Armor (Patreon)

This is a real design doc written by the design director and shared with the team. This was not originally intended to be a patreon post. It has been lightly edited to reflect this.

What’s the purpose of Armor in a fantasy RPG?

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Players arrive at the table with archetypes already in mind, and they don’t even know where they got them from. The Paladin wears plate mail. The Thief wears leather. The Monk or Barbarian wear no armor, but are tough as hell. The Wizard wears no armor, and is squishy as heck.

We should not be in the business of trying to talk people out of their fantasy archetypes. In fact we sort of want to meet them. Not, meet the expectations of people who like this one RPG, I mean meet the greater cultural archetypes. Lots of players arrive at the table for the first time having played lots of fantasy games and they expect our game to broadly conform to those expectations.

Customization

Players like customizing their character. They want to believe their choices matter. Some RPGs get around this by presenting the fantasy of “these choices matter” but in fact they mostly don’t. You get basically four kinds of armor; heavy, medium, light, and none. And for most classes, there’s one “correct” choice. Or there are really two choices, the “I can’t afford the best choice yet” choice, and the best choice and this matters almost not at all, since money doesn't really matter.

Mechanical Benefit

And, of course, players expect armor to do something. They expect at least two things; armor somehow protects you, with heavier armor protecting you more, and armor somehow makes you more bulky. Heavier armor somehow disadvantages you more than light armor.

So it’s a tradeoff and people “get it.” Rogues wear light armor, and thereby gain more benefit from their dex. Paladins wear heavy armor with higher AC but gain no benefit from dex.

Of course, that sort of balances out, doesn’t it? In a game where “bulkiness” is just “less dex” and dex is AC, there isn’t a lot of difference between a high dex Rogue and a heavy armor Paladin. They just tweak the values so the Paladin’s value is higher to make the paladin more of a tank.

The game assumes, in other words, that playing a paladin is the choice to play a tank. So it awards those players a “tank bonus” to AC, they just hide it in their armor rules.

Most games don't seem to take seriously the idea of a Paladin in Light Armor. That PC would face an uphill battle, because they’re losing their Tank Bonus to AC, but not gaining any commensurate benefit, since Paladins don’t usually have high Dex.

How Armor Should Work

It seems to me that we could easily meet all these criteria if we boil armor down to: you sacrifice movement, for protection. The opposite is also true, sacrifice protection, and you gain movement.

Additionally, in a Heroic Fantasy game where movement and positioning matter, where characters are routinely being thrown around (thereby reducing the ‘movement only really matters in the first round, then everyone’s basically where they want to be’ phenomenon) heavy armor making it harder for people to move you around (ie reducing forced movement) suddenly makes a difference in a way it hasn’t in other games. Sure it slows you down, but sometimes that’s good. A tank becomes literally harder to move because of their heavy armor. Tanks are now not just hard to kill, they’re also sticky.

If armor protects you by reducing incoming damage but weighs you down (less movement) then what armor your PC chooses becomes more of a playstyle issue. A Shadow can wear light armor, sure, the safe choice. But if they want to be more mobile, they could wear no armor. If they want to be more of a brawler, more melee, more in your face, they wear medium armor. But what about a Shadow in plate?

One of the things people didn’t appreciate about 4E was: you couldn’t really make a bad character. Unless you didn’t understand the choices you were making.

So Proficiencies help us there and this may be why proficiencies work the way they do currently. We know that a Shadow in Heavy Armor is gonna have a bad time, because that class is all about mobility. If we said “anyone can use any armor” then you get some weird edge cases where we’d be letting the players ruin their own fun.

So a Censor could wear no armor, that might make more sense than a Shadow in Heavy Armor. But if the Censor is about being a Tank, then maybe they have abilities that use their armor in a way a Shadow doesn’t. So maybe they don’t have Light Armor proficiency. You can’t ruin your own fun. Unless the design of the Censor makes sense for a character in light or no armor. Probably the Censor is explicitly a tank? We’ll see.

Magic

Now armor has two qualities and they are mechanically balanced against each other. Which means magic can break that rule. Light armor that protects more. Heavy armor that grants more mobility!

This seems like fertile ground to explore, we should test this.