Updating Armor for AGE

Armor plays a large part in the Adventure Game Engine in the pacing problems. Not only are there large health pools and large chances to miss with defense but there can be hefty armor values to chew through as well. Looking at existing published adversaries armor the median armor is 3 which blocks the average 1d6 attack.

Here are the basic number equivalencies useful for armor:

• 1 AR prevents 1 HP of damage during an attack action
• 2 HP is healed or damaged per 1TN of action, so 2 AR also equals 1 TN
• 1 TN is equal to 1 SP

Armor is essentially a counter to a stat increase for the attacker. The value is more difficult to calculate with rolled damage with it's average value versus a die roll being slightly less than its paper value. This is because with high enough armor much of a die roll is too small to be fully utilized. As such it's not as helpful to balance against the roll portion and instead balance against the ability score progression.

The armor progression is where we will see some pacing benefits. A novice talent can grant you 8 AR which is way too much. It can be fixed with the rule that each talent grants +1/+2/+3 TN equivalent bonus. Therefore novice will grant 2 AR, expert grants 4 AR, master grants 6 AR. Leather, mail, and plate can fall under those tiers.

Armor Training and Dexterity Penalties

Worn armor has a penalty to offset the benefits. It generally is towards Dexterity and we will make it all about dexterity. Speed and Dexterity penalties will be combined together instead of treated separately. Every 2 AR bonus should have 1 TN penalty applied to anything using Dexterity. This means leather will have a 1 Dexterity penalty, mail has 2 Dexterity penalty, plate has 3 Dexterity penalty.

The armor training talent then can be changed such that each rank removes 1 penalty such that master removes the entire Dexterity penalty for plate. Master rank with leather for example would not give additional benefits.

Magic and Armor Strain Penalty

The dexterity penalty for worn armor is justified as it is a zero sum upgrade. The bonus cancels with the penalty, That relationship still exists and to add strain penalties on top of that doesn't make much sense with out a damage penalty on attacks as well. At this point I don't think I can recommend using this rule.

We can try and balance it anyway with the improved principles. 1 MP is equivalent to 2 TN which will be equivalent to 4 AR. That points to the penalty being way to expensive. At minimum it should be quartered. That would leave 1 MP strain for leather and mail, 2 MP for plate.

Perhaps a better penalty would be to increase TN for a spell cast. With 2 TN to 1 MP relationship we could instead say there is a +1 TN penalty for each 2 AR of worn armor. Therefore there would be +1 penalty for leather, +2 penalty for mail, +3 penalty for plate. That seems much more fair, if it must exists in the game.

I would still not recommend using this rule though. There is no tangible trade off why you might need a strain penalty. You could have a setting reason, but AGE doesn't have one.

Pierce Armor Stunt

We can look at the basic stunt "Pierce Armor" which costs 2 SP. This means it should be worth 2 SP = 2 TN = 4 HP = 4 Armor. The stunt description says it ignores half of the armor. If you expect to get the full 4 armor value from the 2 SP investment you would need to be attacking an adversary with 8 armor. More armor you get more value, but less armor you lose value. Optimally you should never "Pierce Armor" when fighting anything less than 8 armor and should instead use "Mighty Blow". Most adversaries do not have 8 AR so we really should make it more useful. The simplest replacement would be a variable stunt like skirmish.

New "Pierce Armor" - SP Cost 1+, For each 1SP spent, ignore 2 AR for this attack