I did it back in previous editions (2nd and 3rd). It's a lot of work. A lot.
You will end up modifying every monster in the bestiary and every NPC you make. Painful.
Worse, spells become overpowered. For example, if a level 1 fighter in the RAW attacks an orc using a longsword, he expects to do around 8 HP of damage when he hits. The mage does around 2 HP with a cantrip. Switch to armor as DR and that fighter does around 10 HP but the orc's armor absorbs about 6 so he only does 2 HP that gets through the armor, about the same as the cantrip. But the mage can do it at (short) range and stay out of combat so suddenly it feels superior. That's just one example of hundreds.
HP and Healing gets weird. It's built around an assumption that characters are taking dozens, even hundreds of HP of damage each round. But now their armor avoids most of that. For example, a 10th level barbarian with 120 HP can probably only take 5-6 hits from a CR 10 giant by RAW, but with armor as DR, now he can take twice as many hits. He's also doing half as much damage. This means every fight takes longer.
One solution for that last part (I did it) was to reduce everyone's HP. After using my homebrew armor/DR rules for a while, I switched it so that d4 classes got 1 HP per level, d6 classes got 2, d8 classes got 3, d10 classes got 4, and d12 classes got 5. It helped quite a bit.
Once you accept changing every stat block of every NPC and monster, reducing everything's HP, and toning down damage and healing spells, the system works very well. Lots of fun.
But if you don't do all that, it's fairly problematic.
First, unless your players are using gunslingers, guns aren't all that great, even decent guns lose out as they are harder to do damage with.
there's lots of suggestions of how to deal with guns.
Some popular ones are
Guns reduce AC by X (like 4) so they are better than a sword, but not the ignore all that they are now.
Guns ignore half of your armor.
armor just gain some DR for bullets. Like half the AC bonus armor gives is DR against guns that can't be reduced.
Or if guns are quite common and don't misfire, make them go against normal AC like all other weapon. Still good for gunslingers to get dex to damage with a ranged weapon.
Any other suggestions for a Victorian era style game?
It's never my first solution, but I think it's applicable here: Maybe Pathfinder is not the best game system for what you're trying to do. I'm sure there are a dozen systems out there that model a late 1800's style steampunk game system with less overt magic, decent firearms, reasonable armor, and better theme-appropriate technology and rules in general.
Sometimes, when the project is uniquely demanding, it's best to find a uniquely appropriate tool for the job.
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To me the real tricky part of balancing armor as DR is how damage scales per level. You need a system where a group of CR1/4 goblins doing 1d4 damage can threaten a level 1 character, but armor is still relevant when a CR 10 giant is hitting for 30+ a pop - but you also don't want the level 10 character to be utterly immune to normal weapons.
I honestly don't have a good answer to this dilemma, but it's the major problem with armor as DR that I've noticed. Maybe armor should take off a % of the damage, but that seriously complicates the math and would require a calculator at the table for many players.
Also, non-armor AC bonuses like deflection and dodge generally become pretty worthless. Nobody is going to pay 50k gp to raise their AC from 10 to 15 at the levels when they have 50k gp to spend.
Edit: To play off DM_Blake's suggestion, you might look at Savage Worlds. It's lower magic than pathfinder and supports pulp-style adventuring quite well - there are even steampunk-style published settings for it. It also has a weird science system for "magic like" inventions.
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Yeah - as others have said - armor as DR doesn't really work in Pathfinder.
I like the vibe of it - but a system needs to be designed with armor as DR in mind from the ground up. Slapping it onto Pathfinder leads to LOTS of issues.
As a simple example - pounce PA builds become even more dominant for 3 reasons.
1. Accuracy matters far less, so PA becomes even better.
2. Since everything is easy to hit, getting those iteratives every round becomes even more important.
3. Shields become worthless - as even with shields characters will be hit on nearly every swing. About the only characters who aren't auto-hit past the first couple levels are dex monks.
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Ryric hit on another point I neglected to mention.
When everybody is attacking low Touch-AC values, there is no benefit to having +10 or +20 or +3- to hit. It all just hits. There is also no benefit to having a few points of non-DR AC (from DEX or Dodge) because everything still hits anyways.
My fix for that was that I did not scale attack bonuses. A level 1 fighter with a longsword had a certain bonus to hit (1 for being a fighter and a few for STR) while a level 20 fighter had about the same bonus (1 for being a fighter, a few for STR, plus his magic weapon). The bonus was a little better (higher STR and magic weapon) but not a LOT higher - it certainly didn't have the additional +19 from going up levels.
That made it possible for high level combatants to actually miss some of the time, and made it useful to pump up DEX or Dodge or other non-DR bonuses to AC.
As for Ryric's other point about having scaling damage, I compensated somewhat for that by reducing damages across the board (more stat block changing) as well as allowing some magical bonuses, feats, and stacking to increase that DR as characters gained levels. Of course that meant that a level 10 character could just about guarantee that he was immune to normal weapons but I'm personally OK with that - real world experienced fighters don't win by letting enemies hack them to ribbons, they win by avoiding being injured at all. If the whole idea is to make it more "realistic" then this works just fine for me.
The short of it is that it took me a huge amount of system editing (most of the pages of my Monster Manuals were covered with Post-It notes with my stat block changes, made it easier to reuse them, and so were my spell descriptions in the various books). This evolved over a long time (I didn't come up with it all at once; I made a armor-as-DR change and as we played over the years, I found the things that broke and fixed them). Meanwhile, the game sessions were filled with weirdness and I was constantly changing things on the fly:
Player: I cast Chain Lightning.
Me: Oh, wait, that spell hasn't been edited to the new rules. *time passes while I work it out* Here, try this.
Player: Wow, you nerfed that a lot.
Me: I think it's probably fairly balanced with the rest of the house rules.
Player: I'm not sure. Seems to weak. *more time passes as we discuss it*
Me: Just try it and we'll see how it works together.
Player: OK, here goes...
Later, by email:
Player: Can I ret-con so that I chose Death Spell instead of Chain Lightning?
Me: Sure. I have to consider changes to that spell too, lemme get back to you...
In the end, I had a stack of house rules and owned stock in the Post-It company, but I thought it was worth it. I played with the same players for 15 years and they liked it too. It all worked out, but it was a huge, long-running headache.
3. Shields become worthless - as even with shields characters will be hit on nearly every swing. About the only characters who aren't auto-hit past the first couple levels are dex monks.
Shields need to be added to DR too.
I think I gave the wielder a choice - use it for AC or for DR but not both (and added a feat with higher level and prereqs that let it do both).
Every time I've looked at the Armor as DR rules in Ultimate Combat, I always get hung up on how easy it is to bypass armor. Your character just needs a magic weapon (Magic Weapon spell) or to be large sized (enlarge person) to completely bypass all mundane armor. I'm not sure it works even on a fundamental level.
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Every time I've looked at the Armor as DR rules in Ultimate Combat, I always get hung up on how easy it is to bypass armor. Your character just needs a magic weapon (Magic Weapon spell) or to be large sized (enlarge person) to completely bypass all mundane armor. I'm not sure it works even on a fundamental level.
Right - and then all CRs need to be adjusted drastically to make up for stuff like that.
I've played a slightly homebrew D20 game (not Pathfinder) where all armor was DR before. It actually felt quite good and natural, but also there wasn't armor doing 9 DR in it. I had the most OP armor in the universe at the end of the game and it was only DR 5. (Though it was light stealth armor with build in weapons and an energy shield.) The bank breaker armor was 8 DR and no Dex. because basically you were wearing a tank. It never came up once.
The chain shirt equivalent was about 3 DR and everything else light 1 DR.
GURPS is good for that type of game. All armour is DR based and at that tech level firearms are balanced versus other weapons by having a slower rate of fire. GURPS Steampunk might be a good sourcebook to use.
If you are stuck using Pathfinder rules then I suggest that you keep armour as AC for all weapons except firearms. For firearms armour acts like DR. Following this strategy you won't have to rewrite any monster stats.
If you are buying 4th edition the minimum you need is the players handbook and the campaigns (GM's) guide.
The settings books are all optional and generally speaking include little in the way of new rules but heaps in terms of: campaign ideas, NPCs, historic information etc.
Every time I've looked at the Armor as DR rules in Ultimate Combat, I always get hung up on how easy it is to bypass armor. Your character just needs a magic weapon (Magic Weapon spell) or to be large sized (enlarge person) to completely bypass all mundane armor. I'm not sure it works even on a fundamental level.
I would suggest house ruling that this kind of DR cannot be bypassed. Otherwise if armor provides no AC and no DR, there is no reason to wear it. The simple fix is to assume that if YOU have DR, the usual bypass rules apply, but if you WEAR external DR, they don't.
Perhaps not exactly realistic, but hey, we're talking about house rules to fix a kludgey and dysfunctional mechanic slapped onto an extremely abstract game system anyway.
