Fantasy Heartbreaker: Armor Absorbing, HP & CON

Everyone from the Gygax school of games thinks of AC as armor helps you avoid being hit. Yeah a hundred hits might actually occur but they are misses, because a vulnerable spot wasn't hit the blow just bounced off. Those from the RuneQuest system think of armor as absorbing damage. Hits are more common but the armor absorbs the damage. The real difference is that the Gygax school means a lot of misses and then a blast of damage and the RuneQuest school has lots hits but then the fun is taken away as the armor absorbing it all and you find out you didn't do any damage after all.

OpenQuest use Dodge or Parry to deny a successful hit. Again, it takes away a successful hit. Gygax used  HP as an abstract way to represent dodging and increased AC to represent Shield parries. The info was built into the hit or miss roll so that success equaled damage of some sort instead of rolling back the success. The OpenQuest way might be more realistic but it slows combat and I hate when a successful roll is taken away.

Newt Newport (the fellow that wrote OpenQuest) wrote the OSR game Crypts & Things. A version of Swords & Wizardry with a Sword & Sorcery flavor. The two things that jumped out at me in this game were the treatment of spells (I'll cover that later) and the use of CON as the flesh & blood of a person while HP represented dodging, fatigue, and skill of not being hit. Gygax hinted at something similar once while explaining away increasing HP as a character gains levels. The idea of using HP for fatigue and dodging, and CON for flesh and blood is brilliant in that it allows a logical line of where dodging ends and wounds begin. A logical line of what might heal quickly with rest and what will require long term hospitalization.

So you could hit the target and do damage in the name of HP damage, but not actually cut and slice them up. You wear the enemy down, you don't have your success taken away. I liked how that worked.

The only issue with shields. Should a shield increase AC by a point, or by more, as Gygax did? A some point using a shield makes it impossible for damage to get through so that doesn't really work. I decided attacks against a shield would be made at a disadvantage (that is roll twice and pick the worst result). This represents the shield totally blocking some, but doing nothing when improperly placed and prevents the denial after-the-fact of a successful attack. This needs more play testing but like it in theory.