Solomoriah wrote:Ah, so it's recent.
Fairly, but you'd be hard-pressed to find an old-schooler these days that doesn't use it.
In a game with different mechanics (such as, for instance, my other game Realms of Wonder), a shield is a sort of parrying weapon and not a kind of armor at all. This sort of question is natural to solve in such a game.
But changing the nature of the Core Rules is off limits, for good reason, so shields have to remain a sort of armor. I'm cool with large shields that are more encumbering but give +2 on AC, and bucklers that only affect one attacker per round, as an option in EE.
Maybe. I think the rule works best when abstracted with a single type of shield, myself.
Trollsmyth's comments about how to handle magic shields aren't so easy to brush off for me. We do, often, have magic shields in my campaign, and even if we didn't, simply ignoring the issue won't work for a published supplement. I personally dislike the idea that a character would choose to sacrifice a valuable magic item willy-nilly (though in extremis I can see it).
Generally this is, in my experience, not something that is used willy-nilly in the first place, it's something PCs save for when they're about to die and just need to hold out one more round.
Further, the rule makes sacrificing the shield a choice of the user... someone with reenactment experience might jump in here to clarify, but I don't think in general you have a choice when your shield breaks.
No, not generally, but it's not really meant to be a simulation of reality so much as a narrative choice, I think-- though in simulation terms, it's more likely to happen when actively using the shield.