What is the mechanically best way to represent armor?

Hitting a real suit of armor worn over ballistics gel and then using precision laser instruments to determine the exact quantifiable damage done to the gel.

>>43708365
>using ballistics gel
wow what a pussy

>>43708104
Damage reduction. Have accuracy and evasion be a separate thing.

If you swing a sword at them and roll low, that represents the armor deflecting the blow, or absorbing most of the impact.

Hitting weak spots or gaps in the armor and overcoming damage reduction that way (such as with a dagger) is then represented by some sort of sneak attack mechanic, critical hits, or by a similar system where you have to take time to aim and set up a called shot.

>>43708104
It depends on why you have armor, and how your damage tracking works.

In a game like DnD the argument could be made that armor is just aesthetic, since it adds to the same value that being nimble does: "don't be hit." There are obviously issues with that (DEX is inherently the most impactful stat in the game), but it has merit. In such a system, you can reasonably avoid getting killed whether you're a hulking metal monster or an evasive acrobat. Having both methods of "I don't want that sword to get embedded in my flesh" being abstracted with the same system isn't inherently wrong like >>43709068 suggests, but it is also obviously inapplicable for some games.

In a realgrit system, you want to have "not getting hit" be separate from "don't get hurt from having been hit." In a military sense, it'll be broadly easier for the players to use the second strategy and medical technology means that even being hurt badly doesn't necessarily end the character's relevance. For more urban/civilian type games, not getting hit in the first place is easier and more important, both. You won't have the same access to armor in any reasonable sense, and the situations you find yourself in will be more of what determines whether you live or die.

iirc nWoD had some stuff with armor being more effective against different types of weapons, which is also not completely unreasonable in certain types of games, but was frankly pretty absurd in that system since the more knowledge/capability the players have the less possible it is to run a horror game...which ostensibly was the point of the system. "The monster has claws like knives" "yeah well my armor is really good at stopping piercing weapons, so I feel empowered to actually fight this thing" ie you have an action game instead of a horror game.

So like, assuming that you didn't ask a question so pointlessly vague and bland as to be "what is real art," what's the context you want your armor in, OP?

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>>43708104
Oil painting

Damage reduction plays better because it divides the process of hurting somebody into psychologically distinct steps.

>Step 1: Do I hit?
>Step 2: If I hit, how well did I hit?

Try to illustrate accuracy reducing armor the same way, and you end up with nonsense.

>Step 1: Did I hit well enough to cause damage?
>Step 2: If I hit well enough to cause damage, how well did I hit within that range?

And that's just rubbish. With that said, however, damage reducing armor has its own share of problems. It tends to be much more effective against low-damage weapons. And maybe there's a certain amount of sense to that (the weapon that hits harder has a greater chance to penetrate the armor, or inflict damage through it), but once you examine things more closely, this starts to fall apart.

Smaller weapons can be better at aiming for weak points in the armor (and here you start to see some logic for armor making it harder to hit creeping in, since you're aiming for a smaller area rather than any part of the body). Also, some weapons are better designed to hurt people through armor. Smashing plate armor with a mace or war hammer tends to be more effective than slashing it with an arming sword. But against an unarmored or lightly armored person, an arming sword has an advantage, because a grazing blow tends to be more effective than with a mace or hammer.

>>43710012
>But against an unarmored or lightly armored person, an arming sword has an advantage, because a grazing blow tends to be more effective than with a mace or hammer.

Dunno bout you m8 but I'm pretty sure a grazing blow from a warhammer would fuck me up just about as bad.

>>43708104
Your armour gets its own hp. Some weapons get a chance to ignore it and some do reduced damage to it.

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>>43708104
Personally I believe armor should work as damage reduction rather than AC. Despite the deceptive name, AC is about avoiding damage (things like size, dexterity, magical barriers etc. affect it) while a suit of armor doesn't allow you to dodge an attack as much as take it with little to no harm done to yourself. As such it should be damage reduction: even the flimsiest leather cuirass may save your life against the slash of a sword, and even the strongest axes and maces will have a hard time getting through full plate. The problem here is how you make it scale properly, as a flat damage reduction simply means you're invulnerable at low levels while you might as well go into battle naked at higher levels.

Shields should work entirely different from AC and damage reduction. IMHO it should add a "deflect" chance depending on the size and material of the shield, forcing the enemy to make a preliminary roll before making one to pass your AC (or streamline it and just make it AC) while also being usable as a secondary weapon (for shieldbashing and the like).

So damage reduction for armor, AC (or something similar) for shields. This would also give a mechanical justification for the real-world trend of men-at-arms ditching shields in favor of twohanders once their armor becomes reliable enough at stopping arrows.

>>43710121
A grazing blow from a hammer will probably just leave one bruised. A grazing blow from a sword can still leave a deep painful gash.

>>43710306
Nigger a grazing blow of a hammer could probably tear skin off. Or crack your bone. And even if it didn't that bruise would probably be worse than the graze you would get from a sword. Grazes aren't much.

>>43710159
Can armor be repaired? What exactly does that entail, like is it something adventurers can do while traveling or do they have to stop in a town and pay someone to do it? If you're going to have to go through several battles before repairing your armor, that basically means either later battles will be done without armor protection (as the armor will have been exhausted in earlier battles) or that it will be strong enough to last multiple battles (which means early battles will basically pose no risk to the PCs).

>>43710518
You can maintain it to repair it but if it gets proper fucked you need to get it fixed or it wont work as well. Simpler shit is easier to fix but more complicated shit is much tougher and harder to damage in the first place.

>>43710012
Ideally, damage reduction would be as a percentage, so that it affected low damage and high damage weapons the same. Practically speaking, this is a bit tricky to implement in a tabletop. If you are playing a game where weapons inflict two dice of damage (like a dagger does 2d4, while an arming sword does 2d8), you can have doubles bypass armor. That means that while armor usually affects a dagger more, you're twice as likely to find a chink with the dagger as with the sword, which at least compensates some.

Also, you probably want to keep in mind that you'll usually be striking at people with at least some armor, so you should calibrate damage based on that. In other words, setting dagger damage at a d4 and then subtracting 2 armor from that virtually erases its ability to injure (an average of .75 damage per hit) and drastically increases the gap in effectiveness between it and a longsword (which does an average of 2.625 damage per hit, or 3.5 times that of the dagger, instead of the mere 1.8 it usually is). Thus, it would make more sense to bump all weapon damage up a die level or two (so that maybe a dagger does d8 damage compared to a longsword's d12).

>>43710518
Replacing snapped or worn-out leather straps, fixing broken rivets, putting bent lames back into shape and planishing out dents. If somebody shot a hole in it, you'll (given medieval tech) need to forge-weld the hole shut and harden and polish the armour again afterwards.

The scale apparently goes from leather lamellar as the most maintainance-intensive (lots of straps that can get worn out, lots of lames that can rot, get eaten away by insects or fungus or deform due to the climate) armour to mail (basically self-polishing and it takes a lot of broken links before its protectiveness seriously degenerates) the least maintainance-intensive armour.

>>43708104
For full plate:
Damage reduction of a flat number. This makes you practically immune to small arms, but weak as shit to heavy attacks, just like real full plate. Armour piercing weapons could deal extra damage to armoured foes, to represent getting through the plate easier.

>>43710791
What?

>>43710121
Warhammers don't do grazing blows. Either it hits you square on and fucks your armour, your bones and your internal organs up equally badly, or it glances off and the momentum is redirected.

>>43710699
Having doubles bypass armor could work well by making bludgeoning weapons use multiple dice, while slashing ones would use a single one.

>>43710818
Glancing blows apparently still can rip the straps and aiguilettes up good, which means that you're either losing bits of your limb defenses or your armour will start coming off in places.

>>43710121
Related (start 2 minutes in) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtYKkwpx1gw

>>43710807
A thousand daggers will just bounce off full plate. A single strike to the head with a warhammer will kill a heavily armoured man. If a dagger deals, say, 1d6 D and a warhammer deals 2d6 D, a flat damage reduction of 4 means the dagger will do fuck all but the warhammer still functions well. The warhammer can be given a special rule that gives it bonus damage against armoured foes to represent it smashing straight through the armour. This goes for all armour-piercing weapons, such as poleaxes, halberds, estocs or even murder-strokes with a straight sword.
If AC is a flat damage reduction and DEX gives a chance for an attack to miss, this makes a fucking difference between the two, and encourages parties to think out their combat strategies more: >"So, we send the rogue after the dude with the halberd, because that will fuck our paladin up, and then he can tank the main force of bandits"

>>43708104
THAC0

>>43710869
That's pretty interesting, actually. Though I think the limited range of dice is something of an impediment for this. 2d4 goes against maybe a d10, but the next step up from that is 2d6, which doesn't match anything very well.

>>43710933
>A thousand daggers will just bounce off full plate. A single strike to the head with a warhammer will kill a heavily armoured man.

No. no it wont.
this idiotic "hammers defeat plate" nonsense has gone on for too long.

Plate is designed to protect from all weapons. the VAST majority of hammer, mace, even pollaxe strikes will deflect. that's what plate armour does - deflect blows.

Hammers, Maces and the likes are SLIGHTLY better at causing impacts which will cause concussion or black/brownouts, than bladed weapons. they are not in any way, the instant counter to plate that this idiotic parroted bullshit would suggest.

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Question to the enthusiasts.

Were there ever knights that primarily fought on foot? What kind of armor did they use? How was it different from a mounted knight's armor? What kind of weapons did they use instead? I'm really curious.

>>43710959
Yeah. It'd need some fiddling to make it work properly, although you could give certain weapons a flat damage bonus to try and even it out.

Say, a mace is 2d4, while a sword is 1d8+2.

Against an unarmored opponent, the sword is going to do quite well, but as their armor gets heavier, the chance to ignore it completely increases the usefulness of the mace.

>>43710992
2spoopy5me

Damage reduction with armour piercing bonuses for low damage but still effective weapons

New question.

How would you meaningfully differentiate between armor and toughness without using HP?

>>43708104
If your character wears armor, you cannot die.

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>>43710992
>Were there ever knights that primarily fought on foot?

Plenty.
Most of the people in armour were not "knights", but men-at-arms.
However, the English in particular preferred to fight on foot.


>What kind of armor did they use?
Virtually the same as everyone else. English armour was a local fashion, some slight detail differences, but otherwise, fundamentally the same. And most english men-at-arms using full harness would've been using mass-produced Italian export plate harnesses, identical to those used in Italy, france, spain or elsewhere.

>How was it different from a mounted knight's armor?
only significant difference was the removal of the lance-rest. See the pic.
See those four little square blocks, near the armpit on the left side (as you look at it)? on a mounted knight, that would have a U shaped rest slotted and pinned to those four blocks, to support a lance during the charge. on foot, it gets in the way, so the English knights took it off.

They might also have made slight adjustments to the sabatons (foot armour) to make walking more comfortable.

thats it.

>What kind of weapons did they use instead? I'm really curious.
Sword, spear, polearms (Pollaxe in particular).

>>43711040
You could also do things the other way around, by giving swords two dice, but having armor subtract per die. So a sword might be 2d8 while a mace is a d12. You have a big advantage against an unarmored guy with the sword. But against a guy with 2 points of armor? The mace does d12 - 2, while the sword does 2d6 -4.

Still, the limited range of dice makes this one tricky too. And in the end, I guess you could just say that armor applies double against swords (or half against maces) without needing to represent it with different numbers of dice.

>>43710430
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtYKkwpx1gw

Please stop. You can like hammers, but don't lie to yourself.

>>43710885
>>43711171
Matt Easton mind.

>>43711196
lul what I get for answering the phone before posting

>>43708104
It adds HP.

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>>43711114
Thanks for the info kinsman

>>43711114
Why in gods name would a knight choose to go on foot? I mean I know English knights dont understand chivalry cuz they are too busy being heratics, but why would any sane knight not want the advantages of a horse especially is heavy (though not cumbersome) plate?

>>43711744
Might not occur to you, but there is fighting where horses don't go. Heavy infantry also kicks the shit out of cavalry when in formation. inb4 muh lances

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>>43711744
Because it can offer a tactical advantage in scenarios where cavalry would be disadvantaged or where having more heavily armored and highly trained infantry would be more advantageous. The Norman cavalry dismounting and joining the shieldwall at the Battle of Hastings is a good early example.

Plus, while plate entered into the cost realm of merchants, craftsmen and mercenaries in later years, horses were always expensive. Footknights and lower class equivalents had their place all throughout western Europe.

>>43711744
mostly because of the terrain

>>43708104
Depends on the armour.

Plate should be like wearing a shield in all directions. 2 handed weapons, blunt maces and specialized anti-armour weapons are the only weapons able to effectively duel it. However it should limit your actions and what you can do. Climbing is out of question; along with sprinting, lying down for long times and sneaking.

Chainmail should be lighter weight, more concealable, be able to negate blunt blows easier and slashing attacks, but be vulnerable to either sustained heavy attacks or piercing strikes. Mobility would be slightly reduced, but not to a point where dodging is completely out of question.

Leather garbs should be able to negate slight damage, be easily concealable/comfortable, but be vulnerable to slashing attacks and heavy piercing attacks.

With non-magical armours, you have to consider both how it'd affect the wearer and how the armour would be compromised. Heavier armour usually can only be pierced by specialist weapons and large weapons. However attacks with maul-like weapons are able to damage the wearer with their own armour with strong enough blows.
Lighter armours should be more resistant to light and blunt blows, but more vunerable to heavy attacks.

>>43711744
Ignore all the other posters, there's one BIG reason.

Economics.

Armor could be bought by the middle class as a sort of "one-size fits all" piece.

Knights with actual fitted armor were much more rare as they had to be a lot richer.

Know what was more expensive than all that armor by far? A warhorse, bred and trained to follow commands and not shy away from the chaos of battle.

Now add in that you would probably need 2-4 of them...

It's a different kind of knight entirely.

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>>43708104
Honestly I don't know if there really is one.

When you get down to it, there are too many varieties and sub varieties of armor all acting differently by material and style to really pin it down mechanically. There's also the fact that armors tend to be objectively better or worse than one another as time goes on which doesn't always work well with game balancing.

An example: Fucknob goes to buy some armor. Picks up a boiled leather lamellar cuirass, a mail haubergeon, splinted vambraces, mail mitts and a kettle helm with a padded aventail.
You immediately have issues. Abstract how the armor works too much and you're right back to the point where it may as well just be a generic chance to avoid damage rolled in with agility deal.
Try and play it completely straight and you basically get Song of Swords or something even crunchier. Which isn't a bad thing but not everyone's cup of tea. Hit locations, individual armor ratings for limbs and so on become concerns.

tl:dr
Too many variables to be a single best way

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>>43712344
> Climbing is out of question; along with sprinting, lying down for long times and sneaking.

All but the latter are quite easy in plate.
sneaking... not so easy, but possible if you're very slow.

>>43708104
fantasycraft does it pretty well

>>43712344
>Climbing is out of question; along with sprinting, lying down for long times and sneaking.
For all but sneaking you're wrong. Full plate that isn't thick german shite made by a dodgy smithy weighs about as much as a toddler. And if your father wasn't shitty then you should know that a man can move with a toddler on their back quite easily. And remember the armours weight is distributed much more evenly than that.

>Chainmail should be lighter weight,
Also incredibly wrong. Chainmail armour is incredibly heavy, much heavier than plate. honestly dodging would be a bit more of a problem in chain, it's not only heavy but less likely to be as secured as plate, meaning its weight is moving around throwing off balance. Though I imagine most chain armour made by a competent smithy for a specific person wouldn't have this problem. Chain taken from foes or just not tailored for a specific person might well have that problem.

>>43708104
This is the way I'm doing it for my mecha game, fishing for opinions.

You have an Armor stat, and anything with Armor has a Hardness. For each point you have in Armor, you roll a die, and have to get equal to or higher than your armor's Hardness. Each die that's over it is a success, which removes one point of damage. The remaining damage is applied to your armor; each point of damage reduces your armor by 1.

So your armor gets worse and worse as you take damage, sort of like how it would be with a real armored vehicle.

>>43708104
Is there a system with realistic armour/plate?
I'd love to play a game with armour that can get as expensive as a large estate but that makes you 99% immortal, 90 % against specialist weapons.
I'd also like to half-sword.

>>43713892

The Riddle of Steel is the RPG probably best known for its realistic armed melee combat, you'd probably want to look at that.

>>43713892
>99% immortal, 90 % against specialist weapons.
A mace isn't a specialist weapon. It's a spiky club made of metal. Any half-competent blacksmith can make one.

>What is the mechanically best way to represent armor?

A reasonably simulationist way would be armor as a saving throw against damage, which would come after you fail your first saving throw for your agility and fightan prowess.

>>43712366

This. A war horse isn't just some regular horse you take into battle with you. It's a horse that's badass enough to go about it's business as your mighty steed in the middle of thousands of people shouting and dying and stabbing each other and doing their damnedest to put holes in you and the horse.

And later, while people are shooting guns and cannons everywhere as well.

A regular horse wants nothing to do with any of that shit.

>>43714403
>It's a horse that's badass enough
Mean and stupid enough, really.

This is just another DR vs AC thread. So... I prefer AC, at least in a fantasy environment.

Technically, yes, DR makes more sense. It's an outer shell that, if struck, is much more difficult to injure. But for practical purposes a suit of metal armor means that it restricts the options of the attacker. The attack is going to try getting around a sheet or metal, not stabbing through it. This limits the options of the attacker, which makes the defender more difficult to hit (in a spot that can be damaged), and that's the same as evasion, much like a shield or a parrying action likewise puts steel between an attack and the defender's squishy bits.

Of course, you can run this as DR, and just make it that the DR of plate is enough that there's no good reason to ever attack it, so you'll always take a penalty to hit a spot with lower DR, but that's getting close to AC again. It's more mechanics and more work for little gain.

In a future environment I think a stronger case can be made where muscle power isn't the limiting factor and armors will only partially absorb damage.

>>43714446
>Mean and stupid enough, really.

I'm not really seeing a difference here.

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>>43714403
French knights had better access to horses (France is larger and flatter than England) so they can afford to get more cavalry. Also, just as >>43711114 mentioned, foot knights can use the pollaxe, halberd, billhook, and other great polearms (or the greatswords in later years) when on foot while mounted knights can't. A polearm allows them to kill both cavalry and infantry pretty well.

>>43708104
I like the idea of giving armor both AC and DR statistics, in varying amounts. Plate provides high AC, because its primary purpose is to deflect, while padded gambesons and chainmail have high DR but little AC bonus. Brigandine and coat-of-plates would probably fill a middle ground niche.

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>>43708104
I've been working on a system that includes layers of armor, blocking, dodging, and parrying.

Blocking, dodging, and parrying work in a dicepool to make AC. If you get hit, the armor works as damage reduction.

The armor has an under layer (like cotton, padding, light maille) and an over layer (heavy maille hauberk, plate, scale armor). Each of those has several values. Blunt DR, piercing DR, and slashing DR, and weight. Weight impedes the users speed, active defense (block, dodge, and parry), and attack ability. Players can wear light armor for maximum flexibility and speed or heavy armor for maximum DR. They also have to consider if they want to focus on blocking one type of attack or want to diversify (full plate and light maille makes the player almost immune to slashes but a mace will be their death).

>>43708104
How GURPS does it.

>>43710250
I roll it all into a single roll, so (atk mods + dice roll) - (dodge + block/parry + armor) = 0 is a hit with any excess rolling into bonus damage

>>43713423
Maille isn't heavier it just has a worse weight distribution as it all sits on the shoulder and waist.

>>43711862
>inb4 muh lances
Well lances are pretty dam fun

>>43710992
>Were there ever knights that primarily fought on foot?

..well sieges made up the majority of military actions. I don't think there are many horses that can scale ladders...

>>43714517
In a fantasy environment you can meet things that can defeat plate. Like a magic sword, or just a huge club in the hands of a giant. Armor as AC isn't very good in such situations.

Use GURPS (dodge seperate from damage reduction via armor, armor heavy and reduce dodge)
---

But other than that, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

In a lot of d20 systems AC is "the blow didn't matter" which is perfectly adaquate for what is meant to be a high speed combat round where realism isn't 100 % important, but finding out whether or whether not the telling blow mattered is.

In GURPS combat is less the focus, so the more differentiation between damage types / armor / defense means you get more to play with when that is interesting. I do recommend the "damage is seperate from injury" mechanic though if you're using any form of DR.

In something like Shadowrun you get dodge + damage reduction, rolled as pools, and in both cases they're about reducing attacks and that's a workable system it just takes 4 rolls per attack which is uuurugh.

>>43708104
If the combat is one roll (damage+attack at once), then it should be added to the character's defensive stat(s); where speed, toughness, accuracy, evasion, and such are all under once roll.

If combat's done in two rolls (attack then damage), it should be damage reduction; roll A determining if/where you hit the guy, and roll D determining how hard/well you hit them.

>>43721512
But a lot of the reason "AC" is so odd is that "HP" to some extent also represents how much you're armored, or can absorb, or can avoid taking in damage. You end in a weird place when you have two mechanics that both represent damage reducton, even if one is mainly ablative.

Fantasy Craft does something pretty neat with the vitality / wound different, and that can work quite well.

The best game of D&D I played did it like this:
DR = ½ armor ac, max lvl 6, hp recovers after short rest, some attacks / criticals / special effects / weapon modifications / traps deal 1d2 straight CON damage, CON damage heals slowly.

Gives you the "harder to hit becaue of better gear so some blows won't matter", the better armor gives more damage reduction, the some damage is more sever and the you can bypass armor by utilizing special attacks and knowing what you're doing along the lines of the old "knife to the eye!" trick. But it's a bit unwiedly for quick pick up and play.

>>43721512
as a guy who likes gurps, going into every thread there is and fucking starting all but literally every pro-GURPS statement with either
"Just Use Gurps," or "GURPS does-" has an almost Pavlovian of "just scroll on, it's a GURPS fag."

we are playing a homebrew , and we have damage subtraction for stab punch and cut for each armor

also , we have a stability value to simulate swords flexing on impact with plate , if a weapons stability is lower than the armor stability , armor resistance will be multiplied by (armor stability/weapon stability)

if you go by this , try to find values which are easy to divide

Why fantasy faggots cant understand how little plate actually affects your movement.