Quote from: Eric Diaz;934149Yeah, DR seems a bit more realistic to me and all... But AC is just faster and easier... if you have 50 HP you probably shouldn't be receiving blows that deal no damage, or the fight will take forever... For a game like GURPS, OTOH, DR might work. ...

Yes, as others have also said, I'm sure there could be big issues trying to switch from AC to DR in games designed for AC, and vice versa, because the numbers for damage and to-hit and hitpoints and the various monsters and ability levels of characters will have been set with the other system in mind, and AC & DR play out differently in several ways. For example, if you have a game with low damage numbers per hit, adding any DR is a big deal and something that will greatly increase the time it takes to reduce a foe with high HP. DR works in GURPS because HP for people is generally in the 8-16 range, damage can be quite high, and there are rules for targeting unarmored places.

Quote from: tenbones;934153Savage Worlds - Okay here's the magic unicorn. SW does BOTH. Armor abstracts not the ability to be hit. But rather it abstracts whether you do enough damage to penetrate which determines the severity of the hit in terms of its very tiny wound-track. At first blush it was unintuitive to me until I played it. After I played it - I thought it was brilliant. To me it combines the best of both AC and DR. AC in the sense you have to roll to bypass the protection of the armor *despite* being hit and to what degree. DR because Armor adds directly to the target number (Toughness) one needs to roll in order to damage you. Both AC and DR in one fell swoop.

I'm curious - how does it represent a blow that hits and does injury, but reduced injury due to armor?

Quote from: Skarg;934155I'm curious - how does it represent a blow that hits and does injury, but reduced injury due to armor?

In SW you have 4 wound-states. The first state is "Shaken" - this assumes you did enough damage to impact the armor-wearing target but not enough to do "real" damage and they're stunned. If you roll 4 more than that target number, you cause a Wound. You only have three Wounds. Each Wound you have is a cumulative -1 penalty to all actions (which in SW is *ugly*).

SW has exploding dice - so you can relatively easily cause some ugly wounds depending on who you're fighting. So yeah armor matters. But do does knowing how to fight.

Edit: to answer your question another way: Armor directly impacts that injury by increasing the number needed to *cause* you injury. So let me give you an example:

If I had a Toughness score of 5. And you swung on me and hit with a Greatsword, and rolled well, let's say you did 12 points of damage. That would directly wound me (it's over 4 needed.) and I would be in the mini-deathspiral.

If I was wearing Plate Armor, my Toughness score would be 9. That means your attack impacted my armor, it didn't wound me - but it put me in Shaken. Which I'd have to spend an action trying to recover from barring other rules in the game that I could try and mitigate.

Edit 2: Actually *hitting* a target depends on the Parry stat of target. It's derived from the target's Fighting skill. Real simple small numbers.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;934112But penetration isn't the only way damage happens.  Impact through the material also applies, a mace for example, will rarely break skin, but the impact will bruise or crush bone under it.  Same idea applies to place armour, hit it hard enough (and two handed weapons were designed for this, yes, even the swords were) and you can send literal shockwaves through the plate and into the target, breaking bones and rupturing organs, now with the padding and spacing between the armour plates, that's a lot HARDER to do, than with chain or leather, but it's still possible.

This is a lot of white-room nonsense. My point was that most, or at least many, common weapons cannot do any meaningful damage to someone through heavy armor, no matter how hard they are swung, fired, etc. This includes most one handed swords, arrows from most draw bows, knives, and a host of other weapons. In these cases, something analogous to AC (or the passive defense in GURPS) is appropriate, and arguably better than damage reduction, or at least better than damage reduction alone.

Quote from: Larsdangly;934161This is a lot of white-room nonsense. My point was that most, or at least many, common weapons cannot do any meaningful damage to someone through heavy armor, no matter how hard they are swung, fired, etc. This includes most one handed swords, arrows from most draw bows, knives, and a host of other weapons. In these cases, something analogous to AC (or the passive defense in GURPS) is appropriate, and arguably better than damage reduction, or at least better than damage reduction alone.

Also of note, "common weapons" might well include early handguns, despite what Hollywood wants you to believe;).

My game uses a hybrid system. When you hit damage is based in a dice pool. The number of dice rolled is based in the weapon used, but the type of die is based on the targets vulnerability to that type of damage from the weapon: d12, d10, d8, d6, d4. To keep the numbers simple, anything 4 or higher is a point of damage.

Simple, fast, and allows for damage types and varying qualities of armor. Nomenclature is something like "Deals 6dEnergy damage." It's a little faster if the defender rolls damage for him/herself.

Also creates a game where 10 hit points is a lot and anything can hurt you. Downside, don't really have a good option for armor values better than d4. Also, downside, nomenclature for writing the becomes muddled because I haven't thought of a good distinction between 2d8 meaning "add two 8 sided dice" versus add each time these dice are "4 or higher."

Quote from: Larsdangly;934161This is a lot of white-room nonsense. My point was that most, or at least many, common weapons cannot do any meaningful damage to someone through heavy armor, no matter how hard they are swung, fired, etc. This includes most one handed swords, arrows from most draw bows, knives, and a host of other weapons. In these cases, something analogous to AC (or the passive defense in GURPS) is appropriate, and arguably better than damage reduction, or at least better than damage reduction alone.

Up untill a year ago Id have swore that hard impacts will do some serious damage to a heavily armoured target.

But after watching the international armour battles I have to re-assess that belief. How the hell are people in full plate surviving the blows they are recieving to the head and upper body? This with swords, pole axes and pole arms. Even if the suits are really thick and well padded the impacts to the head alone youd think would be bad. But Ive seen full force blows to the head that seem impossible to walk away from. (Ok, the guy was stunned. But no neck trauma? WTF???)

Slightly different matter in the AWF fights in plate and chain. But still they were walking away from some brutal head hits with shields edge on, maces, etc. (lots more bloody noses and KOs though...)

So there is some sort of threshold where armour stops being a DR and starts being AC. Or the DR threshold exceeds weapons ability to effect?

There was a period author who wrote that war hath become safe, even if I don't remember his name;).

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;934085Agreed. But I assumed this was an "all other things being equal" kind of question. Assuming everyone uses tactics... or assuming they don't. Given one of those two assumptions - it doesn't change the answer. I like to try to discuss the actual topic of the original post, I am kind of old-fashioned that way.

Ok. First, I apologize for the way I quoted your whole post and then wrote "Not if [bla bla bla]...". Your points are valid and aren't invalidated by what I wrote.

I do think what I meant to add is relevant to the original question. The first post includes the question, "If you prefer armor-as-DR, what systems do it right for you?"

I wrote what I did to add that the game system can impact the whole situation. You were responding to Daztur's post about long slugfests which would mainly just be made longer by DR, and while I largely agree with what both of you were saying in the context of games where the fighters are basically just saying they fight each turn, and rolling to see what happens over and over. Ya that can be fairly uninteresting and adding complexity may mainly just drag it on, since there's nothing much to do about the complexity other than math.

But I wanted to add that I do think that a system where tactics make a big difference can change a lot of that and sway the answer about whether having a more detailed armor system can add something interesting. It can add some elements to play that make sense and are interesting if/when there are logical things you can do about them (as opposed to a game where you have few choices so the DR is largely just delaying your wait to find out who died).

Quote from: AsenRG;934225There was a period author who wrote that war hath become safe, even if I don't remember his name;).

There's another relating about a battle where he says that the chainmail was so well-made, that the only practical way to kill a knight was to beat him to death.

Basically yes I'd say it's that the DR is greater than the damage most weapons will ever do without a critical hit or a hit (accidental or intentional) to a gap in the armor. That's when you need rules for what it takes for those things to happen, as well as for what the effects eventually are of the blows that don't get through armor, and also rules for subduing someone in other ways, such as tackling, pinning, twisting limbs and necks, picking them up and throwing them off a cliff, etc.

One might suggest that AC and a pile of hitpoints aren't so bad for that situation, which may be ok for that situation, but not so much for when someone's not wearing armor, in which case one good hit from a sword or axe can take someone out, etc.

Quote from: tenbones;934156In SW you have 4 wound-states. ...

Thanks tenbones!

For those discussing armor in real life, look at pages starting at 945 here https://books.google.com/books?id=GpVbnsqAzxIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
This is The Knight and the Blast Furnace, and unfortunately Google does not include all pages.

Axe/sword aren't mentioned after the 11-12th Century entries below because, for the armor covered, only missiles are a concern. This seems true even of halberds. However, note the "for the armor covered", he reports other types of, for example, 15th century mail being defeated by sword blows. So, for every century and category, the exact type and origin of armor concerned effects the results. Halberds seem only slightly "better" than sword or axe and seem used more for their ability for ground troops to reach troops mounted on horses.

11-12th Century mail armor: a very strong man with an axe or sword might be able to defeat the armor. Difficult for archer to defeat, but crossbows will defeat.
13th Century mail reinforced armor: can add iron plates to existing armor to defeat crossbows
15th Century Milanese: stop most contemporary missiles (crossbows and handguns)
16th Century Nurnberg: stop most arrows but arquebus will defeat at close range
17th Century "cuirassier's armour": Stop pistols but not muskets

He mentions that the padding underneath all armor helped mitigate blunt force trauma.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aams/hd_aams.htm Dirk H. Breiding Department of Arms and Armor, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqC_squo6X4 How to Mount a Horse in Armor and Other Chivalric Problems (not what you think), Breiding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewUZkxrB_7w The Art of Arms and Armor: Challenges of Research, Display, and Education, Breiding

Right. DR tends to favor those systems that want that kinetic blow-by-blow detailed combat. AC can do that too - but tends to be a little fast and loose in terms of "realism" by abstracting that for a form of verisimilitude which people can take/leave or tweak to their tastes as they see fit.

There are definitely different sensibilities in play systemically that often get overlooked or disregarded in these conversations. Shit I remember being on BBS in the 80's having flamewars about the "realism" of AC alone.

In hindsight it seems, to me, to be more about the way one wishes to portray combat mechanically. It's that simple. You can abstract verbally what's happening blow-by-blow using AC just fine and make it sound every bit as exciting as someone using a mechanical extrapolation of DR. DR tends to fulfill that tactile sensibility of each blow and knowing the quality of that impact.

But we're now parsing that even further, as this discussion has come to, in trying to replicate the impact of non-damaging blows (which I think is perfectly fine if that's what you want in your games). Very few systems do this well in my experience and to my own tastes. Savage Worlds does it. FFG's Edge of the Empire system kinda does it.

Quote from: Skarg;934231There's another relating about a battle where he says that the chainmail was so well-made, that the only practical way to kill a knight was to beat him to death.

Wouldn't really work with plate, though.

QuoteBasically yes I'd say it's that the DR is greater than the damage most weapons will ever do without a critical hit or a hit (accidental or intentional) to a gap in the armor. That's when you need rules for what it takes for those things to happen, as well as for what the effects eventually are of the blows that don't get through armor, and also rules for subduing someone in other ways, such as tackling, pinning, twisting limbs and necks, picking them up and throwing them off a cliff, etc.

You know, the "effects of blows that don't get through" might be "none whatsoever".

QuoteOne might suggest that AC and a pile of hitpoints aren't so bad for that situation, which may be ok for that situation, but not so much for when someone's not wearing armor, in which case one good hit from a sword or axe can take someone out, etc.

My point exactly, since the start of the thread;).

Quote from: Tod13;934235For those discussing armor in real life, look at pages starting at 945 here https://books.google.com/books?id=GpVbnsqAzxIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
This is The Knight and the Blast Furnace, and unfortunately Google does not include all pages.

The book comes highly recommended, but keep in mind that weapons do have properties that make them more or less dangerous (and more or less able to defeat armour) than their penetration power would suggest by itself. Such is the case with halberds, IMO.

I'm fine with AC for D&D-based games. They're full of abstractions and 'extreme suspension of disbelief' mechanics that I've made my peace with. It's part of the flavor of those games.

Anything else, and most often what I'd prefer, are games with DR that differentiate between protection and avoiding blows... like Traveller, BRP, GURPS, Unisystem, etc.

For those people who love their rules soaked in a delicious broth of more rules, probably the most realistic way to crunch these numbers would be through DR's that are specific to certain kinds of damage, scaling up to very high values that effectively stop all attacks for most weapon types, and then introduce a hit location and aimed-shot system so there is both a random chance you'll catch an arrow in an armor joint and there is some way to make that happen on purpose. This is a little what Harnmaster is like. GURPs is sort of like this too if you have layered armor and all the combatants are more or less human scale and realistic strength.