House Rule: Shields Shall Be Splintered! but are also a bit better

Part of the purpose of this blog is for me to make decisions on the house rules for my upcoming game and put them somewhere, so some of these posts are going to be restating (and probably tweaking) other people's excellent work. This is one such post.

Years ago Trollsmyth proposed a houserule called "Shields Shall Be Splintered". Here's my take on shields, drawing on that.

Shields provide +2 AC

Shields shall be splintered: when taking damage from a melee attack, a shield wielder can elect to have their shield be destroyed and not take the damage. This option is also available for magical shields, with the addition that magical shields can even ward against more esoteric things like lightning bolts, dragon breath, death rays, thrown boulders, and things like that. But the shield still breaks, so you better make sure it's worth it.

The shield stopped an arrow, which is pretty good.
(Morris Meredith Williams)

So yeah, +2 to AC is more than usual, but I think that'll make the decision to sacrifice the shield a bit more interesting. It may result in the party having retainers along carrying spare shields (shield-bearers as it were), but that's fine.

I probably will put some ways to pro-actively destroy shields in as well - maybe as some sort of weapon property of axes. But that's a future worry.