Let's say you were replacing "HP" in a system with "Armor Points", with the idea that once a character is out of AP, they start taking wounds and get death spirally.
How do you:
Make AP scale with level
do things equivalent to "health potions", repair oil? Mending balm?
>>47258816
Could have a "natural armor" or have it effectively function as armor but call it Endurance points or something. I like the concept, makes it more realistic.
Making HP scale with level is pretty simple. Just go with you're better at taking the hits with the armor. While early on you might just tense your body when struck causing your armor to baldly dent with more experience you might relax a limb slightly or turn your body, turning a hard hit into a glancing scratch.
As for equivalent to health potions, you can't do too much unless you want to magic away damage. You could scavenge armor from foes you defeated without breaking every piece. Stabbed through the heart? Maybe the helmet is still mostly intact. Decapitation? Might be able to salvage the chest piece or at least the chain under it. Of course this all relies on the armor fitting.
>>47258816
So, say this was implimented in 5e D&D, your AC is instead how many Armor points you have, then hit die are converted to a simpler Wounds. At level one, a wizard has like 1-2 wounds where as a fighter at the same level has maybe 4-5. Once a creature takes a wound, they gain disadvantage till healed. Rolling to hit is based entirely on saves. Damage from weapons is converted to a more appropriate measurement for breaking armor and then damaging wounds. Certain weapins are better at damaging armor such as maces, some weapons have a greater chance to possible ignore armor altogather to cause a wound, based on weapin type and perhaps user skill. Eg, a crossbow bolt could target an unarmed body location to influct a wound at an increased DC. Some weapons when attacking an unarmed target do one extra wound, like dagger or something.
>>47258816
The more battered you get, the more dented and displaced your armor gets.
You can bang out the dents and put your pieces back in place to restore armor points, but it takes time and isn't something you can do in combat. Actual damage to the armor is like a temporary max HP debuff and requires seeing a smith to fix.
What you could do is have mage armor give temporary armor points up to a threshhold, with common-use "healing" potions essentially being potions of mage amor while actual healing is reserved for when your armor runs out or gets bypassed.
>>47258922
On scaling, you could call this Expertise, when they level up the armor doesnt imporove, but their expertise using it does which is added to armor and is removed first. Effectively temporary hit points
Feel like Warhammer's cover and armor systems might be of some useful inspiration for you.
As to how you actually get more per level maybe you could make the players meet some sort of kill quota to forge something better or just do the good ole "because reasons".
Arguably you can just have like a sort of dex or reflex bonus go up over time and that's their "combat experience" which they will always have. Its not that they can take more hits just that they got better at dodging and not leaving themselves open.
Healing is just a craft check for the group's blacksmith. Or maybe gives the other members some interesting ways to apply their trades into "armor" making.
Let me know how it goes OP this is actually pretty interesting.
In order to scale armor points with level, you'll have to consider how powerful the enemies of the same level will be. How many hits sounds reasonable to you? If a Dimorphodon-like creature is bashing its head against your armor, how much power is lost? I suppose this falls more into the level of the armor than the character wearing it, but I don't have any context of what limitations characters have when trying to wear certain pieces of armor.
The repair of armor depends on the fantasy level of your settings, and how magic works, or alchemy, or tech, or whatever. If magic exists, you can have minor to major repair spells that restore the armor to a state before it was damaged. You could even include "smithy" spells, which temporarily add buffs or greater protection with your armor.
Depending on how armor-centric you want your system, you could have different sets offering different abilities, so instead of class deciding what armor you may wear, your armor pieces would decide your class.
>>47258816
From the way this is going it appears your better creating your own rules set than altering an existing one. But you can use existing rules set as inspiration.
>>47258816
HP = Armor Points/Toughness
Take a wound at 0 and on critical hits, but keep fighting. Each wound has a lingering effect rolled on a table, if you roll above X value you die - the FFG crit table basically. The main difference being FFG's crit tables are fucking useless the way combat in that game works. A larger health pool makes it matter much more.
>>47258816
Death spiral systems are stupid in RPGs
>>47258816
The way I'd do it would be as follows, for a very low fantasy game.
>HP exists but is rather static. It's decided by class and CON, but outside of that barely increases (or perhaps doesn't increase at all)
>Your most important line of defense is AP
>AP functions as a combination of damage reduction and a "second line" of HP
>In other words, all damage below a certain value (dependent on the quality of the armor) is entirely ignored
>All damage above that value chips away AP until your armor is gone and you're entirely reliant on HP
>All damage "overflow" goes directly to HP (So let's say you have 3 AP and 10 HP, if you take 5 damage you lose all your AP and 2 HP
>AP can be restored by either getting your armor fixed at a blacksmith or simply buying new armor
Personally I like this system because it still shows that, discounting unorthodox strategies like grappling, knights can pretty much ignore whatever peasants throw at them but are not entirely invulnerable. Speaking of grappling, this actually becomes a viable strategy. A monk could actually be useful against heavily armored opponents that are difficult to take down throuh physical damage (though as he levels up he'd need grapple modifiers that make it possible for him to succesfully grapple larger creatures).
Certain spells would bypass HP but instead affect BP, or Barrier Points. These rely on your class as well as INT or WIS (depending on the class, non-magical classes allow you to use whichever of the two you prefer). BP would function identical to AP except exclusively for spells, and it is naturally restored through meditation.
The only flaw I see with this is that AP would be hard to fix on the go. Unless there's some sort of mobile, not impossible to carry around blacksmithing kit or whatever.
