Remove most armours from the game

[mageykun]

We do have defensive buffs, they just don't synergize with your armour explicitly. They're all things that affect you, or add additional defenses. Offensive buffs do both- some affect you, some affect your weapon.

last I checked, there weren't any legends about King Arthur's breastplate.

...no, but there is a legend about his sheath. Insofar in that it's actually more valuable than the sword itself. Excalibur was a nice, but vanilla, sword. The sheath was enchanted to completely protect the wearer from suffering any wound in battle. Amusingly this annoyed Arthur- he wanted a cool sword. He didn't want a defensive cheat.

Which means King Arthur would agree with your point, Blade. Weapons should be the cutting edge.

[danr]

So what? King Arthur is a fictional character, whereas this game ...

Oops. Time to get back to reality.

[One-Eyed Jack]

The Nemean Lion Hide is fairly important mythically (shame Heracles didn't have a ?enchant armour)

Achilles's armour was also a pretty big deal

(obviously the general point stands)

[dd]

Well let's just remove all the armor from the game and let's just assume the player comes to the dungeon equipped with an optimal armor... everyone has an AC of, say, 6.

[danr]

Better yet, let's just assume everyone has a 10% chance of winning the game. Instead of bothering with all the equipment, spells, monsters and such, the game should just roll a d10 and if you come up with your number, you escape with the Orb of Zot and 1d10 runes. For a bit of flavour, each character class would win on a different number. You'd have to reduce the number of characters to 10 options somehow though.

The best thing is, games would only take about 5-10 seconds, basically as long as you took to decide which class to play.

[roctavian]

Whoa but what happened to my challenge race with only a 5% chance to win? We need that d20 roll in there.

[Eji1700]

Personal experience-
Things you can wear-
robes, leather, plate, dragon, troll.
Everything else better be artifact.

I think the numbers need to be reworked to be less...linear? The increases are fairly straight forward and theres basically no reason to ever sit in the middle due to the one or two small jumps. I mean late game you basically WILL be in dragon armor so i guess thats pointless, but I don't get why things like scale, splint, etc need to be so EXTREMELY niche use, especially when they're super common. I know it took me a ton of games comparing armor values before someone just told me to never touch anything with mail in the name, and for the most part it holds true.

I don't think there's an easy solution without a serious rework. If scale and ring had easier to overcome casting penalties, and maybe didn't inhibit unarmed as much they might find more use. Then bump splint and chain closer to plate? Honestly I think a big issue here is that armor skill is usually so all or nothing until you get dragon armor, and STR doesn't do nearly enough to help out. Maybe more bonuses depending on str+armor skill?

[snow]

One way to add variation to armor is to make GDR not always scale with AC. You could also make some armor more resistant to magical damage or something... or some armor that prevents high hits but reduces the average hit by less. So like anti-spike-damage armor.

[o_O]

An armor with better ranged properties might be useful. In particular GDR applied to physical ranged damage. Its complicated and unintuitive but also fits with medium armor's niche as general purpose hybrid armor.

In any case the only real problem is that medium armor is completely replaced by dragon armors with better AC and free resists, but weapons and spells are like that too.

[Celestirr]

Wikipedia snipits for those people that don't know the difference between the armor types..

Ring Armour is essentially a leather or textile item of clothing (a jacket, or trousers) that has a large number of metal rings sewn or tied directly into the foundation garment. Unlike chain mail, the rings are not physically interlocked with each other. No actual examples of this type of armour have ever been found on European archaeological findings.

Scale armour is armour in which the individual scales are sewn or laced to a backing by one or more edges and arranged in overlapping rows resembling the scales of a fish/reptile or roofing tiles. During Roman times scale armour was a popular alternative to other mail as it offered better protection against bludgeoning.

Mail (maille, chainmail) is a type of armour consisting of small metal rings linked together in a pattern to form a mesh. Mail armour provided an effective defence against slashing blows by an edged weapon and penetration by thrusting and piercing weapons. The flexibility of mail meant that a solid blow would often injure the wearer, potentially causing serious bruising or fractures, and it was a poor defence against head trauma.

Plated mail (sometimes called plated chainmail, splinted mail or splinted chainmail) is a type of mail with embedded plates. From the end of the 15th Century plate mail began to fully replace lamellar(scalemail) armours. Lamellar is pictured in many historical sources on Byzantine warriors, especially heavy cavalry. It is thought that it was worn to create a more deflective surface to the rider's armour, thus allowing blades to skim over, rather than strike and pierce.

Plate armour is a historical type of personal armour made from iron or steel plates. While there are early predecessors such the Roman-era lorica segmentata, full plate armour developed in Europe during the Late Middle Ages, especially in the context of the Hundred Years' War, from the coat of plates worn over mail suits during the 13th century. Plate armour was virtually invulnerable to sword slashes. It also protects the wearer well against spear or pike thrusts and provides decent defence against blunt trauma.

I appologize for the wall of text and I know it'd take some work, but what if rather than outright removal of various "useless" armor types.. different weapons did different types of melee damage like slashing, blundgeon, and peircing damage while the various armours and mails defended against different types.. Full plate mail would still likely be the best even melee resistance-wise, but think about the fact that plate armour is basically a suit of chainmail UNDER a lot of other plates, making it very heavy in comparison..

[KoboldLord]

Having an armor grid is probably not a good idea. Of the monsters in the game, this would mostly apply to orcs. Basic orcs you might have to hit twice instead of once, while an orc warlord in the wrong kind of armor will become a horrible slog as you ineffectually stab at it without making much progress but also without any more actual danger. The opportunity cost for cross-training and cross-enchanting weapons of a different damage type would still be prohibitively expensive, so really what you'd end up doing against such opponents is checking every opponent in the game for problematic equipment and then throwing some of Makhleb's demons or Trog's brothers at it instead of fighting it yourself.

As far as monsters attacking the player is concerned, the player can't exactly switch out armor on the fly so the player is still forced to pick one armor for the entire game. Monsters with the wrong kind of attacks just get to have annoying damage spikes that make the player avoid them longer, but they still don't result in any new strategic choices.

[dd]

Plate armour is a historical type of personal armour made from iron or steel plates. While there are early predecessors such the Roman-era lorica segmentata, full plate armour developed in Europe during the Late Middle Ages, especially in the context of the Hundred Years' War, from the coat of plates worn over mail suits during the 13th century. Plate armour was virtually invulnerable to sword slashes. It also protects the wearer well against spear or pike thrusts and provides decent defence against blunt trauma.

Full plate armor was invulnerable to sword slashes, yes. However, plate armour was seldom worn by foot soldiers - it was almost exclusively used by cavalry, not because it would be too hard to move in it, but because it was simply so hot that people would often pass out if they had to exert themselves too much... Even after the invention of plate armour, foot soldiers would often rather wear mail or other lighter armours.

[Guppyfry]

* Change "vorpalise weapon" into "vorpalise item"; use it on a small set of (mundane) armours to get Stuff, e.g. resistances, increased EA limit etc.
* Make skills more relevant, as indicated by KoboldLord.

Maybe we want something like...

This armour requires <foo> strength to wear effectively and <descriptor> impede(s) spellcasting.
(<descriptor> = does not, barely, somewhat, significantly, severely, etc).

I love these ideas.

Removing splint/scale mail is fine too, but I don't really see how it's a big deal. I never noticed that banded mail disappeared and I even was wearing banded mail on my one pure melee win: n - the +4 banded mail of Phihagga (worn) {rF+ rC+ rN+ MR SInv}
(You found it on level 8 of the Vaults)

[inkydood]

- Crawl is a complex, complete, major roguelike along the lines of Angband or Nethack, NOT baby's first rogue. So long as these items are desirable for some characters some of the time, they should be left in.

-Even if plate mail is strictly better than, say, splint mail, you could go the route of GDA and make it much less available (whether via drops or even greater requirements to wear). Or go the reverse route, making medium armor more viable for dodging characters except for the very frail and for "storm" spell casters. It's not a very interesting solution, but it's one way you would see more characters in the mid-range armors.

[VargrVeum]

I think that gear is such an integral part of any fantasy game - it would be a shame to lose any aspects which diversify and (in my opinion) make the crawl universe so richly flavoured. I also agree that too great a range of fairly undifferentiated concepts is counterproductive - and can lead to no-brainers or confusion. What if armour types were separated into overall type (either light, medium and heavy or cloth, hide, chain and plate) and then specific advantages given to the sub groups (chain mail gives a bonus against ranged, plate against slashing, splint against piercing, leather against crushing, fur against cold)

possibly a flawed idea - but it would mean there was a valid gameplay reason for maintaining some very flavoursome elements.

[Jabberwocky]

KL explained a few posts up why it's a bad idea. Having a orc warrior in plate when you are lvl 27 and are using long blades will be horribly tedious, as it isn't going to kill you, but you have to slog through stabbing it ineffectively with your sword.

[VargrVeum]

KL explained a few posts up why it's a bad idea. Having a orc warrior in plate when you are lvl 27 and are using long blades will be horribly tedious, as it isn't going to kill you, but you have to slog through stabbing it ineffectively with your sword.

Yup, sorry got excited and posted before checking!

If the bonuses were so significant that the player would have to carry around 3 or 4 suits of armour, hiding around corners to change in between fights - then yeah that would be a big fun killer, but if the bonuses were kept minimal (the ac value and ev penalty being consistent - the type of armour offering +1 AC against certain types of damage perhaps) - it would be a further opportunity to tweak your character. I dunno, I used to be a bit of a geek about weapons and armour from the middle ages andall that - so reluctant to see things vanish, even if they are superfluous

[jejorda2]

What if there were a flat 0.1 turn movement speed penalty when your armour skill was less than 2x the evasion penalty of the armour you are wearing? Then there would be a good reason to use the lighter types of heavy armour while training up, just like there is a good reason to use sting even if you've found poison arrow on D2 or a trident even if you've found a bardiche.

[crate]

I'm not sure why you want to make heavy armour worse.

[mrbobbyg]

What about elves in elvish armour? Don't you get a significant reduction in EV and casting penalty if you're an elf wearing elvish armour? I don't ever really focus on this because the mechanics are opaque, but I would love to have my high elf caster wearing elvish scale or something w/o penalty,

[jejorda2]

I'm not sure why you want to make heavy armour worse.

I want to make armour skill a more important factor in choosing which equipment to wear. By doing this, it becomes useful to switch to heavier armours as skill increases, and you have to ask whether you want to train more armour skill so you can wear the chain mail of magic resistance or use the xp for something else.

I see two ways to do that:
1)Change the current penalties to spellcasting, attack speed, and evasion such that they disappear with sufficient armour skill. The problem with this is that at the end of the game, it would make sense for almost everyone to train armour skill up and wear heavier armour, so there wouldn't be the decision we have now between heavy and light armour.

2)Keep the current penalties that don't go away completely, but add serious new ones that do. The problem with this is that it makes heavy armour worse without changing light armour, so it makes that decision easier. Adding a weird penalty like 15% lower HP for anyone wearing a robe doesn't make much sense, so maybe all heavy armours should get a buff at the same time. Magic resistance? Increased HP?

And there's no reason it has to be armour skill that makes the armours wearable. Strength would work, and it needs a buff, too.

[dpeg]

The fact the current strength requirement is not optimal does not imply that all kinds of penalties are "terrible".

For comparison, Brogue has no drawbacks on armours, and it means that all endgame characters dress the same. I believe that the goal of a smooth body armour progression is worthwhile.

[Eji1700]

The fact the current strength requirement is not optimal does not imply that all kinds of penalties are "terrible".

For comparison, Brogue has no drawbacks on armours, and it means that all endgame characters dress the same. I believe that the goal of a smooth body armour progression is worthwhile.

Whats the goal for endgame armors(3 rune) for crawl anyways? As it currently stands it seems like you should be in Plate, a rare armor(dragon, crystal, VERY good randart, etc), leather, or a robe. Of these you need armor skill for...what..one of them, and things like scale and chain are just stepping stones/halfway points until you optimize.

Are we trying to lessen the harshness of the curve(go ahead and wear scale through most of the game, but you should end up in plate) or are we trying to make each one a viable choice(robes for casters, scale for agile hybrids, chain for heavy hybrids, plate for full melee, etc)?

I'm only asking because it seems like several people in this thread have different goals in mind.

[yogaFLAME]

I'd like ring/scale/chain/splint to be condensed down into one thing, if for no other reason than I have serious issues keeping them straight without resorting to learndb every. single. time.

Remembering one mediocre thing is way easier than remembering 4.

[pubby]

Rename ring mail to light armour.
Rename chain mail to medium armour.
Rename plate mail to heavy armour.
Remove the other plain armours.

How about replacing GDR with a minimum AC value which will always prevent X amount of damage? Stabbing skill would allow you to pierce past this number so you could still deal damage if your attack was weaker than the enemy's minimum.

[MaXimillion]

Whats the goal for endgame armors(3 rune) for crawl anyways? As it currently stands it seems like you should be in Plate, a rare armor(dragon, crystal, VERY good randart, etc), leather, or a robe.

Or elven ringmail, if you find one with a good ego as a caster and don't have better artifact robe/leather.