A friend of mine plays alot of 'LoTR' online and really enjoys his guardian character, which is basically a defender in 4.0 terms. A major difference is that in LoTR armor reduces the damage you take instead of reducing the chance of getting hit, so a heavly armored character can sit there and take hits all day. In 4.0 terms the only similar idea I could think of was going on total defense, but that would cost you your marking abilities, as you wouldn't be attacking.
My idea, which I just thought of is to allow a player to reduce their damage by some amount for a bonus to damage reduction (DR) the next round.
Some numbers that might work:
1. Every 5 points of damage you delcare before the attack up to your max is 2 pts of DR. For example if your attack is 1d10+4 your max would be 14, so the most you could sack would be 10, for a DR of 4, while if it was 1d12+4 you could sack 15 for DR of 6. This would give you the DR regardless if you rolled enough damage to cover it, if in the last example you rolled a 4 on your d12 for a total of 8 damage, this would not reduce your DR, but it would reduce your damage delt to zero!
2. Every [W] die you reduce gives you a DR of 5, so on most of your at wills you do 1[W] you could sack for a DR 5, if you used a daily 3[W], you could sack 1, 2 or 3 of them to have 5, 10 or 15 DR respectivly. These dice just wouldn't be rolled, thus the damage would be lost. Example, power X gives you 3[W] + ability and you sack 2[W] for a DR of 10 the next round and roll 1[W] + ability for damage from the power.
From a Roleplaying point of view, I was thinking this was basicly simiar to full defense in which you were putting more effort into avoiding hits and blocking blows then in your own attacks. I could think of making the DR gainned based on the type of armor you were wearing, but that seemed more complex than was needed. I would proably require a feat to gain acess to this or something though...
Any thoughts? Improvement suggestions?
