Armor Rules with a Touch of Crunch

Seeing both Kahva's and Corgi's armor hacks, I thought I'd pitch one more in, as a kind of follow-up to my post about slightly-crunchy weapons. It's similar to both of them, and kind of takes an in-between approach, so thanks to both Corgi and Kahva. It's also worth mentioning that a lot of the ideas of this were drummed up over on the Sad Friends Weekend Society server, so thanks to them, too.

These rules assume that you're playing an OSR game that uses to-hit rolls; it's easy to hack away from that, if you want, but that's how I usually do it. 

If you need a name for these armor rules, call this Damage Threshold Armor, or DT armor.

GOALS FOR THESE RULES:

1. Express that armor both makes it harder to land a hit and also can just shrug off small attacks
2. Express that maces, hammers, and their ilk don't really care about armor
3. Make it easily hackable, and do it without lots of extra dice rolls or tags or anything

Some proper mechanics:

Armor Class and Damage Threshold

Armor has two associated values, which are linked. The first is Armor Class, or AC, which determines how hard you are to hit; this ranges from about 10, which is unarmored, to about 16-17, which is pretty heavily armored indeed. To hit a target, your to-hit roll needs to be above the target's AC. Quite standard, so far.

The second value is Damage Threshold, or DT, which determines how good your armor is negating damage taken from the blows that actually do hit you. DT is equal to AC minus 10; someone at AC 10 has DT 0, AC 13 is DT 3, AC 16 is DT 6, and so on. After hitting a target, to deal damage, your damage roll needs to be above the target's DT; if it's equal to or below the target's DT, the target takes no damage. 

As an example, say you hit an AC 13 target with a weapon that deals 1d6 damage, like a dagger. If you roll a 4, the target takes 4 damage; same for a 5 or 6. If you rolled a 1, 2, or 3, though, because the damage is lower than the DT, the target would take no damage. 

Helmets & Shields

If you wear a good sturdy helmet, like a sallet or greathelm, your AC and DT increase by 1. If you wield a proper big shield, like a heater or hoplon, your AC and DT increase by 1. 

There's an argument to made that each of these should only increase one or other other of AC or DT, and while I think that's valid, I'm a strong proponent of keeping AC and DT linked. You can separate them (more on that in a bit), but I think it's unnecessary.

Slots and Carrying Capacity

Assuming you're using the kinda standard-ish carry capacity system where you have around 8-15ish equipment slots, I use the basic rule of thumb that each DT takes one additional slot. AC 13 / DT 3 would take 3 slots, AC 16 / DT 6 would take 6 slots.

High-DT armor is really, really good under this system, so I feel pretty comfortable in demanding that players spend boatloads of their carrying capacity on it. 

A Sample Armor List

A possible armor list:

• Unarmored: AC 10 / DT 0
• Leather Jacket: AC 11 / DT 1
• Gambeson: AC 12 / DT 2
• Brigandine: AC 13 / DT 3
• Maille Hauberk: AC 14 / DT 4
• Full Plate: AC 15 / DT 5
• Shield: +1 AC / +1 DT
• Helmet: +1 AC / +1 DT

Crushing Weapons

Crushing weapons are weapons that derive their damage from huge crushing force, rather than sharp points (like spears) or bladed edges (like swords). Crushing weapons commonly include maces, flails, hammers, mauls, and stones—both the kind hurled from a sling and the kind lobbed off a castle battlement.

When crushing weapons deal damage, if their damage roll is in the upper half of its possible range (such as 4-6 on a d6, or 7-12 on a d12), the weapon always deals damage, regardless of the target's DT. If it rolls in the lower half of its range, it deals damage as normal, based on the target's DT. 

For example, if a mace (1d6) was to attack a target with DT 5, if the mace's damage roll was a 4 or 5, it would still deal damage, but a 1, 2, or 3 would not. If the target's DT was 2, anything higher than a 3 would deal damage. 

If you're using my combat rules, players can choose to use their weapons in a non-conventional capacity (like mordhau style), you can allow their weapons to deal crushing damage. This gets a little squirrelly with things like, say, ladders, so it's worth discussing ahead of time to work through what the expectations of efficacy there are. 

Semi-Optional Rule Because I Haven't Figured Out Quite the Right Balance: Compromised Armor

If you're attacking a target that is in some way compromised—like they're knocked over and lying on the ground, they're paralyzed or tied up, or you're attacking from a hidden position—you ignore the target's DT. 

I'd like some kind of middle ground here, since this feels a little too good, but I think it's important to have this kind of caveat, A) because it means you have a solution if you're fighting an ironclad enemy and none of you brought a maul, and B) because the image of a knight in full armor getting tripped up by some goblins and then shanked to death by a dozen daggers is cool. 

Like I said, I feel like just straight-up ignoring the DT is maybe a little too powerful, but this is a provisional working rule.

Some Math

Here's some comparison math of the average damage of dice sizes against various DTs, followed by comparison math of the same, but with crushing weapons.

Damage Dice vs. DT : Average Damage

	1d4	1d6	1d8	1d10	1d12
DT 0	2.5	3.5	4.5	5.5	6.5
DT 1	2.25	3.33	4.375	5.4	6.4166
DT 2	1.75	3	4.125	5.2	6.25
DT 3	1	2.5	3.75	4.9	6
DT 4	0	1.833	3.25	4.5	5.66
DT 5	0	1	2.625	4	5.25
DT 6	0	0	1.875	3.4	4.75
DT 7	0	0	1	2.7	4.166
DT 8	0	0	0	1.9	3.5

The equation here is that average damage of 1dX against DT Y, where average damage is Z, is equal to: Z - (Y * 1/X) - ((Y - 1) * 1/X) - ((Y - 2) * 1/X), and so on, until Y is 0. There's a way you can express this using ∑, but it's been too long since I've taken calculus to remember the notation, and I definitely don't know how to put that into blogger.

Point is, the damage drops off slowly at first, and then gets faster; the marginal dropoff increments each time by an amount equal to 1 divided by the die size. 

Now, with crushing damage:

Damage Dice vs. DT: Average Crushing Damage

	1d4	1d6	1d8	1d10	1d12
DT 0	2.5	3.5	4.5	5.5	6.5
DT 1	2.25	3.33	4.375	5.4	6.4166
DT 2	1.75	3	4.125	5.2	6.25
DT 3	1.75	2.5	3.75	4.9	6
DT 4	1.75	2.5	3.25	4.5	5.66
DT 5	1.75	2.5	3.25	4	5.25
DT 6	1.75	2.5	3.25	4	4.75
DT 7	1.75	2.5	3.25	4	4.75
DT 8	1.75	2.5	3.25	4	4.75

As you can see, this makes crushing weapons pretty darn good. Not unstoppably good, I think (hope), but still quite effective. 

What I Like About These Rules

They make armor feel a lot punchier and weightier. A knight clad in full plate will really be able to shrug off the damage, which players love (and hate, when fighting thick monsters). I like that it does this without significantly adding to the either mental math required per roll or the number of dice being rolled. It's still just an attack + damage roll, and then a simple comparison. I also like that it encourages dirty fighting, and it encourages characters to carry ugly, heavy weapons—I like that grungy vibe to my OSR games. 

What I Don't Like About These Rules

They add another variable for players to keep track of; it's an easy variable, but it's still a variable. On top of that, I think this system favors crushing weapons a little bit too much; at tables where soft power (see my weapons post) is less encouraged or enforced, there's very little reason to take a sword or axe over a mace. As I said above, I think the compromised armor rule needs a little bit of work; it risks making sneaky-stabby type characters a little too good, potentially. 

Still, in the minimal tests I've done so far, these rules have worked well. Let me know how they go for you!

I Hate D&D Wizards, but I Love Gandalf (a rant and a class)

You know that semi-famous reddit post where somebody goes really in-depth arguing that Gandalf is, in fact, a fighter and not a wizard? Because he fights with a staff and sword and rarely casts spells or whatever? 

People love to use that argument, and that style in general, to argue that Lord of the Rings characters (and other famous fantasy characters) are one class or another, and I think they entirely miss the point. Our classes grow from fantasy stock; the classes are based on the character tropes, not the other way around. By proving that Gandalf’s abilities suggest he’s a wizard, not a fighter, the argument being made is not that “Gandalf is a Fighter,” it’s that “D&D sucks at mechanically representing fictional characters.”

To my view, Gandalf is the most well-known and thus the most “archetypal” wizard ever. Yeah, there are characters Gandalf’s based on—Odin, the god, or Gandálfr, the dwarf Gandalf’s name is from, or Merlin, or a bunch of other mythical characters—but to a modern, 21st-century audience, when they think “wizard,” they think of Gandalf. (Yes, yes, Harry Potter’s given Gandalf a run for his money, but screw you, Joanne.)

Gandalf is the most wizardly wizard. And we all know what wizards do in D&D—they cast spells. Fireball, magic missile, detect magic, and so on. By the high levels, wizards have a whole boatload of spells, and they’re casting them constantly.

But here’s the question: how many spells does Gandalf actually cast? Over the course of the whole run of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, how many times does Gandalf actually go around and use magic? 

The answer is a little bit complicated, but generally the answer is “not very many.” 

I think it helps a little bit if you break it into “big flashy magic” and “much subtler smaller maybe-magic.”

By my reckoning, the number of times Gandalf uses big flashy magic:

1. Blasting some Nazgûl with light and fire at Weathertop.
2. Force-smacking Saruman at Isengard (which is of suspect canon, anyway)
3. Shattering the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm, plus whatever that white sphere was
4. Some sword-and-lightning shenanigans to fight the Balrog
5. Banishing Saruman from King Théoden
6. Blasting light at the Nazgûl to save Faramir’s broken Osgiliath attack force

There might be one or two more I’m forgetting, it’s been too long since I’ve read the books, but that list is close to accurate. (Yes, there’s some bullshit in Dol Guldur in the Hobbit movies, but those movies blow, and that whole thing gets exactly zero screentime in the book.)

The point is, that’s not very much magic at all. It’s powerful when it shows up, for sure, but it’s quite rare, compared to what we traditionally expect from D&D wizards.Now, the list of things that Gandalf does that may or may not be magic, but are definitely clever and strange:

1. Putting a rune on Bilbo’s door
2. Imitating troll voices
3. Lighting some pinecones on fire to throw at wolves
4. Somehow convincing Beorn to let all the Dwarves stay in his hall
5. Setting off some dope-ass fireworks for Hobbits
6. Some shenanigans with light and dark to scare Bilbo
7. Reading ancient texts deep in Minas Tirith
8. Talking to a moth to summon a giant eagle
9. Lighting up his staff in Moria (I say this is unclear because it’s never been evident to me if this is a thing Gandalf can do, or if it’s a perk of his staff)
10. Seemingly knowing how to get anywhere in Middle-Earth at any given time (like, for example, that Mordor is left of Rivendell)
11. Imitating Saruman’s voice mid-resurrection-glow
12. Shattering some arrows fired at him, also mid-resurrection-glow
13. Summoning Shadowfax with a super-whistle
14. Some deep-insight stuff after Pippin looked into Palantír

These kinds of “maybe-magic” are way, way more common for Gandalf, and I’m sure I’ve missed some instances from the books. I’d also be willing to bet almost everybody has a different interpretation of whether this is magic, or just Gandalf being really clever and knowing stuff nobody else does. 

On top of this, there are myriad instances of Gandalf being wise, or clever, or insightful, or just plain knowledgeable. I won’t list them, because they go on and on and on, but read or watch essentially any scene and you’ll see what I mean. 

I say all this to show that thing that defines Gandalf—and thus, I argue, defines wizards—is not his magic, the literal spells he casts, but rather his ability to be clever and wise and knowledgeable of secrets. 

Current D&D wizards get that all wrong. Across basically all systems and editions. Wizards have been altered and mutated down to a kind of scholarly magician, under a sort of weird thematic argument that magic can be learned the same way that any other sort of education could be. Their focus isn’t on being wise or clever or sagely, it’s on managing spell slots, calculating AoE damage effects, and knowing seventeen billion spell descriptions. Some of the newer-age wizards, like the GLOG wizard, have gotten into interesting kind of “mad scientist” elements, and those are fun and good, but I think they still miss the original point. 

A few games get somewhere close, to my reckoning—the Goði, Seiðkona, and Wanderer from Sagas of the Icelanders all kind of get there, in bits and pieces, as do the Sorcerer and Scholar from Dream Apart, and Skerples’ Philosopher class for the pirate GLOG is pretty close—but for the most part, the image of the “wizard as clever-sage” is sorely lacking in games.

(How and why this happened is kind of up for debate, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that “being clever” is really hard to design in RPGs in a useful way. And that videogames, which D&D gives and takes lots of influence to and from, are even worse. And that most people are more interested in blowing shit up than the are in being clever and sage.)

And I think that sucks. It sucks that we’ve moved so far from the archetypal wizards, and it sucks that we don’t have a good example of a “clever wizard” to work from. And it sucks that snarky posts online breaking down 3.5 feats get thousands of upvotes and get repeated everywhere.

So, I present to you a Wizard that, I hope, fulfills the more traditional, original fantasy of playing a wizard: The OG Wizard (aka the Sage)