Hey guys! Another rules question: How does positioning work with the mechanics of armor, for instance? Like, if you take damage, you can expend your armor to reduce the severity of that damage, but does wearing that armor at all make you harder to fictionally damage in the first place? Reduced effect for weapons? Thanks!
Hey guys!
Hey guys!
The armour reducing Effect is how it works rather than anything that makes it harder to hit (that only happens in D&D not real life or just about any other RPG not based on D&D)
Unless I’ve missed something, there’s no official rule so it’s up to you. Obviously NPC armour needs to be accounted for when determining effect, but when it comes to player armour and positioning there’s already a mechanical benefit to wearing armour.
It really comes down to whether you’re table feels 3/5 load slots is worth 1/2 armour boxes or if you think players should also get superior positioning in certain situations on top of that.
Nigel Clarke I mean, I see where you’re coming from, but the ludonarrative dissonance of armor being a one-or-two hit resource, that once expended is no longer useful for the fight kinda trumps realism arguments here for me.
Furthermore – using game terms but talking about “real life” – actual armor would reduce the effect, like I was proposing in my question above. I think you might have misunderstood me there. I agree though, there’s some mental acrobatics in play when you’re following dnd logic 😀 I appreciate you taking the time to help me out!
Alice Southey Yeah, you’re right. There are no official rules for it, and in my first campaign, we just played it as the dmg reducing effect was the sole rules interaction armor has. Still, I feel like it’s strange that all of the other items (say, a knife vs. a spear in close quarters, or a pistol vs a spear at range, or the increased effect of heavy weapons vs smaller ones) would interact with the positioning rules, but armor would not. Then again, he doesn’t say that it explicitly does change positioning (although it fits with the ethos) so maybe the implication by omission is it doesn’t? Talk about D&D logic! haha thanks!
Nigel Clarke I would recommend to try it out someday.
An armored opponent does make it more difficult to land a descisive blow. Wearing gauntlets will take your option to cut his weapon hand. Wearing an helmet will take away your next most preffarable target. Every further piece of armor limits your ability for a fight ending hit.
If you spend your timing to hit an armored piece, your opponent will use that timing to cut you really good. Same reason why cuts to the legs with one handed weapons are a bad idea.
As unrealistic as D&D is, in proba bly every aspect, armor making it more difficult to land a hit, is a more realistic way than just taking the hit and absorbing the damage.
Machi Davis Going by RAW, I see armour acting as a narrative resource much like strain. Within the fiction your armour is always protecting you, but players have the choice as to when it actually happens to matter. If you don’t check a box, the armour doesn’t save your skin this time. Other gear lacks this kind of specific mechanical effect, so it all gets rolled into position/effect.
This is more clear with special armour that works in more esoteric circumstances. A Lurk with the Shadow special ability is always a master of stealth, they don’t “use up” their talents, but the player gets to choose when this bonus happens to become relevant.
That said, I think it’d be reasonable to allow at least heavy armour to shift position in obviously mismatched situations like say, some street tough trying to punch out a PC in heavy armour with their bare hands.
Any more than that and I worry you’d end with with players making way too many controlled rolls in combat.
Alice Southey Yeah, I agree with your conclusions on the mechanics. That said, the “the player gets to choose when this bonus happens to become relevant” bit still rubs me the wrong way. I think it’s just the nature of the rules that doesn’t sit right.
If I have x impressive quality all the time, but I can only choose for it to be fictionally/mechanically relevant one time per situation, then it’s the same as me having no skill except for that one time I suddenly and inexplicably perform at master level.
Huh – that’s not as clear as I’d hoped, but I think you get my gist. It seems like the only difference between your perspective and mine is just that: a sort of forced perspective one has to adopt to make the otherwise unintuitive (imo), seem plausible.
It might make more sense if say, armor of different qualities used escalating dice, and at the start of combat you rolled that die, and could activate your armor that # of times.
This rule would compromise between ongoing relevance (AC 12) and more narrative based relevance (Current BitD rules) because the number of activations per conflict isn’t predictable/finite, and each combat you’d be able to rely more or less on your armor.
ha, I’m just musing now, but yeah, I see your points 😀
Aragorn, the armour doesn’t make the target harder to hit but does make the hit less effective by preventing potential damage from occurring. You seem confused about how armour works.
Machi Davis As far as trying to make it sound more like the “fiction,” I’d say that the armor is always doing the protective thing – but can only be used (1 or 2) times to resist damage.
What you’ve got to remember (and this is entirely me speaking from my own experience and reading of the rules, so take it with a grain of salt) is that Blades itself isn’t attempting to be realistic in any sense. The level of “realism” is entirely down to how the GM and players interpret and shape the fiction at the table. So, in your interpretation of the fiction, sure, once a player’s taken armour in a score, you can decide as a group that that shifts around position and effect. Position and effect are how to manipulate the tone of the game, so feel free to rule these things as you wish. It’s your table.
So as I said, Blades itself isn’t really trying for realism off the bat. It’s aiming for narrative flow as much as anything else. Think about the bit in Fistful of Dollars where the Man With No Name gets shot, and his opponent is sure that, at least for a minute or so, he’s down for the count. Then he gets up, and slips off the now dented sheet of metal. That’s how I think about armour in Blades. For all intents and purposes, it doesn’t really affect things until the one time (or twice, if you end up taking heavy armour) it saves your skin. Then you get to do that fun post-facto heist movie rationalising thing: of course the character had that armour all along; they knew shit was gonna go south and planned for it.
Remember also that armour is an item, just like everything else: it really doesn’t exist until the player marks it on their sheet, which is when they use it, when they make it real in the fiction. To my mind, this is squarely in the realm of narrative function, and coming into it with an assumption of realism is…. well, it’s just not going to give you that out of the box. You and your players get to decide what the position and effect is though, so use that tool to get at the feeling you want.
Just to piggyback off of this, armor is 2 load, and heavy is 1 more (3 total) or 3 more (5 total)? Also does heavy work twice or can it work once and shift effect 2 places?
Thanks.
Matthew Terry Heavy is +3 load for a total of 5. It works twice, but you have the option of using both boxes to reduce harm by two steps if you like.
Ok thanks. We did it mostly right
In my games I’ve actually done it both ways. So a knife will be less effective against someone in heavy armor even if they haven’t spent their armor resource.
But a musket shot or a lance or a fine rapier might not suffer the same consequences.
Justin Ford That works, at least if the armored one has been shown in the fiction to be heavily armored – but that isn’t often the case with the PCs, is it? In my experience that would mostly apply to their antagonists…
It depends. Blades the way I do load in Blades, if it’s been ambiguous as to how heavily armored you are, we don’t worry about it till it becomes important. So a player could be in full plate and if nothing is said that concerns or clashes with that, COOL!
It’s the same way flashbacks work but you spend load instead of stress. The guard was on your side the whole time. You were wearing chainmail under that cloak. Their was a thick metal plat in JUST the right place.
It wasn’t exactly an official ruling, but John Harper had answered a similar question some time back.
Even if you have already spend your armor to reduce damage, you are still wearing it in the fiction!
And if it feels right in the fiction, the damaged armor should still be taken into account.
If I recall it right, the example was about some punk trying to gut-punch with a bare fist or stabbing in the back with a puny dagger. In such cases it doesn’t matter if the armor below the coat has already a bullet-hole in it, the would-be attacker is in for a nasty surprise.