Armor Encumbrance

[mhd]

I recently found my old Fantasy Hero 3 books again, and noticed that "back then" armor encumbrance actually was a more serious thing. This bothered me a bit in 6E, and I think I house-ruled something the last time I ran it (geeze, 6 years ago). 

 

Let's say I pick a "field plate", weighing 28kg (actually not that far off from reality), and I'm reasonably buff for a Heroic campaign, i.e. STR 15. 

 

In 3E that means I get -3 DCV / 4 END per Turn. Reduced by my strength to 3 END / turn.

 

In 6E it's a percentage of my STR, where I'm at the lower end of the 11-24% bracket, so -1 DCV / 0 END per turn.

 

Quite the difference. I have to say that I like the 3E version a bit better. Fantasy Hero 6E suggests raising the weight of the armor for encumbrance purposes only, but it's not like a huge backpack version of this would be that much more sane. HERO's lifting capabilities are certainly on the more extreme side of things, so basing encumbrance on those shifts things into the superheroic quite easily (and having "realistic" characters being constrained to STR 10-13 would be a bit weird).

 

I like END/round. Sure, it's bookkeeping, but a neat way to distinguish lightly armored and armed fighters from the heavy ones, and taking extra recoveries makes lengthier battles feel more visceral.

 

How does the rest handle this? House rules? Don't care for armor penalties? Still using earlier editions?

[Duke Bushido]

First off:

 

Remember that HERO's lifting limits are just that:  the limits.  You aren't grunting twice and then heaving this over head like a power lifter.  The listed lift capacity is the amount that you can barely get off the floor and stagger a few steps with.  Presumably adter that you fall on your butt and pant heavily for a few minutes waiting for your face to pale up, your blood pressure to normalize, and your colon to retract back to where it belongs.

 

Keeping that in mind helps to get a better grasp of just what should or not be considered "too much to carry."  It paints a clearer picture that just because a character is STR 15, he is not going to embark on a road March while carrying a sixty-gallon keg on one shoulder.

 

To help players visualize this, I adopted (for heroic games) a modifier to the casual STR rules:

 

Casual STR is 1/4 your STR.  Your STR is from over that up to 3/4 your STR.  Anything over that is "full STR" or heavy lifting."  You can do it per the rules, but if you want to so it more than six seconds (half a turn, or one action for a "normal" person), there is an additional (and slightly increasing) END cost.

 

 

Now so that being said-

 

How do I handle encumbrance?  If you are wearing less that 1/4 your STR, I dont worry about it,  if your combined wearing /carrying is 1/3 your STR, I still don't worry about it.

 

The rationale is even if I am wearing iron boots and wooden pants, I should be able to lift as much.

 

Now if you are _carrying_ over  1/4 your STR, that counts.  However, I do a homebrew fatigue system from way back when.  Not really happy with the bookkeeping that goes into the book-legal version.

 

 

[SCUBA Hero]

I like the 3E Encumbrance rules - you wear heavy armor, you're easier to hit and fatigue faster.  Keep in mind that I started role-playing with The Fantasy Trip rather than D&D.  TFT has a 'heavier armor absorbs more damage but makes you easier to hit (and harder to hit someone else as well).

 

Casual STR has always bugged me.  It should be a straight -x to your full STR.  STR 10 normal human goes from 100 kg to 50 kg, while STR 60 brick goes from 100 *tons* to 1,600 kg!  Wha? 🤔

 

Especially since if characters combine their STRs you add their individual lifting capacities and then determine the combined STR by the sum of those capacities.

[assault]

I've been looking for my copy of the original Fantasy Hero for over a week now. I really must have stashed it in an obscure spot.

Incidentally, isn't it annoying that the first edition of Fantasy Hero was contemporary with 3e Champions, while the second was with 4e Hero System? The terminology gets really messy.

I've just started my long threatened grumpy project of adjusting Justice Inc. to run Pulp Fantasy. I'll probably use the JI encumbrance rules, although they don't cover armour in much detail. (Unless I find my Fantasy Hero book, or I steal whatever rules 4e uses...)

[LoneWolf]

When you look at just armor the penalties seem to be pretty small, but if you are using encumbrance you have to add all the gear a character is carrying.  Once you do that your penalties are going to be higher.  Chances are anyone using field plate is going to also have a shield, weapons and other gear that pushes that up to the next category.  That will increase the penalties to -2 DCV -2m of movement and 1 END per turn.   The END per turn is in addition to the END used for STR and movement.  

 

So, a character with a 15 STR, SPD of 4, REC of 10, END of 50 and normal movement will be spending 17 END per turn (including the 1 for encumbrance).    That means he can fight for slightly under a minute and a half before he is out of END.  He also loses 1 LTE per minute of fighting.  10 REC is the most you can have without exceeding the normal maximum.  Dropping your REC to 8 means you can fight for just over a minute and your LTE loss to 1 per turn.  

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

Casual STR has always bugged me.  It should be a straight -x to your full STR.  STR 10 normal human goes from 100 kg to 50 kg, while STR 60 brick goes from 100 *tons* to 1,600 kg!  Wha?

 

Yeah, its one of those rules that breaks down very quickly at high power levels because of the doubling effect of lift in STR.  Technically "half your strength" is 5 points less.  That's half your lift

[mhd]

7 hours ago, LoneWolf said:

When you look at just armor the penalties seem to be pretty small, but if you are using encumbrance you have to add all the gear a character is carrying. 

You'd need 20kg of equipment to get that with a 15 STR. Neither the cliche sword & board nor the more realistic pollaxe would get me there. So, huge dungeon backpack or lots of loot, in a situation where you can't drop it beforehand?

[Duke Bushido]

Casual STR doesnt work in supers because it wasnt designed with that genre in mind.  It was one of those Johnny-come-Later things that was introduced in... 3e?  I think 4e-  and seems,to have been geared for Heroic Level campaigns.   To be fair, it isnt presented that way, but that seems to be where it is the least wonky.

 

 

[archer]

I don't like dealing with the paperwork so I don't usually deal with armor encumbrance. If you've got the strength and training to be a warrior, you know how to deal with wearing armor without it substantially bothering you.

 

If I were better at keeping track of niggling details, I'd be more of a purist about it. 

I like the visual of a shirtless guy being able to swordfight on equal terms with an armored warrior. But RPG's aren't a particularly visual game.  

 

I do casually keep track of armor weight when tracking how much a person is carrying. Most people need to shuck their pack and drop what goods they're carrying in order to fight effectively.

[theinfn8]

Armour weight is a weird beast in general, even in real life. There is definitely a difference between carting around a bag/box of armour and walking around *in* it. Lugging my armour chest from my trunk to a camp site might wind me pretty bad, but I could walk around in it for quite a while before I started to fatigue from the extra weight. Fighting in it is, honestly, only slightly more fatiguing than going with just a gambeson.

 

So, the idea that worn armour should have a lower cost towards encumbrance penalties jives in my head. Particularly if you are well trained in its use. I have definitely seen people sprint 20 yards in plate to exploit a break in a line, fight through, and be perfectly ready to keep fighting.
 

What it really comes down to, is what kind of effect do you want in your game? Do you want people to armour up? Do you want more cinematic blade-dancing? Do you want people to be able to negate armour penalties to represent their increased skill with the armour? I love representing armour in a more realistic way, but sometimes that isn't what I want. Tweak those dials and find what you like best.

[SCUBA Hero]

Makes sense.  Worn armor only counts as x% of its real weight.

 

I've seen STR, Only To Offset Armor Encumbrance used as well.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah its been a house rule for my games for ages that items carried in a backpack cost half as much encumbrance and armor costs half as much encumbrance, as long as worn properly.

[mhd]

So not even the default 6E encumbrance rules, but half that for worn armor, i.e. field plate would "cost" me 14kg? Hmm. I mean, I get that people want to countermand the old cliche that you'd need to be lifted on your horse by a crane. And yes, you can sprint, do cart-wheels etc. in plate. A higher END loss wouldn't change that anyway. But it being no more fatiguing than regular clothing?

There's at least one study that comes to a different conclusion, and I'm sure there's even more about contemporary soldier loads.

 

Never mind that part of me favoring the more drastic penalties comes from a gamist perspective. I'm okay with fewer DCV penalties, but heavily armored combat having different rest patterns can be quite interesting in my experience. Just more money being spent in your typically dysfunctional fantasy economy is a bit boring.

[Duke Bushido]

The biggest problem stems from the earliest days: the mistaken conception that the amount of properly-slung weight you can carry is drawn exclusively from your ability to lift an amount of weight; this is from the simplification that all aspects of carrying a physical burden-- balance, rigging, leverage, support, training- even the rhythm of stride and the terrain, and of course the affect that the load itself has or does not have on the body's ability to cool itself sufficiently--

 

is all summed up in one single characteristic: STR.

 

The solution for a more accurate simulation can be found in the desire to split all those aspects of portage into separate and distinct characteristics-- or, at the very least, modifiers-- and just how far into that simulation one is willing to go.

 

Most of us agree-- there is a scaling issue with encumbrance, casual str, etc, but aren't willing to do the deep dive for true accuracy, or don't find the effort to have sufficient payoff for the efforts, so we tweak a couple of existing rules or enact a couple of house rules until we get what we find an acceptable balance of effort versus simulation versus playability.

 

I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally think that this is one of those areas where "good enough" is good enough.  If looked at too long, it becomes a very deep hole.  if looked at longer than that, it branches into an absolute rabbit warren.

 

 

[theinfn8]

19 hours ago, mhd said:

So not even the default 6E encumbrance rules, but half that for worn armor, i.e. field plate would "cost" me 14kg? Hmm. I mean, I get that people want to countermand the old cliche that you'd need to be lifted on your horse by a crane. And yes, you can sprint, do cart-wheels etc. in plate. A higher END loss wouldn't change that anyway. But it being no more fatiguing than regular clothing?

There's at least one study that comes to a different conclusion, and I'm sure there's even more about contemporary soldier loads.

 

Never mind that part of me favoring the more drastic penalties comes from a gamist perspective. I'm okay with fewer DCV penalties, but heavily armored combat having different rest patterns can be quite interesting in my experience. Just more money being spent in your typically dysfunctional fantasy economy is a bit boring.

 

I would love to read that whole study. I will have to see if I can acquire it from my school library. Interesting to point out that the study found running to be energetically less expensive. Here's the thing with the actual fighting, most of the muscles used aren't as heavily affected by the armour as simply walking and if you train to fight in armour you fight with the same motions out of it. Would there be a difference if I had to fight for half a day on a battlefield walking /running to different areas? For sure. For the length of time of the typical fantasy skirmish? Not that I would experience.

 

But I am glad you have a clear idea of what you want from armour in your games. I think most gamers would smile, nod, and play the game no matter what set of specifications we use. We just love gaming

[mhd]

13 hours ago, theinfn8 said:

Would there be a difference if I had to fight for half a day on a battlefield walking /running to different areas? For sure. For the length of time of the typical fantasy skirmish? Not that I would experience.

For some kind of reason, my fights always run rather (in game turns, okay in real-life time).

I'd also say that in real life skirmishes, there definitely are more pauses and thus "recoveries" than in RPG fights, where no action can get wasted. This might be one way to have breathers.

 

13 hours ago, theinfn8 said:

But I am glad you have a clear idea of what you want from armour in your games. I think most gamers would smile, nod, and play the game no matter what set of specifications we use.

 

I basically ignored most armor penalties the last time around. I'm not the biggest fan of the armour makes you slow type of rules, either. And with the given encumbrance rules in 6E it barely came into play. The people running around heavily armored also had "+ DCV, only to counter armour penalties", too. (We were playing in a setting where its original system had something like this, so that was on my list of pre-made abilities)

 

But when I was reading the Fantasy Hero 3 rules, it got me thinking a bit. I'm not sure whether it's worth it, given that the "tanks" would most likely buy a bit of additional END anyway. But with END use for the attacks, plus armour it might add up well enough to come into play after a few rounds, whereas the skirmishers could prove their worth while the turtles take a breather. Thus without introducing anything totally new, the system creates incentives for different styles. (Although I guess this could be done with much less bookkeeping if I just have a table rule where we agree that only the swashbucklers buy additional SPD over the campaign average; maybe I have to find something equally interesting for the heavy infantry)

 

On the other side of things, I couldgive penalties to people wearing an enclosed helmet in combat or leg armour when marching, but as a game rule that would feel a bit to "gotcha"-ish, realism set aside. Such a rule wouldn't really get anything.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Part of the value for my campaign in encumbrance rules (beyond the 'well it just makes sense' aspect) is that it helps check against magic.  Yes, you can wear heavy armor etc with your spellcaster but encumbrance will limit your ability to cast spells and its... not fun to mess up a spell most of the time.  Also it helps encourage light fighters, where having light armor and being nimble was as valuable and useful as wearing huge layers of clanking metal.