Armour Blocks Some Dice

[David Bofinger]

The post on partial armour made me think about how armour works in TFT. One problem is that armour can make you invincible against some foes. I wondered if there was a way to implement armour differently in TFT, without particularly making it more complex.

Idea: Armour blocks some damage die rolls, or at least reduces them.

Effects:

• We can if we choose implement partial armour by having different parts of the body represented by the numbers reduced. For instance, a very good helmet might change any 6 to a 1, while a light helmet reduces any 6 to a 4.
• We can implement the difference between a bastard sword (good against armoured targets) and a sabre (good against unarmoured targets) by giving them different numbers of dice. Or, if we're feeling heretical, different kinds of dice.
• Armour is no longer completely protective (unless we want it to be): some numbers are likely to get through.

Issues:

• A 2d weapon is now inferior to a 1d+3 weapon so the weapon chart would have to change a lot.
• The damage system was supposed to capture lots of things and we've pushed it back to just handling hit location, that's not so good.

Anyone got any thoughts?