cjh (10/21/82)
In response to your message of Thu Oct 21 00:59:46 1982: The relationship of armor class to a "hit" depends on your vocabulary; perhaps "penetration" would be a better word, since it's perfectly possible to make contact with a decent suit of armor without causing any damage at all (watch how SCA combat is judged for reference and/or look at some decent material (there's very little) on armor design---I've just finished assembling 120+pp on the how and why of armor-making so I've learned more about this than I really want to). This is even more significant when shields are used, since you can hit and even damage them without hurting the bearer (it occurs to me that anyone who's sticking with this combat method should add the shield to the possible targets of a critical hit, since it's common to read of a shield being destroyed in combat (especially against mass weapons such as axes, hammers, or some polearms), presumably with the concomitant decrease in "armor class"). It is also expectable that a high armor class would slightly reduce the damage caused by a penetrating hit; how this is administered depends on the GM, but the only hit tables I've seen recently (for rogue) appear to reduce the total number of dice rolled by an attacker for damage against better armor.