The road to helm is paved with good mechanics.
Friday, December 4, 2009 at 09:26AM Like crossbows, helmets are not getting the respect they deserve in D&D. A character’s head and neck are awfully important, but the mechanics make no distinction between wearing hairspray or a greathelm. Unless they are magical, of course.
Magical hairspray? Someone aughta create a D20 Brutal Legend setting. Also, Tim Curry has an awesome laugh.
If your D20 game appreciates just a slice more granularity, customization, and flavor, all without being bogged down by complex mechanics, read on.
Potential
Helmets mean serious business—there’s something around that might maim or kill you, so you put it on. Half and full (great) helms often hide the features of the wearer, presenting a machine that has no expression and feels no pain. Lack of emotion is terrifying to people because we are passionate creatures, and it is difficult to trust people who want to hide their emotions. Samurai presented tusked demon faces. Gladiators; pitiless gods. Knights in greathelms became metal men with no features whatsoever. Helms are protection and weaponry, and tell us a lot about their wearer.
In short, it would be a shame not to explore helmets in your campaign, and it can be done simply.
The Helmets
I’ve created three helmet categories to correspond with each armor type. Their statistics and descriptions follow. I threw the scutum in there in the spirit of extra character customization.
Helmets: Helmets protect your head, with heavier varieties protecting your face and neck, and come in three basic varieties (light, medium, and heavy). Each offers increasing bonuses to your AC when your enemy tries to confirm a critical hit. Unfortunately, many helms are heavy, interfere with vision and hearing, and make it more difficult to cast spells with somatic components. Masterwork helms are just as protective with better materials and weight distribution (reducing armor check penalties by 1).
Scutum (Greatshield): Greatshields are modeled after the roman scutum (SCOOT-um), which was a more advanced heavy shield shaped more like a man 
than the previous round shields. Great shields were oval or rectangular with their length being vertical rather than horizontal, and they quickly replaced previous shield types. Great shields provide excellent protection, but are so heavy that you can't shield bash with them, or use your shield hand for anything else. Two (or more) great shield bearers can be linked together to form a shield wall, providing cover to themselves and to anything behind them. Cover provides a +4 bonus to AC and prevents attacks of opportunity.
Armor / Cost / AC Bonus / Perception Penalty / Armor Check Penalty / Arcane SF / Weight
Helmet, light 5gp +1 to AC vs. confirm critical rolls 0 0 5% 2lbs.
Helmet, medium 12gp +2 to AC vs. confirm critical rolls -1 -1 10% 4lbs.
Helmet, heavy (greathelm) 35gp +3 to AC vs. confirm critical rolls -2 -2 15% 6 lbs.
Scutum (greatshield) 25gp +3 N/A -6 25% 25lbs.
Light helms are donned with a move action and removed as a free action.
Medium helms are donned with a standard action and removed with a move action.
Heavy helms are donned as a full round action and removed as a standard action.
Rationale
Obviously you would have difficulty maintaining balance if helmets added directly to the AC of a suit of armor, but there are few rules out there that deal with the confirm critical roll, and none that I have seen that add to the defense. I like the flavor fit here, and the mechanics seem sound and simple.
A few more ideas. You could create helmets that are designed to block out sound. A cannoneer’s helmet, for example, would carry heavy penalties for perception checks while affording damage resistance to sonic attacks and immunity to deafness. Wolf- or demon-faced greathelms could provide bonuses to intimidate checks and penalties to diplomacy checks, with any helmet incorporating even a half-mask providing bonuses to bluff checks. Some helms could provide bonuses to saves vs. gaze attacks, and so on.
What do you think?
Do you like the mechanics? Any interest in using them, or something like them, in your upcoming game? Will your next character be known as the Smiling Knight or as simply “Faceless” thanks to her helm and demeanor?
Feel free to leave a comment, and thanks for stopping by.
D20, equipment, helms, shields in 3E, Game Design, Pathfinder 
Reader Comments (5)
I like the idea. A classy hat/helmet can add a lot to a character.
I recall once in a 1e game way back when, the question "Are you wearing a helmet?" would strike fear into any player, as it invariably meant they were about to get decapitated (only the fighter wore a helmet).
The way they run in piecemeal works very similar, the helm decreases your liklihood of receiving critical hits and adds an equal penalty to any awareness checks.
Thus a leather helm is +1 and -1, a coif +2 and -2, open helms are +3 and -3 and the great helm a +4 and -4.
The penalty to awareness checks can be used as a bonus against things like medusa gaze (if appropriate, such as a great helm) and sonic attacks.
It works great.
Full info:
http://zzarchov.blogspot.com/2009/07/protecting-your-noggin-from-enemy.html
Ha! Nice, Swordgleam. That's really funny. So old-school. You're absolutely right on character. too. My next warrior is definitely going to craft his own helmet.
Thanks for the hot link, Zzarchov. Looks pretty nicely balanced and easy to implement.
Sounds like a good system to me. I might say that the crit AC bonus should be bumped up by 1 since it's very rarely used, but that's debatable.
Applying a helm to a character can actually a lot of really good flair to the character, and now the character has a reason to think about helmets. I'll definitely be adding this rule to my campaigns.
In one game my character had a helmet that gave a bonus to intimidate. My group always assumed that most armors already came with a helmet and that the bonus was already included in the AC rating.