The original armor table for 2nd Edition was fairly complex: you could buy individual components and layer different armor types together to determine your overall DR and AC. The problem was that thanks to a character's Defense modifier, you could pretty quickly layer enough armor together to the point where you were shaving 6 points of damage off of nearly every attack.
Obviously, this proves a major issue for low-damage attacks. A goblin packing a spear inflicts 1d6 damage, and it's only thanks to the spear's inherent AP 1 that, unless it manages to bypass the target's AC, it has but a 1-in-6 chance of inflicting all of 1 point of damage.
Goblins get +3 to hit, while the fighter has a modest Defense of 16 and an AC of 21. This means that while it has a 40% chance of landing a blow, it only has a 15% chance of bypassing his DR. But that's 1st-level: at 2nd-level the fighter's base Defense ticks up to 13, and by then he can easily afford a sleeved gambeson, upping his AC to 24: even if the goblin scores a critical hit, armor will still be absorbing most if not all of the damage.
This forced me to revise the armor table, going back to 1st Edition's more abstract armor categories: light, light reinforced, medium, medium reinforced, heavy and heavy reinforced. You can still do armor components and layer materials together, but the sum of what you're wearing instead determines which category you land it. We're also assigning AC values based on coverage and material type, so now instead of a gambeson giving you DR 3 and AC +5, it's DR 3 and AC +3.
This means that our 5th-level playtest fighters are now packing medium reinforced armor, which is DR 6 and AC +6. This sounds high--and it is--but it is still lower than the AC +9 they would have had by now, and so with everyone 3 points lower ran our playtest party against the following randomly determined encounters from our Doom of Dwarves adventure:
- 14 petrified zombies
- 2 helldscribed zombies and 8 petrified zombies
The petrified zombies only deal 1d4+3 damage, so they have a 25% chance of inflicting 1 point of damage against either fighter. At 24 the shield fighter's AC is still pretty high, but I knew this going in and was hoping that excessive numbers would do the trick thanks to the Ganging Up bonus. I also had them behave like zombies, overwhelming the fighters and pulling them to the ground (Prone gives another +2 to hit).
This worked out pretty well: the fighter with a longsword had a bunch of Wound Points chewed off, though the shield fighter obviously fared better due to a higher Defense and AC.
This fight was also made more difficult since the zombies had slashing and fire resistance: the sword-fighters longsword barely made a dent in anything, though the Pyroturgist didn't have much of an issue due to the staggering amount of damage she could deal out (especially when Melissa maxed out the damage to 5d6 at the cost of most of her Willpower).
The rogue ended up dealing the most damage due to using a piercing weapon, +2d6 from Sneak Attack, and having the Chink in the Armor Talent (+2 AP).
At the end of the fight, the sword fighter ended up exchanging his weapon for a normal spear: less accurate and damage, but at least this way he wouldn't be shaving off 6 points of damage with each swing.
The second encounter was harder but still doable: the zombies overwhelmed the fighters yet again, while the hellscribed zombies hung back and threw fireballs. These didn't much impact the wizard, since her Tempered in Flame Talent gave her decent fire resistance, but then their higher-than-usual fire resistance also made them immune to most of what she could do (unless, again, she maxed out the damage).
The fighters lacked any such resistances, and so took a few 2d6+2 fire blasts to the face before they were able to engage the hellscribed zombies in melee, forcing them to switch gears to somewhat less deadly 1d6+4 damage claws.
At the end the shield fighter still had all of his WP, having only lost 7 VP in the process. Disappointing, but the two-weapon fighter was whittled down to 10 WP, suffering a total of 25 points of damage.
Now, this could be chalked up to bad rolls. After all the shield fighter is only 3 points ahead of the two-hander in terms of defense. So we're going to do another playtest to see how it, well, plays out. We're also going to have them go against more encounters, because we want to get a feel for how this works during something resembling an actual adventure.
Even so I wonder if shields need to be nerfed. Or, Defense. I want to keep base Defense values as they are, so there's a difference between warriors, rogues, and casters (+2, +1, and +0 respectively), but I think I could just delay an increase by one level, have it tick up at level 3 instead of 2. It's not like classes don't get a myriad of other improvements.
I am going to change the Defender talent: instead of a flat +1 to Defense when using a shield, you can use your Reaction to Hinder an attack or Assist a save. It'll only make it good for one attack, but I think that's still pretty useful and flexible. It would sync up with Talents like Shield Bash, so instead of having to trigger it when attack misses, you use Defender and if that causes the attack to miss you get to automatically make a bash attack.
Another proposed change is to make it so that shields can only be used against a set number of attacks each round. After all, it's not like if you're surrounded you can use your shield to protect from every possible angle at once. For this we'd likely increase the Defense bonus granted by the shield to make it worthwhile.
Something that else that's been suggested a few times is variable DR. Something like 1d4 for light, 1d4+1 for light reinforced, 1d6+1 for medium, etc. This would add another dice roll to each attack, and would be especially frustrating if, say, you hit a group of goblins with an area effect spell: have fun rolling DR for each of them. Of course, monsters could have static DR, or you could just roll for an entire group to keep things simpler.
The upside is that we could just get rid of the AC value altogether.: a low DR roll means that the enemy struck a weak point in your armor. It would also make masterwork armor pretty easy to work with: each masterwork grade ups the minimum roll. So if you have masterwork armor +1, a DR roll of 1 becomes a 2, plus whatever modifier it might have.
I like this idea a lot but, again, it will bog things down. We actually tried this out while playing 1st Edition years ago, and it only lasted a single session because the group hated it so much. Maybe things will be different this time.
For now going to playtest static DR bypassed by a high roll, and see if slightly tweaking the numbers makes a meaningful difference.
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