Armor types are a failed RPG concept

[TKVNC]

But the thing is, a murderhobo is ALWAYS looking for danger. When your typical murderhobo adventurer is descending into the bowels of the monster-infested depths and roaming around in the caves for days at a time, he does not get downtime to prep for battle.

That may be so, but if you're in a dungeon for days, you will have to sleep from time-to-time, unless you're powered by magic, in which case what difference does the weight or discomfort of armour matter, since you're being juiced up by magic. When you wake up, you can put your armour back on. So on, and so forth. If you were ambushed out of your armour, you are probably going to die.

As for the difficulties of attending to your affairs while in armour, well, Medieval clothing accomodated for that.

It's truly not such a shocking concept.

I digress, and as to the topic itself, the difference between types of armour has, and will always be the respective costs, and means of maintenance, not the difficulty of putting it on - nor really the impact it has on your mobility, since you approach combat entirely different based on the level of armour you have. When you know that your armour is able to take serious blows and you won't feel it, you do not need to focus on defence, and can optimise purely for raw damage output - see the 15th Century and the axe being the primary weapon of nobility.

[DemoGraph]

It's a dumb abstraction that conflicts with the actual mechanics. HP is ultimately more plausible as meat points than luck points. Yes, it means a high level character can be stabbed several times and live, but Gygax himself wrote that high level characters have divine aid, and that's easier to accept than the mental contortions necessary to interpret HP any other way.

Also, luck is inherently aleatory. Constant, predetermined, calculateable "luck points" are unbelievably ******** from POV of ludonarrative dissonance.

[Stack of Turtles]

BTW, the really simple and obvious solution is: HP is meat, but not on a linear scale. Fights are nonlinear by nature. In a fight to the death, you don't get uniformly 10% closer to death every round; typically, a lot of not dying happens for a while until someone suddenly and catastrophically dies at the very end. The argument stems from assuming that every hit point is created equal, but HP is just an abstraction: Think of the first ¾ or so of your HP bar as just representing the kind of light wounds you might get in the first ¾ of a cinematic fight. The first half is just scratches and bruises, at least if it comes little by little; a major hit in the first half still probably doesn't represent getting stabbed in the chest, but more like a glancing blow that staggers and winds you, taking a lot out of you. Only the last couple hits are really fatal — you can tell because those are the ones that killed you.