Armor

Locational Armor

Any attack dealt to you will necessarily target a specific part of your body and is resisted by the armor at that specific location. Your chest armor therefor, does not grant any special protection against attacks to your head, or vice versa. Not all locations are equally likely to be struck, as the most common area for an attack to land is the chest, followed by the legs, arms, gloves, helm, and neck. With chest being struck fully 35% of the time and progressively less likely from there.

Because armor only effects attacks against a specific location, this has allowed individual armor pieces to have anywhere from the entire 0-70% resistance. Armor by default will have higher base resistances in keeping with their ranking. This means that while the weakest armors (leather) will have perhaps 6-8% resistance, ringmail will have nearly 40% resistance per piece. Even the weakest shield has 50% resistance, making Block a very reliable source of early game protection.

Encumbrance

All armor has strength requirements to equip it. For each piece of armor an adventurer has equipped, it's strength requirement is divided by their total strength. The result is multiplied by 25% and added to the Encumbrance rating for the player. For example, a player with 20 Strength who equips only a single 10 strength requirement piece of leather would add a total of 0.125 to their encumbrance rating.

For each step or swing taken by the player, their current encumbrance total results in a chance to lose stamina. This chance is equal to the encumbrance value. a .125 encumbrance would have a 12.5% chance to lose a point of stamina per step. Or roughly speaking once every 8 steps. Any total greater than 1.0 guarantees at least 1 stamina lost, in addition to any remainder proceeding to the above stated calculation.

The result of this system is that strength continues to be significant well past the point that you qualify for the minimum stat requirement of the armor. Additionally, the Fighter ability "Armour Proficiency" halves the contribution to encumbrance from 25% to 12.5%.