idea on way to do armor

[awa]

I was tossing around ideas yesterday to alter my home brew d20 system for it's next iteration.

I had already been using armor as variable dr with dex for hit combined with a defense rating based on level but i wasn't entirely happy with it.

armor both blocks/reduces damge and makes you harder to hit by forcing people with light weapons to target weak spots in the armor.

So it came to me that I could change critical hits to deal say +d6 damge and ignore armor instead of x2 damge and instead of having a crit on a nat 20 or whatever the crits could occur when the attacker hits by say 5 more then they need we can call this second ac the crit threshold and good armor would increase the crit threshold. this means getting crits is based much more on the respective skill of the fighters and much less on raw luck which i prefer.

so some one wielding a big powerful weapon like a halberd could just try and smash through the armor but some one with a light precise weapon would try and find small gaps in the armor.

so abilities like sneak attack (using precision for extra damge) would be folded into improved crit type feats reducing a targets critical threshold and possibly giving a bonus to hit when flanking or attacking a flat footed target.

so what do people think

[Glimbur]

Don't make things too complicated. There are a lot of rules to remember and many dice to throw in base 3.5. A 'crit AC' could be calculated ahead of time, as long as the attacker doesn't get any abilities that make crits easier. Then you're doing more math every attack, which gets messy.

Bonus damage for hitting by more than 5 directly competes with Power Attack. This is not necessarily bad, but it is something to think about.

Rogues and scouts and other precision damage people tend to be a few points behind in to-hit because of their medium BAB. You'd need to do more finesse to prevent fighters from being better at sneak attack than rogues.

[awa]

it's not really d&d just a d20 system, classes and power attack don't exist

i was more wondering if people thought the added complexity of 2 acs (your regular ac and you crit threshold ac) was worthwhile or to much trouble,
and if any one would defend the old system of crits possible pointing out a reason it is superior that i had not considered

[Yitzi]

I think that the basic ideas you're playing with are good ones, but for more precise evaluation they'd need to be expressed as actual rules (preferably with proper grammar and spelling to make them easier to read).


You'd need to do more finesse to prevent fighters from being better at sneak attack than rogues.

Well, unless you want fighters to be better at sneak attack than rogues, which (at least for some fighter builds) might not be so undesirable (though you would have to give the rogue something nice to compensate, probably by making the wizard stop stepping on his toes so much when it comes to skills/noncombat.)