Armor as DR

[veven]

Has anyone played with this variant rule? What was your experience with it like?

[Amphetryon]

In general, it's not a great deal for players, and is a great deal of prep work for the DM to convert everything (or memorize the table and be able to do the math on the fly). If your DM typically throws small monsters at you that do a large number of relatively low-damage attacks, it's decent, but otherwise it's actively worse for most parties.

[Dylaer]

WoTC thinks DR is a lot better than it actually is, in my experience. It's because there's so many ways to ignore DR entirely.

[theForce017]

WoTC thinks DR is a lot better than it actually is, in my experience. It's because there's so many ways to ignore DR entirely.

I agree. There is often a way to get around DR and not only that but DR does not apply to spells and spell-like abilities if I am not mistaken.

Not only this but it lowers your AC and allows you to be hit easier. If you are fighting someone that does a lot of damage, I would want him/her not to be able to hit me to do any damage whereas if he does hit me and does 20 points of damage minus the 4 from DR. Not worth it.

[GoodbyeSoberDay]

Not that I've done this, but it might work better in E6, or any setting where the PCs and encounters tend to stay at low levels. The "horde of stuff that hits you for piddly damage" thing happens a lot more often, what with goblins, kobolds, lizardfolk, gnolls, orphans, you name it.

[Dylaer]

Not that I've done this, but it might work better in E6, or any setting where the PCs and encounters tend to stay at low levels. The "horde of stuff that hits you for piddly damage" thing happens a lot more often, what with goblins, kobolds, lizardfolk, gnolls, orphans, you name it.

The dreaded Orphan Swarm, bane of evil PC's everywhere. Hint: orphans have low reflex saves and HP, so a fireball can save your party a great deal of trouble.

[veven]

This is for an E6 campaign actually. I've been playing in one as well as running one (soon) and we are kinda at the point where we are fighting things quite a bit over CR6-8 and they hit super hard...i feel like a little DR wouldn't help much but I figured I'd ask and see what people thought of the variant.

[El Dorado]

In an old 1E game, we houseruled that armor provided damage reduction instead of defense. As a result, most fighters in our game wore heavy armor and used two-handed swords. Two-weapon fighters were at a distinct disadvantage. I imagine similar (if less pronounced) problems at low levels, at least until the PCs gained ways to bypass damage reduction.

[Johel]

This is for an E6 campaign actually. I've been playing in one as well as running one (soon) and we are kinda at the point where we are fighting things quite a bit over CR6-8 and they hit super hard...i feel like a little DR wouldn't help much but I figured I'd ask and see what people thought of the variant.

DR is very useful at low level, when you don't have access to a lot of spells and two or three hits are enough to kill you.
So yes, when wizards and clerics are more like wisemen with a few tricks and barbarians are running the show, using DR instead of AC is a good idea.

At high level, a DR5 doesn't do you any good because Power Attack are way above that and spells will ignore the DR most of the time.

So yep, it's good up to level 6 and can still be fun up to level 8.
But not after that, as magic now definitely run the show.

[Drglenn]

It would tip the housecat vs commoner fight in the commoner's favour because even if the commoner only has DR 1 worthy armour the cat can do nothing

[stainboy]

Armor as DR only makes sense if you also have AC scale with level. Even in E6, your 6th level half-orc barbarian with a +2 weapon (raging attack bonus +15) only misses on a 1 and you may as well not even roll. Even if he power attacks for full he has to roll a 1 to miss a human with an average dex.

In a regular non-E6 game you'd have characters with attack +20 or more rolling to hit dragons with AC 9. It'd be touch AC all over again.

[Killer Angel]

Has anyone played with this variant rule? What was your experience with it like?

Bonus to AC and DR, it would be a great variant rule.

[Lonely Tylenol]

I think AC is simply a more commonsense application of armor.

I like to think of the +3 you get from studded leather as being the 15% chance that something hits you, but the attack bounces harmlessly off your armor. For example, if you have a Dex bonus of +3 and an armor bonus of +3, and the level 1 Kobold Aristocrat rolled a 15 on its attack, then it swung too fast for it to hit you, but the attack hit a part of your armor at a bad angle or something and bounced off.

If an attack hits the armor well enough, it simply doesn't stop the attack from hurting you.

If you wanted to do DR, though, I'd do DR plus the armor bonus, just to give fighters and armor-users some love. Make the DR equal to half the armor bonus given or something.

[veven]

If you wanted to do DR, though, I'd do DR plus the armor bonus, just to give fighters and armor-users some love. Make the DR equal to half the armor bonus given or something.

I thought about doing that as well. How do you folks think this would affect the game?

Another thought I had was to use the Class Defense Bonus variant combined with Armor as DR. Has anyone used that one, or both rules combined? What are your thoughts?

[Seerow]

A while back I was considering a wounds/vitality system where the wound point damage you take was determined by dividing the damage dealt by the damage threshold, and Armor was calculated directly into the damage threshold. It seemed like it had a good potential to work (at least better than armor as DR, where it makes the damage much more binary), but the math scaling seemed off and I haven't gotten around to going back and trying to fix that scaling.


Personally I'd stay away from the basic armor as DR, just because of the aforementioned tendency to become very binary. Either you're plinking away with no damage done, or dealing nearly your full damage, and it's pretty heavily weighted against anything other than two-handed fighting, which is a style that is already heavily favored.

[true_shinken]

I played using both this and the defense bonus variant rule. Initially, I enjoyed it, since it gave me a good feel of how I wanted stuff to work. People didn't need to be encased in steel and you could play an agile, armorless fighter without any fancy prestige class. However, it soon became more trouble than it was worth and everyone kept forgetting about the DR. We're still using this variant, but as soon as the campaign ends, I won't use it again.

It's fun and interesting, but I think it's more trouble than it's worth.