D&D 5E Anyone have a good house rule to bring some consistency to spell casting in armor/encumbrance/grappling

[Xeviat]

One could treat "encumbered" as medium armor and "heavily encumbered" as heavy armor. I've done that. I think the encumbrance penalties are a little stiff so I've unified them. Adding somatic component restrictions to the grappled and restrained conditions makes sense too.


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[Greenstone.Walker]

You can be grappled and being moved against your will, have zero move speed, and still cast a spell and not have any penalties on saves or checks.

The Grappled condition is when someone has a good hold on your collar or belt. You can't move, but you can still wave your arms, attack, cast, and so on. You can move your body out of the way of blows or twist to catch blows on parts of armour. The only penalty to you is that your movement is controlled by the other person.

But if you are actually restrained by magic/ manacles/huge creatures/ inanimate objects (you are being pinned down by a 500 lb rock (exceeding your strength by 30x)) There is less penalty than heavy encumbrance and somehow can still cast spells.

If you have handcuffs or manacles on, or are tied up, or are held by a constrictor snake, then you don't have the freedom to wave your arms to attack or cast. You can't move your body to avoid blows or to hide less armored areas. The penalty to you is movement of zero and advantage/disadvantage on attacks.

If you are just carrying a lot of stuff then you can't move as fast, but you can still attack and cast, but the weight makes you move slower, thus disadvantage on Strength and Dexterity.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I can't find the reference but the reasoning I recall was that armour interferes with the body-contortionist like requirements of somatic gestures.

The phrase "what is he doing backflips?" pops into my head from back then...