Bitching about the economy updates/questions thread: Armor edition

[Brokkr]

If you're doing it in a dangerous area and fail your sneak check you die.

If it is that dangerous for you, doubt your leather armor is going to save you either.

[Jihelu]

I've played several sneaks that had the raw offense and power to fight their way out of certain situations. I've also been in situations where if I was in pure cloth, I probably would have died.

I don't understand why you are so combative over this.

The damage reduction from a leather helmet/shell gorget is enough to keep my ass alive enough to run away/kill a half-giant who's just hit the shit out of me (Or perhaps a drov beetle/something else in the wild).

[X-D]

Then change the word John. Get rid of encumbrance and change it to load or weight. And it still should make some sort of sense...as it sits...with what staff is saying it makes little sense. This Armor which is described as several layers of hide tied to your person encumbers less then the svelte boiled leather...Why, because one is skin and the other is leather.

Also, I have a question for staff. Are items actually going to show as "Heavy leather" or "light leather" Or "leather" (assuming that is medium) in assess or are they just going to be leather and we have to guess where it might fall?

[John]

And it still should make some sort of sense...as it sits...with what staff is saying it makes little sense.

Armor makes plenty of sense to tabletop gamers. That's what Armageddon is descended from after all. Anyone whose familiar with tabletop RPGs will be completely familiar with how encumberance works in Armageddon. So while you might say it doesn't make sense, that is by no means a universal viewpoint.

[Namino]

And it still should make some sort of sense...as it sits...with what staff is saying it makes little sense.

Armor makes plenty of sense to tabletop gamers. That's what Armageddon is descended from after all. Anyone whose familiar with tabletop RPGs will be completely familiar with how encumberance works in Armageddon. So while you might say it doesn't make sense, that is by no means a universal viewpoint.

Armor in D&D, the most popular and traditional tabletop, doesn't work this way though. Your carry weight is your str score x 15. For someone with average str (10), that's 150 pounds before you're encumbered and suffer any penalties. Plate armor in that game weighs 65lbs, meaning even relatively weak people can have plate armor in their inventories without the slightest difficulty. Hell, a moderately strong dude (str 13) can hoist up three full sets of platemail before he's penalized.

However, there are independent checks to see the sort of armor you can wear outside of what you can simply carry in your inventory. You need str 15 to wear plate. It's a decoupling of carry weight/armor proficiency pre-requisites that allows for people to carry reasonable amounts of weight in their inventory without making it so anyone can wear heavy armor. Armageddon double-dips by trying to make encumberance pull two shifts -- carry weight is applying penalties and that has to work for armor too, because there's no independent armor vs str check. And the only way to make that single system do both jobs is to make armor weigh unrealistic amounts.

[Aruven]

And it still should make some sort of sense...as it sits...with what staff is saying it makes little sense.

Armor makes plenty of sense to tabletop gamers. That's what Armageddon is descended from after all. Anyone whose familiar with tabletop RPGs will be completely familiar with how encumberance works in Armageddon. So while you might say it doesn't make sense, that is by no means a universal viewpoint.

Armor in D&D, the most popular and traditional tabletop, doesn't work this way though. Your carry weight is your str score x 15. For someone with average str (10), that's 150 pounds before you're encumbered and suffer any penalties. Plate armor in that game weighs 65lbs, meaning even relatively weak people can have plate armor in their inventories without the slightest difficulty. Hell, a moderately strong dude (str 13) can hoist up three full sets of platemail before he's penalized.

However, there are independent checks to see the sort of armor you can wear outside of what you can simply carry in your inventory. You need str 15 to wear plate. It's a decoupling of carry weight/armor proficiency pre-requisites that allows for people to carry reasonable amounts of weight in their inventory without making it so anyone can wear heavy armor. Armageddon double-dips by trying to make encumberance pull two shifts -- carry weight is applying penalties and that has to work for armor too, because there's no independent armor vs str check. And the only way to make that single system do both jobs is to make armor weigh unrealistic amounts.

I've actually never found a problem with weight, not as a real human, at least.

You can wear a full set of armor on yourself. You can usually even with shitty strength carry a pack along with that too. Those are about if not more than most average humans. Armor is fucking heavy.

Tabletop is great but if you want realism, without dice rolls (even though if behind the scene that is what is built into the mechanics) strength x15 is not what most humans are capable of by a long shot, even zalanthans.

[Namino]

And it still should make some sort of sense...as it sits...with what staff is saying it makes little sense.

Armor makes plenty of sense to tabletop gamers. That's what Armageddon is descended from after all. Anyone whose familiar with tabletop RPGs will be completely familiar with how encumberance works in Armageddon. So while you might say it doesn't make sense, that is by no means a universal viewpoint.

Armor in D&D, the most popular and traditional tabletop, doesn't work this way though. Your carry weight is your str score x 15. For someone with average str (10), that's 150 pounds before you're encumbered and suffer any penalties. Plate armor in that game weighs 65lbs, meaning even relatively weak people can have plate armor in their inventories without the slightest difficulty. Hell, a moderately strong dude (str 13) can hoist up three full sets of platemail before he's penalized.

However, there are independent checks to see the sort of armor you can wear outside of what you can simply carry in your inventory. You need str 15 to wear plate. It's a decoupling of carry weight/armor proficiency pre-requisites that allows for people to carry reasonable amounts of weight in their inventory without making it so anyone can wear heavy armor. Armageddon double-dips by trying to make encumberance pull two shifts -- carry weight is applying penalties and that has to work for armor too, because there's no independent armor vs str check. And the only way to make that single system do both jobs is to make armor weigh unrealistic amounts.

I've actually never found a problem with weight, not as a real human, at least.

You can wear a full set of armor on yourself. You can usually even with shitty strength carry a pack along with that too. Those are about if not more than most average humans. Armor is fucking heavy.

Tabletop is great but if you want realism, without dice rolls (even though if behind the scene that is what is built into the mechanics) strength x15 is not what most humans are capable of by a long shot, even zalanthans.

Sorry, to be clear:

We want elves to have to wear leather.

A suit of cuir bouilli armor isn't going to weigh more than 25-30lbs for the whole set, then add on a 10lb pack and 5lb of weapons (2x 2.5lb swords), and you have a fully armed leather clad elf sitting on 40-45lbs of total weight, which is a very light load when distributed across the body.

So, if we want elves to not have the ability to get into heavy armor, while also being constrained by having no separation between the carry capacity and armor pre-requisite systems, then there's two solutions:

1) Make elf carrying capacity unplayable. 50lbs carry capacity before penalizing them. Have fun stripping naked before picking up barrels of water to move around camp, you dumb sharps!
2) Make armor unrealistically high weights. Give elves 120lb carrying capacity but make leather armor weigh 100lbs (this is an exaggeration to demonstrate my point).

Neither one of these two outcomes is realistic. Either elves are unrealistically weak or armor is unrealistically heavy.

The ideal solution to marry playability and realism is to just disentangle overall carriage weight and armor wear pre-requisites. Sure, you can carry 120lbs and plate armor only weighs 55lbs, but the ability to carry armor =! the ability to wear it. Just put the str threshold higher than what an elf can get for the wear check and boom. We done.

[MeTekillot]

This armor is too bulky for you to wear.

[Marauder Moe]

Boiled leather definitely should not be considered "light" armor, especially not in context of Zalanthas.

Ideal/realistic light armor would be more strategic.  Guard the knees, elbows, shins, forearms/wrists, neck, and head.  Everywhere else on the body can absorb blunt trauma pretty decently (notable exception of the kidneys and the testicles, but even historically on Earth those were not always armored).  Everywhere else you just need to be decently cut and pierce resistant.  Light leather or even heavy canvas would do a decent job, especially with the crude blades of Zalanthas.

[John]

Armor in D&D, the most popular and traditional tabletop, doesn't work this way though.

Yes it does. Items (including armor) have a weight. Everyone has a maximum weight they can carry/wear and once they reach certain thresholds in their encumberance they get different penalties. That is exactly how it works in Armageddon.

Your carry weight is your str score x 15. For someone with average str (10), that's 150 pounds before you're encumbered and suffer any penalties.

Aaah. Your a 5th edition D&D player. 5th edition is considered to have the least realistic numbers when it comes to encumberance. The reason it has these numbers is because no-one enjoys calculating their encumberance and so many tables ignore the rule. 5th edition (like it did with alignment) kept the unpopular rule, but then designed the rules to minimise any and all impact it could possibly have on the game.

Plate armor in that game weighs 65lbs, meaning even relatively weak people can have plate armor in their inventories without the slightest difficulty. Hell, a moderately strong dude (str 13) can hoist up three full sets of platemail before he's penalized.

1. Platemail is made of steel, not chitin, wood, bone or mekillot hide or silt horror shell.
2. 5th edition grabbed numbers that made sense for the game rather than numbers that had any bearing on real life.

I'm not saying we should use numbers based on real life. I'm saying we should use numbers based on the game. The general mechanic of encumbrance is well understood by tabletop gamers and is not difficult at all for new gamers to Armageddon to understand. It's in a ton of computer RPGs including Skyrim.

However, there are independent checks to see the sort of armor you can wear outside of what you can simply carry in your inventory. You need str 15 to wear plate. It's a decoupling of carry weight

That's because 5th edition had such unrealistic numbers the old system of encumbrance didn't work anymore and so they needed to cludge in "a strength minimum" to stop strength 10 wizards from wearing the best armor in the game with a single feat.

Just to give you a bit more of an appreciation for encumbrance and how out of touch 5th edition is with earlier editions of D&D:
10 strength in 5th edition: 150 lbs
10 strength in 3.5e/Pathfinder had: 66 lb. or less (light), 67-133 lb. (moderate) 134-200 lb. (heavy)

AD&D 2e has even more categories and are even less forgiving (not retyping them from my book).

In D&D an average strength is 10. 10 strength in AD&D 2e has a maximum of 58 lbs for light encumbrance (5th edition doesn't really have light encumbrance it just has a binary condition of encumbered or not).

So using D&D (any edition) as a guide for Armageddon encumbrance levels isn't really helpful. And I wasn't intending to. I was simply pointing out that the concept of encumbrance is well ingrained in many games, even if the latest iteration of D&D has blown it out to who knows what proportions.

[EDIT]: In no way was this meant to cast aspersions on anyone for playing any edition of D&D (including 5th edition). Just to be absolutely clear.

[Namino]

The average weight of a full suit of plate armor is 55lbs. That isn't from tabletop. That is from reality. Platemails weight in D&D has not changed since AD&D so this isn't a 5th edition thing. 65lb platemail is actually slightly heavier than reality. They didn't grab numbers that diverged from realistic expectation. A great sword in first edition was a whipping 25lbs, which is 5.5x times the weight of the heaviest montante in reality. I'm going to go ahead and challenge the notion of later editions being less realistic. What they are, is far more play tested. The changes that occurred in 5e did so after half a century of playtesting and balance discussions. If you're looking for a good system for an rpg, you could do a lot worse than take your cues from that.

The average weight of a green turtle shell is ~20 lbs. I've published research on that species and spoke to my field researcher colleague who have frequently handled the shells from dead animals. She, a 120lb woman, can lift the shell of a 600lb animal with one hand and move it around. Shell armour would almost certainly be lighter than metal.

Your numbers for armor weights are vastly over inflated, in short.

An average athletic person (most Zalanthan combatants) can carry way more than 60lbs without difficulty. Maybe not when dangling from their arms but when distributed across the body.

Today the average US soldier carries at least 60 pounds of gear, with an extended patrol often doubling that weight. Specialized warfighters, such as Automatic Riflemen, Combat Medics, and Special Operations can see totals much higher. For example, US Army Spc. Craig Brown carries 90 pounds of gear as a SAW gunner, not including a ruck.

So I'm not sure what's going on here.

If you want realism these armor weights are not realistic.

If you want playability these armor weights are difficult when factores into overall encumberance.

If you just don't want things to be altered in any way because you hate change...

[Riev]

Remember: This is not a DnD game. Things that happen in DnD RARELY happen here.

Armor has weight. PROPER ARMOR should have less 'weight' to it for better protection.

So long as 'quality' hide armor protects better and/or weighs less than 'some gortok hides draped over your shoulders', I'd be okay with it. There should be a marked difference between 'shoddy' platemail armor and 'well-crafted' platemail armor. It might lead us back to the problem we've had previously, but with better staff oversight (and this overhaul in general) the ranges can be better defined.

Its not perfect, and preferably I'd rather see heavy-armor stack an attack speed penalty, or some other tradeoff. As it is, the meta-game would be to wear heavy armor for damage reduction while training, but only wear cloths/light leather in 'real' situations because it lets you hit harder and more often.

For the record: I'm on board with stamina drain in combat situations being based on current encumbrance level/armor class.

[Is Friday]

Has anyone already suggested that wearing armor should scale to make your PC hungry and thirsty faster? That is the real danger of wearing armor all the time, imo. This would naturally balance things out. Indies cannot afford the cost of wearing heavy armor all the time and/or they're accomplished foragers.

It adds a layer of interesting tactical decisions and favors heavy armor for city/clanned PCs which I feel is realistic to the setting.

[Brokkr]

It is hard to have some quasi-scientific debate about this when you don't know the specific weight of the materials.  On Zalanthas.  On top of that you might be envisioning an inch thick silt horror breastplate and I might envision it as three or four inches thick.

It doesn't matter.  You have the same ways of dealing with this as you've had in the past.  Namely, your character mixing and matching armor so that they are most protected where they feel most vulnerable.  This change is meant to correlate protection to weight rather than having folks hunt through for things they think are more protective, which may or may not have been the case, for the weight.  Now it is a more consistent trade-off.  That's it.  The tangents folks are going off on are just that, tangential.

[Marauder Moe]

Is cost/quality factored in anywhere?  There's a pretty big difference between well-made armor and poorly-made armor.  Maybe not for raw protective value, but definitely for mobility.

[Shabago]

Is cost/quality factored in anywhere?  There's a pretty big difference between well-made armor and poorly-made armor.  Maybe not for raw protective value, but definitely for mobility.

It's one of the factors, yes.

A gortok hide, for example, being worth 10 sid is never going to be as effective as an inix hide at 100 and an inix hide will not be as effective as a mekillot hide at 400. (*not actual numbers) - There are other factors that further contribute to this, including the quality of the craft and its source.

[Shabago]

We're pulling into the home stretch(*) on the armor, ladies and gents!

1,615 items down, 500 to go!




*Home stretch means I should be able to finish the adjustments and craft recipes within a month of this post. It may, or may not take a bit longer to get all the pending crafts in-game/approved.

[gotdamnmiracle]

Now that we're nearly done with armor I have to ask, do weapons work on this (or a similar) continuum already, or are they also fairly arbitrary like armors were?

[Riev]

We're pulling into the home stretch(*) on the armor, ladies and gents!

1,615 items down, 500 to go!

The more good work you do, the less I can bitch and whine.

That's an INCREDIBLE amount of items to dig into and recategorize. Honestly, good work!

[only_plays_tribals]

(seriously though, awesome)

[gotdamnmiracle]

While there is investigation into various item values and weights are there any plans to catalog and remedy the numerous (currently NPC only) items without crafting recipes?

I have noted in requests, while playing a crafter, the sheer disparity between the variety of sword-type items and the variety of axe-type items (somewhere between ~30:6). This could be easily fixed by giving some of the non-clan-specific npc only weapons and armor crafting recipes. This has the added benefit of more variety for PC loadout than the usual store bought/starting shop bought gear. Additionally, this would help up and coming crafters avoid the problem of bumping into the 5 item limit, primarily because between the spider fang, scrap of cloth, and leather cord there are 10 recipes instead of 2, both of which only for the spider fang alone. This would open up new and interesting items already in game, work well in the economy update, breath life into the crafters we have, give us more options for crappy items to properly RP with (as opposed to Salarr or Kuraci) without requiring me to wear gith gear, and make shop inventory even more spacious!

[Shabago]

We've yet to fully discuss the changes that will take place for weapons, beyond the fact that everything will have a uniformity to it. As it stands, things of like materials will have entirely different affects, costs, weights and we'd like to address that.

[gotdamnmiracle]

We've yet to fully discuss the changes that will take place for weapons, beyond the fact that everything will have a uniformity to it. As it stands, things of like materials will have entirely different affects, costs, weights and we'd like to address that.

Apologies. My last post mentioning weapons may have confused my question. Will there be an effort to add recipes to currently recipe-less NPC items while we are addressing the weight, value, and materials? I assume you would start with armors considering that is what we are currently working on.

[Shabago]

That depends on the NPC in question, and if it's clan-specific or not.

Almost everything will be craftable once we're done with the overhaul, armor or otherwise. If we stick to armor specifically for examples, then a Salarr master crafter will be able to craft a majority of items found in Salarr or indy shops. They would not be able see/craft Kuraci armor, however.

If you're concerned that indy's won't have much to see or craft themselves, I can assure you that won't be the case. There are literally hundreds of crafts being added and are by no means locked behind clan doors entirely.

[gotdamnmiracle]

Shabago, when you're feeling down remember that you are doing god's work.