New armour system.

[Grod_The_Giant]

See, Quakers? This guy does not seem to be reading me quite the way you are. (Correct me if I'm wrong, Grod. I consider it a favour.) I'm being civil, he's being civil, both of us are giving the other the benefit of the doubt and there's no problem. See how much better this is? Why can't YOU do that?

Yeah, uh, your responses can be read kind of rudely. Discounting your direct argument with PapaQuackers, where you're being actively nasty. I've been trying to be civil and give you the benefit of the doubt, since I know it's easy to be prickly when taking criticism, and I didn't want to get sidetracked, but... yeah, you could be a little more helpful and less "that's how it SHOULD work because of REASONS and it's a feature not a bug!"

That's fine. That's why I've made a separate GM handbook (separated specifically to draw attention to its existence), and I intend to put them both in a single download file so no group ever goes without it.

It's an unconscious thing, a sense of "well, this is what the system really supports. Even if a game repeatedly says "fighting is the last resort; good adventurers will always try to find alternatives," if there are fifty pages of weapon and armor and maneuvering rules and perks and five on skills, guess what people will get excited about? Half the time DMs won't read that advice anyway, because, well... we already know how to run a game, just get to the new rules I need to know, okay? It's a bit arrogant and doubtless frustrating, but it's a fact, and one that probably goes double for players. That's why it's so important for key themes to come out in rules.

Which edition? I've only got a 3.5 rulebook, and it's really old and kinda banged up.

All of them? Certainly everything from 3.5 on that I've played has spent much, much more time on fighting.

1. Are you sure? The under and over layers are there to allow you to mix and match and get more weight classes. Is it really worth losing that, just to reduce the number of pieces? I'll think about it, but I don't believe I'm going to do it.

I'd have to say "yes, it's worth it." You'd have three weight classes per piece instead of nine. I think that's a fine amount of distinction, especially since said factors will be cumulative over all five pieces.

2. I didn't think it was that subtle. The difference between "damage per hit" and "damage per round" seems really big to me, and I thought ER functioned more like a barrier than DR.

3. We mostly agree on this, but I must say there is an important difference from a game design perspective between a reduction and a health pool. Namely, that different weapon types are effective against them. Hard-hitting weapons are better against DR, but against shields the only thing that really matters is DPR. A weapon doing 20 damage per hit and landing 2 hits per round will not perform as well as a weapon dealing 15 damage per hit and landing 3 hits per round when it comes to shields and barriers, but against a DR 10 it would do much better. That's most of the reason for having these two separate systems.

Eh, I suppose that's true. Two types of DR isn't that bad, and I see now that barriers cover the entire body with a single point pool, so that simplifies things too.

EDIT: Actually, I note that you're further segregating DR by damage type, which is one MORE layer of complication. You practically need a character sheet for each limb, as each body part has what, two or three kinds of hit points (I assume you have limb damage), a dozen different kinds of DR, a friggen' table of material/weight combinations, two mods... a good test for overcomplexity: write out a character sheet, with enough detail that someone who doesn't have significant parts of the system memorized* can pick up the character and play him. How many pages did you need, and how small did you have to write?


*ie, knows how to play the game, but would have to look up how much AC plate mail gives him or what class feature X does if they don't have notes.

I'll need to see the system in action before I make a final decision here, but your proposal does not seem meaningfully different from my system. I already have armour mods (though with two slots, notably), and having an under-armour mod isn't really different than just having under-armour in the first place, it just nets the player one less mod slot. (I have one mod slot for the under-layer and one for over-layer right now.) Granted, those mod slots weren't doing much in the first place and I could just put them both on the over-layer, but I don't really think there'd be a benefit to the change as all the complexity is still there.

Oh, so in addition to Over and Under-armor, you also have two mods? Great gods above, that's nuts. Cut back, son, cut back. Keep it simple. Five options per piece, times five pieces, is twenty-five choices for your armor alone. That's more nuts and bolts than entire characters in some games, and they're not interesting. That's the biggest problem with a system this fiddly-- it's a lot of messing around with a couple of numbers that ultimately boil down to a choice of "live longer" verses "move better." I get that you want customization, but that's much better served through mods (that can do things things beyond "more DR, less weight") than a nine-state armor weight system. Good game design minimizes number crunching while maximizing meaningful player choice. ("DR 2/10lb vs DR 4/20lb" is not a meaningful choice; "DR +2 vs +10 Jump" is)

I'll say that again, because it's important. Math bad, choice good.