MARTIAL ARTS AND ARMOR: THE DILEMMA

One of the things we put off addressing until the very end in Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate, is armor. If the setting were more gritty, we would have simply ported in the Armor rules from Sertorius and Servants of Gaius, but this is a game about larger than life martial heroes, who can leap over houses and parry sword blows with a finger tip. In a high octane martial arts game, armor presents a problem, because in the genre most characters simply don't need it. It presents an even greater difficulty because the mechanics for armor and the mechanics for allowing martial heroes to boost their defenses can clash or stack. 

We've looked at a variety of solutions and we are leaning toward having all armor impose a -1d10 damage penalty. However each type of armor would be keyed to certain types of attacks. So this would allow us to avoid increasing the penalty (which gets too big at -2d10 and -3d10) while having different classes of armor that are differentiated in meaningful ways. So there might be a type of Armor in the game that imposes a -1d10 penalty to damage rolls from attacks made with bladed weapons. A person who attacks you with a sword and would normally roll 3d10 damage, rolls 2d10 instead. Armor also isn't effective against most Kung Fu techniques.