was wondering if anyone had implemented any sort of high quality armor in their games. the rules fro HQ items, as you all know, are adding a fortune die to the dice pool, but that doesnt do much for armor which doesnt have a dice pool. was thinking of ways to work this into the game and i came up with two:

1) add a defence to the armor. i am not a big fan of this as it seems really strong. the most defence one can get in the game right now is 3, so adding one for HQ is increasing the potential defence value of a character by 66% (3 -> 5: one for HQ armor one for HQ shield)

2) if i remember correctly, and i may not as its been years since i played dungeons and dragons. in 3e dont masterwork armors just weigh less? so maybe an HQ armor would have one less encumbrance? this still seems good, but at most it gives a character the ability to carry two encumbrance more worth of stuff, good but not game breaking, and for how expensive HQ stuff is... not sure id really want to take it anyway...

those are my two cents, anyone else have any ideas?

My players don't have great armor. The best is a mail shirt. I am saving the HQ stuff for much later when they can afford it. I also have a rule for special items that are not ordinary.

On a chaos star and a missed attack the players roll three misfortune dice and if two come up as banes the item breaks. If they have more than one special item (armor, shield, weapon), that they are using in combat they decide randomly which one breaks.

So while special items will be nice, they will also not be everlasting.

my breaking item houserule : an item breaks in time with chaos stars. Once you had a total number of chaos stars equal to the item's encumbrance, or critical rate for weapons (you might prefer damage, dunno...), the item breaks. So you need to track these chaos stars during your game.

evilben said:

FYI, in v2 Best Crafstmenship armor weighed less than its normal counterpart and this can be a great boon depending on your party make-up and how you track encumberance.

Another option you can use is always up the soak value by 1 of such a item

Cost I would defer to you as the GM to gauge. This help keeps balance in yoru game and also provide adventure hooks. Need to search out for a particular craftsmen who ask the party to find X type of materials to craft this armor.