Thinking about Armor for d6 Success Counting Dice Pools
I'm working on a game that is meant to be a survival, exploration, fantasy game. I'm wanting to create a game in the OSR/NSR space with a focus on being rules lite and little to no math.
I am starting by working backwards from systems that I already enjoy and the core of the game is Forbidden Lands (YZE), where you roll a dice pool of d6's and are looking for a single 'success' (6) to succeed a roll, with additional successes increasing the effect of the success.
The way armor works in FL/YZE is that, each time you would take damage from a physical attack, you roll a pool of d6's equal to your armor value and prevent 1 incoming damage for each success rolled. If you would take damage after this, you reduce your the pool of d6's for future rolls for each 1 rolled (known as a 'bane').
Honestly, this is mostly great! It is resonant with how armor works as damage reduction, easily scales with how strong your armor is, and has a fair and logical way of determining when armor is damaged (when you suffer a big enough hit to penetrate the armor and the 1's rolled in your pool). On top of all of that, it is consistent with the core resolution system of the game. So, what then is the issue? It requires an additional roll in combat for every single hit. This can slow down play considerably, is sometimes forgotten by the players, is way too cumbersome to track for enemies (if assuming the system is symmetrical), and makes armor feel like an active defense by requiring a dice roll rather than a passive defense. This mechanically makes it function much too similar to the active defenses in the game like parrying and dodging.
When thinking about this system, I'm having to keep in mind some of the more delicate aspects of the game to balance. The main one is how little hp characters have--usually anywhere from 3 to 5, on average. Armor that just flat reduces 3 or even just 1 point of damage no matter what is extremely powerful.
What I'm looking for:
- Damage reduction that is balanced with the health system
- Scalable differentiation between 2 or 3 kinds of armor, based on effectiveness
- System for armor being damaged
- Overall resonant with how one expects armor to work
irl*in fantasy,* while remaining elegant
The closest thing I can come up with is armor applying some kind of modifier to the oncoming roll. It could reduce the number of dice being rolled or maybe let the player force a reroll on some number of dice. But if I go that route, I'm unsure how I could handle armor reduction in a fair way that isn't essentially an at-will effect that could just be invoked (not resonant)