Armour Mechanism

[FzGhouL]

I think you should test play with some devilish players. Thats how I cure my system.

My players will find holes and exploit them. Then you know what to fix and how to fix it.

[HereticalFaction]

You don't need too much technical detail in order to create an authentic feel to your combat. Provided you are willing to keep your system bloody and fast. The one point where so many (especially fantasy) games fail is that they do not capture the shit-your-pants intensity of real combat. Remember that unskilled people regularily kill one another in unarmed fistfights.... Any combat system that allows a charachter to take 2-4 penetrating arrows and keep on fighting is fundamentally goofy no matter how well researched it's historical data is. So, your armor mechanic can be pseudo-realistic if you keep the following in mind:

1) Most of the time, the weapons and armor available in a certain setting should be close to evenly matched and the result should be that only a few narrow choices of weapon or armor can be effective against what oponents will likely be wearing/weilding.

2) Where either a weapon or an armor type is significantly advanced, it should offer an almost insurmountable advantage to it's user, regardless of skill (except for weapons such as the longbow or defenses such as full-plate-and-barded-warhorse where the weapon or defense demands a lifetime of training to employ competently).

3) When (in almost all cases) weapon and armor are closely matched, armor will negate the vast majority (like 75%) of all hits that land, but when a hit does penetrate, it should almost always be immediately incapacitating. Most fights are one-hit fights.

4) Remember: when being an "ace" meant defeating five enemies in one-on-one combat, only one in thirty-two could become an "ace". Face-to-face single combat should be deadly enough that players will try to avoid it: Surprise, superior numbers, subterfuge, high ground, mobility, and fortification have always been far more important to warriors than the differance between "steel" and "adamantine" plate armor.

If you keep these things in mind, you shouldn't have to fret about historical details of armor, since your players will soon learn that nifty equipment isn't where it's at. I think you could then have the "authentic feeling" without migraine levels of research and historical detail.

[btrc]

By the way, BTRC, that idea is an excellent one for full body armour and I was thinking about it a lot! It works well in many cases, however it doesn't handle partial armour well. A breastplate should not negate ALL of the damage dealt to it, since I am not dealing with locational damage. I'd rather link the ability to defeat armour to a random variable, esp given when armour is not homogenius.

Well, if you don't mind going the multiple die type route, you could make damage like 1d10+1d4, where the second die must exceed armor in order for the first die to have any effect.

Another route might be a mechanic like in EABA, where armor is rated in dice (all dice in EABA are d6), and these subtract from the attack before any dice are rolled. So, a 3d6 attack against a 2d6 armor means that 1d6 damage gets through. A 2d6 attack against 2d6 armor is a bounce, and a 2d6+1 attack against a 2d6 armor leaks 1 point through.

You might want more variability, which can be had by rolling dice on each side, but EABA was trying to minimize the rolls and was working with a more realistic armor model.

As far as your arrow modelling goes, never model in a vacuum if you can help it. The infinite Internet certainly has "ballistics" for arrows, like here:

http://www.martinarchery.com/faq/facts.php
http://www.alumni.ca/~lapidep/simhelp.html
http://www.dundeesportsmansclub.com/dundee%20pic/dscinc.ballistics.of.bows.and.arrows.htm

Lots of links:
http://home.att.net/~sajackson/archery.html

Greg
BTRC

[kaikatsu]

BTRC, thanks for the links.  That's definitely going to be good reading material.  The mechanics you posted from EABA ended up getting considered, but I ran into some situations where I didn't like them as much.  In order to have an effective spread of armour, weapons need to do multiple dice of damage -- armour should be at LEAST from +1 to +3, and that means I need weapons dealing 4d or 5d damage.  Multiple dice tend to produce less randomized results, and I'm not so keen on that...

HereticalFaction, you raise some good points...

It's actually quite possible to get killed in hand to hand combat, though not AS likely.  Getting shot with an arrow has, depending on toughness, somewhere in the 30-50% lethality ratio -- and that's from random fire, not a targeted shot.

Gunfights are even more of an issue.  In the end, "two shots, centre of mass" offers good stopping power, and pretty good lethality.

That being said, there are two issues I need to address.  The first is that even with a high lethality index, some things need to make sense.  Running into a knight with full plate SHOULD be a "well CRAP" moment, because of the effectiveness of the armour.  Just like infantry running into an M1A4 tank should immediately cause a major tactical change and a switch to LAW rockets.

Second of all, the high lethality index sometimes NEEDS to be metagamed out.  The winner gets to tell the story, so to speak, but an RPG is a story made up as you go along.  For -certain- games the hero needs to be able to walk into a fight and come on a victor just because he IS the hero.  I mean, if you're reading a book, and the climax of this book is when the hero enters a tournament, you don't expect him to die the first fight.  RPG systems need to have some forgiveness to them depending on how much players should be able to get away with.

Hit Points are generally the wrong way to go about this, if I might say so, because with Hit Points, there is a definite mixing of the game and metagame.  If I take 6 damage, how much of that is bleeding, and how much of that is luck negating the hit?  There's no real seperation of the two, the only thing that is clear is when I finally go down.

On the other hand with a Hero point, players can negate one hit -- regardless of damage.  This means there's a strong incentive to "take a flesh wound" if damage is rolled low enough, but that one hit kill always narrowly misses.  And it's a strong reminder to the players that they CAN get killed rather easily, and it's ONLY the metagame that keeps them alive.

If someone wanted to simulate the realistic fear of combat, simply remove the hero points.  They are assigned on a completely seperate scale from gameworld mechanics -- your typical untrained youth might have far, far more of them than your hardened vetern.  If you want to play without them, best of luck, but it will make dungon crawling a nightmare.  If that's what you're going for, awsome.  If not, the option is there.

FzGhouL, I usually do have a "break the system" day, where all the people at my club are given the rules, and told to make the most broken character EVER.  EV4R even.  It doesn't matter HOW, just that the character is clearly broken.  Then I run them through the mill.

I expect the major breaking point of this system will be that some armours will just be plain better than others.  Plate mail distributes the weight over the body even better than chain, and, if you have a certain level of rediculous strength (possible) and some training (assumed to be, as we're playing competent characters) you can do a cartwheel in plate.  As counterintuitive as that might be.  End result, guess what EVERY player taking the tank route is going to want to own?

Needless to say it will be my job to ensure that dungon economics (oh look, ANOTHER 400 gold pieces) don't happen.  But THAT is a post for another thread.

[Sydney Freedberg]

The one point where so many (especially fantasy) games fail is that they do not capture the shit-your-pants intensity of real combat.

Not to derail this current discussion, but there's an interesting thread about this whole issue here, going more into combat psychology (fear & confusion) than combat physics (armor & weapons).

[kaikatsu]

I've more or less figured out what I plan to do unless someone points out a failure, so more reading material is a welcome derailment.

[btrc]

BTRC, thanks for the links. That's definitely going to be good reading material. The mechanics you posted from EABA ended up getting considered, but I ran into some situations where I didn't like them as much. In order to have an effective spread of armour, weapons need to do multiple dice of damage -- armour should be at LEAST from +1 to +3, and that means I need weapons dealing 4d or 5d damage. Multiple dice tend to produce less randomized results, and I'm not so keen on that...

Well, in the end it is the a)simplicity, b)accuracy(or versimilitude), c)drama thing, and you only get to pick two of the three...;)

It sounds like you're going for a more heroic treatment rather than realistic. Slap a piece of chain mail over a hay bale, and I'll lay money that if I shoot 10 arrows at it, the behavior of 9 of them will follow what the first one does (penetrate or non-penetrate). That may be real, but not what you are looking for.

Perhaps the simplest way to do has I think already been suggested, a multiplier. If a longsword is 1d10(x1), then you have a lot of variability in the damage and armor penetration. If you want more penetration, you just add a constant, like 1d10+3(x1). A rapier might be 1d4(x3). It can't penetrate more than 4 points of armor, no matter how good the hit, but anything that gets through armor is multiplied by 3. Against an unarmored person, the 1d10(x1) longsword does 5.5 damage, while the 1d4(x3) rapier does 7.5 damage. If you want low variability, like for firearms, you use larger amounts of small dice types. A 9mm might be 3d3(x2) or something.

You can further tweak it by adding location modifiers, with a lower limit of (x1). So, arm hits might be -2 to the multiple, making the rapier to an arm be 1d4(x1) instead of 1d4(x3), while the longsword -stays- 1d10(x1), making the longsword more of a threat to extremities than the rapier.

This is all just off the top of my head. Personally, I don't like the NdX+Y(xZ) format (it seems a little clunky), but it does address your needs and maybe you can streamline it.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[Vaxalon]

That sounds an awful lot like the GURPS system.

And yeah, it's really klunkly.

[btrc]

That sounds an awful lot like the GURPS system.

And yeah, it's really klunkly.

Yep. When you completely separate penetration from damage done, then you just doubled the number of things to keep track of. Put in location modifiers to damage and you've added something else. Using different dice types to give varying bell-curves of damage, even more complexity.

In the end, you need to focus on what you want the system to do, do it well, and let the rest slide. If you want (or need) a system that has all of the above features (damage, penetration, bell-curve, location modifiers), then you're going to either have something "klunkly", or a simple basic system that ignores a few of these features, plus some optional rules tucked away somewhere for those who want the added functionality.

Kaikatsu needs to set down everything he wants from a damage and armor system, and then assign them priorities, making each one work to his satisfaction in order of importance. These can be developed separately, and then see how they can be best combined.

And I'd love to see the final results, both in mechanics and the priorities behind them.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[kaikatsu]

Well, I did some tests for klunkyness.  Here is what I've found.

#1 -- combat moves surprisingly quickly.  Each attack does not move as fast as d20, but combat DOES move faster as a whole.  This is mostly because of the lethality of the combat -- one or two hits and it is game over for the combatants.

#2 -- PRE combat calculation still takes a while, especially if using custom armour.  This is considered acceptable.  Kludge in the "setup" is not an issue at all.

#3 -- combat needs to almost -stop- when running into an unforseen damage type.  This is considered acceptable, as it is a rare event.

#4 -- there is a bit more calculation on the end of the attacker, but defenders actually have very FEW calculations.  Because I use damage thresholds and wound numbers, the concept of "DR subtracting damage" doesn't so much show up as "thresholds going up."  In fact, the lookup time was easy to memorize.

#5 -- A character sheet is essential.  It's nearly impossible to do without the character sheet layed out in front to track the wounds.  There are too many dimentions to track without a bit of paper.  However a small (2x3 inch layout with good size text) bit of information on a character sheet makes it work rather quickly.

The kludge is not my primary concern.  It COULD be faster, I have no doubt about this.  A sweeping statement like "any time you seperate penetration from damage done,  then you just doubled the number of things to keep track of" is true -- but is acceptable if the steps can be done in parallel.  I'm not just using that range of elements for the purposes of armour, I'm ALSO using it to factor in the stopping power of weapons, as well as the long term lethality of a deep cut that causes internal bleeding, even if it -doesn't- instantly kill.

One thing I want to make clear is that there are NOT location modifiers for damage.  When establishing the quality of the armour, the location of the armour matters, but when actually -dealing out damage-, where the hit lands is NOT considered.  I have used sectional damage before and, quite frankly, I don't care for it.  There are a lot of reasons for it, and if you want I'll start a thread called "Why I dislike sectional damage" -- but that's a whole other story.

As another note, the importance of bell curves on a weapon by weapon basis will likely become less important at rate I am going -- most weapons will be reduced to one, or at most two dice.  That doesn't mean I'm not going to think about them, however.  For "high scale damage" of tanks and whatnot -- 1d8x10 is a much different beast than, say, 10d8, and the former is easier to roll.  Relatively constant damage tends to be extremely boring, or so I found in early trials.

My primary concern is to avoid the "wait WTF?" moments that tend to happen in RPGs.  You can spend all your time arguing about the effectiveness of a Germanic knight's plate vs a warhammer, as compared to how it would stand up against a musket, but if there is POTENTIAL for these values to be different, than this should be taken into account.

Few people would doubt that a shotgun loaded with 00 shot has good stopping power, but when a shotgun's high damage makes it a better riot-armour penetrator at range, well at that point a "wait WTF?" moment has happened.  A system needs to be JUST complicated enough that WTF moments are factored out.  Arguments about the ACTUAL effectiveness can be obtained by changing the numbers, IF you have enough degrees of freedom.

For example, if someone wanted to take issue with the notion that a shotgun DID, in fact, work well at penetrating riot armour -- this could easily be settled by altering the numbers, in a manner that would allow for shotguns with good armour penetration.  Someone that would argue that the kenetic energy of a shotgun blast, even without penetration, would cause enough pain and shock to down someone would find the optional stun damage rule there to sate them, and could apply it vs something else.  (I think it's a fairly reasonable assumption myself...)

And yet none of these rule tweeks would screw up the difference between an explosive round (not HEAT) vs a SABOT.  The long rod penetrators will still have amazing penetration -- in a single roll no less -- and the explosive round will be far better at causing massive damage to soft targets.

Greg, your example of chain mail over hay is decidedly true.  I might not have made that clear, but that is INDEED what I am going for.  Understand, homogenius armour is NOT a major issue -- the protection of chain vs arrow is generally fixed.

But what happens when you have plate over HALF the body, and chain on the other half?  And the plate is far superior at stopping arrows?  And, as I mentioned earlier, I do NOT want to resolve the hit location of EACH and EVERY shot.

Obviously, approximations are the best I can get in a situation like this.  However the approximations should approximate with reason.  Upgrading a breastplate from leather to steel should provide some advantages, but as long as your head is exposed, you can have all the dragon hide of invulnerability in the world, arrows will not consistantly bounce all the time because your head is STILL EXPOSED.

It is this kind of logical disconnect I need to address.  And I did address, with a mechanism for calculating the total damage reduction of a set of armour, with "damage" seen as a function of the accuracy of the blow as well as it's penetration power.  (I can go into the details if you'd like.)

I'm getting a sense from some of the replies that I haven't explained things well enough, so I'm going to have to make sure to post the official writeups when I get done.

That's enough text for now.

[btrc]

Whew, a lot of reply/comments.

I gather that you want armor to be a general number that can be created by addition of sectional pieces. No hit locations, but "cuirass + helm" gives a better armor value than "cuirass alone". I got no problems with that.

I brought up location specific effects because you had early on differentiated incapacitation on a single hit from a longsword and a rapier, the rapier being judged more likely to perforate something vital, as I recall. I was bringing up the counter example that if you hit an extremity, the rapier is likely going to be -less- incapacitating.

So, if you -don't- have location specific effects, you end up with the factors canceling each other, and you can just go back to a single number for the weapon, or at the very least drop a level of complexity somewhere.

The kludge is not my primary concern. It COULD be faster, I have no doubt about this. A sweeping statement like "any time you seperate penetration from damage done, then you just doubled the number of things to keep track of" is true -- but is acceptable if the steps can be done in parallel.

Which is exactly the way it -should- be done, IMHO. If you do it right, then two numbers can be less than two mental steps.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[kaikatsu]

You're right in that armour is a general number created by the addition of section pieces.  Let's call that the armour rating, which is a combination of material strength and coverage.  However, three things need to be true.

* Maximum coverage is obviously a limiter.  This one is a no brainer.  After you've covered your entire body in soft leather, the only possible upgrade route is to go to better materials.

* Likewise, disparate material strength is not as effective.  Let us assume a completely indestructable material, which ALSO absorbs shock damage and so on, we shall call it protectium.  A full plate suit of protectium would be well near invulnerable.  The armour bonuses would be insane.  Any GM who gave a PC one of these needs to have their head examined -- either that or a plot device that makes it fall apart in the middle of the third act.

* On the other hand a single breastplate of indestructium should not provide nearly the same armour bonuses.  Not even close.  If you say it covers 50% of the body, it should not provide a half bonus.  Because the limbs are still valid targets.  One can assume that you are aiming to do maximum damage with each hit -- the fact that you're aiming elsewhere on the body other than a target like the heart has some form of "damage reduction" -- but nothing near as good as the combination of head and body armour could be, and at least an order of magnitude below full body armour.  That was another challenge for the mechanism, though I didn't vocalize it as well during my first post.

You're absolutely right about the rapier being less effective than the longsword when smacking less vital areas.  In this respect, however, I do not think the two elements "cancel out."  I think that rapier wounds are, on the whole, less likely to drop someone -- regardless of if they hit a lethal zone or not.  Even a piercing blow through the heart can give a person fifteen seconds of full thought and movement before death, though I'll freely admit few would be able to maintain this kind of power before dropping.

On the other hand, even a blow to the leg can have long term lethality problems, if it hits the right artery, or causes an infection -- and this is where deep puncture wounds excel, as they are so hard to clean.  So in this area, I think the difference between the penetration and magnitude of the wound are different.

The end result being that rapier duels are actually more deadly to either combatant, because you can keep fighting even after you've hurt yourself enough that you REALLY SHOULD STOP.  On the other hand a good, clubbing blow from a longsword ends the match.  There ARE extremities on either side of the table, there's no reason you can't just get barely nicked by either blade, but this is the kind of endgame the system should gravitate towards.

Any other potential theoretical absurdities you think might exist?

[btrc]

The end result being that rapier duels are actually more deadly to either combatant, because you can keep fighting even after you've hurt yourself enough that you REALLY SHOULD STOP. On the other hand a good, clubbing blow from a longsword ends the match. There ARE extremities on either side of the table, there's no reason you can't just get barely nicked by either blade, but this is the kind of endgame the system should gravitate towards.

Any other potential theoretical absurdities you think might exist?

Sounds like you have deferred a bit of complexity rather than removing it. That is, weapons can go back to having a single value for damage/penetration, but need an extra value for "long term complications" like nasty deep punctures that are hard to clean.

A suggestion: The chance of complications or the speed of healing is affected not by the hits done, but by the number of wounds. So, someone who has taken three 3 point rapier pokes might find it worse going than someone who has a 9 point "ribs caved in by a mace" hit.

As a counter argument, you might say that the nature of large hits makes -them- less likely to heal, a deep flesh wound still likely to heal faster than a broken bone, for instance.

I believe the fudge used in EABA is that a single wound that does your Health or more is a "crippling" injury, which takes four times as long to heal.

Perhaps you need a threshold beyond which wounds are considered "deep" or "serious", set at a point where weapons like the rapier can have the desired percentage of inflicting them.

For armor, rather than rating it by material, rate it by area, and then have a material modfier for say the -lowest- quality material used. This is slightly different than doing it the other way around. If I say torso armor is AV10, and I have +3 protectium, then if I have a helm for +3AV, and it is only made of +1 goodenoughium, then my armor is:

Torso: AV10
Helm: +3AV
Minimum material: +1 goodenoughium
total: AV14

Yes, you get a benefit for the helm, but it is not all that much, since it is a crappy helm compared to your breastplate. If you tweak the armor and material values, this -might- generate the results you want. Specifically, the armor value added for any sectional piece of armor should work out as +1 for the minimum armor material. I did that in the example above. It could have also been +4AV for the head, if the minimum armor material was +0 so-soium.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[kaikatsu]

I think I might have mis-stated, or at the very least been misunderstood.

I'm not talking about a single value for damage/penetration.  No -- that will most assuredly stay as two seperate calculations.  Initial playtesting has proven to me that it doesn't have a serious slowdown on gameplay, since they can be done in almost parallel.

However yes -- a LOT of the complexity is deferred.  Things like the DR tables of armour, or the "I got wounded in battle, even though we won -- am I going to die from this?" calculations are fine too.  Sometimes you don't even realize how wounded you are... until you take the time to sit down and work it out...

It's post combat calculations.  They can be reasonably complex.  Anything outside the moments between initial attack and final victory/retreat can be reasonably complex.  It's those tense, two or three minutes of fighting (Game time) which needs to be resolved in under a half hour (real time) that demands a simple system.

The suggestion that you made is actually implimented.  You heal wounds "one at a time" so to speak.  Once a wound has been determined to be non life threatening, a puncture wound heals up faster than a heavy blow across the chest, exactly as you intended.  Good eye for catching that though, as I had not explained it.


Regarding armour -- I might have misunderstood you, but let me present a possible WTF effect with what you just said.  I can have a torso plate with AV10, and a +5 modifier for material.  I add a leather helmet, AV 3, with material +1.  My armour mod just DROPPED to 14.  *ahem*  WTF?

Reading below, I'm having a harder time following you on some of the other issues -- the "armour vaue added for any sectional piece of armour should work out as +1 for the minimum armour material."  On that note, you lost me, which is probably why I got confused.

Also, any idea how this mechanic would handle vital armour (like a chest plate) vs non vital (like gauntlets?)

[btrc]

Regarding armour -- I might have misunderstood you, but let me present a possible WTF effect with what you just said. I can have a torso plate with AV10, and a +5 modifier for material. I add a leather helmet, AV 3, with material +1. My armour mod just DROPPED to 14. *ahem* WTF?

That's where you come in. You need to set up the numbers so that at a minimum, adding a piece of sectional armor is going to give you a +1 benefit. That's just a matter of playing with the numbers until they work out.

Reading below, I'm having a harder time following you on some of the other issues -- the "armour vaue added for any sectional piece of armour should work out as +1 for the minimum armour material." On that note, you lost me, which is probably why I got confused.

See above.

Also, any idea how this mechanic would handle vital armour (like a chest plate) vs non vital (like gauntlets?)

I think I would define "armor" as vital. That is, the torso protection is the default. If I have no torso armor, and a helm that gives me +2, then I have an AV2 (or whatever).

Since you don't have hit locations or location specific effects, in combat there is no difference between a guy with a breastplate and nothing else, and a guy with his arms, legs and head armored, with his chest unprotected. You simply have a certain fraction of his body protected, and the numbers give the total armor value.

If it were my design, I would slant those numbers so that for a given material and percentage of area covered, the torso had a higher armor value than anywhere else, since it is a center of mass aim point and more hits will likely strike there as a matter of statistics.

But at this point, to see if it works, you have to start plugging in numbers and tweaking them.

Greg