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3 Ways World of Darkness Gets Armour Right: The Myth Of The Tank

3/6/2016

13 Comments

 
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It’s an enduring image: the knight in shining armour, the ironclad hero. Many of us grew up with stories of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and other stories like El Cid, the hero of the Reconquista, or even Ivanhoe the crusader. All of them honourable warriors, clad in armour, they fight in the name of good. For king and country, or for fair lady’s hand (and presumably her father’s rich inheritance), some of them even kill dragons. But all of them have one thing in common… they’re ridiculously difficult to kill.

Armour is a power fantasy. If you’re playing a hero and you’re clad in full plate, you feel invincible. When I was playing Dungeons and Dragons, I was fond of the paladin class and couldn’t wait to be rich enough to afford plate. I felt invulnerable in it.

…until the mook with the dagger rolled a 20 and shanked me through the plate and I was bleeding out on the floor. Roll a death save, Sir Gareth.

You see, if it’s true that lovers of history – and by that I mean those who actively read and study it – can’t enjoy historical dramas, it’s also true that those with some understanding of historical combat can’t enjoy role-playing games as much. The more you know, the harder it is to let some things slide. For instance, when a fighter with a longsword goes up against a knight in plate and skewers him with it, you can’t help but raise an eyebrow.

Eventually, after D&D I got into World of Darkness, especially Vampire: The Masquerade and later, Vampire: Dark Ages (set in the Middle Ages, just to mess with you). I’m talking here about the 20th anniversary edition of WoD, for which the Dark Ages book just came out. And while it isn’t exactly perfect, it does work a lot better when it comes to combat and especially armour.

Here’s 3 reasons why:
 
1. Armour soaks damage, does not make you invulnerable or harder to hit.
If anything, you’re easier to hit because you weigh a ton. But more on that later.

Some role-playing games go with HP (hit points) to indicate general vitality and toughness of a character. In some, like D&D, the more you level up, the more HP you get, making your mortal character about as hard to kill as a rhinoceros… wearing full plate… inside a Panzer. In a bunker. You get the idea. Even at mid-levels, characters have so many hit points, it often leads to hilarious situations like this:

“The dragon breathes fire on you and deals 50 damage.”
“Yeah, I’m still standing.”


How?!

In WoD, you’re squishy. With varying degrees of toughness depending on whether you’re a vampire (tough), a werewolf (bloody tough) or a mage (as tough as wet paper). You’ve got 7 levels of damage that you can take and depending on how much of it you take in the chin or what kind, it has different effects. Bashing damage from fists or non-lethal weapons won’t take you down as fast as lethal damage and aggravated damage is what a werewolf calls a silver bullet in the gluteus maximus. “Eee, I’m so aggravated.”

If you take one level of damage, you’re bruised. More angry than anything. Two levels and you’re hurt, -1 penalty to your dice rolls. That means you roll one die less, and when you typically have a pool of 6-8 dice, with 10 or more being pretty high for a starting character, a one die penalty can be tough. At six levels of damage you’re crippled: -5 which usually makes a weak character useless. If all seven hit-boxes are full with lethal damage you’re either incapacitated (if you’re a vampire or a werewolf) or if you’re just plain human you’re playing the harp and joined the choir eternal.

Armour stops that from happening by giving you dice to add to your “soak” value. When someone whacks you with a weapon, you don’t just take it like a chum, you soak the damage with your stamina and add to that your armour. So a character with 4 Stamina (fairly decent but not extraordinary) and chainmail would have 8 total dice worth of soaking. Given that a character with a Strength rating of 4 and a longsword would roll 7 dice of damage, all else being equal, you’re going to do fairly well in that chainmail. The chap with 3 Strength and a dagger had better roll like Apollo on attack, otherwise he can forget it.

With average rolls a character in armour can withstand a lot of punishment. But a few (or several) well-placed hits might still do you in, eventually, because…
 
2. Armour makes you easier to hit.
It makes sense. You weigh a ton. While you might parry with your sword or shield, you are easier to hit if you’re a great, big lumbering hulk of metal. To reflect this, armour in World of Darkness incurs a Dexterity penalty (and helmets give you a Perception penalty). Which is only common sense, for the reasons stated above.

In case you’re not familiar with the system, when someone comes at you with a weapon, you have two options for defence: you can dodge, in which case you roll a combined dice pool of your Dexterity plus your Athletics (so a fairly decent character would have 8 dice to roll, while Nadia Comaneci rolls 10 dice, with a perfect 10 on each of those decahedrons), or you can parry with your weapon or shield and roll Dexterity plus melee. So with the Dex penalty from your armour, you’re actually easier to hit. But say you roll poorly and they hit you, you’ve got another 8 dice to soak the pitiful damage they’re doing.

Now you feel like a bloody tank!

If any of you have practiced a kind of martial art that involves weapons and armour (shout out to all my HEMA and Kendo brothers and sisters), you’ll find this very refreshing.

Which brings me to my final point…
 
3. Defence is a skill, not a number
Unlike D&D’s abstract “Armour Class” or the nightmare that was THAC0, it’s your skill with a weapon that makes you harder to hit, not your armour. Combat in World of Darkness is a contested roll between the opponents. The attacker rolls their dice pool to try and hit you: dexterity plus melee, if they’re using a weapon. So an average mook with Dex 3 and a skill of 3 rolls six dice to try and hit you. Then you as the target and intended shish-kebab roll your defence to try and either parry or get out of the way. If you’re any good, you’re rolling upwards of 8 dice again (and this is without all the supernatural bonuses). And even if that hits you with their longsword and meagre strength, you’re in armour. So you take it, scoff at them and with a hearty laugh, shout from underneath your helmet:
“Come at me, bro!” (at which point the GM docks you XP for breaking character).
​
This is significant because you feel less like a Panzer with a sword gaffer-taped to it, and more like a trained fighter who’s spent ten thousand hours in heat, cold, rain and snow, weapon and shield in hand, practicing at the art of combat. You’re not a statistic to hit, you are a trained combatant with experience and discipline. In the end this makes combat a more enjoyable experience and when the stakes are high and your skill is what wins you the day, it makes the player feel rewarded for making a good character and playing it well.
Fantasy role-playing requires you to suspend your disbelief in order to accommodate for vampires, werewolves, or dragons and gelatinous cubes. But it certainly doesn’t have to sacrifice realism for entertainment.

​Something of a modern day caveman, Anderson fell down the rabbit hole of role-playing games 12 years ago and has refused to emerge ever since. Starting with D&D, hisworld changed one evening when by candle light he and a few of his friends plunged into the World of Darkness. That was the last time he saw daylight. When not stalking the night or practicing the way of the sword, Anderson studies cultural anthropology and writes short stories (and promises himself that he'll publish that novel). You can find more of his work on his blog, The Caveman Blues (which he swears he'll update more regularly)
https://cavemanblues.wordpress.com/


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13 Comments
Wolf von Cleve
3/6/2016 10:56:06 am

Well, I can tell you have never worn a suit of plate. much less been hit while wearing one..

Because those things? They DO render you next to invulnerable to a great many weapons. This is why, as plate armour matured, longswords a) became pointier, to find the cracks in the armour, and b) were used either two-handed, or started being discarded in favour of polearms, like halberds, glaives and warhammers.

As for moving more slowly, that's true to a degree. But not enough of one to negate the drastic advantages. In plate, I can simply take a shot that would normally crush my ribs, and use that opening to deliver my own attack.

Reply
Sven
3/6/2016 12:52:20 pm

But Sir Von Cleve, if you get maced to the face, you will still die a horrible death. Anti armour weapons exist and they are very effective against full plate.

Leaving the real world aside, in fantasy your character start hitting harder and harder as they gather levels. There is a point when you hit with the force of a car going 88mp/h. Sheet metal won't do anything anymore at that point. So I can imagen that the WoD mechanics just add more dice to the attackers pool simulating this fact.

Reply
Chris Bell
8/6/2016 01:40:20 pm

Are you familiar with RuneQuest? In RuneQuest, armor soaks damage, and armor has no bearing on the ease or difficulty of a blow landing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneQuest

Reply
Belisarius
3/6/2016 03:39:09 pm

Oh the balance between simulation and simplicity.
Shadowrun did a pretty decent job of making armour reduce damage rather than making you hard to hit. But my goodness do the rules get cumbersome.
I can appreciate a good effort to make this idea simple, I think I'd like the system you're describing, but even the worst systems I believe can be saved (usually) by descriptive role playing.

60 Hit Points does not have to mean you can take 10 times the damage that would kill an average fellow, Since taking points of doesn't usually hinder you skills in most simple systems instead 60 hit points means you can take 10 times the hits of a normal man. HP then is a skill, not a number. You can roll with the punches, use your armour to deflect an otherwise lethal blow, employ your skill as a warrior to cover all vulnerable spots making each hit little more than superficial. You're down to 30HP? Bumps and bruises! You weren't stabbed for 1d8+4 damage six times, but the constant blows to your armour, the strain of dodging six near fatal thrusts, why, that's becoming exhaustion and you're feeling like you can't keep it up much loner before they start stabbing true.
Similarly a rolled miss does not mean you didn't take an arrow to the knee, I like to imagine anything over your naked AC is a hit that was absorbed by your armour, blocked by your shield, or skilfully parried with ridiculous dwarven broadaxe you're gnomish bard somehow became proficient with.

Reply
Matthew
4/6/2016 10:40:49 pm

Great rationalization of the damage aspect of the hit points mechanic. The part that always gets me though is the healing aspect. How is it that a cleric spell that is capable of healing your body entirely and bringing you back from death's door at first level (cure light wounds) isn't even capable of taking the shine off your bruise at 10th level?

Reply
Belisarius
6/6/2016 11:30:36 am

I though about that as I was putting my thoughts down. It certainly does lead to trouble and I think unfortunately most of my experience has seen healing take the form of "here are some numbers".
But clever role playing will always come up with solutions. Perhaps the healing does close your wounds and mend your bruises but the fatigue remains, reducing your ability to defend your self. When you're at 20/100 HP maybe you still don't have a scratch, but the punishment has been exhausting. This fits well with the 5e mechanic of healing to full after a long rest.

Currently I'm playing a hunter in a stone aged themed 5e campaign. I've always enjoyed playing hunters not as spell casters but as such extraordinary woodsmen than their abilities boarder on supernatural. In this case the "healing" has been a combination of chiropractic and acupressure with vague spiritual explanation of the points where the soul connects to the flesh. Anyway, we don't describe it as closing wounds and clearing up bruising, but it does stop bleeding, removes pain, and restores your energy allowing you to keep working as if fully healthy. When "cast" the party members don't see this as magic but just skill in a secret art of healing.

Andrew
3/6/2016 10:38:17 pm

Sorry but properly designed and fitted full plate did not hinder a trained knight's dexterity and movement.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzTwBQniLSc

Reply
Corum89
3/6/2016 10:50:02 pm

Belisarius is right: This article is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the THACO system (at least as it existed in AD&D and 2nd Edition AD&D).

AD&D's combat system evolved from a mix of the 'Chainmail' wargame and some home-brew rules in the founding group near Lake Geneva. Combat rounds were a full minute long, and a "roll to hit" represented the level of skill, luck, and effort offered over that time. So a "roll to hit" was not the ability to lay hands on a particular person, it was the ability to successfully cause worry, fatigue and possibly damage or fatality to an armed combatant.

AC represented the classification of armor; so a person in plate mail with a shield was "AC2", whereas someone in chainmail armor with no sheild was "AC5". Armor made it possible for someone enduring a volley of blows from their opponent to resist taking meaningful damage more often than not as the AC got lower - it was an average thing.

Hip Points ("HP") were not just a measure of physical damage, they were a measure of the ability to turn potentially life-threatening injuries into small ones, the ability to weather small cuts and bruises, and the ability to not shirk in fear when you were first cut or hit. It also represented the fact that wearing said armor should be combined with a bit of skill or experience.

Naked people do not dodge better than armored ones. The idea that as person takes off armor, they will enjoy some sort of 'evasion dividend', is patently ridiculous. The first rule of knife fighting is: You Will Get Cut. It doesn't take much skill to wave a club around; much less than it takes to avoid getting hit by it. So, in a medieval melee, your best defense is to wrap yourself in materials that will allow you to mitigate some of it. Go watch some guys int he SCA, and ask them if they think they would get away with being hit less if they took off their armor.

I think the misunderstanding of the author emerges from the fact that the THACO system has since been twisted into something it is not; a blow-by-blow narrative of combat. The original system never intended to do that, because Gygax knew that trying to make rules for every parry, chop, and thrust was a road that would quickly lead to madness.

Dice Pools sound neat and all until a player wants to get creative or do something solo and in a hurry. I ran both Shadowrun and WoD games (even a Street Fighter game) for several years, and the Dice Pool has many problems all its own - the Zero Sum Game of the opposed dice pool can drag a game down quickly in a way that Gygax & Co. would have avoided. I'm not saying THACO is great, but the WoD system is no better really.

Reply
Corum89
3/6/2016 10:53:39 pm

Sorry about the triple post - the website was acting weird.

Reply
VP Quinn
5/6/2016 03:08:51 pm

We handled it. Thanks!

Reply
Maskman
4/6/2016 09:28:32 pm

I'll just leave this here:
Meta Games Fantasy Trip: Melee and Wizardry games.

Realistic combat systems that accurately depict combat mechanics, long before anyone ever dreamed of WoD.

Reply
Jason
7/6/2016 04:30:23 pm

HarnMaster uses skills, armor, and injuries. Pre-dates WoD by several years.

Reply
Matthew
6/7/2016 01:46:56 am

Yeah this is based on a completely false understanding of what HP represent.

Gary Gygax explained it interesting 1St Edition Ad&d DMG. Hit Points represent skill and luck at avoiding damage. You take 30 Hp from a dragon's breath? Cool, you just pulled that famous trope of the knight ducking behind their shield and deflecting the fire. It's not difficult to explain in the narrative. A hit doesn't mean a high level character was stabbed, it just means they got winded dodging a blow or maybe bruised through their armor.

Reply



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