Continuing our read through of Chapter 7, we now go through shields and armor.

Shields

D&D shields are just an extra bit of armor you can tack onto the one you’re wearing, but DFRPG shields are weapons that have a few extra defensive rules specific to them.

With the Shield skill you can use a shield to feint, bash people’s faces in, and block incoming melee or ranged attacks. Just holding a shield also makes it easier to defend yourself in other ways, too. Shield bashes are back on the weapon tables, so this section focuses on the rest of their stats.

The most important stat here is the Defense Bonus, which goes from 1 to 3 depending on the size of the shield. This gets added directly to all of your active defense scores, including Block. Then come the usual price and weight. Compared to the stuff on the melee weapons table, shields are pretty cheap but extremely heavy.

The table starts with cloaks, which are popular with fencers. To use a cloak in combat, you hold it in your hand instead of wearing it around your neck. You can feint and block with it, and even grapple by entangling foes since it’s flexible. For the same reason, though, you can’t bash people with a cloak and a failed block endangers your arm. A light cloak reaches your waist when worn, a heavy one reaches your ankles. Even the heavy cloak is lighter than a small shield.

Proper shields come in Small, Medium, and Large varieties. All of them are made from wood with a few metal bits and possibly a leather covering on the outside. They let you block and bash as described above, make shield rushes, and are of course a lot sturdier than a piece of cloth with delusions of grandeur. DFRPG doesn’t really deal with shield breakage, so the biggest game effect of this sturdiness is that shields can take all of the modifiers we’ll list below, while cloaks can only take Ornate.

Light and Medium shields are available as either traditional shields or bucklers. A buckler is held by a handle instead of strapped to your arm, so you can’t use that hand to hold anything else but can drop the buckler as a free action if you need it. DFRPG makes you use different skills for shields and bucklers, but I tend to collapse them into a single skill instead.

Large shields offer excellent DB but get in the way of your attacks unless you have the Shield-Wall Training advantage (available only to Knights).

Shield Modifiers

Like with weapons, these relate to how the shield is constructed and are independent from magic enchantments.

Balanced gives +1 to Shield skill.
Dwarven shields are 100% metal! They do more damage with bashes and rushes, are fireproof, and have double the weight.
Fine shields do more with less material, and weight only 3/4 the usual amount.
Meteoric shields are also 100% metal, so they have the same bonuses as Dwarven ones and are impervious to magic like meteoric weapons. Super expensive, though.
Mirrored shields can reflect gaze attacks to someone else on a successful block. Perseus loves them, Mumm-Ra hates them. It’s cheaper to apply the treatment to a shield that’s already made of metal.
Orichalcum shields are 100% made of that metal. They’re only 2/3 the weight, fireproof, and have an easier time breaking other weapons, though they don’t do increased damage.
Ornate lets you impress the gullible as per the weapon modifier, and is the only one on the list that can also be applied to cloaks.

The three “material” modifiers (Dwarven, Meteoric, Orichalcum) are mutually exclusive, but they do stack with Fine, and the weight modifiers multiply together. A Fine Dwarven or Meteoric shield is only 1.5 times as heavy, and a Fine Orichalcum one is half the weight of the standard wooden version.

Armor

In DFRPG, armor provides you with Damage Resistance, which directly subtracts from rolled damage. This means it enters into play after you’ve failed your active defense rolls, as the last line of defense before your HP. There are no such things as armor skills or armor proficiencies here. PCs of any profession can wear any armor. The barriers here are cost and weight: armor is both heavy and expensive.

Money will be much less of a problem once your delver has a few adventures under their belt, but the weight requires either a lot of ST or magic to mitigate. I have seen a wizard who went around in full plate and used constant levitation for locomotion, though, so even that is not an insurmountable obstacle.

The armor list on the DFRPG is the final step on a long evolutionary road. You see, core GURPS had a low-tech armor list that was simple but kind of unrealistic. Stuff like leather and cloth was too light and too expensive, mail was way too cheap, and plate armor was both too cheap and too heavy.

Then came GURPS Low-Tech, which had an extremely detailed armor system that added more hit locations than there were in core GURPS and restrictions of the “you can’t put rigid armor on your waist because it needs to bend” kind.

DFRPG takes that and re-simplifies it a bit. The combat rules still have the same hit locations as core GURPS, but you don’t have to buy a separate piece of armor for every one, and the list of different materials has been pared down considerably. Every line on the table is a different material with a specific DR, and the columns have the price and weight for a full suit of that material and also for smaller pieces covering the head, arms, legs, hands, feet, and body (everything from groin to neck).

If you’re looking for simplicity you can just look at the “Full Suit” column and call it a day. Min-maxers can shop for piecewise armor and cut some corners for the parts they don’t think will be hit often. One-sleeved jackets and backless breastplates are all the rage these days! And who needs helmets anyway, amirite?

The detailed items on the armor table can be divided into these general types:

Cloth or Leather armor comes in both Light and Heavy varieties (DR 1 or 2). It’s the only type of armor that doesn’t count as being made of metal, which is important for certain environmental hazards.
Mail armor comes in Light, “standard” and Heavy varieties (DR 3/1, 4/2 or 5/3). Since it’s flexible, it uses the lower value against crushing attacks.
Scale is cheaper and less vulnerable to crushing attacks than mail, but considerably heavier. It also comes in Light, Standard, and Heavy (DR 3/2, 4/3, and 5). The lighter varieties use the lower number against crushing attacks, but I guess the heavy one is too sturdy for that.
Segmented Plate (DR 3, 4, or 5) includes “lamellar” armor and sits between mail and scale in terms of cost and weight, and doesn’t have the vulnerability to crushing damage.
Brigandine (DR 5) is the thing that confused Gygax into inventing studded leather, because it’s metal plates sandwiched between two leather or cloth layers, with the rivets that keep them in place peeking out. About the same price of heavy mail, at half the weight. It counts as plate for modifier purposes.
Plate armor is the high-end stuff, very expensive and surprisingly light for the amount of protection it provides. Comes in Standard, Heavy, Extra-Heavy and Epic (DR 6 to 9).

You probably won’t be affording anything heavier than light mail or scale out of character creation, and even then you can’t afford a full suit of it without expending some character points on starting money.

You can layer armor, with some restrictions on type. Their DR more or less adds together, but layered armor anywhere other than your head imposes a -1 penalty to DX.

Whether you decide to go for the fiddly rules or not, you have pretty much total freedom to describe your armor as anything you can imagine, as long as it has the right stats.

Armor Modifiers

These have the same base rules as weapon modifiers, adding a Cost Factor to the item’s final price and not counting as magic enchantments. Since the price of armor is so high, a lot of the modifiers that increase DR or reduce weight often end up more expensive than an enchantment that does the same. But the modifier works even without mana, and it stacks with the enchantment, so there’s that.

Dragonhide is for heavy leather, and can add from +1 to +4 DR depending on the dragon “donor”. This bonus is doubled against fire, and the larger it is the heavier the armor becomes. Even sturdier dragonhide suits exist, as well as ones that resist different elements, but those aren’t for sale and aren’t detailed here.
Dwarven material science lets DR 6-9 plate armor become sturdier (+1 DR) at no increase in weight.
Elven mail doesn’t reduce its DR against crushing attacks!
Fine armor has 3/4 the usual weight, but only fit wearers with the same height and weight as the original owner.
Giant Spider Silk improves light cloth armor to DR 2 without a weight increase, and can be layered under other armor without a DX penalty.
Meteoric metal armor resists magic as per the rules for shields and weapons.
Orichalcum plate armor gives its usual DR at only 1/3 the weight!
Ornate is the same as for weapons and shields, but you’ll be paying a lot more to bedazzle your armor.
Spiked plate armor makes people who grapple you regret it.
Thieves’ mail is blackened and woven for maximum flexibility and minimum noise. Its weight doesn’t count as encumbrance for “thiefy” and parkour skills.

Thieves’ armor cannot also be Ornate, of course, and the two material modifiers are mutually exclusive. They do stack with everything else, though, and the weights are multiplied together as with shields.

Impressions

These armor rules fall right into my “Goldilocks” zone. The Basic Set ones are too simple, the Low-Tech ones too complicated, these are Just Right.