Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition: Revising Armor For The Fourth Time I Think

In 1st Edition armor is categorized as light, light reinforced, medium, medium reinforced, heavy, and heavy reinforced. It largely follows Dungeons & Dragons conventions, granting more AC the higher you get, as well as capping or preventing a character from adding his Dexterity due to the misguided belief that armor meaningfully impacts your mobility. It also adds a bit of DR, ranging from 1-3 depending on category.

What the armor actually is helps inform the category it belongs to, and this avoids having to make a bunch of new entries and/or making it granular enough to account for armor made of cloth, metal, bone, wood, and other, more unusual materials: just figure out about how effective the armor would be based on durability and coverage, and pick the appropriate category (adjusting price and weight as necessary).

In 2nd Edition we instead wrote up a table that specified types of armor, such as a gambeson, mail, and brigandine. This is because I thought it would be neat to be able to layer armor together. For example, a gambeson would give you DR 3, but you could throw a suit of mail over that for DR 6. It got tricky when I was trying to figure out the mechanical benefits to wearing vambraces and greaves, but ultimately decided to just have those things add to your AC.

Now, AC in 2nd Edition works differently. Everyone has a Defense value, which is what you need to roll to hit them (and exceeding this deals +1 damage for every 5 points). Armor Class is granted by armor and is added to your Defense. But failing to meet-or-beat the AC here doesn't mean you fail to hit entirely. Instead, it means that you failed to bypass the target's armor, so damage is reduced.

The AC armor grants was determined by coverage, with a bog-standard gambeson granting +5. So if your Defense is 12, your AC is 17. If someone rolls a 12-16, they hit you but your armor provides some measure of protection (assuming the attack doesn't have a high AP value or ignores armor completely). However, if they roll a 17+ they not only hit you but bypass your armor entirely.

So here you could strap on some vambraces for +1 AC each. A helmet is also +1 AC, so by doing that you could get your AC to 20. It didn't make complete sense, as metal vambraces would be able to deflect/absorb more damage than cloth, but it was quick and easy and still made more sense than an ogre smacking you with a tree trunk and your scale armor completely nullifying the impact.

But our recent 5th-level no-cleric playtest caused us to revisit armor, as this system can result in fighters that are so well protected that Medium-sized monsters have little chance of harming them, even in great numbers. I'm sure for a certain type of gamer this sounds great, but for most players challenge translates to fun, so it needed to be addressed.

Armor categories worked well before, so we're rolling back to that and changing the numbers. Here's the current table that we'll be using in the next playtest:

AC values start lower and scale slower, and even though you can get a DR of 6 pretty easily the AC value is only 5, where before you could easily get a 10. Heavy and heavy reinforced have two AC values. If you hit the first value it still offers a bit of DR due to all the layers of protection: you need to meet-or-beat the second in order to fully bypass it. Still not fully realistic, but makes more sense than other DR models I've seen and it still plays fast at the table.

We'll give this a try and see how it plays out. Next would be delaying Defense progression by one level, which results in 1 less point over time. Might not sound like much, but with the reduction in AC across the board it might be enough.