REPOST: 4e House Rules: Mix-and-Match Armor
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I posted this right at the creation of this blog, and it’s something I’d like those who weren’t with me then (everyone) to see. So here it is: Mix-and-Match Armor
This is a simple variant designed to allow heroes to equip different parts of their body with different types of armor, and allow the DM to give out bits and pieces of magical armor as he wants. It also lends itself to the dungeon-delving look of heroes, wearing different pieces of scrap armor.
Armor pieces can be put in the following slots: Head, torso, left arm, right arm, left leg, and right leg. When an enemy attacks, he makes a preliminary d20 roll. This roll determines where the strike lands.
1-3 Left Leg
4-6 Right Leg
7-9 Left Arm
10-12 Right Arm
13-18 Torso
19-20 Head
Your AC at each location is based on how much armor you have at that location. If the attack still successfully hits, then damage is resolved as usual.
When purchasing armor, you can choose to purchase a full set, in which case, the AC applies to all parts of the body. Or, you may choose to purchase individual parts, and mix and match as you see fit.
The costs of individual components are as follows.
Left arm, right arm, left leg or right leg: 15% of full armor cost each
Torso: 30% of full armor cost
Head: 10% of armor cost
If a magical item would normally only cover one or two sections of the body, according to their description (AKA, a magical suit of armor with no helmet), the cost is split up to account for this (before mentioned suit would cost 90% of the cost, since the helmet is not included.)
So, what do you all think? I’m considering implementing it in my upcoming Forgotten Realms game. Comments are always welcome.
I think you’re insane. But if you really want something like this, I’d recommend that you create a sheet where you record everybody’s Min and Max AC for all their armor and roll to hit first. Then if it falls below the min or above the max you don’t need an extra roll to determine location. It’s only when it falls in between you need to roll to see where, look up the AC there and see if the roll is good enough.
I think it’s clunky, insane and contrary to what 4e is all about, but it’s a house rule, so that’s like fighting over the neighbor’s lawn.
Is there a reason why you’d need the mechanic? If a player wants patchwork armor, just work out what that “averages” up to and make the description cosmetic.
I do have to admit, the first thing I thought was “this would make the pcs wear helmets”.
Wyatt, stop being so reasonable all the time. No one will have anything to talk about.
I like the idea, but I agree it adds a lot of rolling. Did you know they make d12s with body parts on them? I have two – one with twelve body parts each mentioned once, which is useless for everything but randomized hokey pokey, and one with head mentioned twice, torso mentioned three times, plus left leg, right leg, etc. You could just roll that d12 along with every d20 roll, which would speed things up considerably. I got it from a website which no longer exists, but I’m sure you can find one somewhere.
Too much extra rolling for too little actual effect, for my tastes.
If I were going to do something like this, I’d use a weighted-average method. Say your player wants, for some godforsaken reason, to wear a platemail breastplate and helm, but leather armor on his arms and legs.
Plate is worth a +8 armor bonus. According to your hit chart, the head and torso cover 40% of all potential hits. 40% of a +8 bonus is +3.2.
Leather is worth a +2 armor bonus, and these areas cover the other 60% of potential hits. 60% of a +2 bonus is +1.2.
Add those together, and the final armor bonus is worth +4.4. Because the pieces weren’t designed to work together the way a full set of armor is, all fractions are truncated (rather than rounded up), so the character gets a +4 from his outlandish mix.
Now you have to decide whether this is heavy or light armor. Personally, I’d say that wearing any piece of heavy armor makes the entire thing heavy.
This is still more math than I’d prefer, but at least you only need to do it once — you end up with a single abstracted AC to roll against, and the end result works out about the same over time unless you’re adding other hit-location house rules.
Or you could just say that mix-and-match armor uses the worst AC instead of a weighted average. The whole AC determines chance-to-hit abstraction is based on the idea that heavier, more complete suits of armor have fewer weak points to attack but if you do manage to score it’s because you’ve found one. If you’re wearing inferior armor at some position, then opponents are just going to concentrate their attacks there.
Another way to handle it (that would tend to better match what people wore historically if they were only partially armored) would be to say AC is based on the worse (or average) of your Chest and Head protection. Then, for further complication, if you felt that the players had to be discouraged from going naked everywhere else, you could say that any hit that does over (say) half the maximum on the die roll hits a random limb and that limb is bruised, broken, or severed depending on whether the armor there is medium, light, or none (heavy would be no extra effect).
I can see this working in a gritty low-powered game where mundane equipment is hard to come by and rather easily damaged. My concern though is that this rule would slow the game and create demand for called shots.