Quote:
Originally Posted by JimmyPlenty
It is also important to mention that once you go to the role playing side of things with In the Labyrinth, things change for our lightly armored fellows...
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A duel normally consists of two equally-matched opponents, who fight to the death, and the winner doesn't care if they get wounded as long as they win. Armour isn't hugely valuable because the reduction of the wearer's tendency to suffer damage is cancelled by the reduction in the wearer's ability to inflict damage, in fact the wearer typically comes out a little worse off.
But a role-playing campaign consists of a large number of skirmishes, the vast majority of which the heroes win. (A significant percentage of the skirmishes the party doesn't win will be total party kills.) This introduces two important changes, each of which can benefit armour.
- Some characters, basically the front line fighters, take more damage than others, such as archers, wizards and perhaps second rank pole weapon jabbers. Armouring the frontliners is of much more benefit than armouring the rear echelon, and can be well worth doing. Armouring the rear echelon is less useful than in a duel and is usually a mistake.
- Because the vast majority of battles are won there's an advantage to the party in making battles more predictable and less random. Which is what armour tends to do: damage is reduced on both sides, battles take longer, and there's more scope for the law of large numbers to average things out. That means fewer spectacular party walkovers, but also fewer TPKs, which is a good trade for the party. Average party damage is probably also reduced.