, especially roleplaying games. Whether one sword has better cutting capacity than another isn't what makes a game fun. It's the decision making you do as a player. Just looking at monster hunter world, you see that the different weapons produce different playstyles. Giving the players options to choose from is what makes a game fun.
In D&D for instance, you have the option to choose between a short sword and a scimitar. And literally the only difference is that the scimitar is heavier and cost more. It might be realistic that they are relatively equal in damage potential ("short swords" could be anything really), but there's no reason to choose the scimitar, since it has more drawbacks than a short sword. For a player this is a false choice, and it's not a fun option. However, if you had a game system where the dagger was good for so and so situations, and the axe was good for so and so, then the players could choose which weapons they wanted based on how they wanted to handle situations. Do they want to sneak around and assassinate, or charge forward bare chested? The weapons and armor doesn't have to be rooted in reality, but rather in what gameplay potential they unlock.
@@gameon_ct Afaik, swords didn't at all rely on impact, that's a myth created by reenactment/show fighting swords. A sword usually has its center of mass somewhere around the lower thrid of the blade. As a result they have a relatively low moment of inertia, making the weapon nimbler (or more easily controlled) but reducing the impact. It's kind of the opposite with axes and maces. So it doesn't come as a suprise that those where popular anti armor choices. It's true though, that straight swords usually appear in contexts with more armor, a result of thrusting being rather effective against it. Thrusts just have a better chance (or one at all) of piercing fabric and mail or getting in to the gaps bewtween plates (which are often covered by mail). In fact stilletos where made for exactly that (hence the rather robust diamond cross section). From what I heard, fuly plate armored ppl often don't feel sword strikes at all. Another factor to consider is that armor often is shaped to let attacks glance off, rather than just stopping them. Works epecially well against edged weapons. That's why hammers and maces are often multi pronged or flanged rather than smooth, gives a better gripping surface.
If you want to fight an armored opponent with a sword, you should probably rely on thrusts, halfswording and maybe the murder stroke (or Mordhau, grab the thing by the blade and use it like a hammer or mace).
Edit for clarification: What i particularly disagree with is the idea, that ony the mass of a sword determines its impact, as the distribution of mass is just as important. In the example you've given in the video its not the arc of the tip that determines it, but the one of the center of mass (roughly). That doesn't even go into stuff like bending or knockback absorbing a lot of the force.
Agree armour is poorly modeled in most rpgs. However weapons are also poorly modeled too. No 3 foot sword weighs 10lbs. What most systems miss, is the relationships between fighters through their weapons. Before you can hit someone you must stop them from hitting you and stop them from stopping you from hitting them. One of the few systems that atbleast came close is Swashbuckler! By Jim Dietz
There's also the fact that you have a sword that's like 3 foot, each unit of area in combat is like 5 by 5 feet squares or something, but you can only hit someone who's in an adjacent square, even though realistically you could easily reach 5 feet to make an attack just by stepping in and still be able to retreat back into your stance in the same square you started in
I've had similar thoughts. However, the weapon/offensive side of combat systems is just as guilty as the armor/defensive side. A knight in shining plate armor is a formidable foe, but if you wrestle him to the ground and stab him through the eye slit, his armor means nothing. Or hit him in the armpit while his attack is being blocked by someone else. How do you represent this with dice and stats without turning D&D into Battletech? Good question.
"How effective you are at wearing armor" covers being able to intentionally turn to catch a sword swing on your breastplate instead of trying to back off and losing your arm to the strike.
Also, kevlar degrades with repeated hits, at a slower rate than ceramic plates, but still faster than AR-500.
there were 2 older systems one called Top Secret. the armor in that game converted lethal damage into nonlethal damage. in shadowrun 1e 2e and 3e armor had a defensive value and weapons had a power and a damage value. if you were shot with a gun that had a damage value of say 9M (9 is the power of the weapon, M is the damage it causes) the armor would have a defensive value of say... 6. you would then run a calculation comparing the power 9 to the defense 6 with some other mechanical factors and the result could reduce the damage (M) to L or even nothing.
i never liked systems that use a damage soaking system for armor (like palladium or rifts) that really only makes sense to me for force fields, the whole force field is gone when the points run out. and D&D's armor, heavier makes you harder to hit... i just cant figure out how to make characters like Conan or Drizzt as skilled in parrying without dressing them up in the heavy armor when thats not how they usually operate.
Opposing skill rolls, attack rolls to attack defender rolls to defend
I guess a good way to do it would be distinguishing between different damage (cut, pierce, impact) and armor (mail, fabric including leather and plate). Then you could have each combination interact differently. Blunt impact just gets reduced by all types of armor to a limited extend but gets through everything. Piercing damage CAN get through plate under rare cicumstances , more often through mail and certainly through fabric (still gets diminshed by all of them). Cuts are always completely stopped by plate, most of the time by mail and get weakened by fabric. Note that most swords can cut for cutting damage and pierce for thrusting damage and many other weapons like warhammers and halberds have multiple business ends with different damage types. Also some weapons should do limited impact when stopped fully. That could be displayed as a secondary damage value in brackets.
Yeah I was thinking the same, like most videogames. But things aren't that simple either. The other day I was playing Elden Ring and that game damage reduction works somewhat similar to what you said, and does a great job at it. But then I was fighting a monsterade of stone, like the classic golem. They are weak to blunt damage, resistant to every other damage (cut, pierce). But... I found a pickaxe, which has piercing attacks, and the stone enemies are resistant to this damage type... But, pickaxes were made to easily break stone! The problem was this, the pickaxe shares the damage type of arrows and rapiers which are terrible against stone. Juwt try to break a giant rock with bow and arrow or a rapier. Pickaxe is heavier and more mass concentrates towards the pointy end, thus making the blow much more powerful...
Axes, the same as pickaxes, are in the family of "cutting" weapons, but axes are far better at cutting through wood, like trees (or plant enemies). But swords and knifes aren't, maybe heavy falchions are good enough.
Armor piercing weapons are waehammers, great spears and poleaxed, but they're in the family of arrows and rapiers, again, bad choices to damage through armor. The same with piercing attacks with swords.
There's only one system that manages to make good representation of this differences when comparing damage types, different weapons and different armor types quite smooth and fast... But it needs a lot of charts.
It really comes down to how simulationist you want to go with it. Many try and abstract it in a way that the narrative of what’s happening feels heroic. You can try to make it more realistic but the more complex you make the mechanics the more it starts to bog down combat.
(Justin) yeah it's a fine line between making the *game* fun and not bogging things down with minutia.
@@gameon_ct I generally agree with what is being said here. The level of detail and crunch you add decreases the speed of the game. For instance, armor damage reduction systems tend to make more sense, but they are also mechanically dense and unwieldy compared to a straight up hit and miss situation.
This is actually a deep topic. You example of a sword vs plate mail raises some questions--are you talking about late 15th century full plate harness, or are you discussing a 12th century coat of plates, or something in between? A sword isn't the best weapon for delivering the kind of blunt force trauma you're bringing up when it comes to delivering damage through armor. Swords are poor tools for delivering that kind of damage (A German zweihander made for actual battle is roughly between 5-7 lbs.) Combat swords were not that heavy. And you're not cutting through plate armor. Not happening.
That's why knights frequently used things like pole axes, bec-de-corbins, war hammers, etc., to help break through heavy armor, or to deliver enough blunt force trauma through the armor to incapacitate their enemy. When they did use swords against others in full plate, they frequently used half-swording techniques to better aim for the gaps in an opponent's armor. And even then fights often came down to a knight wrestling skills where the killing blows were delivered by the humble roundel dagger once an opponent was pinned. Against mail, or scale armor and other less developed armors such as gambeson, swords are excellent weapons. All that said, in lived reality armored fighting is a very different animal than unarmored fighting. Full plate harness was a game changer until firearms became sufficiently advanced.
HEMA practitioners are a great resource for anyone running and thinking deeply about the interaction of weapons vs. armor. I highly recommend to anyone interested in this topic to watch the arrows vs armor video series from Todd's Workshop. Just fascinating stuff.
Problem, armor is not exclusively passive. If someone is wearing platemail for example, they can move to intentionally take a hit on the armor but in such a way that the strike is deflected without damaging the wearer. Does that count as being hit?
I had the same issue myself (as well as personal experience fighting in medieval armour), so I went for basically all 3 methods to have the mechanics to reflect how different groups in the game setting make their armour.
- Every time you suffer damage, reduce it by X
- Ignore the first X hits
- Second HP bar that chips away
I have used the first for reliable armour, the second for cheap or makeshift armour and the third to give my players the walking tank/"I am more metal than sense" feeling of "I can walk to an orc warchief, get slapped in the face with a berdiche and actually be able to punch back, now?!".
I think modern systems completely misinterpret attack rolls and armor.
Attack rolls express an opportunity to materially wound the other guy. Fighting isn’t hitting a dummy as fast as you can. Armor disrupts those opportunities. You either need to hit harder (more directly, etc.) or you need to hit where the armor won’t help or help as much. All of this is massively complicated by the armor type and structure and the weapon; but the basic system is very effective for narrative and gameplay purposes.
Games like white wolf are based on playing out the entire battle. Hence why you constantly call out “dodge!” Or “parry!”. In white wolf armor does have a “soak” rating, which amplifies your personal “soak”. Because you’re always a supernatural creature in white wolf. It’s also a relatively low combat system.
Rolemaster has a very good way of handling this, though it is table heavy. Effectively, lighter armour is more likely to mean you are not hit at all, but when you are, its gonna hurt. Heavy armour means you are going to take some hit points damage on most hits, but will not receive criticals as often (its the critical tablea thatll get you in rolemaster). Also, certain types of armour are less or mpre effective against certain weapon types.
Yeah, I played Role master a lot and it already solved many old problems that bothers D&D community. But most people doesn't know about it and it surprises me to find your comment!
I want to add that weapon tables solves the problem of "resistant to x damage type" in other games where a powerful bec de corbin is weak against armor because their piercing "brothers" are weak against armor (arrows, rapiers, swords). The same about axes, powerful against wood and thick hide, but are weak because they share damage type with weaker weapons like swords and scimitars.
Rolemaster gives more power to axes against wood and shields or thick skin than swords, even when they are both "cutting" weapons.
And pickaxes, polearms and great spears are given much more power against armor than rapiers and arrows.
Also, cutting weapons can do "blunt critical damage" meaning they can't cut through but the hit was powerful enough to break some bone.
Rolemaster weapon/armor system is awesome, but you have to be ready to print a lot of tables! (I still love it).
Metal plates do deflect a blow that isnt well placed, hence no real hit. Much like a helmet being hit by a bullet and it glancing off. This would add 1-3 points of AC not to be hit. The rest is as you say, it absorbs damage.
the armor system has always bothered me, but so do hit points. You'd really need to rework the whole system to change it. Gotta keep in mind it's still a game and simple hit/miss/dmg needs to be.. well simple lol
[Matt] I gather you're referring to one system in particular? 😀 (D&D I'm guessing since that is the default for most.) I agree (as also I mention in another comment below). I think D&D's hitpoint/damage system often leads to power imbalences and an arms race that spirals out of control like the inflation rate of a failing 3rd world economy - things which eventually can't help but intrude on playability. But reworking that would be a monumental undertaking - its so deeply intertwined into all the specialty rules that it would be next to impossible to do.
By comparison, armor rules are fairly self-contained, and could be made more realistic using existing damage mechanics and scales without making any rolls less simple if you just went with a rule like armor halves slashing or piercing damage and converts it to bludgeoning. All other damage types are unaffected.
@@gameon_ct how does that work for AC on classes where it's clearly not actually armor, it's them getting out of the way? The systems I'm most familiar with are the old old Final Fantasy games where it's basically a ton of opposed rolls. to hit vs evade/dodge, if it hit then dmg vs armor - the armor value is reduced for the dmg roll. Systems like that bog things down though when it's not a computer handling all the rolls in a split second
@@QuiniansBudgetCrafts [Matt] Armor really should affect the taking (or soaking) of damage once you have been hit - not adjudicating whether you have been hit in the first place. That sounds like what you are describing - albeit in computer driven rpg form. The problem D&D struggles with vis-a-vis it's AC value is that it dictates the to-hit roll itself.
Systems like that which you describe - that use opposed dodge/evade rolls vs hit rolls - would still have that, and that phase of the attack sequence would be unaffected. As to whether such opposed roll based systems slow down combat or not...well, that's a matter of individual taste.
My take: the good opposed roll systems are actually more seamless and intuitive than single roll systems that require heavy duty arithmetical adding and subtracting of numerous special case modifiers (+2 for this feat, -3 for that condition, +1 for this weapon, +5 for attacks on alternate Tuesday under a full moon - unless your target suffers from lycanthropy, in which case it's a -5 with disadvantage etc).
But all that is sort of separate from the question of armor. A system that depends on opposed rolls for the damage phase (let's say an initial damage vs a soak roll) could either give armor a bonus to the soak roll itself or a flat soak value that skims a certain amount of damage off the initial damage total before the opposing soak roll is made, making the soak roll easier.
Regarding damage systems, maybe you'd like Warhammer rpg and the older 40k ones. There hitpoints are still a thing, but they just means that every hit becomes a crit once it would take you below 0 (crits can still happen naturally). Once you take a certain amount of crits (all of which have special effects) or just an insta-deth crit you are taken out (becoming unconcious and dying after a while when not being treated afaik). Overall, no one has many HP and no one is ever safe. Also crits can be such fun things as permanently loosing body parts, slowly bleeding out or insta-death.
I agree. Step 1 to making armor work well without causing the system so slow down a lot is to get rid of HP. HP is the core problem for armor as well as some other problems.
Take for example, Savage Worlds. Realism isn't even a major design goal for the system, but a more realistic armor system flows naturally by simply replacing HP with a different damage mechanic.
It's also flexible and modular enough that you can add more realistic complexity without completely overhauling the game like you generally have to do with d20 systems or bogging the system down too much.
It's not perfect, by any means (as much as I have a great fondness for it), but I bring it up because it's telling that a pulp system focused on fast paced action ends up being more realistic on accident just by getting rid of HP...while also being able to handle everything from swords and sorcery up through futuristic settings.
Did you ever make armor rules? I am currently trying to make a hack for 5e dnd and I am planning to have evasion and realistic armor much like you discribed I would love to adapt anything you have into my system if you are willing to share
LOVE this idea. Wish I'd heard of it sooner for the hardcore tabletop game I'm working on. Being dealt at least half your max hp's worth of damage from a single hit can cause devastating effects based on a CON save made by the player. The better you roll, the less you're effected, but it's still bad. And there are attack dis/advantages based on that triangle of weakness thing, as well as element types. You know...tank>archer>mage. Like RuneScape, but more in depth to account for many of the funky ttrpg classes you'd encounter. So I think I'd do armor this way. Say your armor provided AC is 10. If 3 successful attacks are dealt against you, you lose a point in your armors AC as sort of wear and tear, and it would now be 9. A critical attack alone would drop your armors AC by a whole point, down to 8. That's all I have for now. lol Any ideas on how to improve this? Also, death is a very important part of this game. Resurrections are commonplace, but very expensive and involved. I don't have any ideas for death saves yet, aside from that I want the enemies to be able to make them too. Just because you knock them down/out, doesn't mean they're dead. The party still has to get in a couple more swings to finish them off, otherwise leaving an enemy alive could come back to bite you in the ass later. And they could have an advantage against fighting you since they've experienced your style of combat and can plan around it.
Think I might make it so that a glancing blow (just meets the AC) and slightly higher, you lose a single of the three AC points durability. Anything else up to just under critting loses you 2 AC durability points. And a crit is 3 durability points, losing a full AC point until repaired. Also, depending on the armor type/material, repairs may cost around 10 gold or more for restoring a single AC point, doubling with each AC point restored. Until it's just cheaper to buy new armor anyway.
I'm late to this discussion but how about different armours have different dice that can mitigate damage.
Leather armour 1d4 damage. On enemy critical it drops to 1d3. Another critical 1d2. Another critical it only stops 1 damage.
This can go up. So chainmail stops 1d6 damage and on enemy critical drops to 1d4 etc. etc.
Plate maybe stops 1d10 damage but on critical drops to 1d8 and so on.
Magic armour maybe doesn't drop on critical so the damage stopped for magic chainmail is always 1d6.
Just my 2 cents.
Two questions you got me thinking on:
1. Do you think this would work with a rules lites system or bog it down by complicating armor values?
2. How do you feel about armor in the Genesys system? I feel like the damage output with ranged defense, soak value, kinda relates to the technical effect of armor.
I think maybe armor and its gradual effects could be a home brew mechanic to games like dnd5e but it would be a bit overwhelming for me as a GM to deal with if I wanted to go for that technical realism. But otherwise it would be cool and add a sense of realism to my games.
[Matt] My intention was always to keep this a fairly rules lite add-in that could be ported into any system fairly easily. Obviously it would need to be tuned slightly to fit the scale and quirks of any given system, but anyone with enough knowledge of a system to run it should be able to do so with little difficulty or complication. The best tack is to take a median damage of a common weapon to use as a baseline for calibration - something like a longsword strike by an average human in a fantasy setting, or a mid-caliber handgun in a modern setting etc. Whether you make the mechanic a damage points absorb/conversion or a bonus to soak depends on the specific system and your preference in making it a passive or active element for the player. If the given system already has your players actively rolling to soak, giving them an armor bonus to that soak roll doesn't make it more difficult or bogged down - its just a different number. If the system uses a single step unopposed damage roll (passive - no soak) then you just have the armor absorb some of the points, and have the amount it absorbs step down very gradually to reflect armor deterioration if you want to. Or not. (Armor degradation is less important than getting the absorption aspect right.)
If your system has damage step down at longer ranges, no problem. That doesn't require changing anything - it just means there's less initial damage to soak/absorb.
If you want a system that's relatively rules light (arguably more medium-light compared to true rules-light systems) and does armor decently, look up Savage Worlds. It's ironically one of the more realistic combat systems I've played and it's not even trying to be.
It's also way faster to play than a medium-heavy D&D.
The first step to doing armor well is to replace HP with a different damage system.
I 100% agree with you. I also dislike how most TTRPGs don't make "tanking" an "active" thing that a character can do. The danger with augmenting something like D&Ds AC system is twofold: 1) Their entire combat and itemization systems are tied to how the AC and HP components of those systems work, so modifying anything on a foundational level requires a LOT of additional changes. 2) A lot of people prefer simplicity over any type of crunch.
So, I think the trick here is to find something as elegant as possible where it's complexity adds "fun," like the ability to create characters around the active abilities related to armor. I think all of that is accomplishable, but trying to modify another system like D&D to achieve it is probably not worth effort, unless WotC does it for like 6th edition.
[Matt] Yes, D&D is problematic on many levels. At its core the damage system is deeply flawed - that a 10th level fighter could ever have 7 or 8 TIMES hit points of that same character at 1st level is laughable. There's no fixing that. It's why the power level arms race in D&D inevitably leads to outrageous power imbalances that need hundreds of pages of special rule bandaids that are only partially effective.
That said, converting armor to something more realistic doesn't break the broken system worse, so why not make this one thing better? It doesn't have to make it more crunchy. If you want to keep it simple then say armor no longer modifies to-hit AC, but instead halves all slashing and piercing damage and converts it to bludgeoning. Not perfect, but waaay more realistic and it doesn't change the system mechanics.
It should work by the premise of was it a hit or not then go to ok was there any attributable permanent damage or not, then go into, well than how bad?
Where as stuff like leather or multiple layers of cloth might not provide as much mitigation but vastly increase your chances of avoiding damage in the first place; in properly trained hands anyway. Heavy stuff like plate should grant a better chance of actually being hit, but a better percentile on actually nullifying it all anyway, once again in properly trained hands, with a steeper training proficiency curve.
This is why I like Palladium. In that game you roll a D20 to hit, but 1-4 is a miss, 5 and up is a hit. BUT! The other player can dodge or parry. A dodge is that character's next action used up, but parries are free. In essence, a sword fight is a series of opposed rolls. You have to strike higher than the other guy's parry roll.
Armor has an armor rating. A hit of 5, but equal to the armor rating, say 13 for a suit of chainmail, hits the armor. This is still a bad thing for the victim, as the armor has it's own hit points, and at 1/2 of its hit points it drops to AR 11, and again at 1/3rd hit points.
So, in Palladium there are 4 outcomes. 1-4 = miss. Next is a 5 or more, but below AR & below enemy parry roll, = no damage. Third is a roll below AR & above enemy parry = hit to the armor, roll damage and subtract from the armor. Lastly, a roll that is above AR and above enemy parry, that is a hit to the character inside the armor and does wounding damage.
Thank you for the discussion.
I'm actually trying to improve the way armour works in my homebrew rule system for WFRP. So, i found your discussion very useful. WFRP RAW uses a Damage Mitigation System for armour which basically reduces the damage inflicted by a hit by a fixed amount. This sounds fine but when running narrative combat or handling armour choices by players really doesn't make armour very interesting. It's like 'You get hit for 14 Damage but you're wearing a breastplate so that's -2 Damage deduct 12 damage from your character's body'. It's a bit bland and uninteresting and I am looking to make armour more exciting for characters to choose and wear. What you describe is actually very similar to the WFRP RAW as it is also based on Damage Mitigation, e.g. Your breastplate gets hit by your opponent's sword which reduces the damage by absorbing part of the blow and negating the cutting damage allowing only the impact to pass through to your body. In effect it just reduces the damage, so back to square one as far as WFRP RAW are concerned. Except that I'm looking to introduce a bit more colour to that scenario by comparing the Type of Armour with the Type of Damage. Where sone types of armour are better than others at mitigating certain types of damage. e.g. Plate Armour might be 100% against arrows, teeth and claws, but only 50% against Hammers, Maces and other bludgeoning weapons. Whereas Padded Armour might actually be 100% against Fists but practically 0% against an arrow or a stiletto blade. Have you seen anything like this sort of assessment in existence?
Hi! This is Justin, I'll ask Matt to get back to you ASAP on this! He's the one in the video and I don't want to speak for him.
@@gameon_ct Thanks Justin, I'm still pondering this issue, but I've looked at several different systems now and I'm starting to get a feel for what I like and don't like at least.
I'm more or less settled on some sort of Table that compares Armour-Type to Damage-Type and defines how much of that sort of damage is absorbed by that sort of armour. That seems to make sense and gives players the choice of what sort of armour is going to provide them with the best protection against the type of opponent they expect to meet, and what sort of weapon (or attack) will be most effective against an opponent wearing a particular type of armour.
However, I'm trying to avoid using Armour Points to mitigate damage merely because it's too predictable and fixed. So, APs in my game will be more akin to Durability or Quality. The idea is that better quality armour has higher AP and thus can take more damage before falling apart.
Finally because my WFRP rules cater for 'Critical Hits' and 'Extra Damage'. I'm probably going to include exception rules for when these occur. So, a 'Critical Hit' will be a hit that actually causes damage to the armour. It might dent it, or rip off a strap, or knock the horn off a vikings helmet. But it will reduce the AP value of the armour by a few AP points.
'Extra Damage' on the other hand is a reasonably rare event that allows a blow to inflict much more damage than it normally would and represents a particularly well-placed shot or blow that just happens to land on the best spot. This might be explained by an arrow finding a gap in your armour, or a blow just happening to catch a weak spot. Extra Damage will always cause actual damage to a character provided that it is high enough to exceed the remaining AP of the armour. e.g. An arrow fired at Short Range hits your character for 3 Success Levels and the bow adds +3 for its effective strength, so 6 Damage. But the archer then rolls a 6! for random damage which in my rules indicates Extra Damage and so another dice is rolled and comes up 5. This is a really powerful hit amounting to 17 Damage and has clearly found the perfect spot on your armour. Only the best armour AP20 would be able to negate all of that impact, but your character is wearing Standard AP10 armour and so 7 damage is sufferred. Perhaps the arrow actually punctured your plate mail or found a gap or join that was only partially protected.
That seems to provide a bit more interest as a narrative for describing combat, which is what I'm looking for rather than just realism.
[Matt] So your proposed idea sounds good in theory and should provide the desired differentiation/interest level for your players in choosing armor with differing effects much the way various weapons often produce differing damage effects - both in magnitude and in category.
I guess my one word of caution would be to err on the side of playability when fleshing out your armor system. A couple/few variations can add flavor, but too many can bog down combat excessively. Remember that your players are inevitably going to be less familiar with - and likely enthusiastic about - the minutiae of your system than you are. Requiring them to reference too many tables can make a combat session seem less like a game and more like an assignment. This may already be your plan, but my advice would be to set it up so that you read the tables and do the math "behind the curtain" so you can preserve the drama and effect for your players. And a big part of preserving drama is being FAST with the calcs so you can quickly get to describing the outcome. If your table is organized in such a way to maintain that speed then your system should get the benefit of increased detail/realism/interest without sacrificing pace.
As to the critical vs extra damage...to each their own. Conceptually I personally don't see the need for having a rigidly defined system metric for damaging armor. Setting aside the question of whether such is realistic, in terms of game play having deteriorating armor then becomes just another consumable like food, torches, arrows, or whatever supplies that players have to spend mental energy, game time and loot maintaining to no real benefit in terms of player enjoyment. If you want to include that element from time to time you can always adlib it as part of roleplay.
As for extra damage (what most gamers usually think of with the term "critical") I am wholeheartedly in favor. And that mechanic should never be "behind the curtain". Nothing gives players more thrill than rolling big and scoring a hugely consequential blow at a key moment in the game. And if they have the strategic option to choose a particularly advantageous weapon versus the opponent's specific armor type to maximize the odds of a big roll at a big moment so much the better!
@@gameon_ct I'm very conscious of the KISS principle when choosing game mechanics. So, I will certainly avoid falling into the trap of confusing more detail with more value.
In fact, having looked at some of the RPG Armour Systems that advertise themselves as 'REALISTIC' I have concluded that most are confusing 'realistic' with 'complicated' and so I've tended to reject them as an inspiration for my own approach. The WFRP 4e Armour System is actually quite good in my opinion but has been badly implemented by relying heavily on a raft of weapon and armour 'Flaws' and 'Qualities' to provide variations in performance. Made worse by the fact that they are printed in different parts of the rulebook and even in different books.
My own approach is to try to replace these rule-modification fragments with something much simpler and ideally with a single cross-reference table, THE ARMOUR PROTECTION TABLE' which will compare the type of armour being struck by the type of damage being delivered and provide a simple value for how much of the incoming damage is being blocked, absorbed or deflected by that specific combination. e.g. Mail Armour would defect far more cutting damage than it will prevent impaling damage.
So, ideally, the final system will be handled by a single table with ARMOUR TYPE on one axis and DAMAGE TYPE on the other. However, it's early days yet and I'm still looking for good references to help create the table. I think Mike Loades did a lot of research into the effectiveness of various types of armour, so I'm hoping to go through those at some point. But if you have any other suitable sources please let me know.
This is the link to my work in progress www.worldanvil.com/w/wfrp-fragile-alliances-didz/a/armour-article?preview=true?
During play, I want to try and keep things as simple as possible.
So, the player will declare who their character intends to attack and what type of damage they want to inflict based upon the weapon in hand. Some weapons will be able to deliver more than one type of damage.
Roll for success and the location of the hit,
Roll for Damage based on the Success and Strength, of the blow plus the usual random damage element.
Finally, consult the Armour Protection Table to determine what if any protection is provided by the type of armour worn on that location to the sort of damage chosen by the player and apply the result.
The results will either be a reduction in damage, if the armour provides protection against that type of damage, or may result in damage to the armour itself which will compromise its protection against further attacks. e.g. Plate Armour being struck by a Warhammer will transmit some of the impact to the wearer and may actually be dented or buckled by the blow, especially if it is of poor quality or fit.
That's the gist of what I'm aiming for any useful reference sources or sample rules would be appreciated.
If I hit your armor, I have hit your ARMOR, not you.
I've watched a number of videos of the fight scene in the 70's MacBeth. Or the fights of Excalibur or Robin & Merriam. The endurance required to keep you going until you get that critical hit sharpens (in chance terms) depending on the weapon. Great video, good discussion to have, I like the premise and the solution hypothesis.
DND design goals are not to provide a perfect simulationist-heavy system with great realism. Is about a bunch of medieval theme super heroes killing monsters, so its mecanics make a trade off between realism and gameability and favor the later one.
A game needs to be playable and have the ability to balance out encounters for the enjoyment of those playing. Thus realism is often sacrificed.
You might prefer a system like the old West End Games where armor increased your body’s ability to resist damage and when you are hit(yes some armors reduced your ability to dodge) damage would be rolled and your Str+Armor would reduce it and if still positive number the consult wound level chart. The system also did not have Hit Points but a set number of wound levels(which were mostly static from creation) and as wound levels increased your ability to function decreased.
For realism you will need to give a vast array of weapon and armor types with a matrix of how each interacts with each other.
Unfortunately as the world is unbalanced any system that try’s to account for those factors becomes unplayable… yes you can apply the inverse square rule for calculating concussive force from an explosion and factor in the medium the wave is transported through and how that will effect dispersion but who wants to spend a half hour or more to calculate one hand grenade.
Just play The Riddle of Steel or Blade of the Iron Throne, problem solved. 😁😁
I agree and I’d love to see what you come up with for an armor system! Great video!
[Matt] Justin got me to agree on camera so now I'm committed! 😀 I'm putting together rough rules for a few different types of system, with the idea that the concepts could be adapted to others with only minor tweaks (to different damage scales etc)
@@gameon_ct Sounds awesome! Looking forward to seeing it!
"Heavy pieces of metal that impede your movement"? I may still be able to glean some ideas from this but based on that phrasing alone I think I'll have a much better time looking elsewhere for thoughts on armor systems.
As someone who once tried a suit of armor on, I speak from my own experience. It was rather restrictive - particularly in rotational movement and in reaching across the body - and it affects your balance in odd ways, although I suspect an experienced user could learn to compensate for that somewhat. Still, my impression confirmed what one might reasonably expect - that being draped in steel makes one less agile and more deliberate of movement.
@@gameon_ct 'Once tried on' a suit of (likely cheaply made, crappy metal) armor is very different from a trained fighter wearing a custom tailored suit of interlocking plates. th-cam.com/video/qzTwBQniLSc/w-d-xo.html
@@gameon_ct A set of armor that is well made and fits properly can hardly be reduced to being called "heavy pieces of metal that impede your movement". There's a lot that can vary, and of course it's made of metal (which is heavy and inflexible), but armor is made to move in. That is its function and purpose. To be functional, mobile protection for your body. It is designed to move and of course the further down the line of armor development you come the better that gets. Just because you wore "a suit of armor" doesn't mean that that armor is a reliable or good example of what all armor is like.
Gurps handles this pretty well.
Lol kevlar that's been hit 50 times is going to be pretty useless
This exposition is rather pedantic. The ‘conversion’ you are advancing is accounted for by the interplay of AC and hit points and the concept of the ‘telling blow’ in 1e AD&D. And no suits of armor are just donned, training is class specific.
Thanks for the feedback!
Sorry, but I'm not taking advice from someone who thinks a sword weighs 10-15 lbs
Ok! Thanks for watching anyway!
Interesting historical footnote - the Dutch pirate Grutte Pier used a great sword that weighed 14 pounds. It currently resides in a museum in the Netherlands. But it's not the largest on record. There is a Scottish Claymore in the National Museum in Edinburgh that weighs 23 pounds. And there is a Japanese ōdachi on record weighing nearly 30 pounds. And of course there are countless surviving ceremonial swords weighing 10-15 pounds.
Sure, these examples are outliers, but they do exist - and really, if you're playing a game chock full of elves, dwarves, goblins, orcs, and the occasional dragon, it would be rather silly to quibble on practical grounds if a PC wanted to carry a big sword.
@@gameon_ct That sword is misattributed to Grutte Pier, as it was made before he was born. Yes, giant swords existed, but they weren't meant for actual combat, more as a means to show off your wealth and the smith's skill.
Most swords weigh 2-3 pounds, with greatswords topping out at around 7. You may say that a barbarian with 20 strength would be able to wield something heavier, but they really don't need to. That same strength can be used to make a lighter sword move faster, thus doing more damage, getting past an opponent's guard easier, and being able to block better. Just cause you could add more weight doesn't mean you should.
The existence of elves and dragons doesn't nullify realism. Those elements are fantastical, but they are justified through magic, divine intervention, what have you, but just because it's a fantasy game doesn't mean we can or should throw away how things actually work. Elves and dragons have a reason to exist, 15 pound swords don't.
PHB also lists longsword at 3lbs. Also, you are making the game way more complex than need be.
.making armor add to HP can add to the gamification of the game by introducing the need to repair or replace armor.
Also, get your microphones off the table. Use a mic stand so you don't pick up the thumps on the table. Keep growing my dudes!
Bring them quick n dirty rules!
You guys should look into rpgs like Star Wars by Fantasy Flight Games, or Savage Worlds Adventure Edition! Both of these games offer rules that literally describe what your talking about. D&D in whatever Edition you have is a total joke!
I (Justin) play both of these!
Yuck
Duck*