Is Your D&D Armor Just a Fancy Outfit? Rethinking Armor Mechanics for Grittier Gameplay: Nerdarchy
Is Your D&D Armor Just a Fancy Outfit? Rethinking Armor Mechanics for Grittier Gameplay: Nerdarchy
Hey there, fellow adventurers and Dungeon Masters! 🧙♂️🐉 Are you ready to buckle down and forge realism into your D&D campaigns? If you’ve ever felt that clanking around in your armor should feel a bit more… consequential, you’re not alone. Let’s dive into the nitty-gritty...
I'm not sure I'd want to slow down combat even further by rolling a die to reduce damage. But I like the idea of armor providing resistance to certain types of damage.
Approaching it via static damage is probably more elegant, especially as basically all attack rolls have a dice roll affecting their randomness already.
It's a shame resistance is already such a sharp decrease, and calculating 1/4 etc of damage is reasonably hard to do on the fly, as resistance is already a damage reduction mechanic that's already in the game.
It'd be reasonable to say "this armour removes 25% of bludgeoning damage". It isn't easy to math on the fly, but I feel like most tables could make that calculation quickly.
there's a number of games that already use this mechanic, and i'd honestly have to agree. The DR aspect of it can make fights drag out pretty badly when you have to roll to hit, roll for damage, roll for reduction, and said reduction can reduce the damage to nothing. The few times ive played a game that does this, i don't know how many rounds went "the goblin attacks, hits you for 3. Your armor reduces it to zero. You attack, hit the goblin for 4, but the goblin's armor reduces it 0" and back and forth like that several times.
That sounds frustrating.