Armour class as DR, how does it change the game?

[Platinius]

I have the idea of giving half (rounded down) of the armour's AC as DR in addition to the regular AC. Natural armour would do the same.

I would like to know how people who tried similar things experienced these such changes. How did it change the game balance? Did it slow fights down? Etc.

[ngilop]

It does not do much.

In fact it eventually hurts melee-ers past the low levels


while DR 2/- is nice at 1st level with an AC of 12 +dex and things are doing 3-8 damage on average when you are 8th level that dr 2/- and AC of 14+dex (including magic bonus(es) does not mean much when things are doing 12-20 damage on average.

If you are playing a low level 'fatal-istic' game then the UA armor as DR rule is not too shabby.. in a syarndard game or once the game goes past 3rd level its basically a moot thing.

[RedWarlock]

The biggest issue is that, especially in a 3.X/PF game, it doesn't scale at all. Unless you add extra DR for magic armor pluses, it's basically worthless beyond the first couple levels, as stuff like raging/power-attacking/sneak-attacking heavy hitters.

Personally, I prefer doing something where the damage is reduced by a fraction, like half. Something like, medium armor reduces damage by half, heavy armor halves that again to a quarter of original damage. (Apply this to energy damage, too.) Could even let light armor reduce by just a quarter.

THEN add DR/piercing. Heh.

[Platinius]

I guess I have to ponder this some more

[Grod_The_Giant]

In addition to the normal bonus? It'll certainly make fights take a little longer, purely because everyone's doing less damage... low-level creatures will be less of a threat to higher-level ones... the biggest unintended issue, I think, is combat styles/monsters that rely on making a lot of attacks-- TWF, archery (to a lesser extent), monsters with lots of limbs, etc. Those will see a much sharper drop in effectiveness than you might expect.