Robots in Disguise
May 23rd, 2011
As I hinted last week, today marks the beginning of Armor Week, devoted to the oft-overlooked pieces of protective equipment that are the last line of defense for the average dungeon-delving hero. We'll have armor-themed articles all throughout this week, and today's Dark Designs is no exception.
We started playing around with armor back in Into the Armory (still available as a free download, by the way). For those of you who haven't read Into the Armory (and are too lazy to go download it now), it's an "equipment book," which means that it's stocked with all kinds of magic items (and more than a handful of demi-magic items) for filling treasure hoards and for daring adventurers to outfit themselves with before setting out on, well, daring adventures. As such, it stands to reason that it would contain a few pieces of armor.
The most radical and interesting kind of armor included in Into the Armory, and one that I don't think I ever really got a chance to talk much about, was golem armor. Golem armor was a bit of a zany idea, and was exactly what it sounds like: gunda—err, that is, giant humanoid robots that you ride around in. Strictly speaking, they were probably more wondrous items than they were armor: for one thing, they were modeled heavily on the apparatus of the crab (I mean, they were really modeled on the aparatus of Kwalish, but no one's allowed to reference that in particular item, so…). Along the same lines, they don't really do the same thing as most armors.
What I mean is, while armor varies pretty wildly in form and function in the real world (and, flavor-wise, in D&D terms as well), they're pretty uniform as far as what they do mechanically in the game. They provide a static and constant bonus to AC, which does not apply to touch attacks but otherwise makes you more difficult to hit. They don't reduce the damage that you take when you do get hit, which has been the object of various criticisms throughout the years, but is probably an issue for another article. Maybe Armor Week 2: This Time it's Mithral.
In the meantime, I actually really would like to talk a bit about the design behind the golem armor, because it was a fun design, and a difficult topic to try and design to, and one that I think I'd like to revisit some day.
As I said, we knew when we started with golem armor that what we were looking for, mechanically, was going to be something like the apparatus of the crab: it wasn't going to just be a bonus to AC, making them harder to hit—it was a whole separate beast that had to be broken through in order to get at the driver himself. Additionally, they provide their own attacks. Really, the goal was to have giant mechs, I guess.
We ran into a couple of interesting snags. The first of which is pricing: an apparatus of the crab is really, really expensive. Prohibitively expensive, in fact. By the time you can actually use one, you really don't want to, because it kind of sucks. It's possible that the price for the apparatus of the crab is technically correct, from a "this-is-what-things-cost-according-to-the-rules-of-item-creation" viewpoint, but realistically it's way more expense than it's worth, and we wanted to bring the price down (something we were moderately successful at. Realistically, I think we could have gone lower, but that's neither here nor there).
One way we were able to do that is by heavily penalizing spellcasters (the armors provide 85% spell failure, and, additionally, almost never offer line of sight or line of effect). It may seem unfair, and it probably is, but magical-profiling is sometimes necessary in our profession. At the end of the day, how many fighters or rogues have you seen break the system wide open like a ripe melon? A few, maybe, but everyone knows deep down it's the spellcasters that are the real threat when it comes to shenanigans. Since magic items have to be priced based on the worst possible abuse they could be put to (because that's just the way things work), by reducing the worst sort of abuse, we were able to reduce the overall price.
Another thing we did that both reduced the market price and helped to make the armor more worthwhile at higher levels was to ensure that even though the armor provided its own attacks (which varied from golem armor to golem armor), the actual attack rolls were still made with the wielder's base attack bonus. Further, the weapons could be enchanted like normal weapons, helping to keep the armor from becoming obsolete as the character continued to level up. The armor itself could also be enchanted, which was valuable for the same reasons (and also increased the hardness/hit points of the armors).
One part of the golem armor rules that I still really like is the fact that, when a golem armor is reduced to 1/2 hit points, it becomes "broken." This reduces its effectiveness, and, whenever the golem takes further damage, causes magical explosions to fill the cockpit, damaging the wielder. Since golem armors didn't come out as the most powerful items in Into the Armory (by a pretty wide margin), you might be wondering why I would be proud about that particular drawback. The answer is pretty simple: it's cool. It's exactly what you would expect from a mech, after seeing…well…basically anything sci-fi. It's a classic scene. The mech (or spaceship, or whatever) takes a hit, everything rocks, people fall over, and electrical explosions go everywhere. They don't really hurt anything, they're all for show (for the record, that's basically how I feel about 2d6 electricity damage, especially considering how much damage the golem will have absorbed at that point), but they're there, and they're cool, and that's exactly the sort of thing we were trying to capture with golem armor.
Ultimately, though I wouldn't say that golem armor was executed poorly, I would say that it could have been executed better, and it's something I'd like to try my hand at again, sometime in the future. It's a little ironic, because I seem to recall being very hesitant about golem armor in the first place: it was, to my recollection, very much Justin Holloway's idea (in fairness, this may just be bigotry on my part: giant robots are exactly the sort of thing I would expect to be Justin's idea). Still, I think it was fun, and has a lot of potential to be very cool, especially if we allowed the golem armors in question to be a little more…mechanically useful, and definitely if we made them a bit more customizable (after all, it's not really a mech if you can't customize it, right?).
Most importantly, it's something that hasn't been handled very well so far, and that's not for lack of trying. I've personally tried a 3.5 system which was designed to include giant mech robots, on a far larger and grander scale than what we tried to accomplish with golem armor. They ran into a fairly similar problem, unfortunately: it's really a shame when your character can deal more damage in a round than his tricked-out 60-ft. tall mechagodzilla monstrosity of a ride, and is more durable, to boot.
So, in short, I guess you could say that giant robots have been put on notice. I can't make any promises—and there are still a lot of issues and difficulties that would need to be overcome—but it's definitely in my agenda. I don't doubt that it's possible to create mechs for D&D which are balanced, fun, and don't make combat painfully slow. I might be wrong, but, well, I guess I'm a "mech-is-half-undamaged" kind of guy.
That's all for today. Join me next week, when I'll be discussing miracles In the meantime, follow your passion, and don't hide behind a giant metal carapace all the time.