The other day i read a line written by Kaptain O of these forums where he mentioned that he didn't think it made much sense that some armours have a defence value indicating that the wearer is actually better at dodging attacks. I don't know if the defence value is thought to represent the deflective capabilities of the armour or what but I agree with Kaptain O. It doesn't make much sense to me either and its actually something thats been bugging me with other systems too for a long time. There almost never any advantage for a fighter type to wear lighter armour compared to heavy armour even if that fighter had ninja agility. For most fighters it’s just a race to get your hands on that full plate unless you have a particular roleplaying reason not to.
This made me try to make some small changes to the armour system of WFRPG 3 to make it a bit more appealing to wear light armour for agile characters.
The stats for most armours don't change just the meaning of the defence value. Instead of automatically adding misfortune dice to the opponent attacker it represents the maximum misfortune dice you can penalize your opponent with. How many that will be, will be dependent upon your ability compared to your opponents. after all you might be fast but if your opponent is just as fast you will still have a hard time avoiding his strikes.
-If your agility is equal to your attacker's then you give him 1 misfortune dice
-if your agility is higher than your attacker's then you give 2 misfortune dice
-if your agility is more than twice as high as your attacker's then you give him 3 misfortune dice.
these are cumulative with any active defenses.
Armour maximum defense soak
cloth unlimited 0
robes 3 0 (robes are more cumbersome than cloth)
Leather 3 1
brigandine 1 1 (some armours are not as good as others though they are cheaper and more available)
Mail shirt 1 2
chain mail 0 3
scale 0 4
ulthuan scale 1 3
breast plate 0 5 (soak change to 5 so it wouldn't be the same as scale)
full plate 1 5 (I want to represent that the full plate is better and more flexible than half plate and chain, and should in fact be less cumbersome than the that, but I'll leave that up to the experts. my only experience come from the armours I sell in my shop and from that I know that chain is at least as heavy as any plate armour we have.)
The shields remain as they are. They still add defence dice to the attacker same as RAW. As long as your opponent is hitting the shield he is not hitting you.
Should you be encumbered you will add one less misfortune dice to your attacker for each point of encumbrance above your limit.
System arguments and thoughts.
With this system most characters will add 1 or 2 misfortune dice to the attacker and only characters with 5 or 7 agility will add three dice. You might argue that characters with 5 or 6 agility in leather and a shield will add 1 extra misfortune dice to attacker than a RAW character with mail shirt and a shield will which admittedly is a lot. But characters with very high agility will most likely have low strenght (or other weaknesses) which will limit the amount of equipment they can carry. A character with high agility is likely to carry a ranged weapon (3 or 4 encumbrance), ammunition (1 or 2), a hand weapon or dagger (2 or 3), a leather armour (3), cloth beneath his armour (1) and a back pack with different practical things (food and water etc.) (1-3). Added together it gives an encumbrance of 11-16 which is pushing it close to the encumbrance limit of an average strength 3 high agility character. Add to that a shield of 2 to 4 encumbrance and you will soon start loosing your defence bonus again.
On the other hand agile characters should be harder to hit than heavily armoured characters as they will take a lot more damage if they are hit than those with high soak value. And should a player desire to spend 7 XP on agility 7 he will lack in other areas so it should be only fair that he is very good at dodging.
Since the natural limit of this system is three misfortune dice is may seem silly to make cloth’s defence rating unlimited but that is simply to make it future compatible. At some point there may be spells that increase your agility or defence dice etc.
I would also use a house rules like imposing a penalty on characters who try to move silently in heavy armour. Add one misfortune to their check for each soak value. Like spellcasters. And if your characters are surprised they do not gain any bonus from the ‘passive defence’ until they have acted, though they may still use active defences.
I’ve been playing with other ideas that included coordination and specializing in Dodge etc. but found that they quickly got too complicated and I feel that complex rules are not in the spirit of this system and also too few careers gained the benefit from it. Besides I have a feeling that at some point that Specialized dodge will have an effect on another active defence card. If one deem this system too favourable for agile characters it would be easy to reduce the effectiveness by removing one misfortune dice from each of the above lines, making it 1 dice for higher agility and two for more than twice as much agility.
Try it out and let me know what you think. I have tested it a bit, but more people makes for better play tests