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Old 07-13-2016, 07:24 AM   #35
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Swords and plate

Quote:
Originally Posted by safisher View Post
I see this come up a lot, but Edge Protection is a spectacularly bad rule. It's too complex and it punishes well known armor-piercing weapons like axes and polearms.
The problem isn't so much complexity as it is incompleteness. Basically, no guidance is given on how to resolve cases of armors that have reduced DR against crushing. It seems easy enough to me to just use the crushing DR when the attack is converted to crushing, normal DR otherwise. Against Cheap Light Mail or Cheap Reinforced Medium Leather (both DR 2/0*) there's a bit of a problem, as cutting attacks of 4 (4 cr penetrate) and 5 (3 cut penetrate) damage do the same injury (4 HP), but as the latter enjoys the special effects of cutting (bleeding, disease, etc), this is probably fine. At higher TL's, things do become a bit more complicated, as DR 12/3 kevlar sees 21 HP injury from a cutting attack of 24 damage, but only 19 HP injury from a cutting attack of 25 - if this happens to come up, just going with the greater injury isn't that difficult, so against that Kevlar you maintain crushing damage up through 29 damage, but switch over to cutting at 30. If you're in a campaign where this is likely to matter, replace the generic "2xDR" with an armor-specific value, like the 30 for DR 12/3. You'll ideally want to use a spreadsheet, but that shouldn't be much of an issue, as this isn't something you'll need to adjust for on the fly.

Note here I assume you're talking about Low Tech's "Blunt Trauma and Edged Weapons" rule; the various houserules bouncing around may or may not address this particular issue.

As for axes and polearms, those shouldn't really be able to easily cut through armor either. Their historical performance against armor typically comes down to either using impaling damage (typically at Chinks/Gaps) or relying on blunt trauma. Dan Howard has repeatedly stated he would have preferred to give such weapons more base damage, which would have helped cover the blunt trauma issue.
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