I've tried twice today to put together a post about armor types in the campaign. While re-reading them I thought that they tended to ramble. The I thought that the subject matter was dealt too much with a quest for "realism" in the campaign. It's something that I am prone to get bogged down in. So please forgive me if some of what I post is over the top.
In a related note, the more I write about making a game more "realistic", the more I realize that simple solutions can work much better than complicated ones. I'm gaining a new respect for Warhammer. Not WFRP, but regular old Warhammer the wargame, 1st and 2nd editions in particular. The idea of categorizing armor into Heavy, Light or None, actually works very well. So does cutting down the weapon list and having a category called "hand weapons" that includes most 1 handed weapons such as swords maces and axes. It seems to me that those rules, along with the original "Rogue Trader" 40k rules were designed to be used with small battle scenarios with a handful to a couple of dozen miniatures, rather than the pitched battles and scores of miniatures that these games have used for the last 20 years.
Sometimes I need to write a long blog post about something in order to realize it's not a very good idea.
ReplyDeleteRegarding armor, I'm quite fond of the Basic D&D trinity of leather (light), chain (medium), and plate (heavy). It allows the AC to be unique per armor (when considering shields too) and also fits the classes well. Much more variety than that tends to end up just being a numbers game in my experience. Such a limited number of armor types might also make a good weapon vs. AC chart tractable.
I'm also playing around with making AC 0 (or 20 in ascending terms) the absolute best AC anything can have period.
I kind of like your idea of AC 0 being the best. If I recall correctly 3e and possibly other editions give you a -8 to hit someone behind hard cover, and I cant see any sort of armor being better than brick wall.
ReplyDeleteOne of the points I was trying to make in my abandoned post is that while having chain and plate in the campaign works well from a game standpoint, it doesn't make much sense if you are going for a more realistic campaign. However that's just nit-picking really.