Dark Souls D&D: part 2, getting hit
I knew I wasn't going to use Armor Class. Which meant that rolling to hit was likely going to end up being a static number, but I decided to deal with this later (and I still haven't figured it out as of this writing).
In the video game there is little to distinguish suits of armor from one another, and often it doesn't matter what you're wearing, which leads to fashion souls. Usually the goal is to get a specific suit of armor and use it in an area or against a specific boss, but that's very game-y and I wanted to avoid that kind of min-maxing.
First thing I did was adjust the physical and magical damage negation percentages of different pieces of armor into simple numbers. Just like damage, these percentages were divided by 10 then rounded to nearest decimals. Each individual piece of armor was given a rating, so the Cleric's starting armor looks like this:
Cleric Helm, 1/0
Cleric Armor, 2/1
Cleric Gauntlets, 1/1
Cleric Leggings, 1/1
Set Total: 5/3
These numbers became the core of my Defenses line. Defenses negate damage and they are Physical Defense, Magical Defense, and Poise. Physical Defense would negate physical damage, and Magical Defense would negate everything else, not just magic but fire and anything else that wasn't physical damage. In the games there are multiple damage negation categories and I did not want that level of complexity so umbrella-ing everything under Magical Defense was my first simplification.
Poise specifically would work against a score called Stagger, and as I worked through the weapons I realized that this was either going to have to be a specific kind of attack or only certain weapons were going to be able to inflict stagger. More on that later.
Physical and Magical Defense would be used primarily, which allowed me to simplify every piece of armor's rating as the 2-digit numbers you see above. When going through the starting classes this became a streamlined way of building stats. 4/3, 3/3, and 3/4 became common outcomes.
Shields were another issue. In the game these also have percentages for damage negation, but they only apply when specifically blocking attacks. I decided that Block would be a move one could do in place of Move (this lead to other problems but we'll cover all of that in part 3) and the character would apply the armor rating of the shield to whatever attack was being blocked.
The Cleric class starts with the East-West Shield, 8/4. When a Cleric Blocks an attack they effectively have 13/7 armor. This seems high, but damage numbers can also get quite high, for now I decided to leave it until I have a proper chance to playtest it.
The other half of armor is the Resistances, of which every character has three: Bleed, Poison, and Curse.
In the games, each type of damage has an individual score and taking damage of that type fills your 'health bar' for that score. When it fills up, the damage takes effect. I wanted to simplify this so players weren't walking around keeping track of their slowly descending Resistances so I changed each one to fit the theme of the damage.
Poison: When a characters takes damage from a Poison weapon that exceeds their Poison Resistance, you gain a Poison die. The weapon will list the die type (Poison d6, Poison 2d8, etc.), and thus you can have multiple Poison dice if you are struck by multiple sources of poison. At the beginning of each round, if you have one or more Poison dice, roll each one and take that much damage. For each die that rolls 4 or less, return it to the GM, dice that roll 5 or higher are kept. Toxic damage works identically like Poison dice, but the rolled amount is doubled.
Bleed: When a weapon with Bleed rating (Bleed 4, Bleed 8, etc.) deals damage to you that exceeds your Bleed Resistance, the Bleed effect triggers and deals its rated damage immediately, ignoring armor. However, I have playtested this a little and it doesn't give much of an edge, I might have to increase the amount of damage each Bleed weapon does.
I haven't figured Curse out yet, but I want it to feel quite different from the other two.