Idea: Armour HP

Instead of reducing damage or making you harder to hit, what if armour had its own HP?

Any non-critical hits would first be taken from the armour's HP. Crits do two dice of damage - one to armour, one to the character's HP. I've been thinking recently about having two kinds of crits - one for 20's on d20, and one for 6's on damage dice, so this would be for rolling max damage. More on this in a later post...

Just like a character, the armour would be able to be "healed" - but in the case of armour, it would require time and tools.

This would give an advantage to the lighter armours - as the armour gets heavier, so does the repair kit! At the high end, you're not going to be making much in the way of repairs to your plate without a set of hammers and an anvil - hardly typical adventuring gear!

Thinking out loud here, but let's toss some numbers together:

Armour as HP

Armour	Armour HP	Repair time (max HP without proper tools)	Tools Required	Max HP with lighter tools
Cloth	12	3 hours	Scissor, needles, thimble, strong thread	3
Leather	12	3 hours	Sharp knife, scissors, heavy needles, awl, thimble, strong thread	3
Chain	18	24 hours	As Cloth, plus: Wire, wooden core, wire cutters, pliers (Optional - mechanical wire winder, specialised pliers and snips, premade rings and rivets)	14
Plate and Chain	36	48 hours	All of the above, plus: Several hammers, heavy snips, steel plate, files, anvil (Optional: spare plates, straps, buckles, etc., planishing stakes, dishing stump)	27

Repairs

Without proper tools, you can't repair the armour.

If you have the proper tools for a lighter armour (i.e. have Cloth tools but Chain armour), you can repair the armour to the level shown in the last column.

If you have the optional tools, knock 25% off the time.

All of these times are for field repairs - expedient, but probably not pretty.

Unbalanced Weapons

Unbalanced weapons would always do 1 point to the character's HP, even on non-critical hits.

Credit

I thought of this after re-reading this post on Untimately:
http://untimately.blogspot.com/2012/06/evasion-armor.html