We started a new game with the world of Dark Sun (with the good GM this time)
I somehow dodged ever encountering it before, but 2 main things about it are: to cast spells you also have to spend HP equivalent of the spell level and theres like no metal left in the world what so ever.
And the second thing made me thinking, me and my game group usually ignore hardness and equipment durability mechanics what so ever. Mostly since your shit is magical, has a lot of HP, and it would really suck to lose your expensive piece of armor that you worked hard for.
But since here everything made of bone and stone and magic equipment nearly impossible to find its easily replaceable. + arena and gladiator fights are the perfect setting for more detailed combat.
So here's my idea (for PF 1e but I'm sure it can be translated to other systems with a bit of tweaking) - you know how theres a sunder move that targets specific piece of equipment and how useless it is since why would you spend your turn trying to break someones shield instead of just killing them? That kinda implies that you shit cant just break because you are using it. But what if it wasn't the case. Lets say we have a guy wearing a breast plate and using a shield, his AC formula would look something like that:
AC 21 = 10+6(armor bonus)+2(shield bonus)+3(dex bonus)
in my mind when someone tries to hit you - you first try to dodge the attack, then you try to block it with you shield and if all that fails armor should take the hit
And now when we have the order of those things we can create hit ranges. So if enemy rolls:
1-10 - dude just misses because he is a retard and doesn't know how to swing a weapon;
11-13 - hit would've connected but you dodged and avoided it;
14-15 - hit landed on the shield absorbing it, and it being damaged in the process with the standard rule set
16-21 - armor took a hit absorbing it, same thing as the shield
of course theres a lot of other bonuses like deflection and natural armor, and order of them can be debated but i think it would be an interesting idea for a game that doesn't include a lot of combat encounters but very detailed onces, so every fight can be treated as a boss fight of sorts.
I have been brewing up a late bronze age setting, where Iron is starting to appear and the idea would be Crucible Steel is showing up in very limited quanities, and the superior properties of these metals vs bronze would play a part in combat (and by extension, politics and the party's murderhobo hoarding) so I'm not unfamiliar with what you want to have happen.
Here is the thing I'm going to point out:
- PF1e has rather large AC deltas between 1st and 20th level.
- How will magic interact with your durability tables?
- Think about your system, and realize that
Every.
Single.
Goddamn.
Attack Roll.
Every.
Single.
Goddamn
Time.
is going to require consulting your effects table and figure out if it applies. Think of how many times that will happen during just a normal combat. Remember how much everyone loves the grapple flow chart?!
WMPRPG and its offshoots like PF1e are ABLE to model a lot things with some ingenuity, but it doesn't always do them well. Which when you try to cram d20 survival rolls onto hex exploration can work Ok, but when you try to bolt-on a system to something as common as attack rolls you are setting yourself up for a bad time.
- You are also, in essence, setting yourself up for making crafting an integral part of the game. Out of the box neither 3.5 nor 3.75 do that well. unless you have a system for the party making/reparing/upgrading their own weapons (ideallly one tested and considered fun/engaging) you are going to have a bad time.
What I would do is this:
- in combat, just compare item hardness, and then decide a "hardness delta" where hitting a thing with hardness greater than X or +Y causes your item to lose "durability".
maybe even add in a "brittleness" value for things more likely to shatter vs flex, i.e. bone vs wood, how horrible obsidan would wear, etc.
Like "Wood being used against anything +3 hardness over its hardness takes damage. Obsidian takes damage if the target is over 2 Hardness."
I personally would opt for "in combat, items hitting/being hit by things over their Hardness thresholds take Durability damage represented by a Durability Loss counter. But that damage isn't resolved until after combat, UNLESS a critical miss/critical success is rolled or the DP counters are greater than <Some value, probably double the item's total durability/hitpoints>". Then just have a mechanism where for each DP counter, after combat the players the resolve it to see if their equipment got fucked up and how fucked up.
ie back of envelope: roll a d6, 1: 2 points, 2-4: 1 point, 5: 0 points unless the previous roll was 0 points, 6: zero points.
But It sounds to me like you're wanting to have sword and armor break in the middle of combat for cinematic moments. So maybe adjust the frequency of rolls, or just have flat item damage.
Or more likely, just use the number on the D20 to determine if an item takes durabiity damage instead of autistically determining ranges. Roll 15+ and its a strong enough whack Durability of the involved materials is affected.
I would also say from what I remember of PF1e hardness and item HP tables, if you want to make this engaging and not completely break the system, especially for how often and how integral you want to make this, you're going to have to rework them from the ground up. The PF1e tables are more about helping a GM adjudicate "the party is trying to break down an iron door with a wooden ram; can they?" vs it being a good, balanced, or user-friendly system designed for frequent use.
