Quote Originally Posted by Amechra View Post
Sadly, I think we're stuck with that one unless they completely rethink how scaling works in D&D. Armor-as-DR tends to work best in games with very limited HP and damage scaling, since having one of your core defensive features be "attacks deal X-Y damage instead of X damage" limits what X can be pretty heavily. Like, it can work, but you'd have to rethink how weapon damage works and balance the math pretty tightly around it.
Oh I am sure it's not going anywhere, which is why I don't bring it up in a lot of these martial discussions. It's also hard to retrofit on to the current system while still keeping things balanced.

The way I would probably do it though, is give armor DR values (probably starting at 1 or 2 for leather, and then going up to 10ish for plate, magic armors would just increase this value), and then give weapons and other attacks a minimum damage they can't be reduced below (another way to differentiate weapons). Reducing health scaling would also be nice. I would start by looking at HP being equal to Con Score + (Con Mod * Prof Bonus) + (0-3 per level in a given class). That would give characters a lot more starting health, making the early levels less swingy. Obviously you need to figure out another source for AC growth, the easiest answer is to just pull from an even older SW system (d20 revised), and just have being X level of a class give you an AC bonus (along using things like a Shield, and gathering AC increasing features or reactions for temporary increases). If Fighters go from getting +1 AC at level 1 to +10 at level ~19 over the career, while Wizards go from 0 to +5, that solves some of the AC imbalance of casters in "heavy armor". If you want to be a high spell caster, you aren't getting good AC from your class period.

There is still more work from there, you would want a built in power attack option (or at least have it be a standard class feature for martial oriented characters), ideally you wouldn't be able to use the power attack and some kind of rapid strike option in the same turn.

But this is all even more of a pipe dream to hope for than a lot of other martial ideas out there.