Armor

[Thorgrim]

Please understand that I say this as respectfully as possible: it is the owners that vote, and to produce a change in the rules you must convince 75% of the owners to vote for it. 100 people cannot write a Larp. I assure you it is difficult enough with the ~12 of us who are involved. If we as owners seem protective of our opinions it is because, when it comes to actually passing these changes, nobody's opinion counts but ours. Again, I swear I mean no disrespect. When we say that we've looked at the armor values you have to have a certain amount of trust that we aren't BSing you.

A fighter has to invest close to 30 build to take advantage of the full armor maximum. That puts them significantly behind their fellows in the ability to do damage, and that is by design. Same too with Hearty. Build spent on defensive and survival skills cuts down on offensive output, and we want those options to be very attractive. Frankly, fighters should be able to be better defensive bulwarks than they are offensive juggernauts because all classes can be big damage machines but only fighters can be huge damage sponges. All that armor is very vulnerable to packet damage and take out spells, and that too is intended, because you shouldn't be the best at everything. If enemies with huge stacks of armor are difficult for your character to defeat, your character needs to make a friend that can help with that. It's supposed to be a community-based game.

Hi Dan,

I think mostly what we'd like is just clarification on whether or not a change has already been decided, and if a decision has been reached, we should probably turn our attention elsewhere. As one of Denver's playtest coordinators, we have been told that the changes from the previous version are the things we should focus on most for the next round of testing, but we were never told to focus on those things exclusively, and the latest feedback form even includes the following: "Comments on any other specific Combat changes you felt especially positive or negative about, including items you feel are unresolved from prior rounds of playtesting:"

Also if a decision has been reached on armor values and wear extra armor, does that also mean the debate is close as to the armor rating of phys reps and layering? I don't have much of a problem with a person wearing full metal plate having 62 points of armor, especially since they spent 27 build to do it. I do have a problem with a person wearing a gambeson and some plastic plate, or cheater chain with a leather vest getting the same as the guy wearing metal plate.

 

[Dan Nickname Beshers]

I mean, nothing is final until the rulebooks are printed, but encouraging high armor values and providing multiple avenues to get there (while requiring physical armor for said high values) is a pretty broad design decision that is very unlikely to get walked back. If there are specific, clear problems we obviously want to address them. Max value is a little too high (or low)? That's good feedback. We would need an extremely compelling reason to revisit the core decision on what to do with armor, though; some evidence that it is fundamentally broken. Nothing like that cropped up in this thread, which is why it was suggested that the line of discussion was unlikely to be fruitful.