Encouraging Light/no Armor

[Vanguard]

I'm starting up a campaign soon, and I'm trying to think of ways to make a lightly armored character more attractive to play.

In the process it would be nice to try to balance the disparity between AC and AB at higher levels.

I've seen a few suggestions but I've never played with any of them. I'll list the ones I remember with my thoughts on them:

1. Defense bonus a la SW or WoT - Seems alright, but I'd be concerned about balancing the bonuses between classes. How will it stack with armor?

2. Reflex Bonus (or some fraction thereof) - Not bad, but seems to skew stat balance way in favor of Dex (Which doesn't bother me TOO much). Also really screws Fighters and their ilk, who should be at LEAST as good at defending as the Rogues and Monks are.

3. Shifting attack bonus to defense bonus - I think the proposal I like the most suggested a 2 for 1 trade of AB -> DB. This is how "fighting defensively" works already, but the house rule opens up any amount of trade in rather than the flat -4 Attack +2 AC. The Expertise feat improves the trade in ratio to 1:1. Perhaps allow trading in reverse ("reckless attack"). I don't see any balance problems with this one, but it does add an extra layer of bookkeeping. Also would need to make some decisions about whether the traded-in bonus applies to ranged or touch attacks. But unless we add some rules for armor stacking (actually the lack thereof) then we aren't encouraging lightly armored characters.

4. Parry Rolls (NWN) -The parry skill is used in lieu of attacking in a round. The defender rolls parry skill, and if he beats the attack roll, then the attack was parried. If the roll is beat by 10 or more, then the defender gets a free AoO against the attacker. I don't like this system because again the Fighter-types get screwed compared to Rogues.

5. Parry Rolls (Dragon 301) - Once per round you can make an attack roll vs an attack roll that would have hit you. If you succeed, the attack has missed. However, opponent gets a free (no AoO, no counter) disarm attempt against you. Can only parry when wearing light armor or less. There's a massive feat chain that provides various improvements to parrying. Overall, the rules are interesting, but they'll slow down combat and aren't that great of a replacement for armor (especially for non-fighters, who are short on feats). Could be good in addition to the Defense Bonus or Reflex->Defense ideas above.

Has anyone tried any of these? I'm interested to hear your comments on how they worked during gameplay (Hopefully more detailed than "It's good").

If anyone has any analysis or comments on any other reasons why the above are good or bad, I'd love to hear them too.

Of course, other suggestions for encouraging light/no armor in the game are also welcome.

 

[Nifft]

I "encourage" light armor IMC by having many conflicts occur in interesting environments.

If you're fighting on a ship, wearing heavy armor is suicidal. If you're on a pile of rubble, you need to balance -- wearing heavy armor reduces your mobility greatly. If you're running after some fleeing goblins, you need every ounce of speed you can get. On the other hand, if you're running away from some bad guys, you need the speed even more.

Stealth, mobility, lack of drowning: these are my carrots and my sticks.

-- Nifft

 

[Crothian]

From my experience people perfer light armor to medium and heavy. The movement restrictions alone have usually been enough of a reason.

 

[thullgrim]

Just by way of example, I currently play a 2nd level fighter, the only real fighter in the party. We are going through a conversion of the original U series modules. I started out in banded mail, for the best AC to price ratio I could manage given the beginning wealth levels. We came across, and I came away with, a suit of plate mail +1. I am now wearing it and I hate it. We just had a large fight on a boat and the whole time I prayed no one was going to attempt to knock me over the rail. It would have been an ugly occurence. Plus, my movement absolutely sucks. To top it off, its very difficult to perform some skills in the heavier armor. I think there is already great incentive to go with the lighter armors.

However for an extra oomph, I think going the route of WoT is hte solution I would use. I would even keep the Armor Compatability feat they have in there.

I also really liked the Feats in Dragon 301, I think combined with the WoT rules, probably a scaled back version of them to be sure, would work fairly well.

Thullgrim

 

[Spatzimaus]

ENCOURAGE light armor? I almost never see anyone take anything BUT light armor. Besides the chain shirt types, there are the Druidic types in leather, the sneaky guys in studded leather, and all the fighter types who try for a Mithril Breastplate.
I see more fighter-types go entirely armorless than wear heavy armor. Thanks to Bracers of Armor (especially with the rules that allow special enchantments), this isn't even a bad idea.

The key to this is that Max DEX drops as fast as Armor AC increases, so if you have a 20+ DEX (and, thanks to items with a +6 Enhancement bonus you easily can) any armor above chain shirt is pretty much suboptimal. Then there's the speed decrease, the Armor Check Penalty, and of course Arcane Failure.
And that's another thing. There's no core armor enchantment that changes either Max DEX, Armor Check Penalty, movement effects, or Arcane Failure, so there's no easy way to make Full Plate attractive to the high-DEX types. The only core-book option here is Mithral, which is just way too good for its price.
There's a few of these enchantments in the splatbooks, though.

If anything, the system needs to be corrected the other direction. Right now, there's no reason to take Banded, Splint, Half-Plate, or any Medium armor besides BP.
IMC, we changed the equipment rules a bit:
> The masterwork bonuses (+1 attack for weapons, +1 ACP for armor) stack with any magical effects. Ditto for anything from a non-magical source, like exotic materials (Dragonscale, Mithral, etc.). Some of these bonuses are pretty substantial.
> Heavy Armor grants its wearer a DR of (H/5)/-, where H is the hardness of the material used (Steel is 10). DR from armor stacks with all other sources and is subtracted first, so if you have Stoneskin on and your armor gives 2/-, reduce the attack by 2 before looking at the spell.
> Medium Armor and Large/Tower Shields grant the wearer a DR of (H/10)/-. Again, it stacks.
> Add two armor enchantments, Lesser Mobility (+2 cost: +1 Max DEX, +2 ACP, -10% weight, -5% Arcane Failure) and Greater Mobility (+4 cost: +2 Max DEX, +5 ACP, -25% weight, -10% Arcane Failure). Can't put both on the same item, although you can "upgrade" the Lesser to the Greater by paying the difference.

So, under these rules Full Plate and a Large Shield made of steel gives a DR of 3/-. Not much, and it's somewhat compensated for by how weapons are treated (the stacking rules help them more than they do armor), but it helps make these types attractive to the pure fighter-types.

 

[mmu1]

My personal favorite for discouraging armor is going to the Star Wars Wound Point / Vitality Point / Damage Reduction model, where DR only applies to damage to your Wound Points (since VP loss represents attacks that didn't actually hit you). This makes armor vital for mooks (all they have is Wound Points) and next to worthless for heroes.

Of course, that requires a massive revision of the game, so just going to a class-based Defense bonus a la WoT is probably the simplest mechanical solution. Under that system, the only people to wear any armor will probably be Fighters, because they have a special ability letting them stack their Defense Bonus and Armor Bonus (but their Defense Bonus is the lowest of any class, so it works fine).

Another thing you can always do is just eliminate armor types and proficiencies that don't fit into the kind of campaign you want to run - there's nothing wrong with saying that your world has a Reneissance rather than Medieval feel, and that Full Plate, Banded Mail, etc. simply aren't used.

 

[Wolf72]

Wolf's House Rules

I know it's not quite what you guys were discussing, but here's some house rules [btw, never tested ... blasted grad school!]

I didn't change a thing for light armor and upgraded medium/heavies.

note this does not address the issues of mobility and weight at all ... in which case you really really need to stick with light armor.

 

[Azlan]

Two simple changes...

The Dodge feat gives a +2 dodge bonus to AC if wearing light armor or none, or a +1 dodge bonus to AC if wearing medium armor. The Dodge feat gives no bonus if wearing heavy armor.

The Mobility feat gives a +4 dodge bonus to AC against attacks of opportunity if wearing light armor or none, or a +2 dodge bonus to AC against attacks of opportunity if wearing medium armor. The Mobility feat gives no bonus if wearing heavy armor.

However, it's been my experience as a DM that, with or without these changes, player characters only use the following armors (listed in order of most to least used): chain shirt, leather, full plate, breastplate, or studded leather. So, already, most players character choose to wear light armor. Those who want heavy armor always go with full plate. There are few player character who choose to wear medium armor, and those that do always go with breastplate. (Chainmail is never worn.)

All this assumes the player characters have gotten past 1st level, where money for non-magical armor is no longer an issue.

 

[Technik4]

I agree with everyone else. Light armor is TOO prevalant, and needs no further encouraging. I think heavy armor deserves a feat or two to compensate.

Chain Shirt just makes me cry sometimes, if you have an 18 dex you end up with just 2 less AC than someone wearing full plate with a 12 dex. And since it cost 1,400 less, you can get yours enchanted so that youre only missing 1 AC. Of course you still have 30 ft movement, a very low armor check penalty, and a very low chance of arcane spell failure compared to the full-plater.

I guess thats why most knights have horses.

Personally I am thinking of giving a +1 armor bonus to medium armors and a +2 bonus to heavy armors in my next campaign. Unfortunately, as Azlan pointed out, people will still only wear the "best" armor for each category as after level 3 they are all pretty accessible.

Its too bad that armors weren't given the weapon treatment, ie- each having at least a reasonably decent benefit to using them vice another weapon (not that this was wholely successful either, but it was certainly better than the armor situation).

Technik

 

[Spatzimaus]

Personally I am thinking of giving a +1 armor bonus to medium armors and a +2 bonus to heavy armors in my next campaign. Unfortunately, as Azlan pointed out, people will still only wear the "best" armor for each category as after level 3 they are all pretty accessible.

The big problem here, IMO, is that the only real advantage Banded/Splint has over Full Plate is price. Anyone who cares about Armor Check Penalty or Arcane Failure wouldn't be wearing heavy armor anyway. And, that 1300gp becomes negligible when you're talking about magical armors with 100,000gp in enchantments.

Now, I've mentioned before that I created a Materials system based on old 2E rules, where each material gives mundane bonuses that stack with the magical ones, and where the cost of the item is multiplied by a constant. Now, that 200 vs 1500 gp price difference becomes a lot more significant when you multiply everything by 50 for Dragonscale.
But, that's obviously a very large set of house rules. Under the core rules, there's just no real reason to use anything other than Breastplate, Full Plate, Chain Shirt, or Studded Leather, at least in my experience.