Awfully Alarmed About Armour

Campbell · Jun 7, 2012

I really hope they keep with the trend they used with the wight where to overcome its resistance you need a magic weapon or some other specialty weapon.

Agamon · Jun 7, 2012

Weapons, armor, monsters are all placeholders for works-in-process. It is known.

ArmoredSaint · Jun 7, 2012

Jeff Carlsen said:
I just want to jump in to say that I love the idea of starting low and buying better armor over the first few levels. I'd like to see weapons and other gear potentially work that way. Let the first couple upgrades be mundane before throwing magic into the mix. It would make a good default, with increased magic as a solid option.

I also love this.

Incidentally, I want to go on record as saying that I really do like most everything else about the rules as presented in the playtest--it's only heavy armour that I have a serious issue with.

I ran the adventure for a diverse group of friends last week. I plan to write up a report, and then have each of them register and share their own thoughts. FWIW, I prefer 1E, while my players almost universally prefer 3E/Pathfinder.

Morrus · Jun 7, 2012

Abstruse said:
It was in the Q&A chat last week...and I'm having a hell of a time finding the archive. Best I can do is give you a quote and a third-party transcript.

Reference is here.

You don't even have to go that far. It's right here!

http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/3...ons-answered-mike-mearls-jeremy-crawford.html

Abstruse · Jun 7, 2012

Morrus said:
You don't even have to go that far. It's right here!

http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/3...ons-answered-mike-mearls-jeremy-crawford.html

I was trying to find the transcript on the WotC website. Sometimes I fear when I try to dig around on there that I'm going to stumble across a minotaur...

Viktyr Gehrig · Jun 7, 2012

This is one area where I feel strongly that D&D should resemble reality, in that wearing armor in combat is always preferable to not wearing armor in combat. The only people who should ever willingly go into combat without armor are people who cannot wear armor at all, or people who need to go without armor when they're not in combat.

And, quite frankly, the solution to this problem is as realistic as it is simple: stop penalizing characters' Armor Class for wearing armor. This is an artifact brought over from Rolemaster, in which the penalty to DB was more than offset by the protective benefits of the armor; it has absolutely no place in a game like D&D which makes no distinction between 'hit' and 'hurt'. In a game like D&D, it is neither balanced nor realistic.

Even if you have a Dexterity of 20, your Armor Class should be better in heavy armor than it is in light armor. Thus, if you absolutely must penalize Dexterity for wearing heavy armor, the amount of penalty-- for any near-human level of Dexterity-- must be smaller than the amount of difference between the AC granted by the best 'normal' light armor and the worst 'normal' heavy armor.

Let's go with 20 Dexterity, since that's our assumed PC maximum. That's +5 to AC. Now, assuming-- for the sake of argument-- that a man in heavy armor shouldn't be able to get any benefit from his Dexterity... that means that a full suit of chainmail needs to be at least five points better than a simple chain shirt. That doesn't make sense to me, I don't think it makes sense to anyone else, and it makes chainmail too damned good for people with no Dexterity bonus.

On the other hand, if Light Armor is no penalty, and Heavy Armor restricts the bonus to half your Dexterity bonus... then the minimum difference only has to be 2 points. Which makes a little more sense, with a chain shirt being only half of a full suit of chainmail and probably being made of lighter chain.

Then, the only way to have a better Armor Class fighting in light armor versus the equivalent heavy armor is to have superhuman Dexterity-- at least 22-- in which case, it actually might, possibly, make a little sense.

GX.Sigma · Jun 7, 2012

Totally (I'll also add "people who can't afford armor" to your exemptions). But there should be some reason why certain characters would choose to not wear heavy armor. AD&D just said magic-users can't wear armor, thieves can't wear better than leather, etc. That's not exactly an elegant solution, but I guess it works.

But can we then not have rangers wearing leather? I guess not, and I guess that makes sense--you want to fight, you get some good armor. Conan wearing armor when he could afford it, etc.

Abstruse · Jun 7, 2012

The issue is less with no armor vs. heavy armor, it's with the frequency with which characters end up with 18s or 20s in the last few editions of the game. In 4e, if you played a rogue, ranger, assassin, and a few other classes, you were going to have a 20 Dex. In Pathfinder, you're frequently going to see 18-20 in Dex for those classes.

In 3rd and earlier editions when attributes were more frequently assigned by dice rolls, 18s were far more rare and 20s unheard of (if not impossible, depending on race). Having a 16-18 in Dexterity was pretty good for a rogue in 3rd, and 14-16 pretty good in 1st/2nd. The armor modifiers in 1st/2nd for high Dexterity were also lower, I think just getting you a +1 at 13, +2 at 16, and +3 and 18.

I don't think we really need to blame the armor for this one, but the inflation of the attributes.

Fenes · Jun 7, 2012

Abstruse said:
So no more "I'm 7th level and I haven't gotten my +2 weapon yet!" whining. A magic weapon's a powerful thing and since to-hit numbers and AC aren't going to scale nearly as much, that's going to be a flat +5% chance to hit for every +1 on the weapon. So that's a pretty big deal, even later on in the game.

It's even more needed if it makes you hit that much better.

Abstruse · Jun 7, 2012

Fenes said:
It's even more needed if it makes you hit that much better.

More desired, not more needed. In 4e and some respects 3.x, it was assumed that players would upgrade their armor and weapons at specific thresholds and monster difficulty was determined specifically with that in mind. In 4e, that expectation was that you'd get an entirely new set of gear every 6 levels minimum so that at 6th you'd have a +1 weapon or implement, +1 armor, and a +1 amulet/necklace for your non-armor defenses. If you didn't have that equipment, you were behind the expected curve and every encounter was going to be far more difficult than it should be. In 3rd, there wasn't really much of a requirement except "get a magic weapon", but 3.5 there was a sort of resource rush to get weapons of various types and enchantments so you could get around damage reduction. This carried over to Pathfinder.

In Next, though, you don't actually "need" a magic weapon. At least not until you come across a monster that has damage reduction and the wizard/cleric can't kill it with spells alone. Beyond that, there's no actual need for one in order to stay up to date. It's great to have one and I expect a lot of arguments to break out when one pops up, but they're not to be expected like they were in 4e.