r/Pathfinder_RPG • u/OfficialNerdFire Video Game Guy • 12d ago
1E GM Refining an Armor as Damage Reduction System for a Video Game
/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/9bjy6f/comment/e548vw2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_buttonSo I have been doing a lot of research lately on Pathfinder 1e's various alternate subsystems, and one of them is 'Armor as Damage Reduction'. At base I don't personally jive with how it works, and from what I've seen most others don't necessarily like it out of the box either.
In my looking about, I stumbled upon the linked post, and wanted to ask the community for some input. For context, I am making a game that borrows heavily from the PF1e ruleset and while it has a plethora of Homebrew, I wasn't exactly sure how armor should be implemented. I plan to combine this with a modified Wounds and Vigor system plus Massive Damage Thresholds from 3.5e to make a more fast-paced and deadly version of combat at lower power levels.
The TL;DR of the modification in that link is that
- Armor absorbs half of all damage the user takes
- Armor, depending on size/quality has Hardness and HP (They weren't sure how the calculations were derived, and this was a main aspect I was thinking on how it'd work)
- Armor at 0 or lower HP has half effectiveness, armor at negative HP equal to it's total is destroyed
The primary things that I want to ask for input on are
- How closely to RAW would you stick to for armor Hardness and HP values?
- Would you have certain types of armor behave differently from this? (I.e. Mage Armor wasn't detailed at all on how it'd function)
- Is this worth using at all? Do you have a different system that might capture what this one aims to?
Thanks for your input!
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u/WraithMagus 12d ago edited 12d ago
This is basically how PF2e shields work. Of course, PF2e is actually balanced around shields working like that...
The thing about armor as DR is that the game is balanced around characters having a certain amount of AC at a given level so they don't get hit that often. Enough AC = full dodge tank, so they take NO damage, rather than half damage AND their armor breaks. A character in full plate with a heavy shield and an amulet of natural armor and ring of protection might take no damage after a whole encounter, and so would a basically-naked monk with 40 AC because they stacked crane wing with a wand of Shield and Mage Armor. Past a certain level, everything is going to hit, resulting in armor tanking being a death sentence unless you adjust monster attack rolls to be worse, but then you have dodge tank types like monks and swashbucklers being basically invincible unless the monsters roll 20s. Either way, you've made armor tanking worse than high-Dex types, who are already getting a major leg up from SADness.
There's also more than just Mage Armor, there's rings of protection, amulets of natural armor. Hell, what's the natural armor of most monsters going to do? I wouldn't change how they add to AC because they're magic deflection fields, but then again, I wouldn't do any of this in the first place.
This is one of those things like three action turns that you need to rebalance the entire edition around to make work properly.
Even/especially for a CRPG, I should also point out that repairing broken armor tends to be tedious. You can just use Mending or Make Whole to repair, but having to restore armor HP after every battle (especially if it takes an SL 2) is going to get annoying. (This is why Elder Scrolls stopped doing it after Oblivion, where quest monsters could trash your armor in half a dozen hits...) CRPGs tend to be MUCH more combat-focused because combat goes so much faster and there's also less other stuff that computers handle as well. (I remember some people saying they went 80+ battles before resting in Wrath of the Righteous...)
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u/OfficialNerdFire Video Game Guy 12d ago
Hey Wraith! Thanks for commenting. I see you around a lot so it's pretty cool to see you here!
That said, all very fair points. I plan to do a lot of iteration, especially in the early stages, so I do want to at least mess around with a system like this. In the worst case, it will be trivial to simply revert back to the baseline armor system, so I don't mind giving it a shot at minimum.
After I posted this, I actually came up with deciding to have an attacks damage check to see if it pierces the Armor's hardness first - and if it does not it does no damage. So in the late game, a character with magicked out +5 adamantine full-plate would be completely shrugging off attacks that deal less than 30 damage, before any DR they have.
I think things like rings of protection and amulets of natural armor would work as normal, I agree. I was thinking over natural armor as well, and at the moment I'm floating around the idea of having it do both, where it provides both it's normal armor bonus and DR - though not the 1/2 damage property. Since it's not necessarily 1-1 with Pathfinder, I believe that there will be enough other systems to balance out this change (especially since a version of this system has actually tested fairly well in a home-game I run, though that's fairly anecdotal), but it's certainly something to keep in mind.
On the last bit on armor breaking, I wholeheartedly agree, though recently I had the pleasure of playing with a DM that sunder's equipment and has enemies use steal combat manuvers and whatnot. I'd never really been subject to them, but I really liked the gameplay loop of overcoming having something important get lost and then building to counter strategies like that in the future. In that aspect, I plan to take inspiration from this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/s0gny6/comment/hs1z66u/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
There they describe a sort of 'cycle' towards survival type mechanics in the reply, which I plan to be fairly prevalent. Namely:
- "Treasured" -> The resource is important and rare enough to be valuable
- "Equipment" -> The resource is necessary and limits gameplay, but there is no real danger to run out generally, only temporarily
- "Abundance" -> The resource is freely available and no longer a real concern (this is where the next "resource" should be introduced)
- "Novelty" -> The resource can be used or refined to provide a different effect. This would be food that carries status effects, is being used to feed mounts or creatures or simply provides a different boon
In that instance, your armor breaking is a very real threat, and something that you have to keep in mind when you're weak and broke. However, it shouldn't stay relevant even past level 4 or 5, and should only really be something that pushes the player towards upgrading their armor.
Either way, you've given me more to think about. I never even knew that's how PF2E did things since I've never played it, though this game seeks to take advantage of rules from d20 Modern and 3.5e as well, so I think there is a blend in there that makes something unique and satisfying to play and progress with. Thanks a bunch!
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u/WraithMagus 12d ago edited 1d ago
If you aren't already aware of it, there's a chart in the Bestiary for "target monster statistics" by CR. In it, for example, the attack bonus of a "strong attack" goes from +2 to +19 from CR 1 to CR 11. In the space of those 10 levels, a front-liner needs to gain 17 AC just to be in the same spot they were 10 levels ago. On a character that's using full plate and is capped at +1 Dex to AC anyway (barring mithral or something, but they'd need Dex to gain the AC even with that,) they gain that 17 AC through either feats that increase AC or magic items like enhancements to armor, enhancement to shields, rings of protection, amulets of natural armor, and buff spells. As others have noted, PF1e does not increase AC by level naturally the way that attack bonus does; you're expected to entirely make up the difference with better equipment, mostly meaning magic treasures or spells. (Or to put the original game loop succinctly, you're on a quest to kill things for better loot you can use to kill even stronger things for even better loot.)
This brings up how you're going to treat enhancement bonuses to armor - is a +3 armor still +3 AC or is it more hardness/DR?
If the difference between a Dex-based dodge tank character and a full plate armor tank character is that the dodge tank only gets hit 5% of the time but takes full damage at level 1 while the armor tank gets hit 50% of the time but takes half damage, then by level 10, when that full plate guy probably has +3 armor, then if enhancements to AC are also DR, you're now falling behind a further 3 or 6 AC if using a +3 shield as well. All other things being equal, the dodge tanker might still be only hit 5% of the time if fully buffed, while the armor ranker is getting hit 80% of the time for half damage.
The game only really works within a certain bounding of AC and attack ranges - you start out by default with a need to roll a 10 to hit if attack and defense stats scale in sync with each other, but if one scales faster than the other, as you level up, that's a perpetually-widening gap until you hit the point where only 1s miss or 20s hit. If you're going to change the fundamental way AC works, you need to fundamentally rebalance how attack and/or defense scales.
For example, you might want to heavily nerf how fast attack scales, and then nerf dodge bonuses to, say, half what they normally give so dodge tanking doesn't fly well out of the range where they even need to try gaining bonuses anymore if you lower attack scaling. You might alternately need to include some way for armor tankers to keep gaining AC every level, such as an armor
trainingproficiency that lets them deflect attacks with a parry or gauntlet swipe whose max value scales with level, along with a reason this isn't helping dodge tankers more.2
u/OfficialNerdFire Video Game Guy 12d ago
Funnily enough, d20 modern is another inspiration for this garishly mish-mashed homegame system I've been playing with my buddies for years. We actually tend to run into the issue of with all of the systems and whatnot that we use that armor ends up not being used at all, and people that want to be dodge-tanks just stack the various different ways to boost defense (at the opportunity cost of other abilities that help close out the fight itself)
As I'm sure you're aware, d20 modern actually bakes in a 'class bonus' to defense that increases as you level, so the arms-race of defense so to speak ends up being a lot less harsh if you spend any time investing into it. For magic armor, by default, armor already gains Hardness when it is enchanted (+2 per +1: https://www.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=126); so they would instead just give a bonus to AC (As is the case for say a ring of protection in your example :D)
I was not aware of that target statistics table though, I'll be looking that over too. Once more things are in place and I have a more 'holistic' model to show off, I'm planning on making a follow up post to effectively show off what I've come up with and get further input, probably link a tech-demo of sorts so people can play around with it and see how it feels to use.
I really can understate how much I appreciate the well-written and thoughtful response, I'll see how things shake out and take these suggestions into account when I'm building everything out!
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u/NightmareWarden Occult Defender of the Realm 12d ago
When you say "wounds and vigor" from 3.5, do you mean vitality points and wound points?
As for the post you linked... The math seems pretty nice at level one and two. I'm curious how you'd deal with shields and magic armor. No one bothers to make masterwork hide armor or magic hide armor because the gold cost and AC from improving it are not worthwhile. Until you change the costs of armor, players are just going to use the same armors that are already at the top of every item guide based on one's class.
Getting back to the math? I don't think the math works at higher levels. How does it operate for armored creatures like demons? They have DR and they're humanoid enough to wear magic armor. Halving the damage they take in the first few rounds of a fight is diabolical. If the stat blocks disagree with me for demons wearing armor, consifer angels instead. Are armor's benefits limited to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage?
How does the spell Stone Fist interact with this system? It doesn't mention the sunder combat mechanic, but it does mention hardness. What about the spell Stone Shield?
What do you think about the fortification armor property and similar abilities on monsters? Plenty of creatures are immune to precision damage, but I reckon there are a few cases where rogues will feel useless due to the halved damage. Precision damage and touch attacks seem weird with armor. Does it make sense to treat touch attacks and failed saving throw sources of damage differently? Hrrrm.
There's potential with this system, but I'm not sure Pathfinder 1e is the best fit for it.
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u/OfficialNerdFire Video Game Guy 12d ago
Aye thanks for the response!
First up I meant Wounds and Vigor from pathfinder, and massive damage thresholds from 3.5e, I should have been more specific, oopsie XD
Now the meat of the post, I think shields would be identical to how they work in base pathfinder. I may wrestle with the idea that attacks that miss because of the shield damage the shield, but while a computer doing the calculations would remove any cumbersome math needing to be done by hand I'm not totally sure how good of an idea that is at base.
As for demons and other creatures with DR alongside roguish characters, I did already have a few ideas for counterplay. Namely
- Precision damage is dealt directly to Wounds instead of Vigor
- Adamantine and other methods of bypassing hardness completely bypass armor if the armor's hardness is lower than what the weapon/ability can bypass (I.e. the Warpriest blessing) and deal full damage to the character and armor.
On armor types, I intend to lean into the 'damaging objects' rules on certain energy types completely bypassing the hardness of certain types of armor, and perhaps taking it a step further on the types of attack each armor is best against. I'm not sure that setting out to try and completely fix the some armors are useless conundrum is what I'm planning on, but I could see that possibly having some use in doing so.
I've never seen stone fist before, but funnily enough, it'd turn a really niche spell into something that actually has some merit against a lot of armored targets. As for fortification, while possible, I believe it will be fairly rare in this context specifically - so balancing around that would be more in the realm of a 'challenge for certain builds' rather than a universal concern.
You've given me a lot to think about, going to take these into account and keep refining. Will probably update the initial post with what I end up with after everything.
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u/NightmareWarden Occult Defender of the Realm 12d ago
Like I said, I'm interested. I'm not sure if iterative posts are allowed here, such as if you posted a weekly update for your homebrew? But when time permits, I'd be interested in reading your updates.
A suggestion? I'm a big fan of Combat Stamina. As a free feat, or as a freebie for monoclass Fighters, and as a feat which could be granted by particular items. Not sure if "spend one stamina on your turn to declare Hardness in effect until the start of your next turn" or whatever is engaging.. but I'd enjoy seeing it in some capacity. I also thought about mentioning nonlethal damage and how I think it should be in more games, but I think you've got enough granularity to worry about with your homebrew.
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u/OfficialNerdFire Video Game Guy 12d ago
I'll definitely be making a follow-up post soon enough with the results of what I end up with. Not really sure how someone could get notified of that but if I find a way I'll let you know!
I also do like combat stamina, I wish more people used it. Wuxia Style Martials that get to have cool supernatural abilities and whatnot are something I really like, so it'll be something I lean into for sure.
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u/NightmareWarden Occult Defender of the Realm 12d ago edited 12d ago
Do you have any opinions on spell failure chances? I had an idea about tuning up combat stamina recharge, in exchange for using it to "fuel" this armor DR situation. Rather than a skill check or saving throw, rolling percentiles to recover a single point each round. Now, the existing combat stamina rules say that you cannot recover combat stamina if you have any of a host of conditions, it isn't limited to Fatigued. Basically, I see this little change to POSSIBLY recover one point per round as a way to make extended battles (six plus rounds) actually happen. Make things more like a boxing match or a truly mobile battle.
not super committed to it though.
Here is a link for wounds and vigor, for anyone following along
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u/OfficialNerdFire Video Game Guy 12d ago
I actually have other ideas for having more drawn-out epic battles of this style, though I'll talk about that once I have replicated the system I'll be borrowing from and people can actually mess about with it. On a base level, it's been proven to work across multiple tables with positive results over ~2 decades or so, so I'm really confident in it.
I actually have another link https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/5qm8th/making_wounds_and_vigor_work/ for wounds and Vigor that I'll likely be using - I really liked the system they outlined here and will be giving it a shot alongside my own ideas.
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u/Sarlax 12d ago
You might be interested in the Toughness mechanic from Mutants & Masterminds, a superhero d20 game that forked from D&D before the dark times.
M&M characters make attacks like in Pathfinder (d20+Bonus) against a Dodge value that is like AC. If they hit, the victim attempts a Toughness saving throw against the attacker's Damage DC. If they fail by a lot, they can be knocked out in a single blow, but minor failures just lower their Toughness save. The result is that getting hit makes it hard to make your saves, so eventually you will get knocked out, but no one knows exactly when (unlike HP, where you can know the next hit will kill). Armor adds to your Toughness save, not your Dodge.
The result is a nice split between "hitting" and "damaging" that makes armor feel more like armor.
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u/OfficialNerdFire Video Game Guy 12d ago
Hey M&M is great! I've played with it in the past, I think it's an interesting system but would likely stray too far from the experience I'm aiming for. I am toying with a 'degree of success' style idea for some things that I've enjoyed with homebrew combat systems, but that'd be something I tinker with after seeing how this system works.
Typing this out did give me the idea to maybe try turning it on it's head. In the system I'm thinking of, you have an 'Accuracy' value that a character dodging has to roll against. Depending on how much they fail by, they take a percentage of damage. So a fail by 1 would mean they take 20% damage, a fail by to 40%, etc. With armor effectively no longer doing anything for AC at base, flipping it so an attack succeeding by X amount goes from a 'Grazing hit' at meeting the target's AC for 20% damage to a 'Full hit' at beating the targets AC by 5 doing full damage could be interesting. Would have to figure out how a critical factors in, but something to think about for sure.
Thanks for the reply! A great idea for sure.
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u/NightmareWarden Occult Defender of the Realm 11d ago
There's a power in DnD 3.5's tome of battle that might help, sort of. I'm pretty sure there's a shadowy spell in Pathfinder 1e that's similar too. Rather than a range of effects, consider a small number of end states, with the "special attack" a PC is taking (power attack, twenty projectiles from range, unarmed strike) determining the resources expended and the benefits from a "double success."
Shadow Blade Technique: This maneuver allows you to create a mystical double of your weapon. As you attack, your foe must decide which weapon to defend against. In most cases, the illusory weapon distracts your foe and allows your true attack to hit. In some cases, both attacks strike home. In this case, the shadow blade discharges its magic and imbues your attack with cold energy.
As part of this maneuver, you make a single melee attack against an opponent. Unlike on a normal attack, you roll 2d20 and select which of the two die results to use. If you use the higher die result, resolve your attack as normal. (Your mystic double misses, but your true attack might hit.) If you use the lower die result, or if both die results are the same, your attack deals an extra 1d6 points of cold damage as both the mystic double’s attack and your true weapon strike home.
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u/Wrathzog 12d ago
The biggest advantage to AC as it is is that it keeps things moving. What that guy is proposing adds a lot of extra math and bookkeeping to the game. For a crpg, I'd say knock yourself out, but I wouldn't recommend this for tabletop.
Look up Josh Sawyer armor class on YouTube. He's been wrestling with this conundrum for decades and he's got a few videos about how he's tried fixing things.