Copy-paste from another thread I posted in, but here goes.

I have a house rule for defence though that I like. You get a bonus defence equal to the relevant skill (resilience for attacks you can block, coordination for attacks you can dodge and weapon skill for attacks you can parry). This gives players (and NPCs) an extra defence of 0-3. You can only use one skill at a time of course, so no stacking.

I am trying to modify this rule to take into account the weight of armor to limit defence. I am thinking about modifying defence by the soak value of armor minus 1. That means full plate would get a defence penalty of 4. Any negative defence results in fortune dice added to the enemy. I haven't found a nice way to balance this yet though. Perhaps I should ask in the house rules forums... so many great minds here with a lot of good ideas.

I just want it to be like my other house rules... simplicity being high priority.

I think that's a nice idea. To keep it simple I would say:

Defense= armour defense + skill defense + active defenses,

where skill defense is skill level - armour soak. Skill defense can never be lower than 0, so you won't ever get negative defense from using high soak armour. Even high soak armor has a defense stat of their own, having the soak stat negatively affect this seems weird (then you'd have to change the armour system a lot more). Maybe you could also say that you cannot use a skill defense that has it's corresponding active defense recharging. That might make the defending a little bit more varied ( but it also makes it more complicated).

What I like about this is that it can tie into narrative part of combat. The player gets to describe how he's protecting himself even when not using active defenses.

A possible problem with it is that monsters generally have no skill trainings so they would not get the skill defense. So maybe you should add a bit to the aggression budget for the monsters to compensate (aggression can be used to add misfortune on player attacks), to keep things balanced.

gruntl said:

NPCs use their expertise rating as the extra defence (max 3 if some npc have more than that in the pool.)