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Post by plethon on Jan 11, 2023 12:28:44 GMT -6
You may be thinking "why is this in the Vol III section?", but it's directly related to some goals I have in designing a dungeon, namely, including more situations where being in full armor either wouldn't work or would add some risks, such as narrow crawlspaces, water, electricity, stealth, magic effects that take advantage of you being in armor (like for example heating your armor to red hot or something like that) etc.
Going hand in hand with this I think a piecemeal armor system could be interesting,
I was curious if anyone has tried this, or knows of OD&D style piecemeal armor? Or, how would you handle it?
Or do you believe it to be incompatible with OD&D?
Or have you tried it and didn't like it?
The reason I'm thinking about this is because I was playing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and trying to imagine a single-class/classless OD&D, where anyone can wear armor, so I want to somehow limit armor so it's not just everyone in plate mail on day one forever.
I did search the catalogue and saw not a lot of discussion on it, but if there's another term besides "piecemeal" I apologize.
EDIT: I should note I'm not interested in hit location in combat, I'm imagining a system where the armor pieces are distilled to an AC value.
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Post by jamesmishler on Jan 11, 2023 16:05:05 GMT -6
The Dawn of Empires boxed set for BECMI D&D had an excellent system for this kind of thing for gladiators. IIRC, there was a similar system in Orcs of Thar, as the humanoids often built armor from the remnants left of deceased adventurers...
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Post by chicagowiz on Jan 12, 2023 8:34:13 GMT -6
In my campaigns, if someone pieces together bits of armor, we come to an agreement what it most resembles, in term of materials, coverage, weight, etc - and then assign an AC that is close to the equivalent of plate/chain/leather/none. For my campaign, it's a discussion, rather than a mechanical set of rules.
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Post by Finarvyn on Jan 12, 2023 11:44:21 GMT -6
First, I should mention that piecemeal armor rules work a lot better with ascending AC than it does with the original descending AC from the rulebooks. Off the top of my head, I think it goes.... None = AC 10 Leather = AC 12 Chain = AC 14 Plate = AC 16 So adding leather armor to an unarmored human implies that all of the armor parts gives a +2, so piecemeal parts ought to add to that total. The main chest protection would probably be half (so +1) and the arm/leg parts are the other half (or +1). Breaking the armor into right leg, left leg, right arm, left arm ends up making +0.25 per body part. Bracers would be part of an arm. Grieves would be part of a leg. This means that specific armor parts tend to be strange decimals with the notion that one would add all of the parts to get a number of the whole. I've tried doing this (and have chatted with the C&C Troll Lord about this) and have never found a satisfactory way to make this work because the charts become bulky and the decimals unwieldy. Another approach is to use hit location charts, such as those from RQ or Supplement II Blackmoor, but I have found I'm not as interested in that degree of detail and/or lethality. The nice thing with hit location is that you can have an AC assigned to each part of the body which is specific to the level of coverage. (Chainmail bikinis have obvious low-AC spots.)  My best solution is sort of a hand-wave method where if they have enough armor parts I "round it" to the nearest +1. Probably not so helpful to you. |
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Post by Finarvyn on Jan 12, 2023 11:45:25 GMT -6
The Dawn of Empires boxed set for BECMI D&D had an excellent system for this kind of thing for gladiators. IIRC, there was a similar system in Orcs of Thar, as the humanoids often built armor from the remnants left of deceased adventurers... There was an AD&D 2E splatbook which was "The Gladiator's Handbook" and I may have a copy stuck in with my Dark Sun stuff. It may have a system like this. |
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Post by Punkrabbitt on Jan 12, 2023 16:03:29 GMT -6
The Dawn of Empires boxed set for BECMI D&D had an excellent system for this kind of thing for gladiators. IIRC, there was a similar system in Orcs of Thar, as the humanoids often built armor from the remnants left of deceased adventurers... There was an AD&D 2E splatbook which was "The Gladiator's Handbook" and I may have a copy stuck in with my Dark Sun stuff. It may have a system like this. It does have such a system. I was going to suggest it myself, but you beat me to it by about four hours! |
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Post by Desparil on Jan 12, 2023 18:12:47 GMT -6
The Dawn of Empires boxed set for BECMI D&D had an excellent system for this kind of thing for gladiators. IIRC, there was a similar system in Orcs of Thar, as the humanoids often built armor from the remnants left of deceased adventurers... There was an AD&D 2E splatbook which was "The Gladiator's Handbook" and I may have a copy stuck in with my Dark Sun stuff. It may have a system like this. For less rare sourcebooks, this was also included in The Complete Fighter's Handbook and in Combat & Tactics |
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Post by ravenheart87 on Jan 13, 2023 3:19:02 GMT -6
You may be thinking "why is this in the Vol III section?", Yeah, it belongs in the RuneQuest section. The reason I'm thinking about this is because I was playing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and trying to imagine a single-class/classless OD&D, where anyone can wear armor, so I want to somehow limit armor so it's not just everyone in plate mail on day one forever. A good choice, Dark Messiah is an awesome and underrated game. Penalizing all kinds of activities (again, we are back to RuneQuest) is a good way to limit armor. Plate can diminish sneaking, spellcasting, movement speed, swimming, and your saves versus lightning for example. EDIT: I should note I'm not interested in hit location in combat, I'm imagining a system where the armor pieces are distilled to an AC value. AD&D2e Player's Option - Combat & Tactics has a similar system. It can be easily borrowed for OD&D. |
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Post by plethon on Jan 14, 2023 11:03:22 GMT -6
Thanks for the suggestions, I think for my purposes in this game I'm planning now I may just do what chicagowiz says and talk it through without a hard system...
But Finarvyn's post also got me thinking on some things hypothetically..The idea I had to solve the decimal armor issue is to convert the d20 attack table to a d100 table with the same probabilities, and assign whole point values to each piece of armor individually. The d100 would give you more space between values. You could even give different values to similar pieces of armour, i.e. one chain shirt need not necessarily have the same value as another chain shirt.. Just some thoughts.
Again, considering I don't really care about hit location and my goal is not to make combat more complicated, but rather to create interesting situations outside of combat wrt armour, I think the looser, ad-hoc way is best.
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Post by dwayanu on Feb 12, 2023 13:04:57 GMT -6
You can use a hit location toss simply to determine effective AC, not for damage effects. Indeed, you can consolidate the probabilities by AC, abstracting away location when it comes actual resolution. The latter way, you need the location proportions only when constructing a table for a figure: more front-loaded preparation work in return for a simpler scheme in action.
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Post by talysman on Feb 12, 2023 17:30:15 GMT -6
I was curious if anyone has tried this, or knows of OD&D style piecemeal armor? Or, how would you handle it? Or do you believe it to be incompatible with OD&D? Or have you tried it and didn't like it? I think tracking armor piece by piece is somewhat incompatible with the OD&D tendency towards broad abstractions, but piecemeal armor isn't impossible if it's used only where the situation makes sense, rather than approaching it systematically (assigning AC values based on pieces used.) It never come up in-game, but I came up with this approach: the AC of what you wear on your chest is your default AC. If only a specific body part can be targeted in a given situation, then you use the armor covering that specific body part. Example: leather armor, chain coif attached to cap, steel gauntlet on right hand. Your AC is 7 (leather.) If you stick your hand in a hole and there's a snake inside, your gauntlet gives AC 3. If you open a door partway and stick your head in to look around, the goblin on the other side targets your head as AC 5. |
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Post by Desparil on Feb 12, 2023 18:13:45 GMT -6
I had forgotten about this thread. Another thing that comes to mind when rereading the initial idea of classless D&D is Elder Scrolls games. Both Oblivion and Skyrim allow any character to wear any armor, but use alternative means to incentivize the use of light or no armor. In Oblivion, wearing armor reduces the effectiveness of your spells and your movement speed - of course, it also reduces movement speed in D&D, but in a first-person open-world game movement speed is more relevant to combat capability. In Skyrim, they went with the carrot instead of the stick; instead of armor penalizing magic use, robes significantly increase your rate of Magicka regeneration, and most also give a discount to spell costs for one school of magic. And of course, in both of them armor affects sneaking, though a high enough Stealth skill rating can outweigh any armor in the game.
As for narrow crawlspaces or stealth, without doing piecemeal armor you could just have certain restrictions on crawlspaces that you can't get through them in plate - only in chain or leather - and in light of another recent thread about how actually chain is extremely quiet to move around in, could similarly give a stealth advantage. Maybe take a cue from the AD&D advantage that elves and halflings get, but extend it to all characters. So in AD&D, an elf or halfling who is not wearing metal armor can surprise enemies on 4 in 6; to extend this, maybe a group in leather can surprise on 4 in 6, a group in chain can surprise on 3 in 6, and just the ordinary 2 in 6 for a party with members in plate.
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