Im rewriting the armor system for a game id like to riun with friends, i feel like its kind of ridiculous that armor only adds to the difficulty to land a hit on a target rather than softens the damage done to them. essentially as it stands you roll a d20 to hit and add their armor class to your roll, if its 20 or more you hit, anything else glances off. I was thinking of making chance to hit based on situational cover instead and armor just used to modify what damage is actually done if they do hit.
TLDR how do i convert number ranging 0-7 to a damage reduction modifier
>>43714195
Listen, OP, you sound like an OK guy, so I'm-a do you a solid here.
Thing is, I can either give you the answer straight, or I can shove you in the right direction and let you find out on your own. In one case, you get a fish. In the other, you learn how to fish.
And this question you're presenting to us sounds like it'd benefit by being thought of as, 'what is the best armor system in a game and why are you using it?' -- to which I'll say that most d20-based games are about quickly-resolving narrativist/gamist fun and not realism.
See, it looks like you want lots of modifiers and stuff for increasing and decreasing armor values. THat being the case, I can recommend a change of pace from the d20 to the d6 (as Shadowrun does it) or the 3d6 (as GURPS does it) or the d10 (as World of Darkness does it).
The exception I keep coming back to is Numenera -- viz d20-based games being gamist, that is.
God speed!
>>43714195
alright, i'll look into those. Thanks friend
What's the rest of the system? A static DR instead of AC will quickly become useless as characters start having 60+ HP and enemies are expected to throw out 2d12+14 damage per attack. DR either requires similar values of HP/Damage across the board or have it scale to HP.
Maybe ignore damage less than 1/X your character's max HP? Just an idea off the top of my head but that might be an easy-to-scale approach. 1/10 for light, 1/5 for medium, 1/3 for heavy? Or maybe X=(AC+3), so AC+7 (the worst, if I'm reading your post correctly) only stops attacks weaker than HP/10 while the AC+0 (the best) stops attacks weaker than HP/3. It's a bit mathier but you shouldn't need to crunch numbers in-game (you would only have to actually do the numbers when switching armor, and that isn't something that happens mid-combat).
>>43714195
Like this?
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/armorAsDamageReduction.htm
No idea if it actually works well.
>>43717535
(assuming you're playing 3.5 and you don't mind armor still contributing to AC)
>>43717535
>>43717573
It falls into the issue from >>43714721. DR 4 from fullplate makes you feel like a tank... until level three or so where your Fighter has so much HP that 4 damage is no longer significant. At best, you're now immune to hordes of worthless fodder monsters that tend to miss anyway, but anything that's actually a challenge for you isn't really hampered by DR 4; it will blow right though it like tissue paper.
>>43714195
Most damage reduction conversion schemes I've seen are actually very poorly designed. The following is something I came up with for Basic D&D, and it keeps the balance of armor surprisingly close to the way it was. Of course, the system only really works if the damage of weapons is relatively the same as in Basic D&D (d8 for longswords, and not a ridiculous number of bonuses added on top of this).
--------------------
Up weapon damage by 1 die level (dagger does d6, short sword d8, longsword d10, two-handed sword d12). Monsters receive a similar bonus to their damage (just give a flat +1 bonus if the alternative gets a little tricky).
Determine your chance to hit according to 3 points harder to hit than unarmored. That's AC 6 (Basic) or 7 (AD&D) on the attack table (adjusted by everything that isn't armor: dex modifiers, shield, even any pluses from magical armor). AC now means "avoidance class" and can still be referred to as Ay-Cee.
For every 2 points armor improved your AC in the rules-as-written, you instead get a DR of 1. In Basic D&D that means:
unarmored (AC 8-9) = DR 0
leather (AC 6-7) = DR 1
chainmail (AC 4-5) = DR 2
platemail (AC 2-3) = DR 3
Under normal circumstances, any hit inflicts a minimum of 1 point of damage.
>>43720019 continued
Special effects that occur when a monster hits you are a bit tricky, as before heavier armor reduced their ability to hit you, and therefore their ability to affect you. Here are a few ideas of what you could do to remedy the issue:
—Don't do anything. The effect still occurs anytime you are hit. This will disadvantage heavily armored characters a bit, and advantage lightly armored ones a bit, but shouldn't affect overall game balance much.
—Apply the special effect only when the damage rolled exceeds your armor's damage reduction (which is to say, you suffer at least 1 point of damage before applying "1 point minimum" rule). The effectiveness of this will vary according to how much damage the monster inflicts, but should be a relatively elegant solution in most cases. It works best if a monster does at least d5 damage (after increasing their damage by one die level), so you may want to nudge damage upwards in cases where they do less than that.
—You can institute a separate armor roll on a d8. Anytime you get hit, roll a d8. If the result is equal to or less than your armor's DR, the special effect does not apply (just as if you had been missed). This is consistent, but inelegant, as it adds an extra roll. You could always apply the previous method, and use this one for fringe cases that are problematic (such as a ghost that inflicts no damage with its touch, but merely ages you).
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/armorAsDamageReduction.htm
Try this out.
>>43714195
Like a shield, armor does several things at once. It makes you harder to hit because blows are deflected and slide right off. It also reduces damage for things that are penetrated.
Armor isn't handled well in most games because health and wounds aren't handled well in most games. Hit points aren't a good abstraction, and that really shows when you try to add the effects of armor to the mix.
Of the systems I've used, GURPS works the best, but even it has flaws. For D&D, armor as DR is probably a good start, but bear in mind that with leveling and hit point accumulation, you're going to need some way for armor to scale up as the players' other stats do.
>>43714195
Make it reduce damage
>>43714195
This is simple as hell
Instead of making the chance to hit some percentage other than 100%. it does this
It reduce damage by damage * (chance to it it would have)
if you do 100 damage and the weapon you reduce the chance to hit to 50%, you now make 50 damage
>>43720019
One way to make this armor scale better in games where damage output drastically increases with level is to have the enhancement pluses of armor add to *both* DR and AC. This, by itself, is obviously more powerful (you get two points for the price of one), but can help offset the fact that 3 points of damage reduction for plate(mail) is, at high level, a poor substitute for 6 or 7 points of accuracy reduction. Thus, +3 plate(mail) would be 3 points of accuracy reduction and 6 points of DR rather than 6 or 7 points of DR.
An intermediate solution is to get *half* an armor's enhancement bonus in DR (you decide whether to round up or not depending on how powerful you want it to be), and the rest in regular accuracy reduction. This makes DR scale a bit, but keeps things from getting out of hand.
1. Dex dont add in AC? Put Con in DR.
2. Use DR and DT as in the true Fallout games.
3. Make damage add to the hit roll and make damage be the total hit roll minus the AC.
>>43714195
Don't use the OGL as a base, first off.
Most of your problems stem from sucking at the poisoned teat of 3e D&D.
Next, AC as it currently is works within the resource system as it is defined. It is a very large abstraction for many, many things that can happen to cause minor injury, and it only goes awry when people try to put hard numbers to it, like DR, a failed concept in and off itself.
Rather than reinventing the nail, get a new hammer.
>>43726421
This still utterly fails past level 10, or if the player decides to, rather than get static enhancements, to spend money on armor abilities.
Even then, DR15 isn't gonna mean fuckall when enemies hit for 40+ damage a hit minimum. Further, this system grossly favors enemy creatures who can, and will, be rocking 20+ points of Natural armor, like giants before any armor they put on.
The only time I've seen armor really work out is in an armor+natural soak system, like RoS or WH.
>>43726421
Actually, now that I think about it, I did a thing to preserve the relative gap in protection between different levels of armor (as they get enhancement bonuses). I can't find it right now, but this is something similar I just threw together.
>>43726875
Alright, so let's run some numbers. To simplify things, let's say that your enemy had a flat 60% chance to hit you in your armor before, and did an average of 40 points of damage on a hit. That's 24 damage per round. Now, if we say that enhancement bonuses add to both DR and AC, and you've got +4 armor with a base 3 DR, let's see what happens. Well, first off, we've increased damage by 1 point, so there's really a net DR of 2. So we're looking at 7 points worth of AC (base of 3 for this system +4 enhancement bonus) and 7 DR (base 3 for this armor +4 for enhancement bonus). Now, our armor is 3 points easier to hit than in the RAW (6 points of armor in the RAW to base 3 in the new rules), which means the enemy hits us 75% of the time rather than 60%. But he only does 33 average damage on a hit rather than 40. 75% x 33 = 24.75 per round. And that's pretty damn close to the original of 24.
>>43727206
Now apply for the fact that few people go for static enhancements on armor because miss chance/fortification is much better, and spending money on armor to get the higher DR means less for tools to win the battle.
Also apply crit tables to your math, because lower AC means that crits confirm more often and you spent your money on enhancement bonuses rather than fortification.
If you use OGL, armor as DR is a losing prospect, period. It works in E6, but once enemies start hitting for 30+ damage a swing and packing more armor than a pc could ever get, it falls apart in ways your simple mathhammer doesn't show.
>>43727324
I have to get to work now, so I can't really hash this out, but let me say that the conversion of AC to DR of base armor should be limited in some way. An easy way would be to say that you can't convert more than 10 points of AC to (5 points of) DR (though 8 points to 4 is probably mathematically better), with the rest remaining AC. Of course, you'd ideally have a table of some sort for converting monsters with high AC to represent a similar progression to players with armor enhancements (where some of your protection is being applied to both AC and DR).
With that done, I'm not convinced that being 3 or 4 points easier to hit with more than twice the gap compensated for with DR is ever going to dramatically change the math of combat. Even if it did result in a marginal disadvantage for the heavily armored, I tend to think this would be a relatively small percentage of overall damage output. But maybe you have math that proves I'm wrong. I will admit that I'm much less used to the runaway numbers of 3.x as compared to the relatively contained and consistent ones of old school D&D.
>>43714195
Most popular systems have "weird" armor because you play characters that are essentially superhuman. Characters can take ridiculous amounts of beating, and no matter if it's literally because they can survive multiple injuries, or because it's some abstraction of them being able to handle pain better or some combination of willpower or reflexes, the armour systems tend to not fit the same theme as the injury or HP mechanic.
The thing is though, that most people choose convenience over realism, and most systems aren't precise and fine-grained enough to make realistic armour work.
"real" armour protects you pretty completely, until it doesn't, and then you die or take a debilitating injury. Most people don't want to bother with fatigue from fighting in armor, limited vision from wearing a helmet, or hitting someone in plate a bajillion times with a sword and doing absolutely nothing except knock him around a bit. Not many systems can model getting knocked on your helmet and fainting, without the helmet actually breaking.
So they stick with harder to hit, or -4 damage or whatever. This leads to a lot of weird gameplay and role-playing, but most people will still pick that over adding more rolls and calculation.
