Heavy Armor Master is a nothingburger and everybody knows it. Knocking three piddling damage off the top of nonmagical weapon attacks accomplishes all of zilcho outside Tier 1 play. Even if the DM is willing to be generous and let you have that three-point damage reduction against environmental hazards too, there's simply not enough time in the day for a character to take enough instances of damage for three points off each instance to be worth a damn thing, let alone an entire feat slot.
I want Heavy Armor Master to be good. I really do. But that's not the world we live in.
Heavy Armor Master is a nothingburger and everybody knows it. Knocking three piddling damage off the top of nonmagical weapon attacks accomplishes all of zilcho outside Tier 1 play. Even if the DM is willing to be generous and let you have that three-point damage reduction against environmental hazards too, there's simply not enough time in the day for a character to take enough instances of damage for three points off each instance to be worth a damn thing, let alone an entire feat slot.
I want Heavy Armor Master to be good. I really do. But that's not the world we live in.
It would be primo against Magic Missiles ;)
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"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
HAM would be primo against Magic Missile...if it didn't specify that it only reduces damage from nonmagical weapon attacks. Magic is not affected in any way, and by RAW neither are adventuring bumps and scrapes It only works against weapon strikes. Sadness.
@Kina: ...cool? o_o
Not actually sure what you're talking about, but good find!
PCs are supposed to be that easy to hit. As is, PCs are almost impossible to kill unless the DM is actively trying, or doesn’t know how to balance things properly yet. They may no be supposed to die easily, but they are supposed to get the snot kicked out of them every day. Every adventuring day that includes heavy combat should be like Die Hard. Light combat day, whatever, no big deal. But a combat heavy day should be brutal. If it isn’t hard fought, it isn’t hard won. And if it isn’t hard won, it isn’t worth it. The players should feel like their characters are constantly loosing until the moment they win. It should be terrifying for them. It should feel like they could die at any moment, but somehow survive anyway. It should be epic. That’s the point.
If every fight is a walkover with pillows for weapons, then it’s a yawnfest. It should feel like cannons are hurling flaming chainsaws at them the whole time, because that is frickin’ awesome! That... that is where legends are born....
See, the problem I was having was that as a DM, typically you ease up on the damage when your PC's start getting a little too close to death, especially when they're using lvl 1's, but up until now, I didn't know there was a means to discreetly fake some attack rolls by monsters who were just decimating my players, even the lowest of the low class ones, so the dice ruled. Two fighters had to gang up on a single goblin just to take it down because the dice just said no and goblins are GROSSLY overpowered if you follow the core rules and play it straight. One of them almost died. TO A GOBLIN. Now I can discreetly adjust damage and attack rolls without making it feel fake or patronizing.
I am in agreement with Yurei. Armour just doesn't feel like armour. A level 1 fighter with scale mail and shield should look at a kobold or a goblin sneering at him and think "Great, I just polished this today, now it's going to get twink blood on it." not "Man, I sure hope that green 6th grader doesn't get too rough with me! I paid 50 GP for essentially tinfoil!"
Armour is no joke. Take a watch of those insane Russian medieval MMA videos on Youtube and see how hard it is to hurt someone in full armour or the tests done to determine exactly how arrow-proof (and in some cases, bullet proof) real combat plate or even simple gambeson (cloth armour) is. See how hard it was to actually get through the average footman's helmet. It's hard to get through even for fit, trained swordsmen, but using strict D&D rules, paying 750 GP for a half-plate suit gives you 15 AC. That means a kobold or a goblin, who have no strength bonuses to speak of, who are smaller, weaker, more fragile than humans, have a 45% chance to score damage on you despite the protection. Even a level 1 fighter in full plate with 18 AC still has a roughly 1 in 3 chance of being hit for 50% of their hit points from a SINGLE dagger attack by some little green punk that can't weigh more than 40 kg.
Does that seem right to you? Cause it seems like BS to me, especially if you spent 1500 GP. It SHOULD be a minor miracle for a 1/4 CR monster to be able to do anything to even the greenest adventurer wearing full plate. A 30% chance is not insignificant, especially if you're dealing with 3 of them. Mathematically, one of them is probably going to make it through before they all die, even though there's almost no way for them to do any appreciable damage unless the fighter is completely ignoring them and admiring their own reflection.
A single knight in full battle dress could (and did, regularly, because they were ***** in real life) easily cut down half a dozen rebellious peasants with hand axes and spears and take no appreciable damage. It would take an entire gang of child-sized goblins to even pose a remote threat, even with them all working together as the knight could just wade into them swinging away with a long sword and there's not much they could do to stop him as he cut through them like wheat. Their only hope would be to swarm and MAYBE ONE would land a single lucky, superficial stab before getting cut to pieces.
Simply put, armour, even mundane, non-magical armour, should matter more.
And Goblin Slayer is a terrible, terrible anime with terrible, terrible writing.
Oh, nevermind. It's still clear I'm not really rolling the actual roll.
Some form of damage reduction or threshold would make armor more realistic, but at the cost of greater complexity. And that's most likely the reason it only exists as a hard-line threshold in walls and boats which you probably aren't smacking with a sword too much.
Heavy Armor Master is a nothingburger and everybody knows it. Knocking three piddling damage off the top of nonmagical weapon attacks accomplishes all of zilcho outside Tier 1 play. Even if the DM is willing to be generous and let you have that three-point damage reduction against environmental hazards too, there's simply not enough time in the day for a character to take enough instances of damage for three points off each instance to be worth a damn thing, let alone an entire feat slot.
I want Heavy Armor Master to be good. I really do. But that's not the world we live in.
I was saying that that is 5e's attempt at "It hit me but my armor absorbed some of the damage." But it is good in the extremely specific case of a marilith, where it prevents up to 18 points per round if I read HAM correctly.
HAM would be primo against Magic Missile...if it didn't specify that it only reduces damage from nonmagical weapon attacks. Magic is not affected in any way, and by RAW neither are adventuring bumps and scrapes It only works against weapon strikes. Sadness.
@Kina: ...cool? o_o
Not actually sure what you're talking about, but good find!
See, I'd be good with HAM resisting 3 damage off of any one source per round in addition to all attacks from nonmagical attacks. Like, I mean, just let it eat the 3 damage so it's worth it. This way, even if you are getting hammered by a whatever for three magical attacks per turn, at least you're loosing less. Over time that would add up. or maybe -3 from all nonmagical attacks and -1 from all other sources. something.
One thing to consider is how abtract the whole hp system is - if your guy gets stabbed 8 times with a sword, they are fighting-fit until the 9th, which instantly incapacitates them.
Rather than giving a bonus to AC for wearing a helmet, instead you can give them the exchange of -2 to perception but advantage on death saving throws. "Helmets save lives" is accurate, but that doesn't necessarily keep you fighting longer - you are more likely to hear "he was knocked out, but if it weren't for the helmet he'd have been killed" than "it should have killed me, but thanks to the helmet I didn't even notice it happen"!
This would also have to be balanced to not work if the final blow is from magic, as helmets won't save you from poison!
One thing to consider is how abtract the whole hp system is - if your guy gets stabbed 8 times with a sword, they are fighting-fit until the 9th, which instantly incapacitates them.
Rather than giving a bonus to AC for wearing a helmet, instead you can give them the exchange of -2 to perception but advantage on death saving throws. "Helmets save lives" is accurate, but that doesn't necessarily keep you fighting longer - you are more likely to hear "he was knocked out, but if it weren't for the helmet he'd have been killed" than "it should have killed me, but thanks to the helmet I didn't even notice it happen"!
This would also have to be balanced to not work if the final blow is from magic, as helmets won't save you from poison!
I do like that, though I'd expand the advantage saves to stuns and blinds as well. After all, if someone's trying to blind you with say, powder or throwing pocket sand and you've got a helmet on, it's way easier to just tilt your head to protect your eyes than having to raise your hand to cover your face.
Well, now I realize that this thread has essentially turned from 'helmets get no love' to 'I don't have a DM screen because my play is in PBP and the dice are the dice and they are BRUTAL to level 1's' because either I'm doing the 'dice fudging' command wrong or there is no such function here. I've tried to puzzle it out but when you mouse over my dice rolls, it's clear that they're not real, so far as I know, there's no way for me to discreetly pull the brakes on encounter difficulty if the dice just don't want to let my players live.
So, in light of that... here's my new proposed homebrew rules (not necessarily all used at once) for protecting players from deadly dice because you're forced to play the game straight:
Armour
Let's face it, armour in D&D as written is a joke. For how little it improves your AC unless you're wearing the very heaviest, it really just doesn't seem to WORK as intended, certainly not how it works in real life. One option to improve PC longevity if you have players who are offended by the concept that the DM is 'cheating' by hiding dice rolls is to simply have armour absorb 1/3 (rounded down) of their AC in damage automatically unless their opponent has advantage or lands a critical strike. It's the only way to make armour make sense but be fair without resorting to GURPS level rule mongering, so a 1/4 CR low-level baddie essentially has almost no chance of penetrating full plate without a crit or actual battle tactics because even if they land a hit, they simply can't do enough damage to actually penetrate. This means that 1/4 CR monsters really will need to attack in groups to be a threat to well-protected PCs who spent their money on sensible things like protection, even the classes who can only wear light armour will have some much-needed damage mitigation.
Enemy armour does not, however, mitigate damage for them unless they are unique adversaries.
Helmets can be worn by any class and are divided up into 2 categories: half-helms and full helms. Half helms don't increase AC and don't limit your perception/intuition/investigation rolls while you're wearing it, but they do offer you advantage to save vs stuns of non-magic origins and will negate the extra damage of critical strikes (but will be knocked off). They protect the skull dome, but not the face. (yes, IamSposta, I know that the face is technically part of the skull, don't 'um actually' me about this, I don't care. This is for simplicity's sake.) Half-helms include things like plated head bands, skull caps and kettle hats as examples, but can also include other head dress as per the DM's discretion. Full helms offer +1 AC but limit your perception/intuition/investigation bonuses to +2 or incur a -2 penalty if you don't already have at least +2, making you easier to sneak up on, and also add disadvantage to stealth. They also have anti-crit benefits but also offer additional advantage to save vs blindness and stun of non-magical origin.
Monster tuning
This rule could be a headache for DM's. Every monster you use, you'll have to look at and determine their combat bonuses by their stats instead of what's listed in the manual. This means that all enemies under 12 STR get NO attack or damage bonus whatsoever. Any bonuses they get are limited to their ability scores, and that's it. Challenge can be increased from numbers instead, but to keep things from turning into a total slog with dozens of attack rolls needing to be made every turn with the players just waiting to act(I see you, 2nd edition and 3.5e), enemies may attack in groups all at once rather than individually if they have a numbers advantage. If they do so, up to 3 enemies attack a single character and get +2 to hit for every extra attacker, but only get 1 attack roll between them. Grouped enemies get a damage bonus of +2 per attacker on a successful hit. If they whiff, they whiff. This means that average 1/4 CR enemies, attacking at once, get +4 to hit in a group of three and +4 to damage. Way more survivable for low-level players and they don't feel like they're having to dogpile onto a single 6th grader to bring it down because they're weak little babies, but enemies in large numbers are still a very real threat.
Player tuning
Probably the simplest way, if the least interesting, of mitigating the 'dice are law' harshness of D&D combat. Players determine their ability scores by rolling 5D6 and dropping 2 or give players 36 ability point buys rather than 27 with no ability score ceiling, or making the standard array 18, 16, 16, 13, 12, 11. This basically means that your players will all be really outstanding with almost no weaknesses, however, so it makes for really uninteresting characters.
HP Tuning
Yet another way to give players more of a chance to survive. Your HP basically represents plot armour. When you hit 0, you're not unconscious or even dying, but you've finally got a serious wound. Your character is still standing, however, and can go into negative HP as far as their regular max HP. They've entered a 'desperation' state. They're definitely hurt and will need medical attention FAST but still have enough left to fight back. All attacks against them are now at disadvantage and they have advantage to all saves as the wounded PC's focus is now on defense. Their wounds also, however, give them disadvantage to attack rolls and spells but get a damage bonus equal to whatever CON bonus they have on top of their regular damage bonus as their will to live kicks in.They can stay standing for half their CON in turns before falling unconscious due to shock. No death saves need to be made.
When the PC is brought down to more than their max HP in negatives, THEN they go down and need to make death saves. PCs can only be instantly killed if an enemy inflicts a coup de grace on a dying, helpless PC, otherwise there is always a chance to save them unless they've been disintegrated.
Any of those options help make D&D a bit more survivable and less frustrating for players if you're forced to play with the dice being absolute. Of course, all of this is pointless if there is a DM screen option available or your players just trust that you're making rolls they can't see, but I would love the ability to spoof dice rolls. The coding for that, however, seems like it would be a massive pain.
@Kina, I think your impression of the current armour system is a bit pessimistic. no armour in D&D is 10+ dexterity - IE, you have an average chance to hit, modified by how well you dodge. armour improves this - meaning if you don't quite dodge well enough, the armour might take it instead. Heavy armours rely on taking the hit rather than avoiding the brunt of it, so don't add dex.
As for plate armour being invulnerable to weak foes, that's A: not great for a game, particularly one based firmly on the principle that you can try to do anything, and B: It's inaccurate. Plate armour cannot protect 100% of you, and is a lot more effective at defending against sweeping attacks. Give an agile, small creature a sharp dagger and they will likely be able to get it between the plates and stab them. do a big swing with a greatsword, and it's likely to glance off. Use a warpick, and they might as well not be wearing armour at all - warpicks punch through armour like it isn't there.
If you're after realistic, you want to make armours relate to the weapon types. Plate armour would be very useful against slashing, moderately useful against bludgeoning and less useful against piercing. I would also add "armour piercing" to some weapons and ammo types - a square-tipped arrow will punch clean through armour plate, but a blade-tipped arrow won't. It's all very complicated and needlessly so. by the time you go that realistic, you might as well make 2 hits kill you - first one wounds, second kills. maybe 3 if you're Boromir.
Now, this abstraction - the fact that you will be dodging as opposed to tanking hits - makes for a new look on the helmet thing. I certainly think it lends itself to advantages on death saves rather than increased AC. It certainly shouldn't increase AC unless you're wearing heavy armour - relying on dodging the hit whilst also wearing a helmet is very contradictory.
And you're back to if you want that kind of crunch, you should look into a different game.
Somebody in the past took offense at that statement, like I was saying you're not allowed to play D&D or something. But with all the changes, it's closer to being something else already and not D&D.
To address your plate should make you a tank but only if you're a PC and not a monster, that makes no sense.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
And you're back to if you want that kind of crunch, you should look into a different game.
my point being that adding extra armor stats to a helmet when the concept of a helmet is already built in is kind of opening a can of complicated worms. if you want to get that detailed, there's way more issues you should think about.
here you see that helmets give you absolutely no protection against something as simple as a war hammer. https://youtu.be/qhknaG9ifbs?t=105
one hit, you're dead, that simple.
Well, if you're totally still, yeah, sure. That's basically a helpless opponent and that's a simple coup de grace. I guarantee you however it's not easy to hit a living target with something that large and heavy that won't simply be a glancing blow until you tire out the one in armour first.
@Kina, I think your impression of the current armour system is a bit pessimistic. no armour in D&D is 10+ dexterity - IE, you have an average chance to hit, modified by how well you dodge. armour improves this - meaning if you don't quite dodge well enough, the armour might take it instead. Heavy armours rely on taking the hit rather than avoiding the brunt of it, so don't add dex.
As for plate armour being invulnerable to weak foes, that's A: not great for a game, particularly one based firmly on the principle that you can try to do anything, and B: It's inaccurate. Plate armour cannot protect 100% of you, and is a lot more effective at defending against sweeping attacks. Give an agile, small creature a sharp dagger and they will likely be able to get it between the plates and stab them. do a big swing with a greatsword, and it's likely to glance off. Use a warpick, and they might as well not be wearing armour at all - warpicks punch through armour like it isn't there.
As I wrote before, the damage absorption only applies on attacks that DON'T have advantage or are critical strikes, so sneak attacks from behind are exempt from the damage soak. This means that low-level enemies will HAVE to use group tactics in order to get the better of someone in full plate armour. You know, that thing that costs a blooming fortune, because otherwise, there is almost no chance that a kobold would manage to be lucky enough to land an effective strike on a trained fighter with that kind of protection in open combat. Again, take a watch of medieval MMA videos and you'll see that fully armoured fighters are not hindered by it in mobility whatsoever, so a small and agile creature would be cut down before it ever got close enough to use that dagger. If armour kept fighters from being effective, they wouldn't have worn it.
Without that, bear this in mind: a 4-foot tall goblin that weighs 40 kg, about the same as an average 12 year old, has +4 to hit and +2 to damage. That means that someone in full plate with an AC of 18 still has a 6-in-20 chance of taking not insignificant damage. A 30% chance. Multiply that likelihood when you're surrounded by 3 of them and it is definitely NOT worth the 1500GP cost. Scale mail, an affordable option for low-level players, offers 14+dex AC. If your character DOESN'T have good DEX, that means that goblin, despite your armour, still has a 50% chance of inflicting damage. A coin flip. Again, multiply that by additional foes against a single target and there's almost no chance of that PC getting out alive using dice-as-is.
In fact, let me show you just how brutal dice-as-is can be when the DM doesn't have the option to fudge rolls in the player's favor:
Simulation (round 1):
a level 1 fighter is caught refilling water canteens and momentarily separated from his group. He has +5 to hit and a great weapon fighting style and scale mail armour, no DEX bonuses. 10 HP. He's ambushed by 2 goblins. Due to a bad initiative roll, he moves last.
Goblin 1 attack: 13 Goblin 2 attack: 21 damage: 4
Fighter down to 3 HP. Fighter can't disengage without taking 2 reaction attacks. Fighter fights back.
19 miss. Goblins have a stupidly high AC.
Goblin1 attack: 22 damage: 8
Fighter down in 2 turns with almost no chance of escape.
Simulation 2:
Goblin attack 1: 21 Goblin 2 attack: 22
PC attack: 10
no damage turn 1.
Goblin 1 attack: 15 goblin 2 attack: 8
PC attack: 25
No damage round 2. Fighter probably survives by calling for help because he can't take down 2 green 6th graders by himself.
Simulation 3:
G1 attack: 9 G2 attack: 17
PC attack: 10 (Assuming insta-kill)
G2 attack: 9 PC attack: 7
In only 1 of 3 simulations does the fighter actually win on his own merit, and he had to get a crit to do so on the most basic of basic baddies. Seeing a pattern?
I think a lot of the problem here is not so much the fact that the D&D 5e armor system sucks (it does, a lot, but that's not the problem here), but rather the fact that D&D traditionally handles very low-level gameplay EXTREMELY poorly.
A first-level wizard is not likely to avoid a simple goblin striking once. Wizards don't wear armor and generally have middling-at-best Dexterity - there aren't many attack rolls that don't hit a first-level wizard. A single goblin can have a comfortable 80+% chance to strike a first-level wizard in combat, and if that goblin does make that hit? There's a very good chance the wizard goes down from that one, single hit. One goblin hits the wizard one single time, which the goblin is almost guaranteed to do? And boom - wizard down, wizard dead next turn, roll new character time.
The fragility of first-level PCs, especially lightly armored ones, is infamous, legendary, and has spawned countless terrible memes. A first-level fighter in scale armor takes gobbo hits less often...but he still only takes maybe two hits tops before he's also on the ground and dead next turn. Some stories love that, the idea that your character is nothing special and can be extinguished by a single errant blade stroke without any chance to do anything about it just like the helpless villagers you're striving so hard and so pointlessly to protect. Some stories...don't. But in either case, armor is a finicky and unreliable defense that doesn't really protect you for snot. The way D&D characters gain resilience is not by becoming difficult to harm, it's by becoming able to absorb a ludicrous amount of harm without...well, harm. And that requires you to gain a ****billion HP, which you only do by leveling up.
The whole system feels weird and unnatural when you really think about it, and it means that first and second-level gameplay just doesn't really work. The DM has to either handwave it or fudge pretty much every roll they make to ensure their party actually lives to level 3, where the game starts making some faint degree of sense again.
Maybe someone can figure out a helmet rule to make that less of an issue? But really, this is a debate between people who hate crunch and want a simple, super-abstract armor system that lets them Theater Of The Mind(C) combat quickly without having to bother with unimportant crap like details, and people who want enough crunch in their combat engine that they don't get crunched and lose a fourth PC in the same session to the same goblin kicking them in the same shin with a rusty leather boot, giving them Kryptonian Turbo Tetanus and watching them dissolve into a puddle of slime because first-level D&D is just so terrible.
I think it's just easiest to assume that a Helmet is a part of any set of Heavy or Medium Armor. If you take it off as an action, that's a -1 to the AC that the armor provides.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Heavy Armor Master is a nothingburger and everybody knows it. Knocking three piddling damage off the top of nonmagical weapon attacks accomplishes all of zilcho outside Tier 1 play. Even if the DM is willing to be generous and let you have that three-point damage reduction against environmental hazards too, there's simply not enough time in the day for a character to take enough instances of damage for three points off each instance to be worth a damn thing, let alone an entire feat slot.
I want Heavy Armor Master to be good. I really do. But that's not the world we live in.
Please do not contact or message me.
It would be primo against Magic Missiles ;)
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
OH MY GOD I JUST found the fudge dice commands for the forum dice roller and now I have the red face.
.....
Yes, maybe I don't understand how to use them, but I found them!
DM, professional illustrator and comic artist, suffering from severe spinal stenosis, married, middle aged, and nerdy.
HAM would be primo against Magic Missile...if it didn't specify that it only reduces damage from nonmagical weapon attacks. Magic is not affected in any way, and by RAW neither are adventuring bumps and scrapes It only works against weapon strikes. Sadness.
@Kina: ...cool? o_o
Not actually sure what you're talking about, but good find!
Please do not contact or message me.
See, the problem I was having was that as a DM, typically you ease up on the damage when your PC's start getting a little too close to death, especially when they're using lvl 1's, but up until now, I didn't know there was a means to discreetly fake some attack rolls by monsters who were just decimating my players, even the lowest of the low class ones, so the dice ruled. Two fighters had to gang up on a single goblin just to take it down because the dice just said no and goblins are GROSSLY overpowered if you follow the core rules and play it straight. One of them almost died. TO A GOBLIN. Now I can discreetly adjust damage and attack rolls without making it feel fake or patronizing.
DM, professional illustrator and comic artist, suffering from severe spinal stenosis, married, middle aged, and nerdy.
I am in agreement with Yurei. Armour just doesn't feel like armour. A level 1 fighter with scale mail and shield should look at a kobold or a goblin sneering at him and think "Great, I just polished this today, now it's going to get twink blood on it." not "Man, I sure hope that green 6th grader doesn't get too rough with me! I paid 50 GP for essentially tinfoil!"
Armour is no joke. Take a watch of those insane Russian medieval MMA videos on Youtube and see how hard it is to hurt someone in full armour or the tests done to determine exactly how arrow-proof (and in some cases, bullet proof) real combat plate or even simple gambeson (cloth armour) is. See how hard it was to actually get through the average footman's helmet. It's hard to get through even for fit, trained swordsmen, but using strict D&D rules, paying 750 GP for a half-plate suit gives you 15 AC. That means a kobold or a goblin, who have no strength bonuses to speak of, who are smaller, weaker, more fragile than humans, have a 45% chance to score damage on you despite the protection. Even a level 1 fighter in full plate with 18 AC still has a roughly 1 in 3 chance of being hit for 50% of their hit points from a SINGLE dagger attack by some little green punk that can't weigh more than 40 kg.
Does that seem right to you? Cause it seems like BS to me, especially if you spent 1500 GP. It SHOULD be a minor miracle for a 1/4 CR monster to be able to do anything to even the greenest adventurer wearing full plate. A 30% chance is not insignificant, especially if you're dealing with 3 of them. Mathematically, one of them is probably going to make it through before they all die, even though there's almost no way for them to do any appreciable damage unless the fighter is completely ignoring them and admiring their own reflection.
A single knight in full battle dress could (and did, regularly, because they were ***** in real life) easily cut down half a dozen rebellious peasants with hand axes and spears and take no appreciable damage. It would take an entire gang of child-sized goblins to even pose a remote threat, even with them all working together as the knight could just wade into them swinging away with a long sword and there's not much they could do to stop him as he cut through them like wheat. Their only hope would be to swarm and MAYBE ONE would land a single lucky, superficial stab before getting cut to pieces.
Simply put, armour, even mundane, non-magical armour, should matter more.
And Goblin Slayer is a terrible, terrible anime with terrible, terrible writing.
Oh, nevermind. It's still clear I'm not really rolling the actual roll.
DM, professional illustrator and comic artist, suffering from severe spinal stenosis, married, middle aged, and nerdy.
Some form of damage reduction or threshold would make armor more realistic, but at the cost of greater complexity. And that's most likely the reason it only exists as a hard-line threshold in walls and boats which you probably aren't smacking with a sword too much.
I was saying that that is 5e's attempt at "It hit me but my armor absorbed some of the damage." But it is good in the extremely specific case of a marilith, where it prevents up to 18 points per round if I read HAM correctly.
I have a weird sense of humor.
I also make maps.(That's a link)
See, I'd be good with HAM resisting 3 damage off of any one source per round in addition to all attacks from nonmagical attacks. Like, I mean, just let it eat the 3 damage so it's worth it. This way, even if you are getting hammered by a whatever for three magical attacks per turn, at least you're loosing less. Over time that would add up. or maybe -3 from all nonmagical attacks and -1 from all other sources. something.
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One thing to consider is how abtract the whole hp system is - if your guy gets stabbed 8 times with a sword, they are fighting-fit until the 9th, which instantly incapacitates them.
Rather than giving a bonus to AC for wearing a helmet, instead you can give them the exchange of -2 to perception but advantage on death saving throws. "Helmets save lives" is accurate, but that doesn't necessarily keep you fighting longer - you are more likely to hear "he was knocked out, but if it weren't for the helmet he'd have been killed" than "it should have killed me, but thanks to the helmet I didn't even notice it happen"!
This would also have to be balanced to not work if the final blow is from magic, as helmets won't save you from poison!
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I do like that, though I'd expand the advantage saves to stuns and blinds as well. After all, if someone's trying to blind you with say, powder or throwing pocket sand and you've got a helmet on, it's way easier to just tilt your head to protect your eyes than having to raise your hand to cover your face.
Well, now I realize that this thread has essentially turned from 'helmets get no love' to 'I don't have a DM screen because my play is in PBP and the dice are the dice and they are BRUTAL to level 1's' because either I'm doing the 'dice fudging' command wrong or there is no such function here. I've tried to puzzle it out but when you mouse over my dice rolls, it's clear that they're not real, so far as I know, there's no way for me to discreetly pull the brakes on encounter difficulty if the dice just don't want to let my players live.
So, in light of that... here's my new proposed homebrew rules (not necessarily all used at once) for protecting players from deadly dice because you're forced to play the game straight:
Armour
Let's face it, armour in D&D as written is a joke. For how little it improves your AC unless you're wearing the very heaviest, it really just doesn't seem to WORK as intended, certainly not how it works in real life. One option to improve PC longevity if you have players who are offended by the concept that the DM is 'cheating' by hiding dice rolls is to simply have armour absorb 1/3 (rounded down) of their AC in damage automatically unless their opponent has advantage or lands a critical strike. It's the only way to make armour make sense but be fair without resorting to GURPS level rule mongering, so a 1/4 CR low-level baddie essentially has almost no chance of penetrating full plate without a crit or actual battle tactics because even if they land a hit, they simply can't do enough damage to actually penetrate. This means that 1/4 CR monsters really will need to attack in groups to be a threat to well-protected PCs who spent their money on sensible things like protection, even the classes who can only wear light armour will have some much-needed damage mitigation.
Enemy armour does not, however, mitigate damage for them unless they are unique adversaries.
Helmets can be worn by any class and are divided up into 2 categories: half-helms and full helms. Half helms don't increase AC and don't limit your perception/intuition/investigation rolls while you're wearing it, but they do offer you advantage to save vs stuns of non-magic origins and will negate the extra damage of critical strikes (but will be knocked off). They protect the skull dome, but not the face. (yes, IamSposta, I know that the face is technically part of the skull, don't 'um actually' me about this, I don't care. This is for simplicity's sake.)
Half-helms include things like plated head bands, skull caps and kettle hats as examples, but can also include other head dress as per the DM's discretion. Full helms offer +1 AC but limit your perception/intuition/investigation bonuses to +2 or incur a -2 penalty if you don't already have at least +2, making you easier to sneak up on, and also add disadvantage to stealth. They also have anti-crit benefits but also offer additional advantage to save vs blindness and stun of non-magical origin.
Monster tuning
This rule could be a headache for DM's. Every monster you use, you'll have to look at and determine their combat bonuses by their stats instead of what's listed in the manual. This means that all enemies under 12 STR get NO attack or damage bonus whatsoever. Any bonuses they get are limited to their ability scores, and that's it.
Challenge can be increased from numbers instead, but to keep things from turning into a total slog with dozens of attack rolls needing to be made every turn with the players just waiting to act(I see you, 2nd edition and 3.5e), enemies may attack in groups all at once rather than individually if they have a numbers advantage. If they do so, up to 3 enemies attack a single character and get +2 to hit for every extra attacker, but only get 1 attack roll between them. Grouped enemies get a damage bonus of +2 per attacker on a successful hit. If they whiff, they whiff. This means that average 1/4 CR enemies, attacking at once, get +4 to hit in a group of three and +4 to damage. Way more survivable for low-level players and they don't feel like they're having to dogpile onto a single 6th grader to bring it down because they're weak little babies, but enemies in large numbers are still a very real threat.
Player tuning
Probably the simplest way, if the least interesting, of mitigating the 'dice are law' harshness of D&D combat. Players determine their ability scores by rolling 5D6 and dropping 2 or give players 36 ability point buys rather than 27 with no ability score ceiling, or making the standard array 18, 16, 16, 13, 12, 11. This basically means that your players will all be really outstanding with almost no weaknesses, however, so it makes for really uninteresting characters.
HP Tuning
Yet another way to give players more of a chance to survive. Your HP basically represents plot armour. When you hit 0, you're not unconscious or even dying, but you've finally got a serious wound. Your character is still standing, however, and can go into negative HP as far as their regular max HP. They've entered a 'desperation' state. They're definitely hurt and will need medical attention FAST but still have enough left to fight back. All attacks against them are now at disadvantage and they have advantage to all saves as the wounded PC's focus is now on defense. Their wounds also, however, give them disadvantage to attack rolls and spells but get a damage bonus equal to whatever CON bonus they have on top of their regular damage bonus as their will to live kicks in.They can stay standing for half their CON in turns before falling unconscious due to shock. No death saves need to be made.
When the PC is brought down to more than their max HP in negatives, THEN they go down and need to make death saves. PCs can only be instantly killed if an enemy inflicts a coup de grace on a dying, helpless PC, otherwise there is always a chance to save them unless they've been disintegrated.
Any of those options help make D&D a bit more survivable and less frustrating for players if you're forced to play with the dice being absolute. Of course, all of this is pointless if there is a DM screen option available or your players just trust that you're making rolls they can't see, but I would love the ability to spoof dice rolls. The coding for that, however, seems like it would be a massive pain.
DM, professional illustrator and comic artist, suffering from severe spinal stenosis, married, middle aged, and nerdy.
@Kina, I think your impression of the current armour system is a bit pessimistic. no armour in D&D is 10+ dexterity - IE, you have an average chance to hit, modified by how well you dodge. armour improves this - meaning if you don't quite dodge well enough, the armour might take it instead. Heavy armours rely on taking the hit rather than avoiding the brunt of it, so don't add dex.
As for plate armour being invulnerable to weak foes, that's A: not great for a game, particularly one based firmly on the principle that you can try to do anything, and B: It's inaccurate. Plate armour cannot protect 100% of you, and is a lot more effective at defending against sweeping attacks. Give an agile, small creature a sharp dagger and they will likely be able to get it between the plates and stab them. do a big swing with a greatsword, and it's likely to glance off. Use a warpick, and they might as well not be wearing armour at all - warpicks punch through armour like it isn't there.
If you're after realistic, you want to make armours relate to the weapon types. Plate armour would be very useful against slashing, moderately useful against bludgeoning and less useful against piercing. I would also add "armour piercing" to some weapons and ammo types - a square-tipped arrow will punch clean through armour plate, but a blade-tipped arrow won't. It's all very complicated and needlessly so. by the time you go that realistic, you might as well make 2 hits kill you - first one wounds, second kills. maybe 3 if you're Boromir.
Now, this abstraction - the fact that you will be dodging as opposed to tanking hits - makes for a new look on the helmet thing. I certainly think it lends itself to advantages on death saves rather than increased AC. It certainly shouldn't increase AC unless you're wearing heavy armour - relying on dodging the hit whilst also wearing a helmet is very contradictory.
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here you see that helmets give you absolutely no protection against something as simple as a war hammer. https://youtu.be/qhknaG9ifbs?t=105
one hit, you're dead, that simple.
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And you're back to if you want that kind of crunch, you should look into a different game.
Somebody in the past took offense at that statement, like I was saying you're not allowed to play D&D or something. But with all the changes, it's closer to being something else already and not D&D.
To address your plate should make you a tank but only if you're a PC and not a monster, that makes no sense.
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my point being that adding extra armor stats to a helmet when the concept of a helmet is already built in is kind of opening a can of complicated worms. if you want to get that detailed, there's way more issues you should think about.
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Well, if you're totally still, yeah, sure. That's basically a helpless opponent and that's a simple coup de grace. I guarantee you however it's not easy to hit a living target with something that large and heavy that won't simply be a glancing blow until you tire out the one in armour first.
Counterpoint: https://youtu.be/G4Umh-pa7FA?t=385 showing what can happen if you don't hit perfectly.
As I wrote before, the damage absorption only applies on attacks that DON'T have advantage or are critical strikes, so sneak attacks from behind are exempt from the damage soak. This means that low-level enemies will HAVE to use group tactics in order to get the better of someone in full plate armour. You know, that thing that costs a blooming fortune, because otherwise, there is almost no chance that a kobold would manage to be lucky enough to land an effective strike on a trained fighter with that kind of protection in open combat. Again, take a watch of medieval MMA videos and you'll see that fully armoured fighters are not hindered by it in mobility whatsoever, so a small and agile creature would be cut down before it ever got close enough to use that dagger. If armour kept fighters from being effective, they wouldn't have worn it.
Without that, bear this in mind: a 4-foot tall goblin that weighs 40 kg, about the same as an average 12 year old, has +4 to hit and +2 to damage. That means that someone in full plate with an AC of 18 still has a 6-in-20 chance of taking not insignificant damage. A 30% chance. Multiply that likelihood when you're surrounded by 3 of them and it is definitely NOT worth the 1500GP cost. Scale mail, an affordable option for low-level players, offers 14+dex AC. If your character DOESN'T have good DEX, that means that goblin, despite your armour, still has a 50% chance of inflicting damage. A coin flip. Again, multiply that by additional foes against a single target and there's almost no chance of that PC getting out alive using dice-as-is.
DM, professional illustrator and comic artist, suffering from severe spinal stenosis, married, middle aged, and nerdy.
Dude, there's no way a goblin should have +4 to hit and +2 to damage when it has 8 STR. Don't give me that. They already have unfair advantages.
DM, professional illustrator and comic artist, suffering from severe spinal stenosis, married, middle aged, and nerdy.
In fact, let me show you just how brutal dice-as-is can be when the DM doesn't have the option to fudge rolls in the player's favor:
Simulation (round 1):
a level 1 fighter is caught refilling water canteens and momentarily separated from his group. He has +5 to hit and a great weapon fighting style and scale mail armour, no DEX bonuses. 10 HP. He's ambushed by 2 goblins. Due to a bad initiative roll, he moves last.
Goblin 1 attack: 13 Goblin 2 attack: 21 damage: 4
Fighter down to 3 HP. Fighter can't disengage without taking 2 reaction attacks. Fighter fights back.
19 miss. Goblins have a stupidly high AC.
Goblin1 attack: 22 damage: 8
Fighter down in 2 turns with almost no chance of escape.
Simulation 2:
Goblin attack 1: 21 Goblin 2 attack: 22
PC attack: 10
no damage turn 1.
Goblin 1 attack: 15 goblin 2 attack: 8
PC attack: 25
No damage round 2. Fighter probably survives by calling for help because he can't take down 2 green 6th graders by himself.
Simulation 3:
G1 attack: 9 G2 attack: 17
PC attack: 10 (Assuming insta-kill)
G2 attack: 9 PC attack: 7
In only 1 of 3 simulations does the fighter actually win on his own merit, and he had to get a crit to do so on the most basic of basic baddies. Seeing a pattern?
DM, professional illustrator and comic artist, suffering from severe spinal stenosis, married, middle aged, and nerdy.
I think a lot of the problem here is not so much the fact that the D&D 5e armor system sucks (it does, a lot, but that's not the problem here), but rather the fact that D&D traditionally handles very low-level gameplay EXTREMELY poorly.
A first-level wizard is not likely to avoid a simple goblin striking once. Wizards don't wear armor and generally have middling-at-best Dexterity - there aren't many attack rolls that don't hit a first-level wizard. A single goblin can have a comfortable 80+% chance to strike a first-level wizard in combat, and if that goblin does make that hit? There's a very good chance the wizard goes down from that one, single hit. One goblin hits the wizard one single time, which the goblin is almost guaranteed to do? And boom - wizard down, wizard dead next turn, roll new character time.
The fragility of first-level PCs, especially lightly armored ones, is infamous, legendary, and has spawned countless terrible memes. A first-level fighter in scale armor takes gobbo hits less often...but he still only takes maybe two hits tops before he's also on the ground and dead next turn. Some stories love that, the idea that your character is nothing special and can be extinguished by a single errant blade stroke without any chance to do anything about it just like the helpless villagers you're striving so hard and so pointlessly to protect. Some stories...don't. But in either case, armor is a finicky and unreliable defense that doesn't really protect you for snot. The way D&D characters gain resilience is not by becoming difficult to harm, it's by becoming able to absorb a ludicrous amount of harm without...well, harm. And that requires you to gain a ****billion HP, which you only do by leveling up.
The whole system feels weird and unnatural when you really think about it, and it means that first and second-level gameplay just doesn't really work. The DM has to either handwave it or fudge pretty much every roll they make to ensure their party actually lives to level 3, where the game starts making some faint degree of sense again.
Maybe someone can figure out a helmet rule to make that less of an issue? But really, this is a debate between people who hate crunch and want a simple, super-abstract armor system that lets them Theater Of The Mind(C) combat quickly without having to bother with unimportant crap like details, and people who want enough crunch in their combat engine that they don't get crunched and lose a fourth PC in the same session to the same goblin kicking them in the same shin with a rusty leather boot, giving them Kryptonian Turbo Tetanus and watching them dissolve into a puddle of slime because first-level D&D is just so terrible.
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I think it's just easiest to assume that a Helmet is a part of any set of Heavy or Medium Armor. If you take it off as an action, that's a -1 to the AC that the armor provides.
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