Armor types are a failed RPG concept

[J1M]

So many games have light/medium/heavy armor types and then either contort their math into everyone having similar armor class anyway, or like D&D, make light armor superior to heavy armor due to fewer drawbacks and superior scaling.

Similarly, you have other games like WoW where all actual defenses come from role-based passives and magic spells, which leads to the same paladin wearing the same armor but having vastly different levels of protection based on what job they are doing in the party at the moment.

Then you have the flat curve problem where a designer avoids the first two traps, but makes the actual difference in mitigation something like light armor mitigates 10% of damage and heavy armor mitigates 20%. The amount of healing someone has to absorb and how tightly tuned mana costs must be for that to be anything other than a placebo is astronomical.

I wish better armor was actually better. Getting armor upgrades in old games felt great. In Zelda, the first upgrade cuts incoming damage in half. The second upgrade cuts it in half again. I'd rather see all of the effort and pointless math associated with armor types removed from RPGs. The concept has been widely mishandled. Maybe they can use that time and effort to figure out how a sword and spear are different.

[Acrux]

I like systems where lighter armor is avoidance based (harder to hit) and heavier armor is damage reduction based (easier to hit, harder to damage).

[Oyster Sauce]

Heavy vs light is significant in Dark Souls, though there's no arbitrary distinction - each piece has its own weight value. Stronger characters are less encumbered by heavier gear.

[rusty_shackleford]

I don't like 'armor types' because computers are for simulations and we can do much better than tabletop simplifications.

Similarly, you have other games like WoW where all actual defenses come from role-based passives and magic spells, which leads to the same paladin wearing the same armor but having vastly different levels of protection based on what job they are doing in the party at the moment.

Don't like this at all, it's just WoW's "muh balance" ********.

I think the archetype of a defender guy that does very low damage is silly to begin with, tonks should do damage,

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Having robed mages be really squishy is only going to work certain types of games specifically constructed around that. For most RPGs, having such a drastic variance in the time to kill a character is going to cause too many complications when designing encounters or just general gameplay where it is possible to get ambush or to chain together multiple different packs of enemies, especially if you are making the implicit promise at character creation that you can pick any of the listed classes or characters and beat the game as it. Plate and robed people not being too far apart in terms of how difficult to kill them is just another one of those RPGisms that people wind up accepting.

I think that having different armor types is still useful for itemizations, as it helps prevent having a lot of different party members or players competing over the same item, as is common if a piece of equipment can be equipped by anyone and is very powerful and everyone wants it but it is in limited quantity. So subdivided the loot so that only portions of the userbase can equip it helps mitigate this. Plate/mail/leather/cloth etc is one of the more coherent ways to do this that people will accept (as opposed to, for instance, Light Cones, which feel like the divisions are much more arbitrary).

[WhiteShark]

Heavy vs light is significant in Dark Souls, though there's no arbitrary distinction - each piece has its own weight value. Stronger characters are less encumbered by heavier gear.

I think this is the way to go. In Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, armor applies a penalty to accuracy, evasion, and spellcasting that diminishes the higher the character's Strength is. Heavier armors apply a bigger penalty that requires more Strength to overcome and lighter armors apply smaller a smaller one. Every character wears the heaviest armor he can get away with.

[Tweed]

It really all depends on how you approach the armor problem. Tabletop makes the excuse that heavy armor interferes with arcane gestures otherwise the only downside to being a mage is ****** hit dice and lack of weapon skills. Bethesderp type games have no downside of any kind since you can ultimately max all of your stats and they finally stopped pretending there were classes in their games altogether. Roguelikes, depending on the kind approach it realistically by trading off the strength of the character with the weight of the armor. Some turn-based tacticals make it so the heavier the armor the less action points you have. Kenshi approaches it by determining what parts of the body the armor protects, what kind of damage it protects from, how much it protects, how long before it breaks, and how heavy it is. The most protective armor in the game is crab armor, but it's almost impossible to fight in because it's too heavy and too bulky.

[Tweed]

Franky I've always thought it was dumb that light armor = evasion. Why should a suit of leather make me dodge my enemy? Shouldn't wearing nothing make me faster still?

[WhiteShark]

Shouldn't wearing nothing make me faster still?

It does!

[Tweed]

I thought later STALKER games and some of the mods had interesting approaches to armor. You're not just dealing with other stalkers and mutants, but the environment so there's a lot to think about in terms of what armor you want to wear and what you want to do. The SEVA suit has great environmental protection, but not so great armor. It can be modified for additional Kevlar plating, but you miss out on things like additional artifact slots or other goodies. Exosuits are the last word in heavy armor, but in some games they lack build in crouching capabilities and paying to mod that in closes off an entire line of other upgrades. Not all of these suits have build in or top-of-the-line night vision either, something that's very helpful in the zone.

[rusty_shackleford]

Bilbo, the archetypical thief, wore chain armor. Albeit mithril.

This would be an example where modeling armor properties is better than merely classifying armor by its type. A mithril coat would be metallic, unencumbering, light, and quite protective. Even a fighter would want to wear something like that under his plate armor.

[J1M]

I like systems where lighter armor is avoidance based (harder to hit) and heavier armor is damage reduction based (easier to hit, harder to damage).

This is one of the problems I mentioned in the OP unless you mean that the light armor is also strictly worse than the heavy armor in aggregate.

[Acrux]

Even a fighter would want to wear something like that under his plate armor.

Now that's the thing that irks me about most armor systems - you're can choose plate armor or chainmail, but never the twain shall meet.

[Acrux]

I like systems where lighter armor is avoidance based (harder to hit) and heavier armor is damage reduction based (easier to hit, harder to damage).

This is one of the problems I mentioned in the OP unless you mean that the light armor is also strictly worse than the heavy armor.

Not worse, just made for different builds.

[rusty_shackleford]

A mithril coat would be metallic, unencumbering, light, and quite protective.

Another property worth modeling would probably be noise. I assume mithril would not make much noise at all, whereas if it was made of iron it would be somewhat noisy.

[J1M]

I like systems where lighter armor is avoidance based (harder to hit) and heavier armor is damage reduction based (easier to hit, harder to damage).

This is one of the problems I mentioned in the OP unless you mean that the light armor is also strictly worse than the heavy armor in aggregate.

Not worse, just made for different builds.

This is a problem, because the heavy armor always has a higher cost to aquire/wear/skill checks/casting/etc and gives roughly the same performance overall. Congrats, the coolest looking armor that has the highest requirements is mathematically bad.

[rusty_shackleford]

This is a problem, because the heavy armor always has a higher cost to aquire/wear/skill checks/casting/etc and gives roughly the same performance overall.

Slippery guys should probably just be innately hard to hit thru abilities rather than as some property granted by their armor.

[Acrux]

This is one of the problems I mentioned in the OP unless you mean that the light armor is also strictly worse than the heavy armor in aggregate.

Not worse, just made for different builds.

This is a problem, because the heavy armor always has a higher cost to aquire/wear/skill checks/casting/etc and gives roughly the same performance overall. Congrats, the coolest looking armor that has the highest requirements is mathematically bad.

Well, coolest looking means nothing - I like how a leather jerkin looks, myself. But I'm not sure where you're getting all this other stuff from when you can just have a dichotomy of "some types of armor are evasion based" and "some types of armor are DR based". There's nothing inherent about different requirement costs in that.

[The_Mask]

I would like to be a smug person and state that this discussion does not affect Monks.

And it feels good.

[J1M]

Just to really drive home how silly light armor is in most games, I propose a new game where:

Everyone can wear plate armor. It mitigates 40% of damage. All classes start with it.
However, evasion armor requires special "evasion training" which has a feat tax that costs two feats. A suit of it also costs more than the weapons for your party. Wearing evasion armor allows you to dodge 40% of attacks but it doesn't mitigate damage. Also, while using evasion armor you can't cast spells. Evasion armor also gives you a penalty to all skill checks and prevents the use of stealth.

This is roughly how D&D and other games balance armor today.

[wndrbr]

This is a problem, because the heavy armor always has a higher cost to aquire/wear/skill checks/casting/etc and gives roughly the same performance overall.

Slippery guys should probably just be innately hard to hit thru abilities rather than as some property granted by their armor.

Sawyer's grazing has entered the chat.

[rusty_shackleford]

Not worse, just made for different builds.

This is a problem, because the heavy armor always has a higher cost to aquire/wear/skill checks/casting/etc and gives roughly the same performance overall. Congrats, the coolest looking armor that has the highest requirements is mathematically bad.

Well, coolest looking means nothing - I like how a leather jerkin looks, myself. But I'm not sure where you're getting all this other stuff from when you can just have a dichotomy of "some types of armor are evasion based" and "some types of armor are DR based". There's nothing inherent about different requirement costs in that.

I think he's saying, and I may be wrong, that a type of armor shouldn't be 'evasion based' but simply strictly inferior. e.g., a shaman may wear mostly the same armor as a thief but rely on not being hit by enemies due to preferring a backline rather than avoiding incoming hits.

[rusty_shackleford]

This is roughly how D&D and other games balance armor today.

5e doesn't do this, does it? It 'fixed' a lot of balance issues 3.5e had, especially with regard to dex characters just being all-around better than str-based ones.

[Acrux]

Just to really drive home how silly light armor is in most games, I propose a new game where:

Everyone can wear plate armor. It mitigates 40% of damage. All classes start with it.
However, evasion armor requires special "evasion training" which has a feat tax that costs two feats. A suit of it also costs more than the weapons for your party. Wearing evasion armor allows you to dodge 40% of attacks but it doesn't mitigate damage. Also, while using evasion armor you can't cast spells. Evasion armor also gives you a penalty to all skill checks and prevents the use of stealth.

This is roughly how D&D and other games balance armor today.

That's not really what D&D does, though. DR armor is extremely rare and not just "heavy armor". All types of armor in D&D are just Base AC+Dex modifier (which heavy usually negates). There's not really a concept of evasion vs DR as an armor differentiator. I completely agree with you that Heavy Armor is bad in D&D, especially with the over-emphasis DEX has.

[J1M]

This is a problem, because the heavy armor always has a higher cost to aquire/wear/skill checks/casting/etc and gives roughly the same performance overall.

Slippery guys should probably just be innately hard to hit thru abilities rather than as some property granted by their armor.

I really like the D&D feat Deflect Arrows, which mitigates damage by ignoring the first incoming arrow each round. FFXI Samurai has Third Eye which evades the next incoming attack. I'd like to see more abilities like this. First, they feel really powerful when they activate. Second, they really sell the idea that you aren't going to take down a heavily protected hero with a stray attack. Third, the character still needs to worry about being outnumbered.

I'd go so far as to say that just wearing a shield should give you the melee version of Deflect Arrows. None of this 12% block nonsense, first attack every X rounds/seconds is just completely mitigated. Imagine how good the progression would feel when that updated to Deflect Blow v2 at level 10 and now you can stand toe to toe with a giant.

[UltraFan123]

We all know that the only reason armor exists in fantasy settings and RPGs is for the drip.

[J1M]

This is a problem, because the heavy armor always has a higher cost to aquire/wear/skill checks/casting/etc and gives roughly the same performance overall. Congrats, the coolest looking armor that has the highest requirements is mathematically bad.

Well, coolest looking means nothing - I like how a leather jerkin looks, myself. But I'm not sure where you're getting all this other stuff from when you can just have a dichotomy of "some types of armor are evasion based" and "some types of armor are DR based". There's nothing inherent about different requirement costs in that.

I think he's saying, and I may be wrong, that a type of armor shouldn't be 'evasion based' but simply strictly inferior. e.g., a shaman may wear mostly the same armor as a thief but rely on not being hit by enemies due to preferring a backline rather than avoiding incoming hits.

I'm fine with different types of armor being evasion based vs mitigation based. That sounds like an interesting decision in the right context. My issue is that if you look at the armor performance in aggregate, the armor with lots of drawbacks should provide better protection. Otherwise it's ****** design. Not unlike making a rogue deal the same damage as other characters in combat with their little daggers but also strictly better than those classes in the non-combat aspects of the game.

[J1M]

This is roughly how D&D and other games balance armor today.

5e doesn't do this, does it? It 'fixed' a lot of balance issues 3.5e had, especially with regard to dex characters just being all-around better than str-based ones.

I think you are right that they have reigned in some of the extreme problems, but AI tells me that a DEX fighter wearing studded leather will still have +1 AC over a STR fighter wearing plate at level 20. And that's before any sort of non-RAW attribute stacking items or story-based boosts you commonly see in computer games.

As was just pointed out, there isn't really partial mitigation in D&D, so AC is the dominant factor and the fact that it is even close is a design failure.

Basically, you wear heavier armor only if you weren't able to distribute attribute points in DEX due to needing them somewhere else.

[rusty_shackleford]

Not unlike making a rogue deal the same damage as other characters in combat with their little daggers but also strictly better than those classes in the non-combat aspects of the game.

I think a thief archetype should be a debuffer in combat, throwing marbles and stuff

rogue has blurred the line between swashbuckler, thief, and assassin too much

[WhiteShark]

Mitigation versus avoidance is hard to balance. With flat mitigation, it's theoretically better against many small attacks while avoidance is better against fewer, bigger attacks, but, in many games, the consequences of getting hit by even one big, unmitigated attack are too severe to risk it. This is the classic problem for swordmasters in Fire Emblem. They may have a really, really high chance of avoiding that berserker's axe, but, if it does connect, goodbye swordmaster.