The Black Houserules : Critical Armor

People have been talking about Hit Points, Gristle, Meat and Armor - this sets me thinking, and creating new rules. It's worth noting that i'm thinking out loud - so all this could well be shithouse. Who knows? You probably.

In this house rule Armor Points (AP) don't reduce damage, they are now a measure of how hard you are to kill. This makes narrative sense, so were all good there (people in Plate & Mail are traditionally much harder to stab to death, right?) This means that HP is really just a measure of Stamina (and could easily me renamed as such) .. how much fight a person has in them before they are taken Out of Action (OofA)

Here's what i'm thinking. You get reduced to 0hp and are taken OofA as per normal. Then you roll a D6 - if you roll under your Armor Points you have taken a Light Wound, this is good for you - well not good for you, but its better than the alternative which is .. Rolling on or over gets you a Critical Wound ..very Warhammer.. obviously Critical Wounds are bad.

Then after the battle you roll on either the Light Wound or Critical Wound tables to see what happens. Do it afterwards to build some player drama round the table!

Here are the dials we can alter to fine tune this system.

The D6 we roll to see how we were wounded. Different creatures could make you roll higher die, Dragons would be a D10. Greenskin Skuttlers would be D4. We could go as far as calling this die a 'Threat Die' or something. Dunno.

Thanks go to +Warren Denning for suggesting we simply use the Powerful Opponents rule, adding that to the d6 we roll. Simplicity at its best - and using a mechanical device we already have. Bravo.

The Light Wound and Critical Wound tables. The actual results on these tables matter a lot. As is TBH's OofA table is kind of split down the middle into Light and Critical Wounds anyway .. look closely .. 1-3 is bad, but 4-6 are much worse. How forgiving Light Wounds and how gross and deadly Critical Wounds really matter.

Armor Points (AP) will be a huge measure on survivability. In vanilla TBH Plate & Mail gives you 8 AP so obviously you wont be able to critically wound someone if you're just rolling a D6. We could easily reduce them to a range Gambeson 1AP .. Plate & Mail 4AP with Shields giving +1/2AP for the Light and Heavy variants.