Re: (TFT) Price of new Magic Item - Paramount Armor

["Jay Carlisle" <Jay_Carlisle@charter.net>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rick Smith"
Subject: (TFT) Price of new Magic Item - Paramount Armor

Something about this bugs me.
Melee uses 5 second turns.
A dice roll for a Melee Attack Action does not represent an individual blow 
for most hand weapons.
It's as valid to view any damage from a successful Attack as the cumulative 
effect of a series of blows as it is to see all of the damage being 
delivered in a single stroke.

"Blows that miss the armor completely, are not
affected.  (e.g. if you have Paramount Leather and
are hit with double damage in the head, the double
damage takes full effect since leather does not
protect the head.)"

I'll look at steel for comparison.
The general level of technology on "cidri" is given as early Renaissance (in 
a few areas).
Efficient production methods weren't devised until the 1600's and you don't 
get Bessemer until the mid-19th century so steel is not common and should be 
expensive.
As a rule of thumb steel weighs 0.283 pounds per cubic inch.
That's almost 500 pounds per cubic foot.
A cubic foot can make a sheet of quarter inch thick steel covering 48 square 
feet in area.
Joe Average Hero has a surface area of around 16 square feet (roughly the 
same area as a Square-hex).
Ergo, the back of the envelope says I should be able to encase 3 Joe Hero's 
in quarter inch thick steel with a cubic foot of material.
The weight would exceed 160 pounds for each Joe.
(@ 1pt ST = 5.5 pounds moved 1 ft in 1 second w/o fatigue Joe Max w/ST 30 
could theoretically walk around in the stuff without fST cost)
A36 mild steel (still high carbon) has a yield point around 35,000 psi, a 
failure point of about 60,000 psi, and a plastic range of roughly 25,000 
psi.
Low velocity rounds like handguns or smooth bore black powder weapons 
available in TFT aren't gonna do a lot to a quarter inch of the stuff but a 
44mag will likely put holes in it at 100 yards.
High powered rifles would likely have standard rounds stopped by three 
quarter inches of such steel but it's gonna get cratered up real quick.
Joe Max Hero @ ST 30 isn't going through a quarter inch of steel with early 
Renaissance tools, much less Joe Average.
However, the stuff described above is about three times the weight of a 
combat suit of medieval plate armour.
Medieval plate wasn't a quarter inch thick in most areas nor was it 
completely encompassing.
.
Wow.
I was looking for a reference to Henry II, etc. and pulled this.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8286225/Time-Team-horseman-killed-by-lance-fragment-during-joust.html
Very odd odds.
.

My point was that I already see critical successes as hitting a chink in the 
armour so to speak.
After all, there's less than a 2% chance of getting either double or triple 
damage in a roll and triple damage is less than half of one percent.
Ergo, I'd see this as a Spell that encompasses the Figure in a kind of force 
field that fills in the chinks.
I like the visual from the Dune movie.
No gaps means no "lucky blows" over the course of a turn owing to the 
uniform protection.

If this effect is viewed as being "inside" the armor in question then the 
chinks are still there along with the exposed "hit locations".

Rolling hit locations for successful Attack rolls over a 5 second Melee turn 
seems like a real problem to me because of the duration of the turn.
Maybe it's something like a potentially damaging blow lands for each point 
under a Figures adj-DX that they are successful by.
Let the result of the damage roll be divided amongst the potential blows at 
the players choosing and then roll hit locations for each blow with armour 
negating damage by location.
I'd even let the player assign all the damage to a single blow and ignore 
the other potential strikes.
That way it's the players decision to put all their damage eggs into one 
blow basket.
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