Rambling Thoughts - AAC

Emanuel Martinez Lema 2016

Something I have been thinking of a lot lately is the interaction of armor to the wearer in rpgs.  I have typically been of the mind that abstractt is better than realistic ... with this in mind, AAC and DAC  have always been quite fine to me as it was an abstract representation of a character's ability to "roll" with a potential blow.  Recently, however, and maybe partially due to the number of actual play podcasts I have been listening to I have started to ponder other systems of defense and damage that do not work toward the DR style most people tend to move towards.

Please note, this is very much in draft form and I have not yet had the chance to test this out in any real way.  Also, this was developed with AAC in mind but should be easily adaptable to DAC.

AAC should continue to calculated in the manner that it has been since the earlest days of the AAC.  This means:

 10 + armor bonus + shield bonus

Second AAC exists Seperate from Health and is tracked in a similar manner. This means a character with 35 HP and an AC of 17 has two potential hit tracks.  This works as follows:

Enemy targets character and rolls as normal, if the roll is under AAC everything proceeds as normal.  If the attack hits that character loses AAC equal to the difference of his AAC to the Dice roll.  If an attack is critical the damage goes directly to the HP equal to the weapon HD.  Once AAC is reduced to 0 all damage is against HP and equal to the weapon HD with the only defense being 10 + Dex Modifier.

Again, this is very much a draft stage and both wording an implemantation needs a lot of work.  Still, I figured it was worth sharing.