Your character is a brave adventurer: they jump over spear traps, dodge boulders, fight bears… whatever. They’re in serious danger of getting smacked around. They should probably strap on some armor.
It didn’t feel right to me to have you buy or find full suits of armor, then just have that suit determine your Armor rating. A full matching suit of armor? That’s for bougie adventurers. This is a game about scavengers. You’ll be building your armor piecemeal, from whatever scraps you find.
So that’s how it works — you acquire pieces of armor, and each piece provides an appropriate armor bonus. Most characters can wear 2 pieces of armor, but the Constitution rating can alter this. Characters with high Constitution can wear 3 or even 4 pieces of armor. Characters with low Constitution can only wear 1 armor piece, or even none if especially frail.
As long as you don’t exceed your limit and all of your armor pieces can logically be worn together, then you can wear any combination of armor pieces. You might find a leather tunic and steel gauntlets and wear them together. You could throw a fur cape on over your chainmail shirt.
(I know that “chainmail” isn’t really the proper word, and it’s just called “mail”, but I’ll choose clarity over accuracy any day.)
Here are a couple of example armor pieces:
The bear pelt not only enhances your Armor Class; it also improves your Resist saving throws and reduces damage from cold. The pauldrons, on the other hand, are pure protection. They make your Armor Class better, and you can have an attack break the pauldrons to reduce that attack’s damage.
Which brings us to the last thing: Armor can break. This is bad news and good news! Some armor has a special ability where it breaks against an attack, but it reduces the damage against you, like the pauldrons above. There are also monsters that have attacks that can break armor — like giant insects with pincers that crack plate armor, or wildcats with claws that rip hide armor. This means that a long day of adventuring may lead to a character wearing out their armor, putting them in even more danger. Then, when they get back from their expedition, they’ll have to pay a craftsperson to repair the armor if they want to use it again.
But it’s not all bad! Monsters and other enemies have armor as well, so a well-prepared group might be able to soften up their foes by breaking their armor. Certain weapons have armor-breaking abilites — like warhammers that crush plate armor, axes that split scales and chainmail, and daggers that cut hide armor. A well-equipped adventurer might wield their warhammer to break an ogre’s bony plates, before switching to their saber to slice their now-unarmored foe.
The goal here is to make sure players have fun choices to make and challenges to overcome, while minimizing the amount of rules to remember or tedious recordkeeping. Having a printed deck of item cards will make this even easier.