D&D 5E Why AD&D Rocks and 3e - 5e Mocks all over AC...

[Vaalingrade]

We use DR and we like it, but it is, supposedly, to cumbersome for some.

Math bad.

Divide by 2 somehow not math.

 

[James Gasik]

I hate the myth of heavy armor somehow having to have flaws. Like putting on some metal armor makes you unable to dodge or do anything remotely agile.

I really despised armor penalties, and hate when DM's ad hoc decide a guy in plate has to have some penalty to climbing or jumping. Often, the main thing a Fighter does out of combat is be good at Athletics-type activities...and then people want to take away that advantage for having the utter gall to have a decent AC?

Even now, disadvantage to Stealth is obnoxious- I wasn't going to be good at that anyways, if I'm wearing heavy armor, most likely, but let's add insult to injury! Especially when DM's decide to ask for group Stealth checks, which means the entire skill might as well be scratched off character sheets, since you know the Fighter, Paladin, or Cleric is going to roll badly...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Try it in leather armor which allows full dex bonuses.

Yeah that is the problem with that argument. It would be nice if people could avoid making it again, because it's just ridiculous/laughable.

The DEX thing is a clearly design-balance choice, not verisimilitude of a genre nor realism. How is @Oofta the only one who has pointed this out? I guess you could call it aesthetics as @Dausuul does but I'm not sure it's as conscious as that, because it's somewhat inconsistent/confused.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. Plate should allow a higher DEX bonus than chain or several other armour types if we were going with even mild "realism", for example. In "realism"-land, the biggest penalties/limits would be on full chain, scale, brigandine, basically anything that's a big huge metal-filled coat and/or pajama suit. But "realism"-land is a terrible place where we're constantly making exhaustion checks, your armour needs to be maintained extensively and gets damaged by combat, and you better have a squire or six following the party around.

But if you were going to be hiking 30 miles a day every day through the wilderness with a full pack, I dunno if anyone would even want to wear platemail even for the extra protection. The water loss and dehydration alone from all the sweating would probably kill you, heh heh!

Plate would be the best choice if you were actually going to wear significant armour, period. For the amount of protection it provides, it's lighter, impairs your movement less, and cooks you far less than chain/scale/brigandine/etc.

It's basically wear some amount of plate (whether breastplate, quarter-plate, half-plate, or full-plate), or probably don't really bother with non-magical armour. "Real" D&D adventurers would be psychotically focused on obtaining and wearing magical armour like Bracers of Defense, Rings of Protection, stuff that let you cast armour spells, and so on.

And no, water loss/dehydration don't kill you, or a lot of crusaders would have died of that, and they didn't, by and large, not even in multi-hour battles (which were surprisingly common in some crusades). And that was generally wearing chain, which is far worse for exhaustion etc. than plate.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The DEX thing is a clearly design-balance choice, not verisimilitude of a genre nor realism.

Here's the deal: it might have been a balance thing... assuming they even considered that back in the day, which I have honest doubts about... but it has been routinely defended and explained in the rules as being because armor is sooo heavy and sooo cumbersome.

So castigating people for citing that is misguided at best.

 

[James Gasik]

In AD&D nobody thought Dexterity bonuses in armor was a big deal- most likely because you needed a 15 Dexterity to even have a bonus...and if you're a warrior with an 18, you put that in Strength first (for the lightning bonus round of exceptional Strength!) and Constitution second (for the bonus hp nobody else could have!).

Though I did once make a character using the Complete Fighter's Handbook with an AC of 0 wearing leather armor. At 1st level! THAT was kind of ridiculous.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Here's the deal: it might have been a balance thing... assuming they even considered that back in the day, which I have honest doubts about... but it has been routinely defended and explained in the rules as being because armor is sooo heavy and sooo cumbersome.

So castigating people for citing that is misguided at best.

I don't agree at all, sorry.

They're wrong, and we've known from people testing armour experimentally since the 1980s at the latest, that they're wrong, and sure, people make the same bad argument over and over and over, but that will literally never make that argument right, no matter how long time continues, no matter how many times the argument is made. There are a lot of similar situations in the world, where people repeat "received wisdom" that they've never made any attempt to engage with critically, nor been intellectually curious enough to look into, and that's not a good thing. It is in fact, a bad thing.

It was definitely a balance thing, given the AC bonus limit was introduced in 3E, which introduced a lot of balance changes, including essentially infinitely scaling DEX bonuses, and some incredible ability to stack bonuses generally.

In AD&D, the speed limit thing was just ignorance. I mean, you know how I know, for sure, that we knew all this? I had an argument with my biology teacher when I was 12 in 1990. I remember it to this day because it was one of the first times I won an argument with a teacher (or an adult at all). He was talking about how humans can copy the biological systems of other animals through tools/equipment, but we always end up with an inferior version (which is like, mostly but not entirely true), and he cited how knights couldn't get into the saddle whilst wearing plate, and had to be winched into the saddle, and couldn't run/vault in plate generally. I was fresh off reading some history book, and I had to be like "Uh sir, no, that's wrong." and cited the book, and he was a good guy so accepted this correction after I explained the source. But at that point, in 1990, a child like me know that you could run, and vault in plate, and get into a saddle, and that it only weighed about the same as much as the full backpack British soldiers carried in the 1980s/1990s (which was about 70lbs), or even less.

This is information that predated 3E, and I don't buy that people like Jonathan Tweet, that giant nerd, didn't know it. Which means it essentially had to be a balance/aesthetic choice, and people defending it on the ground of "realism" were just doing that "fan" thing where they defend something even though it doesn't make sense.

 

[James Gasik]

Although the infinitely scaling Dex of 3e had a big issue. Pretty quickly, you ran out of armor you could actually wear and hope to use all that Dexterity...

 

[Seramus]

The DEX thing is a clearly design-balance choice, not verisimilitude of a genre nor realism. How is @Oofta the only one who has pointed this out?

I just assume most people already know, having had the discussion more than a hundred times across the years and different forums. That's not helpful for newer folk, of course, but a lot of responses (including mine) are just chiming in to expand on one small area or being humorous.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It was definitely a balance thing, given the AC bonus limit was introduced in 3E, which introduced a lot of balance changes, including essentially infinitely scaling DEX bonuses, and some incredible ability to stack bonuses generally.

D&D Simulationism Edition totally tried to play it off as verisimilitude.

In AD&D, the speed limit thing was just ignorance.

As are armor check penalties.

Never ascribe to balance concerns what is absolutely designer error.

 

[James Gasik]

It wasn't so bad when you could lose your Dexterity bonus to AC, though.