Armour and stuff

[assault]

I've been thinking about Fantasy Hero settings for a while now and I've come to the spot where mundane equipment has become an issue. At a certain point, gear implies culture. If characters get to wear plate armour, why aren't you playing a medieval game?

 

If you don't want to play that, why are you allowing that?

OK, (home now), in a personal game, this isn't an issue. If you are writing for publication, it is. Maybe that's one of the reasons why the published settings are so bland.

 

For me, the best published Fantasy Hero setting was the ICE dual-statted Mythic Greece. That was a book that made me want to play it. Because of my life at the time, I never could. Our older people would not be shocked to hear that it was written by Aaron Allston. Apparently some of the details from his game are included in the posthumous version of Strike Force, which appears to mostly be an unedited collection of his files. Which is awesome.

Anyway, in fits of grumpiness, I have expressed the opinion that the best presentation of the Hero System was Justice Inc. Add that to Lands of Mystery, and it's nearly perfect. Except, of course, that it doesn't explicitly cover Fantasy. The historical reason for that seems to have been that the first version of Fantasy Hero (a free-standing game) was in development at the time, and was released a short while afterwards.

For what it's worth, the first version of Fantasy Hero was arguably the first presentation of the Hero System as a generic system, because it was necessary to define a magic system before it could be played. You couldn't just buy it and play it.

 

[SCUBA Hero]

My gaming group played a Mythic Greece Hero campaign.  Very flavorful, different from 'generic' fantasy. 👍

[Tjack]

   There’s a lot of different flavors of “Fantasy” from LotR to Game of Thrones to Excalibur.  Three Movie/TV series (I’m setting aside the books for now.) that show High amounts of magic to low, and varied amounts of reality.

    The same as there is in the Justice Inc. genre.  Maltese Falcon, Raiders of the Lost Ark and White Heat.  Which one is correct?  A lot of the fun of role-playing is in not having to pay attention to annoying realities for a while.

Give yourself a break. If someone’s mixing genres in somebody else’s game then that’s between them and their GM.  I agree with you on some of your points, but this debate can easily drift into “Why won’t those damn kids pull up their pants, turn down that noise they call music and stay off my lawn!” territory.  Be at peace.

[mhd]

7 hours ago, assault said:

I've been thinking about Fantasy Hero settings for a while now and I've come to the spot where mundane equipment has become an issue. At a certain point, gear implies culture. If characters get to wear plate armour, why aren't you playing a medieval game?

 

Aren't we? Most fantasy RPGs are steeped into renaissance tech. Rapiers, "full plate", galleons, frequent inns & taverns, cheap beer, mercantilism etc. Everything the 16th century offers bar gunpowder.

 

The tropes favor a pretty late point in history, you'd have to specifically state your sub-genre if you don't have that. Never mind that the tech level of "sword & sorcery" is dodgy as heck. No issues with full plate in Conan.

[assault]

10 hours ago, mhd said:

The tropes favor a pretty late point in history, you'd have to specifically state your sub-genre if you don't have that. Never mind that the tech level of "sword & sorcery" is dodgy as heck. No issues with full plate in Conan.

I might have to bite the bullet and do that.

As for Conan - Hyboria is a patchwork of different bits that allowed Howard to set Conan in a variety of different types of story. One story would have him as a medieval-style king, another a Viking-style northern warrior, another a Caribbean-style pirate, another fighting proxies for Native Americans... and so on.

It's essentially Pulp Adventure fiction, minus gunpowder and plus some vaguely horror-flavoured frills.

The benefit of this is that readers could supply their own tropes for each kind of story. Howard didn't have to explain how things worked.

 

It's worth comparing Howard's Conan stories to his Kull stories. Kull's world - even his own kingdom, the setting of most stories - is almost entirely undeveloped. Perhaps there's a vague Roman/Medieval feel to Valusia, but that's about it.

The vivid (if nonsensical) feel of Hyboria was largely absent.

A smaller world, with fewer options for types of adventure, can both invoke tropes and make more sense. The problem is then: which tropes and what kind of adventure?

[mhd]

Armour is also highly impacted by the rules or lack thereof. For one, since early D&D there's supposed to be a whole spectrum of armour, graded primarily by their degree of protection. This leads to picking all kinds of protective garments from all over history and/or bad research (all those non-existing armor types prompted by illustrations and bas-reliefs). Because you need 5-10 types of armour four your rules.

 

Also, in real life it would be much more likely that you didn't wear one garment with 30% protection but a good mobility, but rather triple its thickness so that you'd end up with 90%. Because getting hit at all is bad. Both psychologically and medically. Whereas in rules-land, you could have some kind of calculation that armor x might reduce your evade chance by a certain amount, but in the end you'll still end up with fewer hit points lost, so this "slightly protective" armor makes sense. So armour in most RPGs seems more a gamist trope, and one that people are very familiar with. Not sure whether one would like to mess with that and you'd probably need a few different armor types on the spectrum to make up for this. And thus the need for naming them, which most likely leads to stealing from all over history.

 

Finally, fantasy worlds are all over the place, i.e. everything but a few exceptions (Hârn) has a high nutritious pulp content. So you got your knights, vikings, musketeers plus orcs, samurai etc. Having distinctive armour for those leads to further bloat.

 

So yeah, a smaller world should lead to more control over that, where you might be able to get by with a few different styles of armour. Then you could probably come up with a few variants of those (coverage, excellence in manufacturing etc.) to get a sufficient amount of list items to satisfy the gamers who like to weigh their options and consider trade-offs.

[LoneWolf]

The rating for armor assumes that they are made of steel.  In a campaign based on a period of time before steel was common the weapons and armor should be less effective.  This puts the characters at a disadvantage.  Personally, I figure if both the weapon and armor are less effective, they kind of cancel each other out.  So instead of reducing the stats of both armor and weapons I just use what is in the book and don’t bother with adjusting them.   In a fantasy setting there may also be fantastic metals that are not seen in the real world so steel may not actually be the top metal.  These metals may actually be as common as iron is in the real world.  This would allow higher DEF armor without needing more advanced forms of armor.    The biggest difference between a lot of earlier armors and those from latter periods was the coverage.  If you want to simulate that don’t allow full suits of armor. 

[Mr. R]

I am currently modifying an OLD Shadow World module as my home setting.  It is basically a BIG island with a few areas including a LARGE inland lake (1000 km x 700 Km), a steppes area, a highland/plateau, a grasslands and a jungle area.  So a lot of different climates, but I will go with Chain being the BEST and things like Leather and Studded being much more common.  So Shields and Combat Luck is going to be very important.  Also Normal armour will have sectional defenses and real armour limitations.  Magical armour can go past this limitation (hence why it is magical) and could go higher in defense, but is still visibly chain mail (Think the Mithril shirt Frodo had.  He survived a strike from a cave troll and the armour was unharmed so like 10/10 armour with no sectional as it always seemed any nasty strikes would hit the armour [like Red Sonya's bikini, but more believable])

 

[Duke Bushido]

Love it!

 

Mostly because I borrwed heavily from Shadow World maps myself to get a campaign off the ground a few years back.   

 

 

[mhd]

19 hours ago, LoneWolf said:

The rating for armor assumes that they are made of steel.  In a campaign based on a period of time before steel was common the weapons and armor should be less effective.

Probably not within the narrow spectrum of the default armour system, where bronze gives you a -1, and thus most of the differences between the various degrees of iron quality is a rounding error...

Never mind that it varied a lot in almost any age.

 

Earlier tech doesn't have that much coverage and way higher prices, though. Although in a loot-based economy, the latter mostly matters for the very beginning of a campaign.

[Scott Ruggels]

17 hours ago, mhd said:

Probably not within the narrow spectrum of the default armour system, where bronze gives you a -1, and thus most of the differences between the various degrees of iron quality is a rounding error...

Never mind that it varied a lot in almost any age.

 

Earlier tech doesn't have that much coverage and way higher prices, though. Although in a loot-based economy, the latter mostly matters for the very beginning of a campaign.

 

 

I don't think you are going to win this one, unless you Home brew everything.  It's like the  use of certain Damage rules. Like the cartoon about it shows, once you remove someone's hand at the wrist, the table may be empty the following week.  Armor is part of the background, correct, but the background is part of the game, and players will try to get an advantage any way they can in the game to avoid taking debilitating damage or dying. How I handled this was l used sectional armor and hit locations, and the armor would have END penalties above a certain weight, cost money, so people would get plates to cover high stun and body multiplier area, and chain mail over the rest. People ended up looking like the Bayeux Tapestry knights, rather than the 12th century knights, who's armor really only works on horseback. anything without hit locations, then just becomes an over all X value of armour, and then why not the maximum value of X?

[Christopher R Taylor]

The differences in types of metal will not often make a significant difference in defenses.  They made metal armor out of copper in some places, and that's not going to give you steel-level defenses, but mostly its a matter of body in the item or its own defense.

 

Here's where it can get complicated, because the item's defense is not always the same as the defense it provides the wearer.  That is, it protects the person wearing the armor by x rPD and rED, but the armor its self is made of a certain material, and that material has its own rPD and rED.  Construction and thickness will protect the wearer in a way that does not protect the material its self.  Thus, if an attack hits the armor, the damage it does to the victim is reduced by the armor, but the damage also applies to the armor, which has its own defense against the attack.

 

You can blow all that off and just do the quick and dirty 6th edition thing where you have x defense, it applies to both, and if any body goes through, the armor loses a power (its only power: resistant protection) and falls apart.

 

But back to materials, most of the differences will be Body, Armor PD and ED, and weight.  Bronze = iron = steel in a practical sense have basically the same level of protection, but some break easier.

 

What's tougher to represent is that steel is more brittle than iron, so technically might break easier, but is tougher, so it can take more damage before breaking.  Bronze is even more brittle.

[Steve]

I’m talking about armor, a consideration of its interaction with Combat Luck might be valuable, especially if the campaign has set maxima on defenses for PCs.
 

For just six character points spent (five in settings like the Valdorian Age which add an additional limitation that it does not work if wearing more than 15kg of armor), a cap of 8 rDEF means that 4-5 rDEF from actual armor is all that is needed. Buy two levels, and 2 rDEF leather becomes all you can wear.

 

It’s a consideration that probably should be taken into account.

[mhd]

21 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

anything without hit locations, then just becomes an over all X value of armour, and then why not the maximum value of X?

 

Depends on the tech level. If the max is 16th century full plate, sure, everyone who can afford it and goes into combat probably would (and should) buy it. I think there's still a lot you can play around with to make other armors interesting, but everyone aiming for the best armour they could get is certainly not unrealistic.

 

If your max is the Dendra panoply, something that comes with a lot more penalties and doesn't look as cool, things might be different. Even your heavy infantry guys might be happy enough with linothoraxes and decent helms.

 

(As opposed to the OP, if I were to focus on a different style of armour, my cut-off point wouldn't be articulated plate, but maille)

[Ternaugh]

On 2/23/2022 at 7:25 AM, mhd said:

 

Aren't we? Most fantasy RPGs are steeped into renaissance tech. Rapiers, "full plate", galleons, frequent inns & taverns, cheap beer, mercantilism etc. Everything the 16th century offers bar gunpowder.

 

The tropes favor a pretty late point in history, you'd have to specifically state your sub-genre if you don't have that. Never mind that the tech level of "sword & sorcery" is dodgy as heck. No issues with full plate in Conan.

 

The FH campaign that I've run for the last couple of decades had gunpowder. I had originally cribbed my notes from the Campaign Classics Pirates book, mixed with the spell colleges from the 4e FH books, and several fencing styles from UMA. Full plate was rare, but heavy fighters would sometimes have a plate cuirass and steel helmet. Most characters would have light armor, and a few would have magical enhancements, or Combat Luck. 

 

Magic added to the tactics, as one character had a spell that would keep his powder dry, and improve the reliability of his wheellocks, while another had a suppression spell defined as a penetrating mist that made powder too wet to use.