Re: Armour Talents - Being hard to hit in awkward armor

Hi all, Tom, Martin.

Tom:

I've been hearing a lot of 'armor does not lower your DX,

you can do gymnastics in armor', stuff. Glad to hear from

you because it confirms by biases!!!

;-P

More seriously, I suspect that the DX penalties in TFT may

be too high to be realistic. But I'm not going to worry about

it. In real life, people will take the optimum armor. In TFT I

want there to be tradeoffs, so that better armor has a higher

cost.

One of Steven Colbert's words of the day was "Truthiness".

This is not the truth, but it is a lie that is designed to sound

truthy. "Realitiness", is what I aim for in my TFT rules. Not

reality, but something that seems Reality-ish.

Martin:

A person who fought a lot in the SCA was telling me that the

main advantage of a shield in melee combat was that it was

much harder to hit you. So I made a talent (Shield Three)

which gave people a –3 DX when they tried to attack you

thru your shield.

This worked fine. It is a useful talent, and several players

have taken it. But giving people negatives to hit you, should

be done with care. It slows up the game, is easy to forget &

adds a calculation to every swing.

A little bit of this sort of thing is fine, but I think it should not be

a default thing. (In fact, this ability used to be in Shield Two,

and I eventually moved it to Shield Three to make it rarer and

more difficult to get.)

My rules give several ways to boost damage stopping power,

but you have to be GOOD, before I start giving out negatives

to hit you.

Warm regards, Rick.

On 2017-10-18, at 5:41 PM, Tom Ellis wrote:

Speaking as someone who actually has worn armor, it generally makes you easier to hit, not harder. It absorbs damage but it also slows one down unless it is very lightweight stuff. Think about how fast you could get out of the way if you’re wearing 80 lbs. of chainmail that hangs most of the weight on your shoulders.

On 2017-10-18, at 4:31 PM, Martin Gallo wrote:

Of course you are correct. I was trying to ruminate about how armor could affect both damage taken AND being harder to hit (a DX penalty on the attacker). It might throw off the “balance” in such a simple game, though.

On Oct 18, 2017, at 5:44 PM, David Bofinger <bofinger.david@gmail.com> wrote:

I think it's not that simple - armour can be penetrated or pushed in for blunt trauma, especially flexible armour - but yes, there's an element of truth to that and for rigid armour it's probably a large element. Why do you ask?

D&D basically follows your paradigm - armour makes it hard to hit. TFT follows a different paradigm, that the armour has to be penetrated. Reality is probably in-between. D&D apologises to the other paradigm by damage reduction powers. Some house rules for TFT allow bypassing armour by DX penalty which is an apology to the D&D paradigm.

--
David