I’ve been thinking abut about harm and armour recently. This is for a fantasy hack. Conventional armour is either 1 or 2 point. A shield adds 1 point and moderately available magic can add another point. That means when fully topped up a warrior can have a reasonable chance of having 4 armour.
On the usual scale a sword would do 3-harm and something like a pole arm or two handed weapon 4-harm. Neither of those straight can harm a well prepared character.
For PCs attacking NPCs they can choose to inflict more harm for +1 harm, but even so they’d need a two handed to inflict any harm at all. 4 armour seems too much, but I still want shields and magic to matter and be significant and it should at least be possible, if difficult, for a character with a sword to injure such a well defended opponent.
One way would be to increase the harm inflicted by weapons by +1 across the board. Don’t like it, but it’s there.
Another would be to modify the shield rules so it doesn’t always provide +1 armour. Maybe it allows a character choosing to take less harm to take -2 harm instead of -1? Or provides the +1 armour on any hit in combat? Either of those options means our maxed out warrior has 4 armour most of the time, but sometimes only 3. Still proof against 3-harm swords though.
So have you had issues with heavily armoured characters in your games?
Well, in real life (medieval ages and so), a heavily armoured person cannot be harmed by a sword or even a mace, because none of these weapons could penetrate metal plates.
I’d suggest, better than increasing harm ratios of the weapons, to maintain the logic of PbtA games and ask to the players to describe the way they fight those heavily armoured foes in order to reach a less protected part of the body decreasing the armor ratio for that attack.
Without knowing more about your hack, it’s tough to offer concrete advice, but I think making shields give an advantage to a move rather than harm is a good idea. Either give a bonus to the roll on your basic combat move, or maybe have a specific result option than is only available if the character has a shield.
+1 harm from moderately available magic, and +1 from a consumable bonus like a poison or flaming oil that lasts one fight?
A shield may provide a +1 to the defending move (or –1 to the attacking move if you’re attacking a person with a shield). If that’s too powerful, you can limit shield use to only one opponnent if you’re fighting more of them.
You can also rule that, on a 6-, you always take at least 1-harm regardless of armor. Or if you’re attacking, you deal at least 1-harm on a 10+.
Harm is the least interesting consequences of failed rolls. If someone is that heavily armored, dump them in a river or something.
Seibei and Aaron Griffin have it. Go with the fiction, not the mechanics. The players will figure it out.
I dunno, I think an ad hoc fictional solution is fine if this will be a rare edge case scenario, but from the sounds of it this will probably come up a lot in your hack, in which case having a solid rule is a good idea
I feel if you have shields and armour be prolific, unbreakable, and carry no downsides then everyone will have them all the time, which negates their usefulness in both fiction and mechanics.
I have probably been playing too much Breath of the Wild, but allowing kit a certain amount of use before it breaks and needs replaced (most likely stolen off an opponent) has both mechanical crunch and narrative possibility.
Perhaps a shield could add an option on a 7-9 to go ‘all in’, if a player describes this in the fiction they take less damage but add a usage to their armour or shield (depending on the fiction).
Yeah, you could borrow from Blades and Burning Wheel and give the armor a “degradation clock”. Every time you use it to lessen a blow, it takes a tick.
Something else to consider, with magic you don’t have to give a numeric armor bonus, instead you can have it defend against things that normally would bypass armor. Such as damage from from say a toxic gas or stunning beam, really anything that bypasses no more armor. This way, you don’t escalate the numbers but you do provide a very dependable effect. Let me also agree with a previous poster and say that you also don’t need to apply a numeric bonus to armor for shield, instead that could apply as a bonus to a role to defend.
Isn’t this what an armor-piercing tag is for?
One version I’ve used is to say that a shield doesn’t provide armor, but allows a character to roll tough instead of nimble to avoid danger.
Alan Scott an easy and logical solution.
Plenty to think about, thanks. All armour has weak points, so there should generally be a possibility to get past it somehow. Slipping a blade through a joint, into an eye slit, concussion, etc. This is for Glorantha, which doesn’t have tightly interleaved Renaissance plate armour anyway.
I think I’ll need to do some play testing around this.
You can make it so that the only way for you to open the option to suffer less harm is by using a shield. I guess it depends on a lot of factors, it’s hard to give an opinion without further context.