At the moment for me the existing Fate Points rules seem to clearly be the better choice. So what do you see as the advantage of your rule vs. the Fate Point rule? Perhaps this helps me understand it better.
I want a rule that has an ingame explanation for the character surviving an otherwise lethal blow. With a game mechanic which runs in the background but with visuals in the foreground. IMO Fate Points don´t do this, it´s a deus ex machina game mechanic. But it´s also needed to allow for less mortality among player characters, as RM is quite lethal.
So my thoughts were with armors taking the blow instead, you would have both the saving of the PC´s hide and an ingame mechanic which explains why and how the PC survives that deadly blow (the armor breaks).
After posting my idea here and getting feedback, I was made aware of the flaws of this system:
A: Armor is cheaper than Fate Points, and in essence this rule could lead to endless Fate Points just by a different name.
B: NPCs use armor too, but not all NPCs have Fate Points. Of course I could use the same concept of just having the major NPCs take advantage of the armor rule, but that made little sense as reference to my need for an ingame explanation. So either it would be everyone had Fate Points in form of their armor which would lead to long battles with pieces of armor flying all over the place, or the concept of a piece of armor suddenly being imbued because a PC wears it.
C: Unarmored PCs would get the short end of the stick.
A possible solution (for me at least was inspired by Arioch)
What about this: a player can choose to ignore a crit result (not the damage done by an attack, just the crit) by increasing the "level" of risk run by his character. This means that he must put his character in a dangerous situation to avoid the effects of the critical.
I took the "dangerous situation" and made it into "complication", as I feel that putting your character at risk runs contrary to the point of sacrificing armor to save your own butt. So the PCs (and major NPCs) have a number of Fate Points which they may spend to negate a Critical, but spending them creates a complication of its own. EG: The armor or weapon breaks, the E Crit to the head only knocked the PC out instead of taking off his head, and so forth.
So conclusion? I can´t say this is better than the normal Fate Point rules or worse for that matter. All comes down to your preferrence of play I guess. I am glad I posted the idea in its raw here, so I could get all the feedback allowing me to see the idea from a different pov