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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5017918" data-attributes="member: 58197">Regarding stripping out +X items, there are guidelines in the DMG2 for doing that. IIRC, it basically comes down to giving the PCs a cumulative +1 bonus on attacks, damage rolls, and defenses at levels 2, 7, 12, 17, 22, and 27. Adjusting monster attacks and defenses to 1/2 level is not a good solution because it doesn't factor in level-based boosts to PC stats - unless you want to strip those out as well.As regards economic realism, for me the trick is making semi-realistic prices work in-game. Full plate is a good example. If full plate - the kind of stuff knights wore in the late Medieval/early Renaissance era - is priced realistically, then its price will be so high as to make most armor and weapons trivially cheap by comparison. So then you have to ask: What happens to the PC who wants to start with full plate?<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If PCs don't get to start with plate armor, then the paladin is kinda screwed.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If PCs start with enough money to buy plate armor, then everyone who wears light armor is going to be rolling in gold.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If PCs start out with "one suit of armor you're proficient in," then smart paladins will immediately sell their plate, buy scale, and be rolling in gold at the cost of a short-term -1 to AC.</li> </ul>One solution I've thought of is to redefine masterwork armor. Get rid of the silly names, and instead use the following:Cloth armorNormal: Normal clothes/unarmoredMasterwork: Silk [Mongol-style]Leather armorNormal: Soft leatherMasterwork: Masterwork leather*Hide armorNormal: Leather cuirassMasterwork: Leather plate**Chain armorNormal: Ring mailMasterwork: Mail hauberkScale armorNormal: BrigandineMasterwork: LamellarPlate armorNormal: BreastplateMasterwork: Full plate[SIZE=-2]*Couldn't come up with an "expensive" version of a leather jerkin, so I punted on this. I thought about "leather and silk," but that sounded more like something you'd find in a high-class brothel.**Essentially a suit of full plate, with all the shaping and crafting a suit of plate would have, but made from hardened leather instead of steel. I don't know if anyone actually wore such a thing, but it was the best "expensive hardened leather" I could think of. The problem is that D&D tries to make every type of armor a viable option, whereas in real life full plate was just better than anything else; if you could afford it, you were crazy not to wear it.[/SIZE]EDIT: It occurs to me after some thought that the "one suit of armor you're proficient in" solution is maybe not as bad as I'm making it out to be. Yeah, you could sell your plate, buy scale, and have a lot of money, but would you? What would you buy with all that money that would be worth sacrificing a point of AC? Especially considering that you only get 20% of list price when selling, and scale armor, while cheaper than plate, would still be fairly pricey... this might be a worse problem in theory than in practice.</blockquote>

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